My Six Hours Back

This is my Alabama Pink Bingo Square, chosen for being the cheapest book not about politics on the list.  If I could get away with a musical review it would be the first three bars of “nobody but me” by the human beanz (a band name almost as stupid and ugly as this book) looped for ten straight minutes, just a cavalcade of NO.

This book is so reductive I think it gives me negative credit for my underrepresented square.  Handler is the worst kind of ally, the one who thinks that because she’s “one of the good guys” it’s ok to fetishize black men, play into gay stereotypes, and my vote for the cherry on top of this sundae, use achondroplasia as a shock value rock bottom (but not really, because they didn’t sleep together – see how transgressive I am without actually doing anything subversive? I’ll use dwarfism as a sex joke but I won’t actually fuck one!).

The kicker on all of this is that, as was said of Lillian Hellman, I’m reasonably certain every word out of Handler’s mouth is a lie, including “and” and “the.”  The whole damn book reads like embellishment at best and fabrication at worst, from someone who writes multiple vignettes about her propensity to lie for no damn reason.

I’ll give Handler some minimal credit for having this read by someone a decade after she wrote it – times change, norms change – but damn, it was a decade ago, not a century, and I’ve never thought anyone going out of their way to shock was particularly funny.  This is the kid who ate worms on the playground growing up and expecting you to be shocked that she’s wearing a thong and likes dick.  So do a lot of people, and a lot of them are actually funny without denigrating minorities.   Let’s find one of their books.