I had a lot of fun reading this book. This memoir is a collection of humorous anecdotes from his childhood to his biggest successes in Hollywood. It was a quick and easy read. Enjoy

I started to read the book with a feeling that it would be a ride through a director that I admire memory and history. What I didn’t expect was a description of a neurotic survivor who was surrounded as he grew up of completely dysfunctional and otherwise neurotic people who happened to be family members and friends.

This is a very funny book if you are prepared to read about some serious dysfunction. It’s very touching and also really sometimes difficult to read. If you get past the difficult passages you will literally laugh aloud.

Some of my favorite passages are those where Barry Sonnenfeld talks about himself and recognizes how neurotic he is and explains why. Most of the book is riffing on this. Hey if you can’t make fun of yourself who can you make fun of is the saying right?

As I was thinking about what I was going to write, I realized how hard it is to write a review of a book that really is pretty painful to read some of the time, but, you know really does end up ok… and has a great martini recipe? What is my take on this? I was honestly thinking that I don’t like to give away too much about myself but I do find myself wanting to make fun of my personal neurosis. I was driving to an appointment, thinking I would rather be going anywhere else I heard an interview on the radio and honestly… this helped me decide to put the book down for a couple of weeks and marinate in what I wanted to get out of it.

At first I thought I was going to get insight into a filmmaker’s background and business. Nope it really is a collection of anecdotes, very well documented anecdotes about overcoming weird situations with a sense of neurosis and humor and a deep delve into a human's mind. That was the gift of this book. There it is. I went in thinking one thing was going to happen and through empathy and reading through a bit of laughter was the gift of understanding someone else's tragedies can bring everyone some joy in a roundabout way.



In this book… Barry Sonnenfeld overcomes some of the following…..and I am giving nothing away here… parents that are less than ideal by yesteryears standards or todays for that matter, a horrible cousin, his college shutting down, living in the woods, porn, kidney stones, making films and falling in love (and other maladies). Normally no one would want to read about these things. But Barry Sonnenfeld has written a first person memoir that takes you to these places and honestly you kinda are glad that he takes you there.

He is very self-effacing and has an incredible sense of humor about what terrible things he has overcome. I was cheering for him and all his successes as we went along.

If you can find (and you should) the press that Mr. Sonnenfeld has done for this book, honestly and candidly his talking about it is so much … so much… better than my review ever could be. Just know that I really did enjoy it. I wanted to gag a little at some of his descriptions but knowing that he probably did a little as he wrote them makes me feel better. I felt like he was telling me a story across a kitchen table. It was weirdly a joy to read. As I imagine it was a weird joy for him to write.

Odd, hilarious, disturbing....

I've been a big Barry Sonnenfeld fan since ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES. (The first one was a nice try, but didn't quite click for me.) His quirky Directing style and outlook on life fits perfectly with me. BARRY SONNENFELD, CALL YOUR MOTHER: MEMOIRS OF A NEUROTIC FILMMAKER goes a long way towards explaining how he came to be so quirky, and the tales he tells from his chilfdhood are both hysterically funny and deeply disturbing. Raised by people who had no business having a child, young Barry Sonnenfeld grew up neglected by his philandering Father and depressed, vaguely suicidal Mother, often being left to the depredations of his Mother's pedophile Cousin Mike, who lived with the family, and would often molest children in full view of other adult family members, who shrugged it off with a "That's just Mike..." attitude.

The episodic stories that Sonnenfeld relates about his childhood are laugh-out-loud funny, as are the stories that spring from his involvement in movies such as THE ADDAMS FAMILY, GET SHORTY, and MEN IN BLACK. If I had one quibble with this book, and its a small one, it would be the way that the book tends to drift off on unrelated tangents when talking about his experiences with "difficult" people, especially towards the end of the book. Sonnenfeld has no trouble relating how insane Producer Scott Rudin could be on the sets of the ADDAMS films, or how nasty and dismissive Penny Marshall was while shooting BIG, but Sonnenfeld seems to have a lot to say about Robin Williams, who surely must have been incredibly annoying to be around all day every day in real life, but holds it back, as he does with the notoriously nasty Tommy Lee Jones. Sonnenfeld starts to relate a conversation with Jones where he informs him that he is basically being removed from the third MEN IN BLACK film, but goes off on a tangent after two sentences and never finishes the story. On the whole, I'd say that Sonnenfeld glosses over his movie career so quickly that he he probably has enough funny stories and inside information to fill a whole other book, which I hope is the case. (Interesting tidbit for the easily offended: The advance reading copy that I was provided has a VERY graphic photo of a behind-the-scenes moment from an adult movie that Sonnenfeld shot early in his career. While it did provide a great laugh once I noticed it, I was surprised to find it in such a mainstream book. But, if you're easily offended, this maybe isn't the book for you anyway.)

Hilarious and unflinchingly honest, Sonnenfeld killed it with this book, and I would love to read more from him about his bizarre life and incredible career.

The publisher provided a review copy.

Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother is one of the best "celebrity" memoirs I've read in quite some time. It is witty, silly, funny, serious, and occasionally even a little disturbing.

Whether you know who Barry Sonnenfeld is or not, chances are you are familiar with his work. As a cinematographer he has worked with such well known filmmakers as The Coen Brothers (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing), Rob Reiner (Misery), and Penny Marshall (Big). Among the films he has directed are The Addams Family, Addams Family Values, Get Shorty, Men in Black, Men in Black II, and Men in Black III.

Early in this book Barry Sonnenfeld claims that "I am by all accounts one of the most neurotic people on the planet." and shares a quote from Men in Black III that he believes summarizes his life "A miracle is what seems impossible but happens anyway."

After reading Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother I can't disagree on either point.

Anyone looking for a gossipy celebrity tattle-tale type of thing will be disappointed. The author mentions a few of the big names with whom he has worked (Will Smith, Robin Williams, John Travolta, Danny DeVito, and more) but it's generally more as a reference point to his own story.

Just as well; If he hadn't bothered to mention any of them at all this would still be a fascinating story. His philandering father (a salesman with questionable business sense) and hypochondriac mother (a pathological liar who taught grade school art) were monumentally ill-equipped to raise a child.

From being awakened by his father in the middle of the night (at age five) so that he could talk his mother out of suicide, to the rare gourmet treat of half-burned half-frozen Swanson TV dinners (his mother never really mastered the art of cooking), to the child molesting relative who was a frequent houseguest, on to his brief tenure filming pornography... This is not a dull story!

It also bears mentioning that Mr. Sonnenfeld has never been defeated at leg wrestling. Never. (It seems very important to him.)

I would recommend this memoir to all but the most sensitive readers (seriously, if you are very squeamish skip the pornography section - I'm not kidding).

***Thanks to NetGalley, Hachette Books, and the author for providing me a free digital copy of this title in exchange for an honest review