Home Books All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns

All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns

All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns

by Betty Gilpin

Flatiron Books ·2022 ·256 pages ·Essays
Maybe Someday
Maybe Someday
I Index
40/99
Bottom of the Pile

21/99

Critics

Near the Top

59/99

Readers

n/a

Scholars

27/99

Rating

15/99

Volume

39/99

Rating

79/99

Volume

Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.


About This Book

Like Jenny Lawson and Caitlin Moran, Emmy-nominated actress and writer Betty Gilpin delivers a lightning-strike dispatch of hilarious, intimate, and luminous essays on how to navigate this weird and wondrous life. Betty Gilpin has 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 some, oh God, and some…slowly vomiting up a crow without breaking eye contact? Jesus. These women take turns at the wheel. That's why Betty feels like a million selves. With a raised eyebrow and a soul-scalpel, she tells us how she got this way.Betty has depression, Betty has a dream, Betty has tits the size of printers. She has debilitating shame and then, impossibly, a tiny voice saying what if. She takes us from wild dissections of modern womanhood to boarding school to the glossy cringe of Hollywood. We laugh through the failures (monologue to beagle! Ancient mentors proposing fellatio!) and quietly hope with her for the dream. Whether that dream is love or liberation or enough iMDb credits to tase the demon snapping at her ankles, we won't know until the shit-fanning end. There's Hamlet, there's self-sabotage, there's PTSD from turkey. Stunning, candid, and laugh-out-loud funny, All the Women in My Brain is perfect for any reader who's ever felt like they were more, or at least weirder, than the world expected.


Preview


Reviews

"Gilpin's written voice makes for an unforgettable read...She spins entirely original patterns of phrasing and combines wickedly clear imagery with novel cultural references to convey unique human experiences—she'll make any noun a verb, and vice versa...Yet her writing is universal, never relying on the audience to know some obscure, niche thing...The book is riotously funny and braver than brave."

Courtney Eathorne· Booklist Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"A young, accomplished performer's life in theater, TV, and film...In this comic memoir, Gilpin, best known for her role as a female wrestler in the Netflix series GLOW, charts her journey as an actor and offers advice for other young women pursuing a similar path...The author chronicles her childhood as the daughter of show-business parents; awkward adolescence and struggles to reconcile self-doubt and artistic ambition; hard-won ascent in her chosen industry and routine endurance of humiliating tests of her professional resolve; and, finally, disappointment after the commercial failure of the film she hoped would launch her to superstardom...The writing comes alive, however, when the author digs into the specific indignities she endured during her journey through the gauntlet of endless auditions and the merciless whims of those who orchestrated them...A quirky tale of lessons learned from the world of acting."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Near the Top

"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...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...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."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Maybe Someday

Reader Reviews

0 reviews

Sign in to write a review.

No reader reviews yet. Be the first!