Approval Junkie
My Heartfelt (and Occasionally Inappropriate) Quest to Please Just About Everyone, and Ultimately Myself
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4.4 • 10 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From comedian and journalist Faith Salie, of NPR's Wait Wait…Don't Tell Me! and CBS News Sunday Morning, a collection of daring, funny essays chronicling the author's adventures during her lifelong quest for approval
Faith Salie has done it all in the name of validation. Whether she’s trying to impress her parents with a perfect GPA, undergoing an exorcism to save her toxic marriage, or baking a 3D excavator cake for her son’s birthday, Salie is the ultimate approval seeker—an “approval junkie,” if you will.
In this collection of daring, honest essays, Salie shares stories from her lifelong quest for gold stars, recounting her strategy for winning (very Southern) high school beauty pageant; her struggle to pick the perfect outfit to wear to her divorce; and her difficulty falling in love again, and then conceiving, in the years following her mother’s death.
With thoughtful irreverence, Salie reflects on why she tries so hard to please others, and herself, highlighting a phenomenon that many people—especially women—experience at home and in the workplace. Equal parts laugh-out loud funny and poignant, Approval Junkie is one woman’s journey to realizing that seeking approval from others is more than just getting them to like you—it's challenging yourself to achieve, and survive, more than you ever thought you could.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This beach-read of a memoir by comedian and culture commentator Salie is a series of essays, or more accurately, stand-up routines put to the page. The point of most of them is to win the reader's approval by convincing us that Salie is beautiful, successful, smart, and thin, a message she smooths over by couching it in self-deprecation. She is clever enough (a Rhodes scholar, in fact) to disarm her readers with witty neologisms her "wasband" for her ex-husband, her "noga pants," for yoga pants in which she does no yoga and to almost convince readers that she believes that her life, where she won a high school beauty pageant and made out with a boyfriend near Eliot House at Harvard while listening to Madame Butterfly, is just par for the course. There are some great moments in here: Salie takes responsibility for failure when she bombs an appearance on Bill O'Reilly's show, and she is poignant and loving in describing the bond that breast-feeding created between her and her baby. When Salie is not trying to win the reader's approval and writes from the heart, the memoir is as pleasing as they come.
