All the Women in My Brain
And Other Concerns
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4.4 • 12 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"If DAVID RAKOFF and DAVID SEDARIS had a baby and that baby was Betty." —Zoe Kazan
If you’ve ever felt like you were more, or at least weirder, than the world expected?
you're not alone...
In this collection, EMMY AWARD-nominated ACTRESS/WRITER Betty Gilpin "writes like an avenging angel, weaving a tapestry of light and darkness, hilarity, and pathos." (Dani Shapiro)
Oh. Hi. *takes six long gulps of water during which you’re like, may I help you?*
My name is Betty. I have depression. I have passion. I have tits the size of printers. And also: I have a brain full of women.
There’s Blanche VonFuckery, Ingrid St. Rash, and a host of others—some cowering in sweatpants, some howling plans for revolution, and one, oh God, and one . . . slowly vomiting up a crow? Worried for her. These women take turns at the wheel. That’s why I feel like a million selves. With a raised eyebrow and a soul-scalpel, I’d like to tell you how I got this way. Because maybe you feel this way too.
Let’s hop from wild dissections of modern womanhood to boarding school musings to the glossy cringe of Hollywood. Let’s laugh at my failures and then quietly hope with me for the dream. Whether that dream is love or liberation or enough IMDB credits to taze the demon snapping at my ankles, we won’t know until the shit-fanning end.
As a dear friend said after reading this book, it’s “either a masterpiece, or it’s…completely…” and then she glazed over into a haunted stare. Reader? This book is my opus and it is chaos.
Welcome to All the Women in My Brain.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Emmy-nominated actor Gilpin, star of Netflix's GLOW, explores in her animated if addled debut the disappointments and triumphs of being an artist and a woman in a world that's indifferent to both. She grins and cringes through the different phases of her life, as the Marlboro-smoking child of actor parents in the 1990s who trudges through the pain of an eating-disordered adolescence in boarding school, then goes on to study acting at Fordham to make a career for herself. Working with the material of her own life as an actor—from familiar casting-call humiliations to overwork-induced muscle spasms—Gilpin critiques societal expectations that circumscribe creative women to docile beings, while suggesting that it's the unruly parts of women's minds that should be tended to as wellsprings of creativity. As she moves through reflections on loneliness, shame, and finding meaning in her work, she balances profundities with humorous looks at the more mundane parts of her life, including romantic blunders in an attempted open relationship ("I wasn't the hardened, sex-positive, thousand-yard-stare poem I insisted I was"). Oftentimes, though, Gilpin's quippy humor trips over itself, making it difficult to locate the point beneath the surfeit of zingers and extended metaphors that refer to her depression and self-doubt as nagging "brainwomen." This one's best left to the fans.
