Girl Walks into a Bar : A Memoir

Rating:
Summary: cry me a river...
Review: I found this book to be sort of a cross between "Prozac Nation" and "The Devil Wears Prada"... and not in a good way. Like Elizabeth Wuertzel, Ms. Saroyan is quite privileged and successful. Her complaining throughout the book was hard to get through. Her anecdotes were long-winded and most could (should?) have been trimmed extensively. Like "The Devil Wears Prada", this book didn't make the magazine world sound like a good place for us mere mortals. I guess it was nice of Ms. Saroyan to give me a peek into her world... but I'm quite happy to step back into my own world which is filled with plenty of real people.

Rating:
Summary: A disappointing read
Review: I read a favorable blurb in Newsweek about this book and therefore decided to read it. I myself have struggled with my career aspirations and with trying to mesh reality with my dream of what I thought adulthood would be like, so I had high hopes for this book. I found the first few chapters engaging and compelling and then I began to get . . . bored. The author teases you with the hope of upcoming revelations but then never gets around to making any sort of point. The whole book is rambling and disjointed and lacks any sort of a central theme. I also feel like the author contradicts herself by gladly embracing that which she earlier purports to reject (i.e., a glossy magazine lifestyle). Also (and I know this is a petty point, but I can't help it) her tendency to begin sentences with "For" (as a synonym for "Because") drove me absolutly CRAZY! It sounds so artificial and stilted! Overall, a disappointing read.

Rating:
Summary: Infuriating Read
Review: I started reading this book because I loved the title, AND I could relate - I also worked in the New York media world, recently moved cross-country, and am in my 20s. I've gotten halfway through the book, but I just CANNOT finish it. Forgive me for sending out bad energy with this review, but maybe this will be constructive criticism for Saroyan if she writes a future book. I agree with the reviewer below who wrote that you get the sense that the author is hiding something from you. And that's exactly it! The author hides behind her intellectual, show-offy, wordy style of writing (and thinking). It's as though she's hiding her real feelings behind her sentences, when all the reader wants is to read about the emotional truths, pains, joys, etc.. The author frequently writes as though she's building you up for this great epiphany, but then she deflates the build-up with pseudo-intellectual analyses of her situations and relationships that circle back upon themselves and leave you feeling completely empty. Maybe that was the author's point. But really, as a reader, all you want to say to her is, "Just come out and say it! What are your real feelings?!" And the way she cuts up her sentences with loads of clauses doesn't help the read either. This book had the potential to be a lot more resonant for 20-something career girls, but it ends up reading like the author's own catharsis, which you wonder if she ever really reached.

Rating:
Summary: "Perfect Media Voice" Does not Make for the Best Memoir
Review: I was very relieved to see the other frustrated reviews on this book. I picked it up after seeing it hyped in some media outlet, and I was so aggravated reading it that I had to check Amazon's reviews to find out if I was the only one having difficulty finishing it after getting halfway through it. She talks about a colleague mentioning her "perfect media voice." That's great and all for magazine or PR, but it's hardly the tone you expect from something as personal as a memoir. There are also WAY TOO MANY sentences beginning with "For" ("For I was not only a girl who thought she was going to a party but who found herseld out in the cold..."). Good thing the book is short.

Rating:
Summary: Girl Walks into a Bar...then what?
Review: Overall, this is an OK book...just OK. Perhaps I am not being fair, for I have not read all of it, but I am somewhere along the middle. The problem with the book is its dishonest author - you always feel like she is hiding something from you, and perhaps, herself. I do appreciate how she skips all the childhood experiences and sets the story up where it should begin - the year she turned twenty-five and still realized she was a virgin. It's a great beginning, and enthralls the reader. However, you feel Ms. Saroyan is just being redundant, and confusing, as well as somewhat paranoid, even if she is only writing a memoir. I have not read her magazine work, but her writing isn't as impressive as she would like us to believe. She does write simply and snappily, allowing for quick reading as opposed to agonizing us with every page. All in all, not as cheerful or as witty as "Sex and the City"-esque Manhattanite favorites, but a good read if you are either an aspiring female journalist and/or want a peek at the New York City life with little of its infamous sex, drugs, and snobbery involved.

Rating:
Summary: cry me a river...
Review: Strawberry Saroyan has written a memoir that tells a universal story -- one's coming to maturity -- within an extraordinary context. What makes this book significant is the fact that the author is the grandaughter of a legitimate, do-something celebrity -- author William Saroyan -- and she herself worked as a staff writer for some of the most high-profile print media in New York and California.

Few people can claim to have played out their roaring twenties on Strawberry Saroyan's level, yet there are many who did work for a Pittsburgh Magazine, or a Centre Daily Times, and who had their own memorable "Thursday Night" gatherings of like-minded friends. This book is for them -- those who aspire to actively participate in the culture of the urban American experience.

Saroyan uses a cool prose style: crisp sentences and succinct descriptions. One can imagine the author telling this tale during an evening's conversation over a bottle of red wine. At the end of the night, the reader feels that one of her (or his) own have made good, and have done so by writing a book that entertains and advises without asking for anything but a sympathetic ear and an open mind.

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the worst book ever published
Review: This book is awful... Saroyan's wanderlust in writing is neither intelligible or enlightening. While lyrical in some sense, the text piles several non-consequential stories without order or point into 193 pages of the most expensive firewood ever produced. If you're interested in a good memoir, invest in "The Liar's Club" or "Cherry" by Mary Karr.

Rating:
Summary: Infuriating Read
Review: This book was a frustrating read because I oftentimes related to what Saroyan was discussing (especially her detailed exploration about how we grow apart from good friends as we get older) but more often I just wanted to set the book down and never pick it up again. After a while, I just was tired of hearing about her exploits with this person, or that boy, or this friend. The book felt to me like the kind of conversations you have with your friends after a couple of beers: You think that you are being quite deep and insightful, and sometimes you are, but more often you are talking just to hear the sound of your own voice.