Approval junkie Adventures in caring too much

Review by Booklist Review

Those wise enough to pick up this collection of essays are about to find their newest best friend in Salie. Sharing intensely personal information lightened with touches of humor and an appreciation for the absurdities of life, the author chronicles her first unsuccessful marriage, her second, very happy marriage, her body-image issues, and her often-changing career path. Readers may recognize pieces of their own lives in the challenges and joys of her journey and will undoubtedly find even more to emotionally connect with in Salie's awkward and endearing experiences. Plan on reading this once for entertainment, or better, twice for the life lessons available. Not content with being a Rhodes scholar, this brilliant, funny woman has a resumé that includes multiple listings as a guest commentator on political and pop-culture television shows in the U.S. and England, her own National Public Radio show, Fair Game from PRI with Faith Salie, regular appearances as a panelist on NPR's Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!, and a variety of acting credits.--Hayman, Stacey Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This beach-read of a memoir by comedian and culture commentator Salie is a series of essays, or more accurately, stand-up routines put to the page. The point of most of them is to win the reader's approval by convincing us that Salie is beautiful, successful, smart, and thin, a message she smooths over by couching it in self-deprecation. She is clever enough (a Rhodes scholar, in fact) to disarm her readers with witty neologisms-her "wasband" for her ex-husband, her "noga pants," for yoga pants in which she does no yoga-and to almost convince readers that she believes that her life, where she won a high school beauty pageant and made out with a boyfriend near Eliot House at Harvard while listening to Madame Butterfly, is just par for the course. There are some great moments in here: Salie takes responsibility for failure when she bombs an appearance on Bill O'Reilly's show, and she is poignant and loving in describing the bond that breast-feeding created between her and her baby. When Salie is not trying to win the reader's approval and writes from the heart, the memoir is as pleasing as they come. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A TV and radio host acknowledges her need to be liked and tells how she's worked hard to overcome this. Comedian and journalist Salie wittily lays bare the highs and lows of her life (so far) and explains how much of what she's done has been because she's "an approval junkie." When she told people the title of this book, some immediately understood what she was trying to do, while others looked at her askance. "At which point," she writes, "I put down the cake I was frosting for them while simultaneously breastfeeding my daughter and doing squats and explained that I'm not ashamed about wanting approval. It kept my high school GPA very high. It's kept my BMI somewhat low. It's kept me on my toes when I wasn't already wearing heels to elongate my legs." Salie tells readers about falling in and out of love with her "wasband," the struggles she's had over the years with her weight, losing her virginity and telling her mother about it the next day, receiving hand job instructions from her gay brother, and a host of other intimate details about her personal life. The author talks about her mother's illness and death, her difficulty in conceiving children as an older woman and the fertility treatments she endured, her various jobs on TV and radio, and falling in love with her new husband. Salie uses humor throughout her short essays, particularly in the beginning. As the book progresses, the moments she discusses are more tender than humorous, allowing readers a closer perspective on the author's life. Salie's children also make appearances in short narratives about miscarriages, the desire for a girl, and breast-feeding and breast pumps. She concludes with a sweet letter to her daughter, in which she urges her to "care a lot about winning your own approvalenough to stretch, appreciate, and occasionally embarrass yourself." Funny, touching essays on being a multifaceted woman with unique dreams, desires, and needs. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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I totally saw the proposal coming, because, well, it was simply time. We'd talked about getting married, explicitly and erosively, for so long that it wasn't worth talking about anymore. We'd been dating for five years, which is also known as a "lustrum." But even that rococo word doesn't romanticize that half a decade is a long time to wait, and everyone in our lives was sick of it. There was an unspoken feeling of Let's get this over with, so we can see if it will make things better . Please buckle up, because here comes some caps lock: YES I TOTALLY KNOW THAT GETTING MARRIED IS NEVER THE WAY TO FIX A CRAPPY RELATIONSHIP BUT I ALSO KNOW I SHOULD FLOSS MY TEETH EVERY DAY BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH THANKS. I really didn't think it would happen this one particular afternoon. This explains why I had no makeup on and had decked myself out in an Old Navy shirt, comfy jeans, and boots that supplied no flattering heel height. The wasband had gone into the Lighthouse Museum, because his great-grandfather or someone had had something to do with the building of the village lighthouse. I was exhausted (from an­ticipation) so I stayed in the rental car, reclined my seat, and napped. He woke me up with a knock on the window and an enthusiastic grin. "You've got to see this view!" If you've watched Braveheart , you know that Scotland doesn't really give a shite that it's late May or that you're about to get proposed to, so it was wildly windy and chilly. My hair was flying everywhere. Poised on the precipice, we admired the vibrant indigo of the North Sea and the was­band's cultural provenance. When he told me to sit on the lone bench surrounded by wildflowers, I knew. His fist was clenched, and he began to kneel. My heart started beating faster. I shook my head. "Oh my God . . . no. Stop." That is what I said. Something deep inside me, beyond ego and beyond heart, knew this thing for which I'd been yearning wasn't what was best for us. He paused midkneel, his blue-gray eyes full of hurt. Un­characteristically, transparently, vulnerably surprised and hurt. I'd never seen that look on his face before, and I would never see it again. It lasted maybe "one Mississippi, two Mississippi," and I couldn't bear it. "Go ahead," I said. "I'm sorry, go ahead." He knelt down and asked me to marry him. He kept it simple. Perhaps that was a bold choice suggestive of a re­birth of our relationship, or maybe it was head-in-sandy not to acknowledge how rough our journey to this moment had been. Or, quite likely, I wasn't much of a muse after ordering him to stop proposing. When he asked, "Will you marry me?," I looked at him through my shades, coolly. His question, like his first "I love you," created such a panoply of emotions that the best course seemed to be to try to keep my face neutral. I didn't smile or cry or gasp. I waited a few moments, my heart beat­ing out of my chest, while I tried to relish the return of that ephemeral taste of power. The man I deeply loved and resented, in whom I'd deeply invested, was on one knee, asking me the question I'd longed to hear since our first date. It was, in theory, the ul­timate gesture of approval, but it didn't feel that way. It was too hard-earned, and that made me feel hollow. The Scot­tish winds carried any "power" I had out to sea. I said only, "Yes," quietly, because I wanted to. I wanted to marry him. You don't have to believe in karma to understand this: he and I were meant to be, well, not meant to be. We had to live through the first part to realize the last part. I couldn't wear his grandmother's ring, because it was too small. Way to feel fat at your betrothal. Excerpted from Approval Junkie by Faith Salie All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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