Overview
A delicious, laugh-out-loud funny Southern-fried memoir about growing up a "proper young lady"...or not.
A strict regimen of Southern-belle grooming should have prepared Anna Fields for a lifetime of ladylike behavior.
But it didn't.
As it turned out, Anna-a smart, outspoken, bookish girl- was a dud at debbing. After being kicked out of cotillion classes, the "Rebel Deb" left North Carolina to seek her fortune. Her first stop was Brown University-right in the heart of Yankee-land-and then the crazy world of Hollywood talent agencies and celebrity-packed restaurants. After a disastrous stint as Diana Ross's personal assistant, Anna headed off to the Big Apple, where she worked for one of Bravo's Real Housewives. It's a rollicking, unlikely success story from a natural-born storyteller.
Sharp, sweet, and sassy, Confessions of a Rebel Debutante proves you can take the girl out of the South, but you can't take the South out of the girl!
Synopsis
A delicious, laugh-out-loud funny Southern-fried memoir about growing up a "proper young lady"...or not. A strict regimen of Southern-belle grooming should have prepared Anna Fields for a lifetime of ladylike behavior. But it didn't. As it turned out, Anna-a smart, outspoken, bookish girl- was a dud at debbing. After being kicked out of cotillion classes, the "Rebel Deb" left North Carolina to seek her fortune. Her first stop was Brown University-right in the heart of Yankee-land-and then the crazy world of Hollywood talent agencies and celebrity-packed restaurants. After a disastrous stint as Diana Ross's personal assistant, Anna headed off to the Big Apple, where she worked for one of Bravo's Real Housewives. It's a rollicking, unlikely success story from a natural-born storyteller. Sharp, sweet, and sassy, Confessions of a Rebel Debutante proves you can take the girl out of the South, but you can't take the South out of the girl!
Publishers Weekly
Although Fields, a standup comedian and writer for As the World Turns, bemoans non-Southerners who “prefer to believe I grew up with Jim Bakker-style televangelists hoarding Confederate silver,” she dishes out plenty of stereotypes when recounting her own missteps up North—New Yorkers, for example, are “crammed into tiny little apartments... like sardines” and they all dress in black, and the subways are just awful. Fields's memoir skips from one set of anecdotes—boarding school in North Carolina, college at Brown, misadventures in Hollywood, living as a struggling writer in New York—to another, with occasional digressions intended to reflect a down-home common sense leavened by a rebellious streak. (As she remarks early on, she was groomed to be a debutante, but never did get to have her coming-out party.) Most of her stories are, however, unremarkable, and neither her experiences nor her insights stand out. Things pick up when she begins taking gratuitous swipes at celebrities she's encountered, from Julia Stiles (arrogant) to Diana Ross (“crazy-ass”); a later misadventure working for one of Bravo's Real Housewives reads like a Nanny Diariesknockoff. The overall effect is occasionally entertaining but ultimately ephemeral. (Apr.)