I must have been reading a different version of this book than everyone else?? It's been so wildly popular, I started questioning my own feelings & wondered what I was missing that everyone else was raving about. Where is my copy of that riveting, enthralling page turner with all the 5 stars????!!!
In all fairness, I've never been a fan of autobiographies. I'm not sure why reading about other peoples perceptions of their lives doesn't thrill/interest me?? Turns out I feel the same about fictional autobiographies too...
Note to self: refrain from picking up anymore!
TJR definitely takes inspiration from real life celebrities (thinking about Daisy Jones & the Six) and now this one which I could actually believe was based on Elizabeth Taylors life.
There are things to admire and find realistic and truthful about Eve and how she craftily & calculatedly rose to fame. I also agree if she were a man, no one would think twice about most of her actions. I've never understood why the "gilded age of Hollywood" was/is still revered as such tho?? Wasn't it only gilded for the studios & executives in charge of them? The studios "owned" the actors & actresses and dictated everything about their lives. Looking back, there's a question about what was real and what was not about any of the stars from that time period. This book just added another layer of concrete (in my mind) about how faux the personas were that the studio heads created and what they actually had to do to achieve that fame. Mostly I feel sympathy for the real stars (like Marilyn Monroe, Rock Hudson, etc.) who were insanely famous and beloved but unhappy in their personal lives. That's how I ended up feeling about the fictitious Eve too.
Monique (the "ordinary" person & dual storyline in the book) wasn't very compelling for me either. I wanted to connect with her (there was plenty to work with there ~ child of divorce, mixed race parentage, left fatherless, etc.) but call me cold, the only thing I could eek out was apathy.
I got within 80 pages of the ending, put it down and then took 3 days to come back and finish. Never a good sign! To anyone reading this, please don't let my opinion be off-putting. It's obviously a best seller and my thoughts are definitely in the minority... I just can't muster any enthusiasm for it.
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