Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch : Tales from a Bad Neighborhood

From Publishers Weekly
In this zesty memoir, NPR commentator and flight attendant Gillespie riffs on everything from her work as a "bad German translator" to her belief that a lesbian ghost is haunting her house. Gillespie, a hard-living bleached blonde who yearns to own a house, is as charming as a friendly drunk who says one funny, impossible sentence after another. She chronicles her life in diminutive essays, with an appreciation for absurd, seemingly minor moments. The book's title comes from the curses yelled by a man who was taking an "asshole stroll" across the road, ambling along with the speed of a diseased bovine, Gillespie notes, when she almost hit him because she wasn't paying attention. She suspects the neighborhood denizens will be unhappy that someone like her is looking for a house in the area: "[The crack dealers] shake their heads dejectedly, knowing it's a bad day for the neighborhood when bleachy-haired honky bitches can't brake to accommodate a good asshole stroll." Among these bright moments of detail, Gillespie manages to tell the story of her family, and like any family worth examining, it has an unusually large number of oddballs. Her mother, who wanted to become a cosmetologist but was terrible at it, ended up as a weapons designer after falling into a job at IBM. Her usually jobless father excelled at charming people into buying him drinks and wearing designer shoes. Sometimes tender, but mostly just wry and a bit wild, Gillespie's writing is like the best radio commentary, leaving fans hungry for more. Photos. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
A publicist attached the word memoir to this book by the NPR commentator and Creative Loafing columnist, but lacking much of a through line (and with a lot of repeated information), it reads more like a collection of commentary and columns. Gillespie dealt with a difficult, itinerant childhood by settling in Atlanta, forming a new family of offbeat friends, and working toward home ownership. Irreverent and earthy, sometimes fairly funny, most of these microessays follow a similar formula. She free-associates between past and present, ruminating on self, friendship, and family, bundling it all into a life-affirming epiphany (let go of needless attachments, live in the moment, don't live in fear) within a couple of pages. Some are quite successful, although the book isn't entirely compelling as a front-to-back read: each piece is so short that it feels like being stuck in stop-and-go traffic. Curiously, the bad neighborhood of the title is discussed only at the very end, and Gillespie's reflections on moving to a poverty-stricken area are pretty thin. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Vanity Fair
"Riotous . . . rib-crackling."


Entertainment Weekly
"Raucous."


Publishers Weekly
"Zesty."


Vanity Fair
"Riotous . . . rib-crackingly funny."


San Francisco Chronicle
"Funny and moving. Completely compelling."


Writer's Digest
"Gillespie’s irreverent wit and hilarious observations are reverberating far beyond the trailer park."


Book Description

NPR commentator Hollis Gillespie's outrageously funny -- and equally heartbreaking -- collection of autobiographical tales chronicles her journey through self-reckoning and the worst neighborhoods of Atlanta in search of a home she can call her own. The daughter of a missile scientist and an alcoholic traveling trailer salesman, Gillespie was nine before she realized not everybody's mother made bombs, and thirty before she realized it was possible to live in one place longer than a six-month lease allows. Supporting her are the social outcasts she calls her best friends: Daniel, a talented and eccentric artist; Grant, who makes his living peddling folk art by a denounced nun who paints plywood signs with twisted evangelical sayings; and Lary, who often, out of compassion, offers to shoot her like a lame horse.

Hollis's friends help her battle the mess of obstacles that stand in her way -- including her warped childhood, in which her parents moved her and her siblings around the country like carnival barkers, chasing missile-building contracts and other whimsies, such as her father's dream to patent and sell door-to-door the world's most wondrous key-chain. A past like this will make you doubt you'll ever have a future, much less roots. Miraculously, though, Gillespie manages to plant exactly that: roots, as wrested and dubious as they are.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"NPR commentator Hollis Gillespie's outrageously funny - and equally heartbreaking - collection of autobiographical tales chronicles her journey through self-reckoning and the worst neighborhoods of Atlanta in search of a home she can call her own. The daughter of a missile scientist and an alcoholic traveling trailer salesman, Gillespie was nine before she realized not everybody's mother made bombs, and thirty before she realized it was possible to live in one place longer than a six-month lease allows. Supporting her are the social outcasts she calls her best friends: Daniel, a talented and eccentric artist; Grant, who makes his living peddling folk art by a denounced nun who paints plywood signs with twisted evangelical sayings; and Lary, who often, out of compassion, offers to shoot her like a lame horse." Hollis's friends help her battle the mess of obstacles that stand in her way - including her warped childhood, in which her parents moved her and her siblings around the country like carnival barkers, chasing missile-building contracts and other whimsies, such as her father's dream to patent and sell door-to-door the world's most wondrous key-chain. A past like this will make you doubt you'll ever have a future, much less roots. Miraculously, though, Gillespie manages to plant exactly that: roots, as wrested and dubious as they are.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly