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    All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers
    Unavailable
    All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers
    Unavailable
    All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers
    Audiobook5 hours

    All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers

    Written by Alana Massey

    Narrated by Alana Massey

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    "Alana Massey's prose is to brutal honesty what a mandolin is to a butter knife: she's sharper; she slices thinner; she shows the cross-section of a truth so deftly--so powerfully and cannily--it's hard to look away, and hard not to feel that something has shifted in you for having read her."--Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams
     From columnist and critic Alana Massey, a collection of essays examining the intersection of the personal with pop culture through the lives of pivotal female figures--from Sylvia Plath to Britney Spears--in the spirit of Chuck Klosterman, with the heart of a true fan.

    Mixing Didion's affected cool with moments of giddy celebrity worship, Massey examines the lives of the women who reflect our greatest aspirations and darkest fears back onto us. These essays are personal without being confessional and clever in a way that invites readers into the joke. A cultural critique and a finely wrought fan letter, interwoven with stories that are achingly personal, ALL THE LIVES I WANT is also an exploration of mental illness, the sex industry, and the dangers of loving too hard. But it is, above all, a paean to the celebrities who have shaped a generation of women--from Scarlett Johansson to Amber Rose, Lil' Kim, Anjelica Huston, Lana Del Rey, Anna Nicole Smith and many more. These reflections aim to reimagine these women's legacies, and in the process, teach us new ways of forgiving ourselves.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateFeb 7, 2017
    ISBN9781478971252
    Unavailable
    All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers

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    Reviews for All the Lives I Want

    4/5

    23 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This rating is rounded up from 2.5, if only gr allowed half stars...I was expecting more personal essays; these seemed mostly just observational. The essay "Long Game Bitches" seems to have the most personal anecdotes sprinkled in all the commentary and they totaled maybe 5% of the word count. Also, many of the details about the celebs felt like they were just expanded headlines from celeb news sites.
    • 4/5
      3.5 I had a decidedly mixed reaction to these essays. I am and am not the ideal target reader, as a woman I four d them interesting, but I have never been the type, not even in teen years, to idealize nor base my perception of life on the famous, or infamous. Still I did like some of these much more than others. Some I understood the message was not familiar enough with the subjects, such as Fiona Apple or Little Kim. The essay on Sylvia Plath was very interesting. The cult of followers that she unwittingly unleashed, and somewhat sad that she is more known for her suicide than any of her literary accomplishment. Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen and their lives, or rather how their lives were shaped by their early stardom, I found also unfortunate. How do you develop a separate identity after that?The author intersperses her experiences, how she felt about these stars and many other of the well known. How their lives were. shaped by the media, the men they were with and how others felt about them. The Joan Didion essay for me didn't work well, and it was the one I had been looking forward to the most. Surprisingly the essay that stuck most in my mind is on Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain, and I was never a fan of either. But it is well written and it seems Love is another that has been misjudges and her talent unacknowledged. Have a new respect and liking for Angelica Huston. Interesting to see how these women are perceived, some essays were written better than others, some worked for me, some didn't. Worth reading though especially if one considers themselves a feminist.ARC from Grand Central publisher.
    • 4/5
      Some essays are amazing, some I wish went further. I believe I responded best when it connected to The author's deeper and more personal stories. Regardless, all essays elicited a level of response and thought from me, even if the ideas were familiar they felt like looking through a fresh lens.
    • 4/5
      Hit many uber-specific cultural touchstones that resonated with me deeply. Her tone is just right - not too casual, not too confessional. A few essays suffering from an excess of quotations (sorry, Sylvia Plath), but the collection was very strong as a whole and achieved its project wonderfully.

      Still, at the end of the day, it's hard to read about people's abusive relationships and eating disorders, even if they're amazing writers (which Alana certainly is).