Entertainment Weekly (Editor’s Choice)
“The tales veer from razor sharp to hilarious. A”
Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice)
“The tales veer from razor sharp to hilarious. A”
(Editor's Choice)
"The tales veer from razor sharp to hilarious. A"
KLIATT
One of Entertainment Weekly's 10 best nonfiction books of 2005, Everybody is humorous, frantic, self-effacing, laugh-out-loud funny—well, look up "flippant" or "irreverent" in Roget's and it's all that. Beth Lisick moved with her parents from the stodgy Midwest to Northern California in 1967, settling in Sunnyvale. They went from working-class Catholic stability in small-town Illinois, wholesome as white bread, to the madness of a liberal West Coast town. "They were naive, sweet, and open to just about anything—as long as it wasn't illegal or didn't hurt anyone's feelings." Beth's life became somewhat more unusual. Her tales include: Nancy Patten, their live-in teenaged babysitter, a braless Mary Poppins in platform shoes; an improper sexual suggestion during the prom; ripping off nuns the weekend before college began; a flirtation with lesbianism; buying a house in the San Francisco Bay Area with a crazy neighbor who tended the lawn with scissors one blade of grass at a time; a brother in advertising who wrote the immortal phrase "Drop the chalupa!" for the Taco Bell Chihuahua; earning a couple of bucks by dressing up in a giant foam banana costume and Ray Ban knockoffs; writing a book and having a baby. Lisick's witty observations are for mature readers only, due to sex and adult language.
Library Journal
Lisick has sampled most of the alternative culture experiences available to Americans. Currently a prominent figure in the San Francisco arts community, she has contributed to National Public Radio's This American Life and has been a comedian, musician, and actor. Her memoir is made up of loosely connected chapters about being too bizarre for mainstream life but too mundane for the fringes. She delights in contrasting her wholesome (and slightly na ve) family with her later experiences (squatting in illegal warehouses, touring with punk poets, and ending up-slightly perplexed-with a child of her own). "[T]he fact that I had a stable childhood was precisely what let me stray pretty far away from it without ever landing in therapy, rehab, or jail," she writes. Readers who like their memoirs with loose ends neatly tied will not necessarily appreciate Lisick's breezy style; a number of one-time references are left unexplained, and chapters occasionally end abruptly. Still, these stories most definitely entertain. Recommended for larger public libraries.-Audrey Snowden, John F. Kennedy Sch., Santiago de Queretaro, Mexico Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
California performance artist Lisick offers bright, funny takes on her square upbringing in Sunnyvale during the 1970s and 1980s, her adult life in San Francisco's 1990s counterculture and beyond. A weekly columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle's Web site, the author presents herself as "too weird to fit into the mainstream world, the one I came from . . . too normal for the fringe world I found later." She highlights the contrast between normal childhood and freaked-out adulthood in her account of an annual ladies' luncheon and Christmas gift exchange at which she appears first as an eager child waitress in 1976, then, in 1991, as a disheveled invitee with a hangover and bad hair bringing a poorly wrapped, last-minute gift. Lisick uses her uneasy stint as a homecoming princess and her appalling first date with a popular jock to create an entertaining glimpse of her high school years. Later, she's at UC Santa Cruz stuffing $20 bills into her black bustier at a Catholic charities raffle because she needs money for an abortion. It's darkly funny, and there's more to come. After college, Lisick travels with an all-female punk-rock troupe named Sister Spit and explores her sexuality with a female construction worker named Trouble. Then, while living with her boyfriend in a San Francisco warehouse that's flooded by broken sewer pipes, she is forced to move her possessions out in a beat-up shopping cart. When she eventually buys a house in Berkeley, it's in a rundown, garbage-strewn neighborhood known as Brokely. Such personal disasters, small and large, are the stuff of these memoirs, providing her with the material for her sharp observations and self-deprecation. The final piece finds hera bemused new mother, coping with a drooling and crusty-headed baby boy who's clad all wrong in pink and yellow. Exaggeration in the interest of a good story is no sin, and Lisick is above all an accomplished storyteller. Light, flippant and savvy. Author tour
