Fully Baked
A Messy Memoir
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An astonishingly candid and funny memoir that will make you laugh and cry while it steals your heart, from a renowned stand-up comedian and veteran SNL writer who is “an expert in making light of life’s most devastating moments” (Rolling Stone).
Rosebud Baker grew up as a loudmouth who preferred to be honest than polite, which is another way of saying she was unemployable. She spent her twenties trying to make it as an actor in New York like every other privileged millennial transplant cosplaying Rent, while gigging as a barista and as “the world’s angriest yoga instructor.” She was blackout drunk most of the time, struggling with alcoholism. She even tried to steal a bodega cat.
Eventually, she harnessed the qualities she once saw as defects—her dark humor and insistence on saying the awkward thing out loud—into a comedy career. She got sober. And she went from dating NYC’s most emotionally unavailable artists to falling in love, and becoming a new mom.
Fully Baked is Rosebud’s riotously funny and emotionally resonant memoir. Inspired by her pregnancy and early motherhood, it’s also her quest to discover who she really is and how she wants to raise her daughter. Every chapter is smart, self-deprecating, and laugh-out-loud funny, and no subject is off limits, from her famous yet unknowable grandfather, White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, to her youngest sister’s sudden death. You’ll speed through the pages to discover what happens next. Then, you’ll look back on a remarkable book that felt like an intimate conversation with a friend who made you feel better by confessing all the ways they screwed up.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Comedian Baker debuts with a bittersweet account of her dysfunctional upbringing, sobriety, comedy career, and experiences of marriage and motherhood. A solid chunk of the memoir turns on Baker's drunken 20s in 2000s New York City, which helped give rise to her comedic voice. She parallels childhood memories of her mother's alcoholism with her own struggles to get sober: "Leaving behind the bulletproof confidence of my drunken identity, of the girl who could walk into any room and situation certain she could handle it," Baker writes, "was the scariest thing I'd ever done." A professional breakthrough came in 2018, after Amy Schumer DM'ed Baker on Twitter and asked her to open for her ("Having one of your comedy gods pick you out of obscurity... is the kind of shit I thought only happened in movies that rushed the plot"). Throughout, Baker is bold, funny, and self-incriminating, keenly aware of the racial and class privileges—her grandfather was George H.W. Bush's secretary of state—that afforded her second chances many addicts never receive, though a few attempts to mine her entitlement for laughs fall flat. She saves the day with genuine gratitude for her success and the stabilizing forces of her husband and daughter. Readers will be charmed.
