Just Jennifer

Approval Junkie: Adventures in Caring Too Much by Faith Salie

If you are looking for a self-help book addressing how NOT to care too much, how NOT to be an overachiever, look elsewhere; if you are looking for validation that it is OK to overreach (and sometimes fail) and to always try to be the best, than look no further, Faith Salie’s hilarious, sometimes self-deprecating memoir is for you.  Salie, a TV and radio host and regular panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me, spares no details about her life thus far, her obsession with being her high school’s Miss Aphrodite in the late 1980’s, her relationship with her “wasband”, her struggle with fertility, her feelings of loss after her mother’s death when Salie was twenty-six and her “oopses” along her career path.  Her essay on interviewing techniques offers a lot of good pointers for anyone who has ever done a broadcast interview and a letter to her daughter is a final coda to a life well-lived (so far).  Salie approaches her memoir much as she has approached her life to date, with enthusiasm, honesty and a whole-heartedness that will make readers not only cheer for her but realize that it is OK to seek approval as long as it is done with Salie’s wit and wisdom.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for this review.