This is such a delightful book of essays! If you didn't already love Lippman, you will after reading.

The Bitch is Back

I interviewed local genre author Laura Lippman for the Baltimore City Paper back in 2011 for her novella The Girl in the Green Raincoat (which I highly recommend). We talked over breakfast at Hampden’s Golden West the Sunday morning that happened to be the Sunday of the very last episode of The Wire, a beloved and highly successful show her husband David Simon created and was a showrunner on for five seasons. I mentioned the timing in my piece--my editor took it out. In Lippman’s first book of essays, My Life as a Villianess, she talks about Simon and The Wire her own way, the right way--it’s her goddamn story to tell. She also writes about being an older mom--she became one at 51--and Twitter, Baltimore, revenge. She drops names and keeps some under her belt, her thoughts on body image are refreshingly honest, she talks about her younger self, her parents, her moments of being loud, and of being the bad guy. It’s really good.

Wendy Ward
http://wendyrward.tumblr.com/

I do not usually gravitate to short stories and essays. But am I glad that I read these grouping. Love lippman and hope she develops some of these characters into full length novels

Laura Lippman’s collection of essays, her first, marks her as a contemporary woman I want to hear from regularly.

See my interview with her at https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-07-30/laura-lippman-on-her-essays-in-my-life-as-a-villainess

My Life as a Villainess by Laura Lippman is a collection of essays that chronicle her various writing and life experiences. Her language is as salty as a sailor’s, and she makes no apologies…for anything. She is brash and surprising.

Her role as the wife of a successful television showrunner offered some insight into David Simon’s work, especially The Wire (which I have never seen.

I’m not a big essay reader, but I enjoyed this book thoroughly, having read it from cover to cover nonstop.

Laura Lippman, former writer for the Baltimore Sun, is a crime novelist who has a detective series with protagonist Tess Monaghan. Lippman is originally a Southern Belle who was transplanted in Maryland…and she sometimes shows up in New Orleans as well.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting August 24, 2020.

I would like to thank HarperCollins Publishers and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

I really love Lippman's writing, but I just couldn't get into these essays. Don't get me wrong; she's had a long, successful career and I guess she deserves to write a bunch of essays about her personal life, but they just didn't speak to me very much. I'm sure this is a good collection for someone, but that someone isn't me. {shrug}

I love Laura Lippman's novels to a ridiculous degree, but this collection of essays reads like a privileged person's whinging. I don't feel the pain of being rich, famous, and being married to an equally famous man and having the ability and time to write a book of navel gazing. Pretty tone deaf, especially now (the publication should have been pushed or shelved) and as a result, this book is out of touch to a staggering degree. Great title, though!

Just when I needed something that wouldn’t challenge my tired brain, was interesting, and most important—enjoyable, I picked up My Life as Villain. In the essays Lippman writes about challenges faced by many women. I particularly enjoyed her essay on being a 60-year-old mother of an elementary aged child. I had expected more about her mysteries but it is what it is.

A compilation of essays by Laura Lippman of detective fiction fame. Quick witted and funny Laura gives us a glimpse into life and family. Enjoyable reading.
Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for providing me with this ARC.

I came to Laura Lippman a bit backwards, I guess, as the essay collection “My Life as a Villainess” is my first experience with her writing; I haven’t read any of her popular Tess Monaghan mysteries and “Sunburn” is queued up on my Kindle but still waiting for me to start. But after hearing Lippman interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air and on The New York Times Book Review podcast, I suspected I would love “My Life as a Villainess,” and I was right. (I knew I was in for a treat when she ended the Introduction by quoting James M. Cain: “I am a registered Democrat. I drink.”) In these essays, on topics ranging from Twitter to her early days as a struggling print journalist to hiring a nanny, Lippman is conversational and straightforward, with a razor sharp wit and deadpan funny style that had me laughing and kept me reading. And she is not afraid to turn that withering eye on herself—far from it, in fact, particularly in the essays “The Whole 60” on aging, “Game of Crones” on being an older mother, and “The Art of Losing Friends and Alienating People” (on exactly what it sounds like). I thoroughly enjoyed “My Life as a Villainess” and look forward to finally starting “Sunburn” very soon.

Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for providing me with an ARC of this title in return for my honest review.

Laura Lippman is a bestselling crime novelist and former journalist. In this essay collection, she gets personal, exploring her experience as 50-year-old new mom, career struggles, romantic relationships, and more. I haven't read all of Lippman's work, but still enjoyed learning about her journey. Her writing is witty, smart, and fast-paced. I'm only giving a 4-star rating here because it feels like she was fairly flippant about other people's pain and problems in some of these essays. I should have seen that coming (she identifies as a villainess, after all), but her self-centeredness doesn't feel particularly fresh or interesting or thought-provoking. I think a smidge of self-awareness would have made a big difference. But overall, an enjoyable read!

***Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review***

Funny and interesting.

I appreciate the opportunity to have previewed this book (thanks to the publisher and NetGalley), but did not finish it. I have not read other books by the author, and I suspect the best audience for this one is her fan base. There were some entertaining moments in what I read, but not enough to keep me interested. I am giving this two stars since this review requires a star rating, but I imagine this peek into Lippman's life and thoughts will be enjoyed more by her regular readers.

This was very quirky, funny, and serious. I guess this author always writes crime fiction which I didn't know but it totally makes sense. I liked how this one flowed from one thing to another and it was pretty interesting.

Laura Lippman is the essayist we've been waiting for. Of course it's beautifully written. Lippman is a brilliant novelist who doesn't get the acclaim she deserves because she writes genre fiction. But in My Life as a Villainess she owns all of who she is, especially those qualities that, for those of us who came of age in the 70s and 80s, were considered socially irredeemable. Things like revenge fantasies and grudge lists -- in the words of Dorothy Parker, "If you don't have anything nice to say, come and sit here by me.” BUT there is no snark in Lippman's book. There is plenty of love and wonder in her work, but it's not unicorns and O Magazine Livin' My Best Life Type love. Lippman's realistic. In talking about motherhood, there's none of the, "once you have a child you will know a love nobody has ever known," drivel. Childless by choice, I usually skip over the mommy stuff, but not this time. Lippman's stories are funny, awkward, and ambitious but never self-deprecating, and it is this clear-eyed point of view that sets "Villainess" apart. Her essay, "The Whole 60," puts a fresh spin on our body-obsessed, diet-ridden lives, and, in some kind of way, it sets the reader free, should he/she/they choose to accept that mission. Several times throughout the collection, Lippman mentions wanting to be someone's friend. I'm thinking the girl crush is going to be on the other foot when "My Life As a Villainess" comes out this August. In sum, this is a book that can hold a reader's attention in the midst of an allergy attack during a plague. Read it.

Laura Lippman is one of my favorite mystery authors.Now I have fallen in love with her essays .She is real funny honest.The fact that she is the oldest mom in the kindergarten group she is in her sixties or that she is not a good friend are essays that drew me in .These essays are really a terrific read highly recommend. #netgalley#harpercollinsbooks,

What a treat this book is -- a freewheeling, wide-ranging collection of essays that was just perfect for reading in these difficult times. Lippman's voice is so engaging -- smart, funny, self-deprecating -- and I love the glimpses into her writing life and her thoughts on parenthood. I encourage all to read her crime fiction, but you'll enjoy this even if you haven't read her other work.

Many thanks for the opportunity to read and review!

Thank you to NetGalley for allowing me to read this in exchange for my honest review.

Holy shit, I could barely force myself to finish this. I love Laura Lippman’s novels, I really do. And I expected to love this. But it was just so incredibly boring. She’s a great writer with a fantastic sense of humor, so I don’t know why these essays fell so flat for me. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to how these were organized, and I didn’t understand why she had even shared a few of the stories - they just weren’t interesting. It felt also a little pretentious, a little try-hard. I’m really disappointed, and I will not be recommending this nor purchasing it for my library. I give the collection 2 stars because the writing was great, the content was not.

I like Lippman's essays very much. They're zippy and interesting and super feminist. I'd read a couple of them in other places, but otherwise much of this was new to me, so that was a treat.

Thanks to NetGalley and to the publisher for the digital ARC.

This book of essays by author Laura Lippman starts off strong and hilarious with plenty of girlpower, and slowly weakens until it concludes with a worshipful essay about her husband, who is some guy in television who made some show I've never heard of. Lippman is sure that his art will outlast hers and is more brilliant than hers. Is it a given that "The Wire" will go down in history and the Tess Monaghan series will be forgotten?

In fact, Lippman might write for a good twenty-five more years and "The Wire" will be so dated that it won't even popular for streaming or mainlining or whatever we'll do in 2045.

Previously published essays can be very tricky to expand into an effective book: when putting together old material with new material and fleshing it out with explanatory material, while trying to wrestle it into topical sections, the result is sometimes underwhelming and uneven, and this is the case with "My Life as a Villainess."

As the book slips into dull decline, Lippman declares that she's a goddess (great), she's an excellent mother (very good), she's a terrible friend (huh?), she's a moron compared to the man of the house (even if true, why say so)?

Lippman opines that she might even be, as a friend of hers accused before ghosting her, a narcissist. She then adopts a refrain about everything being "all about Laura.". This comes across as either creepy or whiny, but definitely not funny.

Lippman actually writes that there isn't room in her house for two geniuses, herself and her husband, and it doesn't sound like a joke. I'm not sure that her husband's absence, mentioned several times, is supposed to loom as large as it does in the book. It feels as though his genius must be praised to the skies in order to justify the fact that the author is 60 and raising an eight-year old daughter alone. It's okay if he's AWOL. He's a MacArthur Fellow.

I was interested in Lippman's flashes of autobiographical material (childhood, career, Twitter, menopause) but bored by her father's bar (another staggering genius, her father) and bored by her fabulous nanny. Her nanny is absolutely perfect but Lippman is not the least bit threatened by the prospect that her daughter loves her nanny more. Okay, fine. So what?

Ideally, from a marketing perspective, this book of essays would be so sharp and clever and witty that a reader would be inclined to read Lippman's fiction. Unfortunately, it flops in the middle like a souffle.

I received an advanced readers copy of this book from the publisher and NetGalley and was encouraged to submit an honest review.