Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility - Hardcover

Gillespie, Hollis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1599213850 ISBN 13: 9781599213859

Publisher: Skirt!, 2008

Synopsis

Hollis Gillespie used to be embarrassed about having an alcoholic, trailer-salesman dad and a bomb-making mom with broken dreams of being a beautician. If anyone asked about her family, she would tell them her parents were wealthy and that she came from a refined background. She never mentioned the time they lived in a mobile home two miles north of the Tijuana border.

 

"Trailer Trashed" is a collection of interconnected essays, ranging from hilarious to heart-breaking, all on one broad theme—Hollis Gillespie's relationships with her equally offbeat sisters, her precocious daughter, her bizarre friends, and the people they love. Think David Sedaris meets "Thelma & Louise."

 

"If David Sedaris had a vagina and wasn't such a pussy, he'd write like Hollis Gillespie." --Bust magazine

 

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Hollis Gillespie used to be embarrassed about her hard-drinking, trailer-salesman dad and her missile-making mom with broken dreams of becoming a beautician. But that was then. This is now.
Trailer Trashed is a hilarious and blisteringly honest collection of essays that follows an offbeat single mom through the journey of her life from finding solace wherever trailer hookups were found, to kidnapping a meth-addicted friend in need of rehab, to pondering over whether to use her bartender’s young sperm from his old self or old sperm from his young self. In short, Hollis’s prospects of climbing her way out of the riotous lunacy from whence she came sometimes do seem dubious indeed.
Brimming with irreverent, side-splitting observations on life that will wow fans of Augusten Burroughs and Sarah Vowell, this is an irresistible, roller coaster ride
of a book.
Ride with me,” Hollis’s father used to say, and she’d hop into his Chevrolet Corvair. And off they’d go again to no place in particular, happily so. Trailer Trashed is like these rides in the end it’s not where you go, but the ride to get you there that matters.

From the Back Cover:

If you enjoy your humor twisted like a molly bolt, Gillespie is your gal. One
of the few writers who require stretching warm-ups to avoid pulling something
in a laughing seizure.” Tim Dorsey, author of Atomic Lobster  Can a book be bust-out hilarious and also break your heart? Hollis Gillespie’s
roller coaster memoir, Trailer Trashed, does just that. In it she manages to remember not only herself, but each of us as well.
Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and The Midnight Twins
 

About this edition

• Publisher: Skirt!
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1599213850
• ISBN 13: 9781599213859
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264
• Illustrator: Polisky James