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FIERCE, FUNNY, AND FEMALE

Name: FIERCE, FUNNY, AND FEMALE
Author: Marti MacGibbon
ISBN: 978-0-9860067-3-9

A JOURNEY THROUGH MIDDLE AMERICA, THE TEXAS OIL FIELD, AND STANDUP COMEDY

by Marti MacGibbon ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 20, 2017

An effervescently witty, if exhaustive, chronicle of perseverance and the power to overcome the darkest of days.

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Stand-up comedian MacGibbon (Never Give in to Fear, 2012) returns in this follow-up memoir, offering a more introspective look at her upbringing and early life.

While her debut memoir charted her incremental ascent to comic notoriety by way of drugs and catastrophe (which she overcame), noted humorist and inspirational speaker MacGibbon now shares the story of her childhood and adolescence growing up in 1960s Middle America through a sweeping series of anecdotal, coming-of-age sequences. Already precocious by age 6, with laughter as her mainstay, she “knew for sure I wanted to be a comedian,” even while the nuns at her Dominican elementary school found little amusement amid the “original material” she began to produce, write, and direct. In her teen years, the author demonstrated more turbulent, rebellious behavior by following garage bands in her hometown and cultivating random friendships with rowdy girls. As idyllically as it began, however, MacGibbon’s youth soon became repeatedly scarred by sexual abuse, psychological trouble, and episodes of violence that not marriage, childbirth, nor a series of spontaneous, ill-advised relocations could harness. The author consistently lingers over the finer details of these sobering, bleak years, a narrative quality that tends to bloat the account with gloominess and delays the arrival of the recovery and hard-won happiness that readers will yearn to read about. Though her extended time as a laborer in the early ’80s on Texas oil fields (“one of the last bastions of male supremacy”) proved physically challenging, it marked a turning point for MacGibbon as she embraced her independence, rediscovered her self-confidence, and began enjoying the fruits of love, genuine friendship, and how “all those earned skills and learned lessons came in handy when I stumbled into the world of standup comedy.” Her successes performing in the live comedy arena (and befriending Jay Leno, no less) finally provide some levity to a relentlessly melancholy narrative. Perhaps the most rewarding chapter in this chatty, affecting book is the concluding one, where MacGibbon lists the tried-and-true pearls of wisdom that continue to sustain her into midlife.

An effervescently witty, if exhaustive, chronicle of perseverance and the power to overcome the darkest of days.

Pub Date: March 20, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-9860067-3-9

Page Count: 424

Publisher: Stay Strong Publishing

Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2017

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)