Um, I have never laughed so hard in my life.... and if you live in Los Angeles, you will find the book to be even more hilarious because she captures that whole sort of la/hollywood/west l.a. scene and mentality with her going on that game show and her working at shitty jobs while "finding" herself and dealing with her "issues". Like Cats57 said, if you love reading blogs (and I do) then you will love this book. What a strange, but true correlation. ( )

I loved this collection of personal essays by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor. Wilder is very honest about the kind of person she was/is and holds nothing back of her faults and mistakes. What I found so interesting about her is that through her stories about growing up, coming to LA, getting married etc, it's easy to see she didn't have the best childhood growing up yet remained remarkably upbeat and optimistic, even through her (many many) rough patches. Perhaps it is because hindsight is 20/20, but Wilder managers to look back on those crazy times with a humorous spin and highlight the absolute ridiculousness of the situation.

There were a few issues with the book. The various chapters seem to jump around a bit. Even though it's a collection of essays, I was hoping for a little more continuity with the layout. Also, I thought she was a little too light-hearted about her drug use as a young adult. Maybe that's just the goody-goody in me but I was a little uncomfortable with her overall nonchalance.

Despite that, her honesty is refreshing and (as much as I hate to admit it) it was nice reading about someone whose life was messier than mine. A quick and entertaining read! ( )

Its Not Me It’s you by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor

If you are one of millions of people who love reading Blogs about people you don’t know, then this is going to be the perfect beach book for you. Its short, easy to digest chapters remind me of reading Bloggers postings. Stefanie’s life is very self intensive and we see her go through many of the ups and downs experienced by women from every walk of life.

.In this book we will meet Stefanie Wilder a non conventional, confused, body-conscience, drug addled, under loved teen/child who has no clue about the world and we get to watch her grow into a somewhat similar and slightly neurotic and clueless adult. Her life can be viewed as tragic, yet she persevered and kept on going. The difficult birth of her twins actually made me cry. Stefanie’s life is very self centered and we see her go through many of the ups and downs experienced by women from every walk of life.


Some issues that I found to be confusing and made this a difficult read for me: just what kind of work did she ever find? Though the back of the book claims that she became a producer, yet we never get to see anything about that. We do find out that she is a writer now and I feel cheated that we seemed to have missed some important areas where she may have shown us how she grew into the adult she became. This book also has a problem with jumping back in forth in time with out fully explaining why.

I did have another problem with the continuity of the chapters. And we also see inconsistencies in the telling of the story. We see Stefanie trying to win a car on the TV game show Hollywood Squares very, early in the book when she seemed very young and are led to believe that this is the first time she is on TV, yet in a much later chapter Stefanie writes of her appearance on Star Search that this was the first time she’s been on TV.

I neither loved nor loathed this book. And since I did read it as an ARC I hope all the problems I had with the continuity is fixed when the hard cover comes out on the 7th. ( )