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Overview
When Merrill Markoe, successful comedian, two-time author, and four-time Emmy award-winner, looked back at her life's loves, she found a long track record with few successes. In this hilarious collection, Markoe walks ground that the average woman, lost in a sea of unsuccessful relationships, would never step on to present a bold, brazen, and brilliantly funny take on love and sex in the self-help world of the nineties.
Synopsis
When Merril Markoe looked back on her decidedly checkered romantic past, she decided, in the name of women everywhere, to set out on a quest for the holy grail of true love. The result is Merrill Markoe's Guide to Love, which goes boldly where no book has ever dared -- from a hands-on oral-sex class to a consultation with LaToya Jackson's psychic. Markoe discloses the "Secrets of Seduction" -- who knew that oven mitts can make intercourse more fun? -- and visits a "love channeler" who delivers advice from his alter-ego Shontee, who lives 250,000 years in the future. Having scaled a mountain of Hallmark poetry and "breast enhancers," Markoe has proven herself a guerrilla in the struggle for love. Coming in comic aid to women in distress everywhere, Merrill Markoe's Guide to Love is a brazen and brilliantly funny take on love and sex in the self-help world of the nineties.
Publishers Weekly
Partly a spoof on guides to romantic relationships, Markoe's look at love and sex in the 1990s is often tiresome, sometimes wickedly funny and occasionally hilarious. Roughly one-third of the 21 selections appeared in New Woman. Writing with a keen sense of the ridiculous honed by her own checkered love life, Markoe, a columnist for Buzz and New Woman, offers witty takes on marriage, flirtation and screwed-up relationships. She exposes the inanity of much self-help advice as she reports on seminars and weekend retreats she's attended in the Los Angeles area on the art of seduction, the fine points of oral sex, finding one's soul mate and how to appeal to the opposite sex. She distills tongue-in-cheek lessons from Hollywood romantic movies and brings sharp feminist humor to her discussion of dating rituals and men's fixation with scoring and with body parts. But much of her counsel reads like a stand-up comic's scattershot monologue. (Feb.)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Partly a spoof on guides to romantic relationships, Markoe's look at love and sex in the 1990s is often tiresome, sometimes wickedly funny and occasionally hilarious. Roughly one-third of the 21 selections appeared in New Woman. Writing with a keen sense of the ridiculous honed by her own checkered love life, Markoe, a columnist for Buzz and New Woman, offers witty takes on marriage, flirtation and screwed-up relationships. She exposes the inanity of much self-help advice as she reports on seminars and weekend retreats she's attended in the Los Angeles area on the art of seduction, the fine points of oral sex, finding one's soul mate and how to appeal to the opposite sex. She distills tongue-in-cheek lessons from Hollywood romantic movies and brings sharp feminist humor to her discussion of dating rituals and men's fixation with scoring and with body parts. But much of her counsel reads like a stand-up comic's scattershot monologue. (Feb.)Library Journal
With four Emmys to her credit not to mention a history of bad relationships humorist Markoe claims to have the answers for anyone curious about love.Library Journal
With four Emmys to her credit not to mention a history of bad relationships humorist Markoe claims to have the answers for anyone curious about love.Kirkus Reviews
Markoe (How to Be Hap-Hap-Happy Like Me, 1994), a columnist and Emmy Award winning former writer for David Letterman, is like a sassy friend who's fun to spend time with—although maybe not too much time all at once.Being guided through the vicissitudes of love by a self-described "hyper-ironic smart ass" is bound to be enlightening, and Markoe doesn't disappoint. From hysterical send- ups of the "Hallmark poets" to the finer points of canine attachment, Markoe's vision of love is unique and hilarious. The largest part of her search for understanding is taken up with doing the circuit of love-related seminars in her home state of California (where love and self-help are not so easily distinguished). In "Secretz of Seduction," Markoe finds herself waist-deep in vibrating, squirting, anatomically correct love tools. In romance guru Dr. Pat Allen's seminar "Getting to I Do," she must raise her right hand to affirm: "I promise on my honor I will keep my mouth shut when I am trolling as a sexual person and wait until I am spoken to and then respond enthusiastically no matter how stupid the remark, so help me, God"—which is patently impossible for Markoe, who cannot let a stupid remark go unremarked. (Markoe ends up spending much of her seminar training time at hotel bars with friends, who accompany her on her quest.) Sometimes she goes it alone, as when she visits a love channeler, who puts his hand down her shirt and makes her a horsehair charm that she must wear in her "Triangle of Venus" to attract men. Markoe is more impressed with the fact that she is still alive after this adventure than she is with the charm's efficacy.