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Approval Junkie

My Heartfelt (and Occasionally Inappropriate) Quest to Please Just About Everyone, and Ultimately Myself

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
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.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 8, 2016
      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.

    • Booklist

      March 15, 2016
      Those wise enough to pick up this collection of essays are about to find their newest best friend in Salie. Sharing intensely personal information lightened with touches of humor and an appreciation for the absurdities of life, the author chronicles her first unsuccessful marriage, her second, very happy marriage, her body-image issues, and her often-changing career path. Readers may recognize pieces of their own lives in the challenges and joys of her journey and will undoubtedly find even more to emotionally connect with in Salie's awkward and endearing experiences. Plan on reading this once for entertainment, or better, twice for the life lessons available. Not content with being a Rhodes scholar, this brilliant, funny woman has a resume that includes multiple listings as a guest commentator on political and pop-culture television shows in the U.S. and England, her own National Public Radio show, Fair Game from PRI with Faith Salie, regular appearances as a panelist on NPR's Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!, and a variety of acting credits.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

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  • English

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