Faith Salie says she is both “deeply honored and deeply apologetic” at being chosen as master of ceremonies for today’s Adult Book & Author Breakfast: “I looked up the names of hosts from the last few years, and I hope they won’t be sorry they picked me.” That’s unlikely given Salie’s impressive and somewhat quirky résumé. She’s an Emmy-winning contributor to the venerable CBS News Sunday Morning and a panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me! As an actress, she’s appeared in gold lamé on Sex and the City and been beamed up on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. And did we mention she’s possibly the only Rhodes scholar who’s also been a standup comedian, albeit “for way too long, and I was not great at it.”
Despite a master’s in Modern English Literature from Oxford, it took her 40 years to finally decide to write a book of her own. “I thought it was time to write about what I know instead of critically deconstructing the world’s greatest works,” she says. Approval Junkie: Adventures in Caring Too Much (Crown Archetype) is a series of candid, witty, and sometimes heartbreaking essays that reflect on a lifetime of looking for validation in all the wrong places and how she finally overcame her addiction to gold stars. The book has already won the approval of Publishers Weekly, which said, “the memoir is as pleasing as they come.”
Salie’s essays range from “My Summer Fling with Bill O’Reilly,” which she describes as “a lesson in learning how dangerous it is to go toe-to-toe with a man whose forehead is twice as big as mine” to “Ovary Achiever,” about having two babies after age 40 and “What I Wore to My Divorce,” which details Salie’s struggles to pick the perfect outfit to wear to the courthouse to divorce her then husband. “These are the themes I wanted to write about; the meaningful and sometimes ridiculous stories I have to share,” she says. The quest for approval, Salie believes, is a universal one. “Wanting to be loved and appreciated connects us all.”
Salie will be hitting the road after BEA for events and book signings in New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Dallas, and D.C. Today, at 10 a.m., she’ll be signing books at the Penguin Random House booth (2433, Table 3).
This article appeared in the May 12, 2016 edition of PW BEA Show Daily.
