If I Knew Then

Rating:
Summary: Excellent and Honest
Review:
I thought this book to be excellent and honest. Ms. Fisher tells the story with dignity, allows herself to be honest about her role in what occurred...and doesn't do it with over sensationalism.
I Recommended this book along with some other great books:
A Child Called It,Nightmares Echo

Rating:
Summary: How cliche of me but..Long Island Lolita - her story
Review: Amy Fisher is a name that I do remember from the past, we're about the same age so I pretty much remember all of the media coverage of this terrible story.

Basically a spoiled rotten Long Island girl who goes to a school in an affluent area runs into trouble - because she can. Her Mother is hard at work running a business and supporting the family's needs while her father is abusive. Amy is an unsupervised young girl who gets away with alot, she runs wild in and out of school mixing with the wrong crowd and ultimately ends up in the hands of a weirdo, (JB) who doesn't even deserve to be named. He amazingly brain washes her into prostitution and ultimately the shooting of his wife. I can't believe that a)he wasn't charged in the attempted murder and b) his wife went back to him. Anyway, Amy is now set on a course that can not be reversed. She heads off to prison for about seven years.

The book leads you through her turbulent story from start to finish. It is certainly a 'page turning' story. Her story takes us through the time leading to that fateful meeting in JB's garage, her years in prison and ultimately catches up to her present life which includes a JB look alike husband (weird) and a son. It's heartbreaking in the fact that yes, she should have known better but once you read her side you can see that she was just trying to fill a void in her life with JB and unfortunetly it turned pretty ugly. If she at 16 should have known better than what the hell was JB at 30+ thinking?! He is the real criminal.

The positive note is that she has turned her life around and has a loving family. She seems to have picked up the pieces of her life (after paying her debt to society) and is working hard at being a good wife and mom. That's all we can ask!



Rating:
Summary: Very touching and inspirational story
Review: Amy Fisher's book is a very easy to read work, and is very reflective and moving.

Amy is a mature, intelligent, woman who at no time shirks responsibility for her actions in the past, but at the same time is so clearly a much different young lady. Her evolution has given her a life and family which is warm and rewarding and loving. In many ways, this is inspirational for those of us who have lamented our lot in life and never thought it was possible to ever achieve happiness - but yet have never ever suffered the horrible things that Amy has.

Amy's book is engrossing and I believe it is easy to see why Mary-Jo was able to declare she had forgiven Amy; the Amy Fisher today is a positive influence on society - with a strong social conscience - who obviously feels solid remorse and horror at her crime.

I well recommend this book to you. In it, Amy makes mention of the 'other' Amy Fisher book and explains how little she contributed to it, with the author then largely relying on the hearsay of her morally bankrupt lawyer at the time.

One last comment - Amy's mother is tremendous. Well, except for the fact she was very forgiving of Amy's transgressions during her teens, but apart from this she really comes over as a tower of strength and support.

Rating:
Summary: NOTHING NEW
Review: I bought this book with great anticipation. I read "Amy Fisher: My Story" and was curious to see if Amy had really grown up. I caught her appearance on Oprah. Most of the book is about Amy and what it was like in prison. There was very little about her feelings and thoughts after the attempted murder. It is not at all what I anticipated it to be.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, tragic story, poorly written
Review: I came of age at the same time and in the same part of the country as Amy Fisher, so I was eager to read the first-person account of her life. Much of what she wrote resonated with me and I have great compassion for what she experienced that shaped her and led her astray. It is also compelling that she truly refused to be defined by her adolescence and that she has worked diligently to overcome her past. That being said, I expected a higher quality of writing than this book delivers. The prose is full of short, choppy, simplistically-worded sentences. I'm a huge fan of the late Caroline Knapp and highly recommend, for those interested in autobiographical accounts from courageous women, Drinking: A Love Story and Appetites: Why Women Want.

Rating:
Summary: The title says it all...
Review: I didn't expect to like this book, as I wasn't familiar with the Amy Fisher of the tabloids. But Fisher, now a newspaper columnist, tells her story honestly, without asking for pity. And for the most part, it's a story worth reading.

Fisher's title makes the theme. "If I knew then..." If she'd known about the consequences of her actions, about how to deal with an abusive family, and a whole lot more, none of this would have happened. But that's precisely the point. She didn't know. And her parents were not available to teach her.

Fisher's mother worked full-time, leaving Amy to her own devices. Some young women can handle independence; Amy couldn't. Her father was abusive and impatient. So when Amy damaged her car, she felt desperate. And when a thirty-something mechanic offered to help her, and then expected sexual favors in return...well, she was in way, way over her head. And when this man started hinting, "Wouldn't it be nice if you'd help me kill my wife..." Amy went from being a naive high school girl to convicted felon, almost overnight.

Many readers say, "Come on. Surely she knew what she was doing." But teenagers aren't sensible or logical and they don't know what they're doing. They disconnect actions and consequences, even if they have loving, stable parents.

Once caught up in the legal system, Fisher paid more than her share of dues. Interrogated by the cops, she reports the typical response: at some point, she'd say anything if she could just stop. She describes mind games, with the interrogators holding back food and drink until she "gave" them something. She didn't know how to hire a lawyer, so she ended up with a longer sentence than she might have gotten otherwise. Advised not to contact her victim, she didn't share her remorse for many years. And she testified against Joey - who received a mere slap on the wrist for statutory rape.

Fisher's account of prison life is sadly familiar: brutal guards, lack of dignity, singled out for abuse because she was "high profile." It's not clear why we taxpayers continue to support those institutions as we move into the twenty-first century.

Fisher's survival is a testament to her own strength. After prison, she went on to build a career for herself as a free lance journalist, as well as a life with marriage and children.

And she takes responsibility for her actions, now that she's old enough to realize what's going on. But I still wish we'd spend less money on our prisons and more on programs targeted to teens, even teens from families that seem great on the outside. Somehow this tragedy should have been prevented.





Rating:
Summary: Poor Little Amy Fisher............
Review: I'm glad I didn't pay for this book, I got it from the library.
This is a self serving book from a woman who claims that she only wants to be left alone by the press, even going so far as to have plastic surgery to change her appearance and then plasters her new face all over the cover of her new book. What's wrong Amy, no one paying any attention to you anymore?

I'm sorry if I sound hard on her, but please, she needs to stop blaiming her decisions on bad parenting or being led astray by the older married man. I was 16 at one time, not to far before Amy was, and I got mixed up with wrong people and did things that I am not proud of, too. But I still knew that what I was doing was wrong and I made the choice to do them. Did she think it was ok to shoot Mary Jo in the head? Didn't she stop and even think, "Gee, maybe I shouldn't be doing this?" Did Joey B. hold a gun to her head and make her become a call girl? Nope, as I remember she was the one with the gun. He was every bit the sleezy low life that he was made out to be, but Amy made those decisons of her own free will.

It was very poorly written, darting from one subject to the next and leaving out very important imformation in between. This book has nothing to do with "If I Knew Then". She did know then, a 5 year old knows you don't shoot someone in the head. A teenager may turn to being an escort if she is desparate and can find no other way to survive on the street, but Amy, in her own words, said she came from an upper middle class household. I came from a straight middle class household, and you know what I did? I got my money from babysitting or working at McDonalds, never once did I say "I think I will just become a prostitute." What is it that Amy wishes she had of known? How to use her brain?

Her description of her 7 years of prison life were indeed terrible and I feel sorry that any human being has to be subjected to that kind of treatment, but I also think that Amy is holding back a whole lot of what she probably brought on herself. She was spoiled and no doubt she probably whined and complained so much that she made herself a target, she also said she was a magnet to the opposite sex. The inappropriate relationship that she had with her own lawyer speaks volumes to me. We get to see his letters to her, but do we see what she may have written to him during that time? Not a word. She used sex as a weapon and when the weapon got used on her she cried foul. I don't want to say she got what she deserved because she didn't, she deserves to still be in jail and she should thank God everyday that Mary Jo has been blessed with a forgiving heart. Amy talks about how she was such a victim. Excuse me, maybe my thinking is a bit off, but had she not have chosen to put a bullet in Mary Jo's head then there would never have been a question of who was a victim at all.

Amy, you came out of this whole ordeal a different person. You did indeed indure some terrible things along the way, but I guess "If You Only Knew Then" what most 10 year olds already know now, you would know you never play with a loaded gun. Someone could get shot. Oh wait....someone did. God Bless you Mary Jo, you are an exceptional human being.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Work
Review: Like others that have reviewed this work, I too, was unsure as to how good this book would be. Surprise-surprise, it is excellent. Ms. Fisher is honest and forthcoming. She also does so with tact and grace. The tell all story of the century is really a good book to read and difficult to put down.

I also recommend: Nightmares Echo by Katlyn Stewart and A Paper Life by Tatum O'neil.

Rating:
Summary: Actually Good, Who Knew?
Review: Oh those wacky Americans. Here Amy Fisher tells the story of how as a teen she got bamboozled by an overweight New Jersey mechanic into an affair that so consumed her she decided she needed to kill his wife over. It's actually really entertaining! Kind of like My Fractured Life, Tommyland, and How to Make Love Like A Porn Star - If I Knew Then makes sense of the absurb side of American celebrities.

Rating:
Summary: Finally...Amy's true story
Review: This book is the other side of the story, Amy's side. The one we never knew until now. I was totally engrossed by Amy's compelling tale of her life in prison and how she struggled to get her life back on track. We only heard the negative side of the "Long Island Lolita" through the media's coverage all these years, but Amy sets the record straight in this book. From meeting Joey, to torturous years in prison, to finally finding love, happiness and peace, Amy's takes you through it all.