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When I was first asked to review Rosie O’Donnell’s new book Celebrity Detox I was beyond skeptical.
Not only was it another celebrity biography, but also in years past it seems that Rosie has performed stunt after stunt for media attention. However, after reading O’Donnell’s memories about her hardworking mother and Rosie’s anguish about her death when she was only ten years old, intrigued me enough to take another look.
Depleted by the exhausting, isolating world of celebrity-hood, O’Donnell details her time away from the intoxicating effects of fame, offering up snapshots and personal reflections of life around the kitchen table, and even inside the bathtub, of her family home.
She returned to TV to co-host ABC’s The View in 2006, and divulges the ins and outs of the events that kept her in the public eye and in the tabloids, including artistic disagreements, the Donald Trump scandal, and a complicated friendship with Barbara Walters.
The content of O’Donnell’s narrative may seem overwhelmingly sentimental, but don’t be fooled --- Celebrity Detox is as charmingly frank as its title indicates. O’Donnell’s sometimes serious, sometimes humorous, narrative is a great inside look into celebritydom. While the average mom doesn’t learn to park a car at age 45 in order to pick her child up from school, she will get an appreciative laugh from O’Donnell’s efforts --- and she will certainly relate to the desire to spend more quality, worry-free time with her children. O’Donnell does an exceptional job of talking about fame in tandem with the experiences of every working parent; she reminds us of the fundamental joys of being human that no amount of money can buy.