All the Wrong Men and One Perfect Boy : A Memoir

Amazon.com
With the same blunt honesty that characterizes her online journalism, Spike Gillespie chronicles her disastrous love life, a litany of abusive, alcoholic men she seems to have selected primarily to reexperience the unhappiness she felt in her relationship with her distant, hypercritical father. At 35, she managed to salvage three good things from the mess she made of her youth: a network of loving friends (she knew several good men, she just slept with all the bad ones); her writing career, based in large part on savagely intimate excavations of her personal affairs; and her son, Henry, with whom she finally found the joyous love that eluded her with father, husband, and countless lovers. If it weren't for Henry (born in 1990) and Gillespie's exuberantly X-rated prose, this would be a grim tale indeed, filled with heavy drinking, self-sabotage, and groveling self-abasement to a series of losers and nutcases, described with pitiless precision. Gillespie doesn't pretend to be objective--her second husband in particular is practically nailed to the page--and readers may sometimes find it hard to understand how the obviously intelligent author could have made the same mistakes over and over. But her candor is compelling, and her tender letters to Henry extremely moving.


From Publishers Weekly
Yount (syndicated religion columnist and author of three previous spirituality books) addresses death as a topic that interests everyone because we all face its inevitability. While many people avoid thinking and talking about death and attempt to deny its reality, Yount prefers to look at it directly and discover grounds for hope. He firmly believes in an afterlife. His sources include the Bible and recorded near-death experiences, and he stresses human beings' almost universal belief in eternal life. Yount touches on such topics as the story of the Garden of Eden, the concept of purgatory, whether hell exists (and who might go there if it does) and, of course, what we can hope for and expect after we die. The "ten thoughts" include such injunctions as "be prepared for surprises" and "enter eternity laughing." Yount writes as a Christian speaking out of his own tradition in a way that neither excludes non-Christians from his ideas nor disregards the particular teachings that bring comfort to Christians. The book suggests that a proper perspective on death will assuage some of our fears (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Gillespie publishes online and has written for magazines such as Cosmopolitan, GQ, Playboy, and Mademoiselle. This book, which began as an online column, reflects her online style, offering frank reflections of events in her life and honest examinations of the mistakes she has made. This memoir covers her generally disastrous relations with menAfather, lovers, and husbandsAand reflects her struggle to understand why she behaves the way she does and her efforts to change her life. She is motivated to change through her love for her son, her "one perfect boy," and is supported in this change by several good friends. Women struggling to end destructive relationships and start new lives will find inspiration here. Buy where there is a demand for women's self-help books.AShana C. Fair, Ohio Univ., Zanesville Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
An astonishing, and astonishingly frank, account of one young woman's disastrous relationships with men, beginning, naturally enough, with her cold and disapproving father. Self-styled diva feminista Gillespie, operator of a Web site for women, has the art of the confessional down pat. She shares with the world intimate details of her sex life and the driving force behind her desperate search for a loving man. Its not a happy story, nor does it have a happy ending. Gillespies first pregnancy, by a man she couldnt stand, ends in a miscarriage; her second, by a man she has no desire to marry, produces the perfect boy of the title; her third, by a soon-to-be-ex-husband she married six weeks after meeting him online and two days after meeting him in person, ends in abortion. These are but highlights in a life filled with bouts of heavy drinking, sex in unlikely places with innumerable unsuitable men, waitressing and bartending to make ends meet, and moving restlessly from city to city. In Knoxville, Tenn., this loud-mouthed, untameable chick with a wacky haircut began to write and perform angry poetry at open-mike nights at a local club. She attracted a following, a writing career was launched, and online work for Prodigy and assignments from major magazines (Cosmopolitan, GQ, Playboy, among others) followed. Into these memoirs, Gillespie inserts letters addressed to her young son, Henry, born in 1990. He is, by her account, a terrific kid, bright, articulate, warm, and loving, and someday will perhaps become the kind of husband Gillespie has never found. Readers over 50 are hereby warned: this is raunchy exhibitionistic stuff; for the rest, its also funny, absolutely believable, and very, very sad. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
Debbie Stoller editor of Bust magazine Spike Gillespie is one of the smartest, wittiest, and sassiest writers on the Internet today. In her memoir, this woman-on-the-verge delivers the same brutal honesty that regular readers of her column have come to expect, as she lays bare her years of looking for love in all the wrong faces, while overlooking the true love that surrounds her.


Book Description
Some women have trouble with men. For Spike Gillespie, a widely followed online journalist, those problems started early with her father -- the first and most important man in any child's life. Spike's relationship with her emotionally distant parent was so flawed that she has had an unending series of disasters with men...from the day she first noticed them to the day she made one of her own -- her perfect little boy, Henry. In a memoir of sometimes lacerating honesty, Spike Gillespie tells us the story of her life with men -- a blunt, moving, and profoundly revealing account that asks all the hardest questions about love between the sexes. All the Wrong Men and One Perfect Boy isn't a memoir of abuse or tragedy. But it is about the lack of connection -- to family, to lovers, to the world -- that defines much of modern life. Most importantly, however (and here Henry comes in), Gillespie also tells us a story of hope and resolution, of reaching out to touch the world with the newest tools, the computer and the Internet -- and in the oldest way -- through one's children. And it's about the deepest mysteries -- how we love the ones we love, and how we stop loving them when they're destroying us. Spike Gillespie first began chronicling her thirty-year adventure of love and heartbreak in a weekly online column, and within a few months she was being described by USA Today as the queen of the online confessional. Gillespie has continued to feed her stream-of-consciousness biography to thousands of readers via her website. After years of publishing to the online community, now she is ready to tell the whole tale. Gillespie is a natural storyteller, a writer with a marvelous ability to immerse her readers in a flesh-and-blood world of her lovers, her family, her friends...and above all, her son. This is a writer unafraid to tell the truth -- about human nature, men, family, and motherhood. The result is a memoir of unadorned and refreshing power from a woman on the most intimate terms with passion, anger, love -- and herself.


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