How to Lose Your Ass and Regain Your Life: Reluctant Confessions Of A Big-Butted Star
by Kirstie Alley Rodale, $186
I find it difficult to understand how an actress with stellar TV credentials and serious populist clout - Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Look Who's Talking, Deconstructing Harry, Cheers, Veronica's Closet, Fat Actress - can acknowledge authorship of a book that includes the line 'I decided to take the onus off of something by out-creating it', but Kirstie Alley has no such qualms. She is so proud of this thin hambone stew that she posed (sober) for its cover.
Far from being an inspiration to 'big-bottomed girls out there who are not always treated like queens', How to Lose Your Ass and Regain Your Life is a disorganised series of sad and badly written anecdotes by a 54-year-old woman who appears to perceive herself as a cross between a garbage disposal unit and the town bike. Page 25: 'I may have been nothing, but now I'm a coke whore!' Page 48: 'I said casually, as if I'd experienced this kind of thing hundreds of times in my work as a prostitute.' Page 54: 'I was in Nirvana, eyes closed, pumping my legs like a little hooker.' Page 149: 'Showtime made possible for me. Need to remind self to give head to Showtime head.' Page 162: 'Want to thank him for new kitchen with token sex acts.'
Herculinary indulgences are equally grotesque. On New Year's Eve in 2003, she gorged on 'massive quantities of Santa-head frosted sugar cookies, cheese fondue, steak tartare, Key lime pie, homemade chicken and noodles, with Cinnabon chaser, and 50 or 60 other mystery foods. Then went to dinner.' Thanksgiving, 2004? 'Went to fancy restaurant and ate. Back to house and new kitchen and several thousand cookies. Ate dessert of pumpkin pie, pecan pie, hot fudge sundaes, and turkey cake. Later in evening, snacked on sausage gravy and biscuits and Pillsbury croissants.'
Why Alley should degrade herself in such a fashion is never explained. In the place of insight and compassion is relentless self-abuse, hot shame, and unsteady anecdotes of kitchens and emotional abuse at the hands of men.