Working Girl Reads

Let me start this post by first stating that I am the unfortunate lover of horrific chick lit - really anything that has a pink cover and a title that gives an air that the main character might be a single Working Girl in a big city and I'm sold. Every once in a while, however, I settle into a memoir about a real, live Working Girl - someone who has been there there, done that, walked a mile in the real deal four-inch heels and lived to tell the tale. 

My recent foray into a memoir was "But Enough About Me: A Jersey Girl's Unlikely Adventures Among the Absurdly Famous" by Jancee Dunn. Dunn writes an engaging account of her trials and tribulations as an reporter for Rolling Stone, as well as her foray working as a VJ at MTV2 and Good Morning America. What really draws me to her as a writer is how she writes of how she unexpectedly fell in the lap of Rolling Stone. While writing was not her passion from the day she was born, her love of music and a chance meeting at a party with a girl who worked at for a leading music magazine, Dunn blazed her own path and became a successful Working Girl interiewing Dolly Parton about her love of Velveeta cheese one day and the next hiking in the Rockies with Brad Pitt. 

The book itself is a short, quick read that alternates between interesting interviews that Dunn has conducted (such as Madonna and Ben Affleck) to her personal memoirs about growing up a Jersey girl in the 1980's. The memoir even takes a dark turn as Dunn becomes pulled further and further into the glamorous and drunken lifestyle and begins to pull away from her good girl beginnings and finds herself losing herself and what she had wanted to become. Overall, the read is funny, and a great read for anyone who enjoys celebrity gossip. 

And with chapter titles that come equipped with pearls of wisdom promised such as 'How to Jolly Up a Surly, Hungover Band During an Interview' and 'How to Approach an R&B Artist When You're the Whitest Person in the Western World', who can resist picking up this gem of a book and learn how to ask a celebrity about their recent bout in rehab or their ongoing divorce settlements? 

And in case you find yourself in the sticky situation of being offered illegal drugs by a rock star (which regularly happens to me, of course), take advice from Dunn and hide out in the bathroom so you stop sweating bullets and then quickly sway the conversation to his new album slated to come out that fall. Works like a charm every time.