Approval Junkie: Adventures in Caring Too Much

This beach-read of a memoir by comedian and culture commentator Salie is a series of essays, or more accurately, stand-up routines put to the page. The point of most of them is to win the reader’s approval by convincing us that Salie is beautiful, successful, smart, and thin, a message she smooths over by couching it in self-deprecation. She is clever enough (a Rhodes scholar, in fact) to disarm her readers with witty neologisms—her “wasband” for her ex-husband, her “noga pants,” for yoga pants in which she does no yoga—and to almost convince readers that she believes that her life, where she won a high school beauty pageant and made out with a boyfriend near Eliot House at Harvard while listening to Madame Butterfly, is just par for the course. There are some great moments in here: Salie takes responsibility for failure when she bombs an appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s show, and she is poignant and loving in describing the bond that breast-feeding created between her and her baby. When Salie is not trying to win the reader’s approval and writes from the heart, the memoir is as pleasing as they come. (Apr.)