Jen-X: Jenny McCarthy's Open Book - Softcover

McCarthy, Jenny; Karlen, Neal

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060392339 ISBN 13: 9780060392338

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1997

Synopsis

Presented in the form of a "diary," a witty portrait of Jenny McCarthy vividly captures all of the day-to-day drama, romance, heartbreak, action, and humor of the star and is filled with outrageous new photographs. 150,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

Review:

This book will chat your ear off, one gal pal to another. Arranged like a high-spirited scrapbook of quips and rapidly dispensed disclosures, Jen-X is somewhat of a surprise. In this completely entertaining tell-all, Jenny McCarthy has indeed packaged herself as an open book. This is a tale enamored neither by ambition or success; it's a BH/AH memoir--before and after Hollywood--sometimes raucous, sometimes coolly self-assessing. It's loaded with brash magazine and MTV-style graphics, cute pictures raided from the family album, and zany cartoons of friends, freaks, and phobias.

Jenny McCarthy tells you about growing up on the South Side of Chicago, about dropping out of college, about her breast implants at the age of 18 ("I mean, isn't that the American dream? To purchase fine new breasts on credit?"). Her advice on dating ("Rule #1: Fart immediately") is nothing if not empirical; her lessons learned as a Playboy Bunny, candid without being self-pitying. She talks about her life with comic grit: "Instead of becoming a campus honey, I was a bratwurst queen who sold sausage sandwiches for minimum wage over the counter at a Polish delicatessen in the same neighborhood where I grew up as a friendless geek. At nineteen, I'd already been turned down by every modeling agency in Chicago...." If McCarthy weren't a celebrity, Jen-X would still be worth reading. It's pop culture chronicled through the eyes of a Gen-Xer--fresh, self-deprecating, and silly, like a fun-house mirror.

Review:

Freed from the constraints of anything but the desire to sell this book, Regan and Co. have accidentally produced a witty, inspirational story that is both a classic piece of pop-culture ephemera and a grand record of it. At its heart, Jen-X works because McCarthy, the tough, determined daughter of a Chicago steelworker, tells the truth about being a woman--about being ambitious, lonely, jealous of other women; about being used by men and using men. -- Entertainment Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0060392339
• ISBN 13: 9780060392338
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240