Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch : Tales from a Bad Neighborhood

Rating:
Summary: "Bad Neighborhood," good book
Review: "Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From A Bad Neighborhood" is probably the best title so far this year. And, unlike with many books, the contents live up to it. Writer/NPR commentator/translator/airline attendant Hollis Gillespie shares nuggets of her life (and razor-edged wisdom) in this offbeat, zany memoir.

Gillespie draws readers into her life, past and present: Her three best pals are Lary (who offers to shoot her sometimes), Daniel (a likably weird artist) and Grant (gay bartender/seller of porno-religious signs made by an angry ex-nun). She struggles with horrible bleach jobs, jars of teeth, imperfect German ("It would please me greatly to purchase medicine for my fluid nostrils"), and Myrtle the lesbian ghost.

She suffers the world's least dignified mugging, a visit to the Amsterdam red light district (rubber fists?), and the question of whether she flashed people when she was soused. At the same time, Gillespie deals with more touching topics. As the daughter of an alcoholic trailor-salesman and a kleptomaniac bomb-making mom who wanted to be a beautician, she describes her family's trials and distances, one of the last visits to her terminally ill mother, and how her young niece was hospitalized.

"Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch" veers between wacky and touching, past and present. Gillespie's stories are less like a memoir or autobiography than like a collection of columns, loosely strung together. She also has the unique knack of being able to take little experiences, ramble about them in an engaging way, and wrap it up without losing her way.

Gillespie comes across as real and a bit twisted, like the zany pal of yours who lives down the street. Life keeps swinging at her, and she keeps dodging. Her tone is honest, endearingly self-deprecating, with a dose of sarcasm to keep her observations sharp. Backing her up are her likably eccentric pals, who serve as her partners in crime (translation: in ear-piercing and drinking).

Funny and poignant and strange, "Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch" is a unique look at a witty woman who tells us of her personal storms. Wickedly delicious and highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Bleachy-Haired babe!
Review: A friend got me this for my birthday and my only regret is that it isn't longer and she doesn't have any other books out...

When I grow up, I wanna be Hollis.

Rating:
Summary: She Frolicks In The Ottomiss."
Review: A friend of mine and fan of the author calls her the "potty-mouth of Creative Loafing", a title I suspect that would not displease her since her language is saltier than the peanuts her father ate to disguise his alcoholic's breath. In this loosely-connected string of essays-- Ms. Gillespie finally moves into her home in Capitol View in Atlanta and several of the essays lead up to that move-- she will make you laugh with her raucous humor, marvel at her uncanny ability to coin new phrases (housework impaired,for instance) and identify with the universality of her sense of loss and sorrow. While the essays are chockfull of sailor vocabulary, many of them end in sorrow for lost oportunities. Ms. Gillespie's alcoholic father died alone and she blew a chance to be with him, for example. And she could have been kinder to him by pretending to like the cooking he did for her and her brother and sisters: "Looking back, I wish we could have pretended we liked some of his meals, but when you're young your weapon is honesty, which is perhaps the most merciless of them all." I would have liked to have known her parents, particularly her mother, an atheist who built bombs for the government, but who, on her deathbed, said that her greatest regret in life was asking for a bicycle for Christmas as a little girl, knowing full well that her parents could not afford to buy her one. Gillespie has aptly named this chapter about her mother, "Jesus Loves Atheists." There are many other essays like this here that will warm your heart.

As I "frolicked through the ottomiss" of these essays--Gillespie's childhood misunderstanding of the words of "Puff, the Magic Dragon"-- two thoughts kept popping up in my brain: (1) which of these essays does Ms. Gillespie select to read aloud at signings and (2) that her parents would be proud of her if they could read this book.

Rating:
Summary: She Frolicks In The Ottomiss."
Review: A friend of mine and fan of the author calls her the "potty-mouth of Creative Loafing", a title I suspect that would not displease her since her language is saltier than the peanuts her father ate to disguise his alcoholic's breath. In this loosely-connected string of essays-- Ms. Gillespie finally moves into her home in Capitol View in Atlanta and several of the essays lead up to that move-- she will make you laugh with her raucous humor, marvel at her uncanny ability to coin new phrases (housework impaired,for instance) and identify with the universality of her sense of loss and sorrow. While the essays are chockfull of sailor vocabulary, many of them end in sorrow for lost oportunities. Ms. Gillespie's alcoholic father died alone and she blew a chance to be with him, for example. And she could have been kinder to him by pretending to like the cooking he did for her and her brother and sisters: "Looking back, I wish we could have pretended we liked some of his meals, but when you're young your weapon is honesty, which is perhaps the most merciless of them all." I would have liked to have known her parents, particularly her mother, an atheist who built bombs for the government, but who, on her deathbed, said that her greatest regret in life was asking for a bicycle for Christmas as a little girl, knowing full well that her parents could not afford to buy her one. Gillespie has aptly named this chapter about her mother, "Jesus Loves Atheists." There are many other essays like this here that will warm your heart.

As I "frolicked through the ottomiss" of these essays--Gillespie's childhood misunderstanding of the words of "Puff, the Magic Dragon"-- two thoughts kept popping up in my brain: (1) which of these essays does Ms. Gillespie select to read aloud at signings and (2) that her parents would be proud of her if they could read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Brillantly funny and touching
Review: BHHB is a work of art. Humorously real while demonstrating an eloquent appreciation for life and a brillant expression of the imperfectly perfect nature of people.

Rating:
Summary: A celebration of dysfunction
Review: BLEACHY-HAIRED HONKY BITCH by Hollis Gillespie is a series of autobiographical musings in celebration of dysfunction reminiscent of such works by David Sedaris as NAKED and ME TALK PRETTY ONE DAY.

The book's ninety chapters, each usually no more than 2-3 pages long, are a sequence of stand-up comedy routines put to print. The difference is, of course, that much of the humor in a live stand-up routine revolves around the performer's delivery, facial expressions, and body language. Here, each chapter is at least headed by one of four face shots of Gillespie that reappear in a regular sequence. One is of a pleasingly smiling Hollis. The second shows a teeth-baring grimace. The final two show Gillespie sticking her tongue out at the reader - in one she looks ill, and in the other she appears insulting. My immediate reaction to the latter two was "Classy broad!" Since, judging from other photos in the book of the author, her parents, and her friends, Hollis is not unattractive, I'm not sure why she included the grimace and tongue shots except to demonstrate that she has "an attitude". Fair enough.

It seems everything about Gillespie's life has been dysfunctional. Her brilliant Mom was a government missile designer who was apt to feed Hollis and her siblings a bowl of Halloween candy for breakfast because she couldn't cook. Her alcoholic Dad was a generally-unemployed trailer salesman. Currently, Hollis describes herself as a part-time airline attendant and foreign language interpreter, and that's about as "normal" as it gets. Otherwise, she describes her adolescent fling with drugs, her occasional descents into alcoholic drunkenness, and her bad financial credit. Apparently, she's incapable of an intimate relationship with a member of the opposite sex, but rather hangs out with, and devotes much of the book to, three equally dysfunctional male friends - Lary, Daniel and Grant.

BHHB is funny at first, but it becomes tiresome at about the half-way point. And, by the time she describes the run-down Atlanta neighborhood, where she buys a fixer-upper home, as an area "in which people were clamoring for in-town property like feral hogs set free in a field of sleeping newborn babies", I also began to wonder what sort of person would come up with such an unhealthy analogy.

Hollis occasionally demonstrates bursts of insight, as when she writes:

"... I'm old enough to have a box of broken dreams all my own ... You need to look inside that box sometimes and see what isn't beyond mending."

Finally, Gillespie is perhaps at her most engaging at the end of the very last chapter when she describes her last comfort rendered to her dying mother. At that point, I almost began to like her.

Memoirs can be both humorous and perceptive without being unkind. Take SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS by Laura Shaine Cunningham as a fine example. One's views of the world can also be both humorous and sharply pointed without being self-flagellating, such as THE ROAD TO MCCARTHY by Pete McCarthy.

BLEACH-HAIRED HONKY BITCH may grow on you, but it didn't on me.

Rating:
Summary: She's Like Your Funniest Friend.
Review: Hollis Gillespie claims she's "ripped the hell off " out of her favorite writers, Dave Barry, Carl Hiaasen, David Sedaris (to name a few of my favorites as well) but I found her work to be hilariously original and enjoyed spending a few days of reading alone and often out load to appreciative listeners from *Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch.* At the conclusion of each piece, I found it was difficult to stop reading. I wanted more.

She is honest, unique, laugh-out-loud funny, raunchy and ... sweet. There is a tender side blended into the series, particularly when she writes about her father and other family members. A piece entitled "One of Those Nights," about the night she learned her young niece was in a serious accident, was quite poignant.

On the other end of the scale, the funny "Born Again Booze Weenie," a tale of a talking liver, is alone worth the price of the book.

This book created a fan out of me. I'll look for work to come. Thanks!

From the author of "I'm Living Your Dream Life," and "The Things I Wish I'd Said," McKenna Publishing Group

Rating:
Summary: Outrageous Ironic Humor Drawn from Painful Memories
Review: Hollis Gillespie has an original voice whose many tiny tales of her youthful recollections will sear their pain into your memory forever. At the same time, she is able to connect to and from those experiences into current lessons. When she flips from one time frame and reference to another, the leaps will often leave you gasping for breath. Like most people who hold their pain close to the surface, she uses overt exaggeration and self-deprecating humor to make her story more appealing. When she leaves more of past behind her new "bad" neighborhood, she becomes a raconteur of the sort whose humor would be spellbinding from a comedy stage after four drinks. You make a connection with her, though, because she is unpretentious about what she wants and has achieved. The many photographs in the book help make her and her dysfunctional family more real than any book has a right to be.

As I read this book, I was returned to my own memories . . . of young women whose families failed to perform for them . . . and who shared their pain with me while I was growing up in self-deprecating humor. Although I have never met Ms. Gillespie, I feel like I have known her all my life through those memories.

There are several aspects of this book that will not be appealing to many. Let me spell those out so potential readers can judge for themselves. First, the tiny essays don't always connect well to the material before or after them. Each one is a polished jewel . . . but they often seem scattered carelessly in the street (like her father's Bible after it flew out of her car on the highway). Second, Ms. Gillespie loves vulgar language and references. Third, with so much focus on her youth, the book will seem remote to some older readers. Fourth, she doesn't try too hard to hide the pain . . . and it gets hard to read after a while. Fifth, there's an antireligious sentiment in the book that will require some to turn the other cheek. I personally saw it as antihypocrisy . . . and wasn't bothered.

Above all, I found the experience of learning about someone whose life has many unusual fears to be intensely interesting. It would never occur to me to have many of these thoughts, and I felt like my humanity was broadened by the experience. That was a good thing, and I'm glad I read the book.

I kept trying to connect her writing to an existing author in order to give you a clue about her work. If you can imagine Erma Bombeck having had an dysfunctional childhood that led her to love vulgar language, I think that's as close as I can come.

As I finished the book, I realized new dimensions of how important it is to provide love and emotional security for children. Go hug a child today!

Rating:
Summary: Hilarious "scripts" for a 1st rate standup commedienne!
Review: Hollis Gillespie is one of the funniest, wittiest, brightest writers around. BLEACHY-HIRED HONKY BITCH: TALES FROM A BAD NEIGHBORHOOD reads like hearing a standup comedienne play to an audience for all its worth. Though I have never heard her on her gigs as NPR commentator on "All Things Considered" or read her "Mood Swing" column for Atlanta's CREATIVE LOAFING weekly, I am in awe of her craftsmanship with words, her outrageous analogies and metaphors, and her ability to find humor in the most mundane of circumstances and events. Yet despite the corrosive title, Gillespie does not come across as a weirdo to be avoided at all costs: if all that she writes is based on truth then she has to be one of the most endearing friends and observers around. Perhaps this richness of material comes from the fact that in addition to her 'cultural side' as an NPR commentator, she actually is a flight attendant and a linguist, so put all that background together and the sky is not even the limit for this talented writer's imagination. She peoples her 'memoirs' with friends (gay Brian and Grant whose own lives are rich in hilarity, Lary who is looney and plies her with drugs, her rocket scientist mother - who dreams of being a beautician! - and alcoholic ne're-do-well trailer salesman father, and her brothers and sisters who provide material from her incredibly weird childhood to her normalcy-challenged adulthood. The book is an easy read: chapters are rarely more than two or three pages and peppered with photos of her friends and family. Because of the nature of the layout of the book, it is a terrific traveling companion or bedside icon for chuckling the day's troubles away before sleep.
I'd like to see Gillespie write a full-fledged novel, so keen is her word craftsmanship. Examples: "I never had a pussy-pet dog. Once I temporarily inherited two Labradors named Gracie and Amber. They were sisters, and both of them were the most comical, slobbery, eye-booger encrusted, walking wads of psoriasis you ever saw. Having birthed three litters, they each had hefty leftover dugs that dangled from their underbellies like big balls of soft warm dough. Amber had a problem with her left ear too, which occasionally swelled up like an eggplant and stuck straight out from her skull, making her look like she had a furry party balloon taped to her head. etc." and "There must be something really wrong with the world when you can't get a buzz off your codeine cough medicine. Christ if that doesn't just suck all the fun out of being sick." You get the picture.
If there are episodes of repeated information, read them like reminders of some of the previous laughs in the book. Oddly, too, for a book format such as this, the quickie memoirs hang together with clever continuity: Gillespie usually sums up each short remembrance with an introspective bit of tenderness. This is a refreshing, well-written bit of welcome satire of our world "and welcome to it!"

Rating:
Summary: Great Fun
Review: Hollis Gillespie is really funny--she's got a warped sense of humor that leans toward exaggerating. She's lived a somewhat wacky life and has given us a collection of little essays, meditations if you will on her life. All of these essays are amusing, at a minimum and some are so unbelievable funny and just so on, that I still can't stop thinking of them. She has a way of describing that sort of slow-paced walk people take, oh, right in front of your car when your light's green that is utterly perfect. Reading these essays is a little like having a few beers with your funniest friend. You won't be able to stop laughing and you'll keep coming back for more.