Product Description

Part memoir, part monologue, with a dash of startling honesty, There’s Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say features biographies of legendary historical figures from which Paula Poundstone can’t help digressing to tell her own story. Mining gold from the lives of Abraham Lincoln, Helen Keller, Joan of Arc, and Beethoven, among others, the eccentric and utterly inimitable mind of Paula Poundstone dissects, observes, and comments on the successes and failures of her own life with surprising candor and spot-on comedic timing in this unique laugh-out-loud book.

If you like Paula Poundstone’s ironic and blindingly intelligent humor, you’ll love this wryly observant, funny, and touching book.

Paula Poundstone on . . .

The sources of her self-esteem: “A couple of years ago I was reunited with a guy I knew in the fifth grade. He said, “All the other fifth-grade guys liked the pretty girls, but I liked you.” It’s hard to know if a guy is sincere when he lays it on that thick.

The battle between fatigue and informed citizenship: I play a videotape of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer every night, but sometimes I only get as far as the theme song (da da-da-da da-ah) before I fall asleep. Sometimes as soon as Margaret Warner says whether or not Jim Lehrer is on vacation I drift right off. Somehow just knowing he’s well comforts me.

The occult: I need to know exactly what day I’m gonna die so that I don’t bother putting away leftovers the night before.

TV’s misplaced priorities: Someday in the midst of the State of the Union address they’ll break in with, “We interrupt this program to bring you a little clip from Bewitched.”

Travel: In London I went to the queen’s house. I went as a tourist—she didn’t invite me so she could pick my brain: “What do you think of my face on the pound? Too serious?”

Air-conditioning in Florida: If it were as cold outside in the winter as they make it inside in the summer, they’d put the heat on. It makes no sense.

The scandal: The judge said I was the best probationer he ever had. Talk about proud.


With a foreword by Mary Tyler Moore

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #611487 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-07
• Released on: 2006-11-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Poundstone makes self-involvement entertaining in her memoir-cum-history, which takes biographical sketches of seven historical figures—from Joan of Arc to the Wright brothers—as an excuse for a hilarious and sometimes exhausting stream-of-consciousness confessional. She's interested in other people, she explains, it's just that their stories inevitably—and uncontrollably—trigger her own: "Martin Luther King could come to my house tonight and say, 'I have a dream...' and I'd cut him off and say, 'I had a dream once, too, only in mine....'" Most everything reminds Poundstone of her well-publicized drinking problem. Joan of Arc didn't drive her livestock to pasture while drunk, but if she did they'd "have something in common." Segue to Poundstone being court-ordered on television to attend Alcoholics Anonymous ("That pretty much blows the hell out of the second A"). An explanation of Helen Keller's deafness and blindness is the perfect opportunity for the non sequitur: "God, I loved to drink." But Poundstone deals frankly with the nightmarish results of her alcoholism: she temporarily loses custody of her children, does 180 days in rehab and "was seeing four therapists a week to satisfy the court. Even Sybil didn't see four therapists." (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
In 2001 comedian Poundstone was convicted of DWI--with her three adopted children in the car. The court placed the kids in foster care, and for a year Poundstone picked them up from the foster home early each morning, cared for them, brought them back for bedtime, and didn't leave until they were asleep. She sparks this sad but ultimately triumphal story by uproariously comparing and contrasting herself and famous people. For instance, like Joan of Arc, who claimed to hear God, Poundstone "heard God speak to me once. He said, 'You're wearing that?'" Mocking her alcoholism, she recalls the potted purchases of a pet-store bunny and, later, a dog whose temperament resulted from familial alcoholism: his mother went on a binge and mated with a shark, producing a pet that routinely jumps fences to devour cats. Near the end of the book, Poundstone rhetoricizes, "Am I the luckiest woman in the world or what? I have three great kids, and not one of them is at risk of inheriting my pot belly." Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Paula Poundstone has been a stand-up comic for twenty-seven years. Her long list of successes includes HBO specials, an Emmy Award, two Cable ACE Awards, and an American Comedy Award for Best Female Stand-Up. She now appears regularly on National Public Radio’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, and her highly anticipated Bravo special, Look What the Cat Dragged In, will air this fall. Paula lives in Santa Monica, California, with her three children, Toshia, Allison, and Thomas E. Poundstone.

Customer Reviews

Very Very Funny
This book is very funny. I could not put it down and finished the book so fast that I wanted more.

Paula Poundstone presented a very popular stage comedy routine on the Bravo television channel. This book is an excellent extension of the stage routine. The book is even better than the Bravo television presentation.

Read this book.

Let Me Speak for/to the Detractors
I enjoyed the book. I appreciate that Poundstone took such a creative approach to launch her stream of consciousness. As I read, I chuckled a lot (I'm not much of a laugh-out-loud kind of person) although I did experience the occasional loud snicker.

As I read, I imagined something that the book's detractors would say (if Poundstone can wander off into the weeds writing the book, I can certainly do the same as I review it!):

"Poundstone goes on ad nauseum about her arrest a few years ago....she keeps bringing it up....like she's trying to explain her side of her legal troubles..."

So let me "'splain" to you that this is a stream of consciousness book. Poundstone gets in a biographical mode and then veers off to what pops into her mind. Her legal woes were traumatic for her and a turning point in her life. They're on her mind. When she thinks of one thing, her mind sometimes wanders off to her arrest and drinking and follow-up healing. Though embarrassed, ashamed, and even angered about what she went through (particularly losing her kids and the endless parade of diagnoses), her self-deprecating humor can still see some humor in some of her experiences.

This is not a book for someone who takes himself and life too seriously, who can't eke out some humor in bad experiences in retrospect. If you've never been described as being irreverent or having a morbid sense of humor, if you're turned off Jon Stewart or SNL, don't read this book, and re-read one of your inspirational books.

Very, very funnu, and surprisingly touching
I don't normally read memoirs, or personal histories, or biographies, but I love Paula Poundstone and her kind of humor, and picked the book. I foolishly started reading it before I went to bed, which was a big mistake - I couldn't put it down. Trust me: it is laugh out loud funny. There is also something genuinely straightforward and a bit sad about her writing. I'm now even bigger fan of her. It is a very fast read, and even though jagged narrative style was a bit jarring to me at first, I loved when she wrote about Beethoven. Also, how can you not like a woman who admits she has a crush on Wilbur Wright?!