Entertainment? Yes. Self-help? Hahaha
Watch three eapisodes of Vanderpump Rules and get back to me on if you think Kristen Doute is any authority on relationships. It should be classified as humor.

Doute's look back through her relationship history is an entertaining ride, and her approach of acknowledging mistakes is refreshing and certainly relatable. Unlike most relationship advice books, she's not really trying to give you advice or help you along your path of self-betterment. It's about looking back, recognizing your mistakes and patterns, and appreciating where you've ended up as a result of them.

I adore Vanderpump Rules so of course, I had to read this book!!
This is a funny & witty read. You definitely don't have to be a fan of the show to pick this book up.

I definitely would not follow some of the 'tips' suggested in this book, however, it does provide for a good laugh!

Wow! Just couldn't believe the 'woe is me' mentality that kept this author thinking she was always the victim (everybody else was at fault, NEVER her!). Trying to gleam dating advice from this felt like trying to set oneself up for a trainwreck…. Couldn't believe this even got out, let alone was marketed as dating advice.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Kristen Doute, and Chicago Review Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest book review. My thoughts and opinions are 100% my own and independent of receiving an advance copy.

Confession time…One of my guilty pleasures is Vanderpump Rules. Lisa Vanderpump, a former Housewife of Beverly Hills, owns a bunch of restaurants in Los Angeles. This reality TV show is about a group of friends that originally all worked at SUR and reveals the goings-on in their twenty-something lives. Now, after eight seasons, they are all much older (though you wouldn’t know from the botox), wiser (really?), and on to bigger and better things (although most of them still work at SUR). Kristen Doute is one of the original cast members and definitely comes off as crazy on the show. So she decided to write a book and explain why all the men in her life have driven her crazy.

Kristen has been through a few relationships on the show. They never end well and by the end she usually turns into a yelling, screaming, shrew that lashes out while still trying to save the relationship. One of the impetus for writing this book probably was that her bestie, Stassi Schroeder, wrote one and so she thought she could do it too. The thing is, Kristen is no Stassi. Thank goodness she was smart enough to have a co-writer, Michele Alexander, although I’m not sure what her role was. I wasn’t expecting the great American novel but some guidance as to content, continuity, and I don’t know, substance would have been helpful.

The second reason I think Kristen wanted to write this book and she does sort of mention this, is that she wanted to be able to tell her side of the story. What we see on TV is an edited version that she has no control over, so if they want her to look crazy, then crazy it is!. Here she can give as many details and round out the story to reflect more of the truth. Well, her truth. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. This book is so erratic. She is often very vague with details, jumping from one thing to another. At the same time, it seemed very empty. If she meant for this to redeem her image so that her fans would think her less crazy, this book won’t do it. I really wasn’t convinced that it was the man in the different relationships that made her crazy. I think she owns that all herself.

As a self-help book this fails. Not that I thought there would be valuable steps to follow. But she cites this as one of her goals in writing this book. I was familiar with a few of the relationships that she talked about and honestly, if I didn’t have that frame of reference, I wouldn’t understand any of what she was talking about. There was an air of inauthenticity. I felt like she didn’t write from her truth, but rather from a desire to be seen as the one who was wronged in the situation. It isn’t a good look.

So overall really disappointing for me. I wasn’t expecting much, but I was hoping for better than what I got. Her co-author, I think, was a writer, so where was her influence? Kristen would have benefited from an outline, a clearer strategy for what she was trying to say, and lots more rewrites. Even if you are a fan of Vanderpump Rules, pass on this one.

I received a temporary digital advanced copy of He's Making You Crazy by Kristen Doute and Michele Alexander from NetGalley, Chicago Review Press, and the authors in exchange for an honest review.

If you are reading He's Making You Crazy you are probably one of two people (maybe both), you are either a Vanderpump Rules fan or you have had toxic relationships and want insight into your "crazy." I am the former--a diehard VPR fan--although, let's be honest, I've been the latter. A few months ago I listened to Danny Pellegrino's Everything Iconic podcast featuring Kristen Doute; she talked about He's Making You Crazy, and from their chat I knew I was going to read her book. I didn't realize I would have the opportunity to read it prior to publication, so this was extremely exciting for me.

If you have tuned in for any or all of VPR, you are well aware of "Crazy Kristen" and the tornado she can leave behind in the wake of a take down. He's Making You Crazy explains how her relationships have created "Crazy Kristen" and throughout the book, owns her "crazy." I found her experiences to be not only interesting, but relatable. Doute possesses a level of self-awareness and understanding that the viewer doesn't get to see in most VPR episodes. For a refreshing moment, she is humanized.

He's Making You Crazy is written in a blog-like style. It was a fast read. If you are looking for more insight into Kristen's more notorious relationships--Tom, James, and Carter--this is where you will find it, but you will also find the confident teen, the delusional 22-year-old, and the confused/torn young-woman, trying to herself within a plethora of relationships. The book speaks to so many stages of love, so I hope it catches the eye of a non-VPR fan, or a woman in a solid relationship; we can all relate to some "Crazy Kristen" moment, own it, and feel stronger because of it.

I’ll never forget a moment that happened at the office of my old job. Our team was chit-chatting one morning as we normally did, and when we randomly got on the topic of TV shows, I revealed that I love watching reality TV.

The quietest dude on our team – a real starched shirt, Bud Light Lime, never-needed-to-develop-a-personality-because-my-parents-have-money kind of guy – whipped his head around to stare at me. “You watch reality TV?” I calmly explained, yes, resident Average Joe, the egghead and well-known bibliophile on your team also gets down with some “real” TV drama.

Maybe I should be ashamed of that, but I’m not. I find reality shows to be both mindless, relaxing binge-fodder, but also mini psychological studies. To even agree to be on a reality show establishes a ground level of narcissism, and when you as a viewer spend enough seasons with a group of people (not even mentioning rewatches), you start to get to know them well. Real well.

One of the shows (and the casts) I know best is Vanderpump Rules. Originally a spin off of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (let that fact sink in), the cast was sourced from “housewife” Lisa Vanderpump’s West Hollywood restaurant, SUR. She pitched the show to Bravo since her employees were a natural well of drama; six of them – three girls, three guys – were all best friends and had all paired up with one another. They also took turns hating and betraying one another and used the restaurant as the arena for their (literal and figurative) boxing matches. Lisa figured it would be reality show gold and, per usual, she was right.

The ever-expanding cast has long since abandoned pretending they actually work at the restaurant (with the exception of the newbies) since they’re now famous for being on the show, a detail that Bravo seems hellbent on not disclosing. Andy Cohen must believe that viewers will implode if that fourth wall breaks.

But since they are so famous, a few of them have snagged book deals. Stassi Schroeder released one last spring and is reportedly working on a second one, bartender pair Tom Sandoval and Ariana Madix put out a cocktail book just in time for Christmas last year, and now, Kristen Doute, the ex-girlfriend feared around all around the Bravo-sphere, has just dropped a book all about, wait for it, relationships. It’s called “He’s Making You Crazy,” proving that Kristen will take her responsibility-shirking as far as the title of her debut book.

Vanderpump Rules has featured some seriously toxic relationships (season one Stassi and Jax, anyone?), but no one has been in as many on the show as Kristen Doute. She started off the show in a long-term relationship with the above-mentioned Tom Sandoval, then she moved onto the pipsqueak DJ James Kennedy. She only recently ended things with the alleged sponger Brian Carter. Pretty much all of her relationships featured on the show started messy, stayed messy, and ended messy. It is the kind of thing that makes you wonder, good lord, if she’s like this in her 30s, what were her relationships like when she was younger?!

Well, in this book, Doute will tell you. She teamed up with the “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” author Michele Alexander to adapt her past exploits into a rom-com-style, do-as-I-say-not-what-I-do kind of tell-all. Kristen goes as far back as her childhood crushes, then takes us through the conveyor belt of attractive, yet slow on the up-take guys she’s gone for over the years. The guys made some serious mistakes in these relationships, as did Kristen, and, props to her, she almost takes responsibility for them in this book.

I know you can probably almost taste the shade I’m throwing, so let me state outright: I don’t hate Kristen. Certainly, she’s one of the best things that ever happened to the show because she cannot control herself. But on the other hand, she’s incredibly frustrating. Because she cannot control herself.

There are patterns in her behavior and in her relationships. I’ll give it to her – she’s certainly more self-aware than she’s ever been before, but on the first part of the season eight reunion that aired last week, it was revealed that Kristen hooked up with Max, the ex of not one, but two of her friends, one of whom was still interested in getting back together with him. It’s a situation uncomfortably reminiscent of her hookups with Jax Taylor when Stassi, her best friend, was entertaining a reunion with him. It’s hard to buy into her “I’ve changed so much” brand when her behavior as of last fall was merely a slightly toned-down version of what she was doing seven years ago.

Also, for as much as Kristen says she spills in this book, there’s something I really noticed the absence of: the story of how she and Tom Sandoval really got together. Kristen is happy to give stories of how she found out men were cheating on her (and then gives you, the reader, step-by-step instructions on how to double down on a cheating man’s error by egregiously invading his privacy), but she doesn’t admit that she and Sandoval started their relationship off by cheating.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory: when the show starts, she says the two had been dating for four years, sleeping together for five, and later, when Tom gets with Ariana, Kristen says something to Tom along the lines of “we know how things go when they don’t start honestly.” (I feel like they’ve alluded to this elsewhere as well, but the examples aren’t coming to mind.) Yet, there’s not mention of this in the book. Nor does she talk about the numerous physical and emotional affairs she’s admitted to having with other guys while she was with Tom.

Basically, the point I’m getting at is two-fold: Kristen is repeating past behavior as early as this past fall, so the “this is what I used to be like” tone is blatantly false, and she leaves out stories that viewers know exist, probably because they are highly unflattering. It makes me wonder what she’s left out of the stories she does include.

But let’s get to the real question here: is this book worth reading?

As a self-help book? No. It’s not written like one (someone put some white out over the words “how to” on the cover – they don’t belong there) and shouldn’t be taken as one.

If you’re not a fan of the show? No. She leaves out names (for legal reasons, I’m sure), so only viewers of the show will fully know who and what she’s talking about. She’s a little too vague for non-viewers to understand; she’s assuming you’re a viewer. (That makes the “how-to” marketing on the cover that’s clearly looking to extend this book’s audience beyond viewers of the show pretty dang gross, but that complaint I’ll direct at the publisher).

If you love the show and want to read about Doute being Doute before she became famous? Oh yeah. You’ll get some gloriously messy stories, even if they are, as I suspect, incomplete.

If I had to list reality stars I love to hate and hate to love Kristen Doute would be at the top of the list. She can be vicious to those she is friends with. But something about getting a glimpse into her side of things without the interruptions of her friends endeared her to me. I enjoyed this.

It was interesting to read about Kristen's dating history, and it seems like a lot of us women have similar experiences!

He's Making You Crazy by Vanderpump Rules star Kristen Doute is one part memoir, one part Stalking 101. It's as if Kristen & her alter ego "Crazy Kristen" wrote a book while fighting with each other for page space. It reminded me of non-fiction version of The Dark Half.

That being said, as a fan of Vanderpump Rules & an unapologetic Kristen Doute fan, I was thoroughly entertained reading her book. It is funny & witty, with dashes of humility & self-awareness. You don't necessarily have to be a fan of the show or know much about it to enjoy her book. It is written with a much wider audience in mind then just fans of the show. Fellow cast members names aren't dropped during parts about things that happened or are currently happening while filming. However, fans will know exactly who Krsiten is talking about.

While reading about the early parts of Kristen's romantic relationships, I felt like I was reading stories of my own life. I'm about the same age as Kristen & grew up in the same area, so I immediately connected with stories of high school parties with Dave Matthews playing, concerts at Pine Knob & trips to Cedar Point. I enjoyed getting to know a side that has rarely been given much time on TV.

However, a bit of advice....If you want to avoid a restraining order, I suggest not following some of the "tips" given & take them as anecdotal evidence of what not to do.

I didn't expect to enjoy this book as much as I did. Kristen Doute is a realty tv star on a show called Vanderpump Rules. If you've seen the show at all you'd know Kristen's love life is always a mess and usually by her own doing so her authoring a relationship advice book surely invokes a lot of eye rolls. But "He's Making You Crazy - How to Get the Guy, Get Even, and Get Over It" shows that Doute is trying to work through her own mistakes and short comings with a humorous twist. Don't be fooled by the title, this isn't a blame-fest. Doute recognizes her own faults in relationships while sarcastically pointing out the guys as well.

The book starts off strong with early school stories of love gone wrong. I found myself laughing and nodding at familiar tales of high school dates gone wrong. The insecurity and inexperience of a young girl's first kiss, first time and first boyfriends moves quickly into a pattern of poor choices, over the top reactions and relationships that start off well only to become a nightmare.

Funny and relatable relationship anecdotes are sprinkled throughout the book. Also, for fans of Vanderpump Rules, there are extra behind the scenes details that add layers to some of the popular storylines from the show. Doute cleverly never uses real names but if you've watched the show the culprits should be easy to identify.

There is also an admission by Doute that she has never revealed before and that sadly many can probably relate to.

While Doute comes across as self-deprecating and refreshingly self-aware it doesn't appear she's fully learned from her life lessons. The book eventually becomes a study in what it looks like to be a work in progress as they say. The progress occasionally stalls. Thankfully the entertainment doesn't and "He Making You Crazy" proves an good read albeit a bit tedious towards the end.

Important to mention that the book was co-written by Michele Alexander who wrote "How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days" and has a similar temperament.

I really wanted to like this book as I’m a big fan of the show and have been watching for ages – but it just didn’t do it for me. I think I was hoping it was a bit more of a tell-all, inside scoop kind of book versus providing dating advice – and that’s on me, because the description should have told me what I needed to know! There were some fun tongue-in-cheek lines and it was easy to tell who she was writing about when it comes to her exes featured on the show, but overall I just didn’t love it.

This book is the type of book that I expect from a Vanderpump Rules star. Kristen doesn’t mention names but the entire VPR gang is in here - Sandoval, Ariana, James, Carter, Jax, etc. There’s no need to read the book if you watch the show because you’ll already know these stories.

I love me some Kristen Doute! Kristen is one of my favorites from Vanderpump Rules and I couldn't wait to read her stories about her dating life, especially parts that have played out on the show. If you watch the show, I would highly suggest reading this book, as there's a lot of juicy details and funny stories in here that any fan will appreciate. She doesn't exactly name names, but it's easy to figure out when she's talking about Tom Sandoval, James, or Carter.

Kristen is known for being a bit out there (she is called Crazy Kristen after all!) and she really doesn't hold back when it comes to talking about sex and relationships. I devoured it one sitting, it's highly readable, fun, and a great summer or beach read.

If you are a fan of Kristen Doute or Vanderpump Rules, this is a fun book to read. I found myself laughing out loud at several chapters as the book is very Kristen, if you will. She is known as that crazy girlfriend who will snoop through your phone (a la Tom Sandoval) and find out if you're cheating before you even thought about cheating. This is a fun book, especially if you're looking for tips from Kristen. Highly recommended to Doute fans.

I really love Kristen Doute and I thought this was a fun tongue-in-cheek book. As a fan of Vanderpump Rules, I enjoyed trying to connect some of the chapters with the people on that show.

I couldn't take this book seriously. I've watched VR for years and the train wreck of their lives. Kristen has always been trying to keep up. All the others have married and bought houses so she has to buy a house too. Relationships have been her biggest downfall. Stasi wrote a book so now she has to. She rambles on about her relationships and is proud of how she can detect when she's being cheated on. I feel,sorry for her. She wanted to be loved, but keeps choosing the wrong type of guy.

I originally was interested in this book as I was a fan of Vanderpump Rules (the show that made Doute famous). But had I not been a fan, I’m not sure I would have picked it up and truthfully, I’m not sure if I would pass it along to a friend who wasn’t. While the writing style was incredibly relatable and the stories were interesting, it all just felt a little too detached. Yes, these were her stories and her life, but it wasn’t a memoir and it didn’t feel like a straight up advice book, so it fumbled it’s way through the middle. Was she trying to tell me how to avoid these situations in the future? It was incredibly unclear. When it came to her life, It was so vague on some of the details that at first I almost didn’t recognize males that I had watched her date on tv. (She could have been talking about another male model at first, for all I knew.) It was as if the Doute wanted to share her life, but wanted to not be held accountable if someone recognized themselves in a story.

If someone is interested in reading some straight up crazy dating situations about a woman who has had some bad dating luck in life, then I would definitely recommend this book.

As a fan on Vanderpump Rules, I was excited to get an advanced copy thanks to #Netgalley.

This is a very casual quick read, as if she was talking to you over a glass of wine. No names are mentioned, but if you watch the show you will know who she is talking about. I thought it was an interesting insight into her mind and what she has been through. Even if you don't agree with her actions or advise, its a funny relationship advice quick read.

I looooooove Vanderpump Rules so I was so excited to get this book. The first chapters are short and fast paced so it felt very. much like the Kristen we see on the show. The backstories were very interesting and I was nice to hear her perspective on some of the relationships that we see on the show. It is not really a self-help book, however, and I thought it would include more of that.