Surrender the Pink

Rating:
Summary: Carrie Fisher can act AND write!
Review: I FINALLY read "Surrender the Pink" and I have to tell you, while I wasn't quite able to surrender to the story entirely, I did enjoy a semi-fun read. First, the down points. For being such a strong woman, Carrie comes off as entirely too sexist for my tastes. She repeatedly reinforces the idea of the "weaker" sex, continually whining and kavetching about how horrible it is to be a woman. I agree, women are oppressed and a lot of times it's tough, but this male-identified authoress puts her own sex and herself down entirely too much. (As far as the character being a different person other than herself, I'm not buyin' it.) But she does have some pretty funny insights about the human condition and that alone kept me grinning and turning pages. I was fascinated by Carrie's choice to include little science factoids on animal mating habits, juxtaposing these tidbits with facets of her own (character's) story. It was a nice frame. I also dug the open-ending ending,. Glad it's not TOO tidy.

Rating:
Summary: Funny and eloquently written
Review: I have to say that I didn't know anything about Carrie Fisher before I started reading Surrender the Pink. So I just enjoyed the book without having any preconceived notions about it. For the first 60 pages or so I didn't find the plot all too engaging, but it kind of picked up when Dinah travelled east. What I really enjoyed about this book were the language, mostly the dialogues. There is nothing particularly intellectual about them, I just thought they were funny and they made the book well worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: Good if you've already read Postcards from the Edge
Review: In Postcards from the Edge you could easily see that there was only a fine line dividing Fisher from the exploits of her main character, Suzanne Vail. After all, Fisher had been in drug therapy; so was Vail. Fisher was a movie star, daughter of movie stars; so was Vail. The success of Postcards from the Edge, however, wasn't in the voyeuristic opportunities of seeing how Fisher's life was like from her point-of-view, but the point-of-view itself: sarcastically caustic and witty. Well, it's all back in Surrender the Pink. And I mean all back. Once again, you wonder just how much of Dinah Kaufman is fictional and how much Fisher. How much of this failed relationship between Dinah and her famous playwright ex-husband Rudy Gendler is taken from the break-up of Fisher and famous songwriter ex-husband Paul Simon. The wit and sarcasm are there as well, this time informed with brief quotes on the nature of sex in the animal kingdom. However, Surrender the Pink isn't quite as satisfying as Postcards from the Edge. For all the action that takes place here, what one remembers are the interminable "talking heads" on the cliched differences between men and women. Even though the characters (and Fisher) realize that they are repeating cliches, it makes it no easier for the reader to swallow. The only thing that kept me reading at times were the occasional glimpses of true lunacy that was the focus of Postcards from the Edge. Surrender the Pink is also a more traditional narrative, with chapters and backflashes that flow evenhandedly, rather than the herky-jerky, episodic nature of Postcards from the Edge. Unfortunately, the bridges in Surrender the Pink probably would have been better exorcised rather than be allowed to bog the narrative as they do. For all its jerks, Postcards from the Edge was the better book.(This "review" originally appeared in First Impressions Installment Two [http://www.owt.com/users/gcox/fi.contents.html].)

Rating:
Summary: What's so funny?
Review: This book is sick! I'm not sure how I endured 67+ pages when I didn't like it from the first page. The "plus" is because I flipped through it after page 67 to see if I could find any reason why this book had such rave reviews. I could not find anything.

Not only could I not find anything to laugh about, but I couldn't even find anything to smile about.

Is there a "story" in here somewhere? If so, it sure wasn't in the pages I read. I'm glad I wasted no more precious reading time on this book. It's in the "give away" stack, but could be in the garbage.