Live Wire

I don't particularly care about Kelly Ripa - I used to watch All My Children when she and Mark were on it, so I've always liked her but I don't really pay attention to her life outside of what makes it to the tabloids. Before this came out, I happened to watch an interview with her where she mentioned "telling the stories that needed to be told," which I took to mean spilling some tea. Sadly this book was tea-less. I would have really liked a short story about how she was blindsided by Michael Strahan's departure since that was all over the news but instead we got a short story about how weird Regis was.

I know this wasn't a memoir and she doesn't claim that it's a memoir, but having it just be short stories, made it seem disjointed, especially because she didn't always tell the stories in chronological order so it was hard to keep track of what was going on. Perhaps the biggest issue for me is that I don't see what the point was for her writing this book. I think if you ask her, it was becoming an empty-nester, but lots of people become empty-nesters without writing books. Without it being a memoir, just a collection of short stories, that don't even center around a particular theme, the book just seems sort of pointless or the ultimate vanity project.

She credits Andy Cohen in the acknowledgements section for getting her to take up journaling, and having read all three of his journal-style books (though the first one was more of a traditional memoir), I prefer his style better.