'This Will Only Hurt a Little' by Busy Philipps

Sent by the Publisher in exchange for an honest review

From the BLURB:

A memoir by the beloved comedic actress known for her roles on Freaks and Geeks, Dawson's Creek, and Cougartown who has become 'the breakout star on Instagram stories . . . imagine I Love Lucy mixed with a modern lifestyle guru' (New Yorker).

Busy Philipps's autobiographical book offers the same unfiltered and candid storytelling that her Instagram followers have come to know and love, from growing up in Scottsdale, Arizona and her painful and painfully funny teen years, to her life as a working actress, mother, and famous best friend.

Busy is the rare entertainer whose impressive arsenal of talents as an actress is equally matched by her storytelling ability, sense of humor, and sharp observations about life, love, and motherhood. Her conversational writing reminds us what we love about her on screens large and small. From film to television to Instagram, Busy delightfully showcases her wry humor and her willingness to bare it all.

'I've been waiting my whole life to write this book. I'm just so grateful someone asked. Otherwise, what was the point of any of it??'

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‘This Will Only Hurt a Little’ is Busy Philipps’ memoir, available in Australia by Hachette and available from October 16.

Confession – I instantly flipped to the “Is This It” (The Strokes) chapter of Busy’s memoir when it arrived. The ‘Dawson’s Creek’ chapter – because how could I not? This was the show that defined my teenage years of yearning, and a couple of weeks previously myself and a bunch of rad people on Twitter had concluded an epic live-Tweeting re-watch of all six seasons (#PaceysCreek). We had all been in agreement that Busy’s character of Audrey Liddell had been a low-point in an already terrible final two seasons of a once-great show … but we were also all in agreement that upon re-examination as strong, feminist adults – Jen Lindley and Michelle Williams had been the true breakout star of that show, and we were all smitten with her and Busy Philipp’s best-friendship that had its start in Capeside.

So I flipped to the gosh-darn ‘Dawson’s Creek’ chapter because I wanted goss – particularly on Busy’s sure-to-be-truthful observations as a late-comer to the show and how the dynamics played out by then. And she did not disappoint … or – maybe she did – but not in her gossip content delivery, just in shattering some of my teen idols;

Josh really fancied himself “one of the guys” with the crew. The Creek’s very own mini George Clooney! He’s a good guy and just wanted to be well-liked but I wish I’d known the term “mansplaining” when I met Josh. His ability to turn a conversation into a dissertation was incredible.

Dang it, Pacey! 

There’s also a lot of hints given about the tensions on set between the cast by this point, as Busy points out;

One day, the whole cast was sitting around a table filming the Thanksgiving episode, and James looked at me and said, “See? You got lucky. Your show was cancelled after the first season.”’ 

Gossip delivered. But the chapter offers a lot more than just the Dawson’s Creek revelations I had hoped for… Busy highlights the many ways she was made to feel inadequate about her weight and appearance on the show, particularly in being constantly compared to the “breakout star” of Katie Holmes. The chapter also takes a sharp turn when September 11 happens in the middle of a break from filming, and Busy needing to take a flight back to Wilmington from LA despite being terrified – as everyone was in those days – of getting back on a plane and then having to carry on with life and work. In the wake of it all.

I felt so silly at work the next day, dressed in a costume for the Halloween episode. The world was fucking ending and I was trying to get Joey Potter to come to a party with me. I remember there were a lot of pep talks about how this is what we do. We make entertainment for people so that they can escape the real world for forty-three minutes a week. It’s not without value or merit. It’s important to not just tell stories, but also to remember to entertain. Any anyway, someone’s got to. May we well be us.
And so we did.

And she delves into how she started drinking as a coping mechanism for all the ways the world sucked, and she was made to feel shitty in her little corner of it. The chapter ends on a doozy of a scathing and on-point one-liner and it pulled me up short. Hang on. I was mostly looking forward to this memoir for the celebrity gossip, but … could it be that Busy is actually a good writer?

Yes. She is. A damn fine one, in fact.

I went back to the beginning and then I didn’t stop – I ended up reading the whole book through to 1AM when I finished, teary-eyed and a little weak from the punches she packed.

This memoir is GOOD. Not just good … bloody brilliant! It’s up there with ‘Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?’ by Mindy Kaling and Tina Fey’s ‘Bossypants’ for comedic memoirs … but it’s also more than that. It’s a memoir by an actress in the wake of #MeToo and Harvey Weinstein (who – yes – she knew, but not the extent of his depravity). An actress who is pulling no punches about the toxic masculinity and patriarchy upon which Hollywood is built and Busy acquiesced to for a long time.

Case in point: Busy had the idea for the 2007 film ‘Blades of Glory’ and shared it with her boyfriend at the time who agreed they should write a script together … until he and his brother took the idea and ran away with it, even having the audacity to shop it around without Busy’s name on it, though she’d also contributed to the writing. Luckily she’d registered the idea with the Writers Guild of America screenwriting credit system and they ended up having to credit her, since there was a sufficient paper-trail proving her ownership (so it was fear of potential litigation rather than letting a woman own her damn work as the right thing to do!)

Busy dissects these moments, and many more (including – yes – the one the media has chosen to pick apart in James Franco’s treatment of her on the set of ‘Freaks and Geeks’). But she doesn’t just talk about them in the context of Hollywood. Busy’s memoir – starting from when she’s a child and then a teenager in Scottsdale, Arizona through to her college years acting and early established career – is a searing personal critique of all the ways she tried to contain herself to please men in her life. Tried to be less than, quieter, prettier, thinner, agreeable, laid-back, loving … even at the expense of her own happiness and mental-health. It even results in her convincing herself that being raped at the age of 14 was something that she wanted from the boy, because she convinced herself to love him to make the event “okay” in her own mind.

‘This Will Only Hurt a Little’ isn’t just a memoir. It’s a searing, honest and fantastic examination of a young woman taking control of her life, career and identity. I also got this idea that it’s a little bit ‘La La Land’ meets ‘Lady Bird’ (a film I hated by the way, for its feeling directionless and pointless – but after reading Busy’s memoir I now wish more than ever that Greta Gerwig’s film had some of her beats and honesty to coral it).

The most impacting chapter to me was ‘Tear in Your Hand’ (Tori Amos) which delves into Busy’s first true teenage love affair that ends with an abortion and then winds up somewhere miraculous. It’s a chapter that you feel down to your bones, and is so incredibly literary perfect – I want to see it reproduced in The New Yorker or made into an indie movie (again – better than ‘Lady Bird’ in all ways) or maybe even fictionalised into a contemporary YA novel. This is the chapter that sealed the deal for me – and not just because it shits all over James Franco’s ‘Palo Alto’ wankery. But because it’s genius, perfectly crafted. That I read Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’ right before delving into Busy’s memoir further highlighted this for me – the beauty in writing about the pain of teenagers and teenage girls in particular, the finesse and fierceness was all in this chapter. It makes me hope that Busy has another film-script up her sleeve, or another book – collection of essays, further memoir or fiction – I don’t care, I just want more of her words, thoughts and ideas.

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5/5

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'Wildflower' by Drew Barrymore

From the BLURB:

Wildflower is a portrait of Drew's life in stories as she looks back on the adventures, challenges, and incredible experiences of her earlier years. It includes tales of living on her own at 14 (and how laundry may have saved her life), getting stuck in a gas station overhang on a cross country road trip, saying goodbye to her father in a way only he could have understood, and many more adventures and lessons that have led her to the successful, happy, and healthy place she is today. It is the first book Drew has written about her life since the age of 14.

‘Wildflower’ is the 2015 memoir by award-wining actress, by Drew Barrymore.

I’ve found myself in intermittent reading-slumps a lot this year. Sometimes they span a couple of days, or a couple of weeks but I’ve even gone on a month-long bookish drought this year, and mostly because I’m working on projects that are exciting and fun and taking up all my bookish energies! So I wanted to read a book that could be a bit of a palate-cleanser … outside of my usual scope, something I can pretty much guarantee will amuse me and be something I can put down and come back to with long lags in-between. That book has proven to be ‘Wildflower’.

I love Drew Barrymore – who doesn’t? She’s not so much the cute but troubled E.T. child to me and my generation, but I know her as the kick-butt Charlie’s Angel who told a room full of bad guys that; “By the time this is over, every one of you is going to be face-down on the floor, and I’m going to moonwalk out of here.” Or she’s Josie “Grossie” Geller from the (greatest) 1999 movie Never Been Kissed, standing on the pitcher’s mound waiting for her moment and man. She’s the real Cinderella in Ever After, who saved herself – thank you very much! Or she’s the woman tearfully introducing herself in the mirror as ‘Julia Guglia’ in The Wedding Singer, and discovering that true love is giving up the window seat on a plane. Basically, I know the Drew who has made a career out of playing and being the woman that everyone wants to be best friends with …

‘Wildflower’ totally leans into Drew’s infectious likability and aspirations. There’s not a whole lot in here that delves into the darker periods of her life … including being institutionalised as a preteen for drugs and alcohol abuse, emancipated at the age of 14 (and figuring out how leftovers and washing machines work), the intermittent appearances of her hippie-unstable estranged father… and probably because she’s very upfront about writing this book for her two girls to read one day, she chooses the sunshine and silver-linings over the nittier and grittier, which may be a let-down for some who would prefer to know those in’s and out’s of her life.

But for me – I loved reading about her growing up in LA (with these total Francesca Lia Block/ Weetzie Bat feels!) and the trickles of information she has about her family of thespians, including ‘The Profile’ John Barrymore … she may not lean into the darker parts of her history, but she does say that she supports and loves her mother, and it’s interesting to learn of her mother’s background – she was born in a displaced persons camp in Brannenburg, West Germany, to Hungarian World War II refugees.

When she goes into her growing up in the 90s (when she was at her most exhibitionist, seemingly wild-child) it’s kind of nice to read about the oddball family she was amassing behind-the-scenes, and people who she’s still friends with now and built a fantastic production company with;

That’s what we did. It was Los Angeles, and we had a lot of friends, and all of them were at the beginning of their exciting lives too. Some of the coolest filmmakers and the biggest movie stars would come hang at our house, but they hadn’t become those things yet. We were all in the incubation process and in the last carefree times of our lives. We were human Polaroids slowly developing into what other people would see, but for now we were just scrappy kids in no rush to grow up.

I will admit that this memoir isn’t overly groundbreaking, and it’s probably of such little interest to anyone who isn’t a total Drew fan (duh!) … probably a lot of the book’s appeal is just getting to see behind the Hollywood curtain, and discovering that Drew Barrymore is exactly as fictional best-friend worthy as you’d always expected. My favourite chapter is her delving into post-Charlie’s Angels media tour, when she, Lucy Lu and Cameron Diaz were roped into doing a 3-day survival course as part of the publicity trail. Drew (who was also the film’s producer, and weighed down by stress ahead of release) was not the out-doorsy, go-get-em’ type during the trip, thereby making her my *spirit animal patronus;

“This is peelu. It’s a tree and people use it in toothpaste and gum, but you can chew on it for hours and get water and saliva from it. It’s really pleasant. Peelu is your friend. Make a mental picture and let’s find some along our route.” Go fuck yourself.

… And she’s just plain funny. Of course she is – humour is her forte, and it’s a total kick to see that she’s just as clumsy and sarcastic and hilarious in real-life as she is on screen;

“OK, now your turn Cameron!” A born athlete from Long Beach, California, she made her way down like the girl we all know and love. Cool, funny, capable. Everyone roared with delight.
Then came a halfhearted to me “OK, now your turn” – no name, just “c’mon, let’s get this over with and get the unfun one down the rock.” And so I did. And while I was clinging for dear life, my foot slipped and I fell a good ten feet, and then I snapped with a hard jerk as my tether caught, and I was just swinging in midair, back and forth like a stupid metronome in unflattering khakis.
 

This wasn’t a groundbreaking, all-time-favourite read … and there’s a little tinge of sadness to some chapters on her family, given that she and Will Kopelman announcedtheir split this year … but if nothing else, ‘Wildflower’ is a celebration of how many times Drew Barrymore has picked herself up, dusted herself off, learnt to enjoy her own company and keep on keeping on. It was cathartic and enjoyable, and made me want to pull out all my Drew Barrymore DVDs for a binge-watch… and solidified my feelings that we would be insta-BFFs should we ever meet in real life. So, there’s that.

4/5

* Thanks to Diem, for pulling me up on this! 

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