- I stumbled across this book when searching on GoodReads for The Debutante. It looked too cute to pass up.
- Summer at Tiffany by Marjorie Hart
- The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan
Summary from GoodReads:
A strict regimen of Southern-belle grooming should have prepared Anna Fields for a lifetime of ladylike behavior.
But it didn’t.
As it turned out, Anna-a smart, outspoken, bookish girl- was a dud at debbing. After being kicked out of cotillion classes, the “Rebel Deb” left North Carolina to seek her fortune. Her first stop was Brown University-right in the heart of Yankee-land-and then the crazy world of Hollywood talent agencies and celebrity-packed restaurants. After a disastrous stint as Diana Ross’s personal assistant, Anna headed off to the Big Apple, where she worked for one of Bravo’s Real Housewives. It’s a rollicking, unlikely success story from a natural-born story teller.
Sharp, sweet, and sassy, Confessions of a Rebel Debutante proves you can take the girl out of the South, but you can’t take the South out of the girl!
My Review:
There were things I loved and things I rolled my eyes at in this book. First of all, I want to say I did not pick this book up expecting it to be the end all and be all of memoirs – I expected something light and fluffy, and it was exactly that. My issues with the book were, in spite of some flashes here and there of laugh out loud humor, the first half of the book was fairly boring. It wasn’t until the story spiraled into a “tell all” regarding notable names like Julia Stiles, Julia Roberts, Diana Ross and other celebrities that it started to get more interesting… if not a little dramatic.
While I enjoyed learning about the south from Anna Field’s point of view, I think she was not as much a rebel as she tries to make herself out to be. I mean, rebel or no, she still attended a well-off girls finishing school, went through all sorts of classes and rebelled in ways that kids in every day schools do. In spite of that rebellion, everything was taken care of for her, she wasn’t thrown out of school, she still got an ivy league education and it was just hard to feel sorry for the poor, oppressed girl from the South.
I can’t whole-heartedly recommend this book, but I will say this: If you want a book that will give you some fun sayings, some interesting looks at how the “rich” of the south live, then I’d at least skim through it.
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