All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers by Alana Massey (Epub)

Description

“Alana Massey’s prose is to brutal honesty what a mandolin is to a butter knife: she’s sharper; she slices thinner; she shows the cross-section of a truth so deftly–so powerfully and cannily–it’s hard to look away, and hard not to feel that something has shifted in you for having read her.” — Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams From columnist and critic Alana Massey, a collection of essays examining the intersection of the personal with pop culture through the lives of pivotal female figures–from Sylvia Plath to Britney Spears–in the spirit of Chuck Klosterman, with the heart of a true fan. Mixing Didion’s affected cool with moments of giddy celebrity worship, Massey examines the lives of the women who reflect our greatest aspirations and darkest fears back onto us. These essays are personal without being confessional and clever in a way that invites readers into the joke. A cultural critique and a finely wrought fan letter, interwoven with stories that are achingly personal, All the Lives I Want is also an exploration of mental illness, the sex industry, and the dangers of loving too hard. But it is, above all, a paean to the celebrities who have shaped a generation of women–from Scarlett Johansson to Amber Rose, Lil’ Kim, Anjelica Huston, Lana Del Rey, Anna Nicole Smith and many more. These reflections aim to reimagine these women’s legacies, and in the process, teach us new ways of forgiving ourselves.

User’s Reviews

Review “ALL THE LIVES I WANT is a brilliant collection on the things women think but do not say. The essays delight and infuriate in equal measure, and Massey’s sharp and poignant writing solidify her place as one of the best cultural critics of her generation.” ―Jessica Valenti, New York Times bestselling author of Sex Object: A Memoir”Alana Massey’s writing often makes me uncomfortable, and sometimes makes me feel like resisting–but it also makes me laugh, and always makes me think, and always–certainly–makes me feel. Her prose is to brutal honesty what a mandolin is to a butter knife: she’s sharper; she slices thinner; she shows the cross-section of a truth so deftly–so powerfully and cannily–it’s hard to look away, and hard not to feel that something has shifted in you for having read her.”―Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams”Brilliant and tender where you want it to be, incisive and damning where you need it to be, ALL THE LIVES I WANT gives us the chance to reconsider how we’ve absorbed the public lives of women so that we may ask new questions about how we live our own.”―Mychal Denzel Smith, New York Times bestselling author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching”With brutal honesty, sly wit, and natural suspicion toward our most commonly held cultural assumptions, Alana Massey renders each and every subject she lands on a million times more interesting. From Sylvia Plath to Princess Diana, Fiona Apple to Amber Rose, Massey examines the most complicated and confusing female celebrities to shape the modern psyche, gracefully reflecting our shared sympathies, blind spots, and vulnerabilities along the way.”―Heather Havrilesky, author of How to Be a Person in the World”Alana Massey’s book is a diamond, in both the glitter of its prose and its capacity to cut through inferior things. This is a manual for survival disguised as culture writing. A stunning and necessary book.”―Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood”Through the prism of female icons and celebrities, both deified and demonized ALL THE LIVES I WANT offers a poignant and often hilarious dissection of how pop culture shapes and consumes the women it elevates. Embedded in personal anecdote, Massey draws vital attention to, and urges celebration of, (the overlooked) sites of resistance therein. Massey’s work, with prose both poignant and acerbic, is an invocation towards empathy-a call to women to be generous with ourselves and each other. We do ourselves a great favor to listen to her.”―Natasha Lennard, columnist and contributor at The New York Times, The Nation, The Intercept, and Fusion”Finely wrought . . . Massey is best when she pinpoints the particular viscousness of living under patriarchy.”―New York Times Book Review”At times funny and refreshing, other times honest to the point of cruelty, but always genuine in her words, Massey’s prose drips with passion and flare… A collection that celebrates and critiques the lives of everyone from Britney Spears to Courtney Love to Massey herself, ALL THE LIVES I WANT is a sharp, insightful, and hypnotizing debut…”―Bustle.com”Together the chapters add up to more than a lived trajectory: They are an argument for girls’ complicated selfhood and underrated power, an examination of the ways in which female celebrities have been misrepresented and reclaimed… Massey seems to aspire to a kind of complicated soulfulness. Her prose is measured and cool.”―Slate.com”Alana Massey is rightfully hailed as one of the sharpest voices today. When she’s writing about women and pop culture, there’s no one I’d rather read.”―New York Observer”Searingly insightful reminders of shared experience– humor-filled rafts of humanity in a sea of contemporary TMZ and Trump-fueled despair. Massey’s prose captures barely perceptible nuances of feeling we have all felt and holds them up to hilarious effect–all while discussing Daily Mail headlines and Gwyneth Paltrow’s kids’ multilingual tutors.”―i-D Magazine”Though Massey discusses celebrities she doesn’t personally know, she writes about them with intimacy, drawing connections between their lives and her own… this book reminds readers how celebrities’ seemingly dazzling lives can provide insight into their own.” ―Publisher’s Weekly”Massey engages lovingly but thoughtfully with the lives and work of her subjects, and she offers herself the same even-handed treatment. As she writes her own feminist canon, she insists on the veracity and value of her own presence and voice: Courtney Love and the Olsen twins and Britney Spears, imperfect and compelling, belong in books-which means that Alana Massey does, too.”―New Republic”[Massey] has a seemingly uncanny ability to perceive things in a way that goes far beyond what’s visible on the surface, and then, through her writing, transform the way others see them as well, revealing truths and offering insights not only into the lives of others but also, of course, about our own.”―Nylon.com”For those who have fantasized about being BFFs with all their favorite celebrities, you have to read Alana Massey’s incredibly smart book analyzing the way society lifts and destroys famous women.”―Cosmopolitan”A beautifully articulated, personal collection of cultural criticisms . . . All The Lives I Want is the book we want to be dissecting with all our girlfriends in the months to come.”―Refinery29.com”Massey’s collection of essays strikes a nerve with her poignant and grittier form of celebrity worship… enlightening and powerful.” ―Library Journal”Massey traverses the corners of the internet that are home to Plath-esque female melancholy, resuscitating girlishness and female pain as objects worthy of study in their own right. She reminds us that girls’ expansive documentation of their own vulnerability is fundamentally a project of making meaning of their (our) lives. She insists we bear witness.”―Feministing.com

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ In this collection of essays, Alana Massey tackles contemporary musical icons (Britney, Nicki, Courtney), female writers (Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion), and other celebrity, larger than life figures such as Anna Nicole Smith and Amber Rose. With a mix of wry humor, anecdotal research, and her own personal experiences, the writer attempts to analyze these women and shed new light on them. While I enjoyed some of the essays, i.e, the Gwyneth versus Winona, Amber Rose, and the Olsen twins, I skimmed some of the others, i.e, Scarlett Johanssen, which didn’t grab me at all. While it was a good collection of essays, it didn’t keep my attention throughout and I would have liked to see more punch to these essays.

⭐ I have read this book twice now and I will probably read it again after I write this review. Alana is a clever and insightful writer who beautifully blends together high and low-brow in a way I’ve never seen before. It is refreshing, honest, and perfectly emotional. Whether or not you consider yourself a person who cares deeply about pop culture, you’ll find meaning in these essays as Alana dissects what these women mean to our culture and how our culture has treated them.

⭐ Alana Masseys book enveloped me right from the start. Laugh out loud moments to uncomfortable honestly that is completely relatable, this book has it all. I truly couldn’t put this book down and would recommend it to all my friends espcially young women who don’t always fit the perfect mold. Can’t wait to see what Alana Masseys comes up with next.

⭐ A raw and honest collection of essays that is a good critique of modern society’s portrayal of women in media. It offers interesting insights into the lives of famous women while also delivering heartfelt introspection. One of the best essay collections I’ve read this year – highly recommended.

⭐ There are tens of thousands of essays on women and celebrity in the world, and yet Alana Massey manages to cut a path perpendicular to this well worn road. Bypassing the traditional sociological analysis of the influence these women and girls have on our culture, Massey examines how our culture influences them. In “There Can Only Be One,” she litigates the media-created feud between Nicki Minaj and Lil’ Kim as the product of cultural misogynoir that will only “allow” one tough and sexy Black woman to rule hip hop at a time. Essays on Anna Nicole Smith and the “crazy ex-girlfriend” label applied to women as seemingly dissimilar as Lisa “Left-Eye” Lopes and Princess Di critique our treatment of women who break the traditional boundaries of class and gender rules, often to be met with derision even when they suffer tragedy.But All the Lives I Want is not simply cultural criticism; Massey digs several miles below the surface, past intellect and emotion into the spiritual meaning of our one-sided relationships with these famous figures. Her essays don’t attempt to humanize these women (though that does happen as a byproduct of her singular empathy) but rather to make a compelling case that each of them fulfills the timeless necessity as the individual incarnations of the many faces of femininity. My favorite, “The Queen of Hearts: An Alternative Account of the Life and Crimes of Courtney Love”, presents the rocker and actor (more famous for being a widow than an artist in her own right) not as a parasitic nagging wife (and accused murderer by her husband’s fans), but as an aspirational icon of chthonic power, a destroyer figure, and necessary model of “female brutality.” Her elevation of the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides alongside the many clusters of sisters scattered across Greek mythology, interwoven with the genuinely mystical love she shares with her own sister (born on the same day under the sign of Gemini), is almost unbearably beautiful. The essay is not just a coruscating love song to sisterhood, but punctuated throughout with a needle sharp critique of the failure of imagination of the male gaze that fetishizes and sexualizes sisterly love while missing the deep spirituality of the connection.Massey’s time at Yale Divinity School may seem incongruous with writing about something so “trivial” as celebrity, but she effortlessly clarifies the metaphysical quality of feminine fame; by comparison, all others writing on the topic see only as if through a glass, darkly.

⭐ Though I have been reading the author’s essays for a few years now, All The Lives I Want gives a new wholeness and depth to her brilliance. These essays, and the overarching book, accept and embrace true womanhood by acknowledging and giving voice to realities…and not sordid fantasies painted by men who have yet to know better. There is an air of redemption in the Alana herself, it seems, and this book definitely helped me to accept and forgive my own narrative. To me, a good book is one that eloquently captures a slice of humanity, and she does that here. Thanks, Alana.

⭐ Massey observes a wide range of women (from Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion to Anna Nicole Smith and Amber Rose), consumes their personal stories and the work they’ve created, and makes astute connections between these women and herself. Massey does all of this with brilliance and grace, maintaining appropriate balances between self and other, between “high culture” and “low culture,” and between comedy and tragedy.

⭐ Not for me. I couldn’t get through more than 2 chapters of this and I missed the return window. I guess I was expecting personal anecdotes that maybe tied into pop culture, but it was just about celebrities lives and most that I knew nothing about.

⭐ Alana’s ability to interweave cultural criticism and memoir is a master class for writers and a joy for readers. This book is unflinching and rigorous and human in all the best ways. Reencountering your idols through Alana’s elegant prose and razor-sharp intellect will provide the same dizzying joy as learning about them for the first time. And if this IS your first time, well, I’m especially jealous. Buy this book and gift it to every young woman grappling her way through the world.

⭐ The premise for this book got me instantly for I too spend my days idolizing celebrities and their lives. Alana Massey took this yearning and tacked onto it a pop culture criticism and wove in personal anecdotes. It’s a quick read, but a good one and she addresses a wide breadth of pop culture. Massey is a smart writer and made pop culture more than just its usual fan girl fluff (which I also adore).

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