Publishers Weekly |
Kirkus Reviews |
Anneli Rufus | Entertainment Weekly
| Washington Post
Publisher's Weekly
This comfortable recounting by the Emmy-winning
Everybody Loves Raymond co-star sustains a nice
mix of wisecracks and sincerity that's sure to
appeal to viewers of the television show and
under appreciated moms. In tidily constructed
chapters, divided into sections representing the
three cities she's lived in, Heaton recounts her
happy childhood in Cleveland, her adventures in
New York and her attempts to sustain an average
life with four children and a husband in Los
Angeles. Particularly authentic are her takes on
motherhood: "[A]s much as we'd like to believe
otherwise, we're all going to be forgotten
somewhere down the line. We'll certainly be
forgotten by the world, and eventually by our
own families. I mean, who can name their
great-great-great grandmother?" The occasional
lists, such as her "I Confess Top 20" ("#12: I
add MSG to everything"; "#16: I throw away my
kids' art projects almost immediately"), are
amusing. Heaton's discussion of more weighty
subjects, such as religion she tells of her move
from Roman Catholicism to tacitly more socially
acceptable Presbyterianism is predictable.
Heaton has penned a worthy book, and her playful
and positive attitude shine through.
Kirkus Reviews
The Emmy-winning star of Everybody Loves Raymond
pens an engaging, effervescent story of her
life. Heaton's humor occasionally lapses into
strained wisecracking, and she repeats some
details, but these are minor flaws in that rare
thing-an upbeat memoir that doesn't obsess about
the rough times but instead is beguilingly
sensible and wise about what's important: the
author's family, faith, and craft. "I suffer
from an early childhood malady that's more
common than you've been led to believe," she
begins. "I call it Way Too Normal and Happy
Upbringing Syndrome." Born and raised in a
suburban Cleveland house filled with laughter,
she belonged, like many of her neighbors, to a
large, Catholic family. The local children
played together, building snow forts in winter
and picking berries along the rail track in
summer, knowing that they could stay outside
unsupervised until the streetlights came on. Her
father was a sportswriter for The Cleveland
Plain-Dealer; her mother, a homemaker who read
widely, especially theology, died from an
aneurysm when Heaton was 12. But the family held
together, and Heaton now realizes that "bad
breaks are not the worst things that can happen
to you."
As she details her bumpy road to stardom-in New
York she waited tables, proofread on the
graveyard shift at Morgan Stanley, and washed
her hair with shampoo samples handed out on the
street-the actress also describes her religious
journey from staunch Catholicism to staunch
Presbyterianism. After moving to Los Angeles,
she married, had four sons, and began to get the
parts that matter-and pay. Though she loves
acting, Heaton also loves her kids and admits
it's tough to raise them in present-day La-La
Land: "Life was simpler in Cleveland. Parents
were only expected to feed, clothe, house and
educate their kids. Today you're supposed to
raise their self-esteem, give them piano and tae
kwon do lessons, and teach them to download
research for their kindergarten report." An
invigorating breath of fresh air.
Anneli Rufus
(author/journalist)
Now a two-time Emmy Award winner, Heaton, co-star
of the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, is
enjoying the perks that accompany life in what
she wryly calls "Fairyland." Her new memoir
recounts a pleasant but unremarkable childhood
followed by years spent working a series of
"survival jobs" and commingling with other wanna-be
actors. The self-described "cynical broad"
portrays herself as a Hollywood outsider, a
churchgoing mother of four whose job just
happens to be in prime-time TV. The funniest
sections of the book concern Heaton's
eleven-year marriage. "You need to have a bit of
contempt for the person you are about to marry,"
she argues, " 'cause it's gonna show up sooner
or later." Heaton's sincerity and the strength
of her convictions lend this memoir a surprising
resonance
Entertainment Weekly
Too often, the words ''celebrity bio'' are code for
''self-absorbed non-revelations ghostwritten for
a star who has another project to push.''
Fortunately, Patricia Heaton's memoir,
Motherhood & Hollywood: How to Get a Job Like
Mine -- much like her ''Everybody Loves
Raymond'' alter ego -- has that glorious
combination of down-to-earth frankness (on her
postpartum tummy: ''It wasn't even a stomach
anymore.... It was more like a big old wrinkly
suede bag'') and sly sense of humor
(''You...think [celebrities'] s--- doesn't
stink? It's true. In fact, mine is peach ice
cream'') that makes it a gas to read.
But it's not all guffaws: Heaton candidly details
her boozy collegiate days, cocaine hangovers as
a struggling New York actress, and all-around
religious confusion -- elevating the celeb bio
to something actually worth perusing.
Entertainment Weekly Grade: A
Washington Post
Heaton is a two-time Emmy award-winning star on the
hit TV series "Everybody Loves Raymond." Her
life in "Fairyland" as a rich, successful
actress is not that of the typical American mom.
Yet with her straight-talking humor, her
aggressive religiosity, her four kids, her tummy
tuck and her boob job, Heaton is able, in a way
Furedi isn't, to speak our language. And with
her unapologetic nostalgia for suburban family
life in the 1960s, her yearning for normal
people with normal families doing normal things,
she's tapped right into the Zeitgeist.
Heaton grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, eating
Pop-Tarts and drinking Tang for breakfast, not
wearing a bicycle helmet and running with a pack
of neighborhood kids, "getting stung by bees,
stepping on broken glass, and stubbing our toes
on uneven suburban sidewalks when we weren't
skinning our knees while roller-skating."
She writes: "It was all so much fun back then. It
was a different time and the world was a
different place. Our parents would let us run
the neighborhood wild between meals. In the
summer the only rule was to be home when the
streetlights came on. The neighborhood was
communal. So maybe we were a bit more
aggressive, didn't have sensitivity training,
got whupped by other people's moms. But it was a
blast, and I'm sorry I can't give the same thing
to my kids." She mocks the hyper-vigilant,
high-achieving world around her and wonders,
sensibly, "Do we really need to stuff our kids
with quality time and quantities of activities?
Is that what's going to make them successful
human beings? And by the way, just how do we
define a successful human being?"
She is funny and clever, bawdy and verbally
fearless. Nevertheless, Motherhood and Hollywood
is, at base, quite a bad book. It's a
compilation of one-liners with an almost audible
laugh track, padded by lists, too-long
descriptions of Heaton's childhood games (Brave
Tomboy, Nazi Killer Dogs) and even a rather
over-long (and off-target) analysis of Du Bose
Heyward's 1939 children's classic The Country
Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes.
That the book sometimes exerts the fascination of a
train wreck doesn't matter much, though --
literature it ain't, fun it is. Heaton's the
semi-obnoxious pal you always hope to find out
on the playground. And aren't mothers too tired
to read serious books, anyway?
