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    My Life as a Villainess: Essays
    My Life as a Villainess: Essays
    My Life as a Villainess: Essays
    Audiobook5 hours

    My Life as a Villainess: Essays

    Written by Laura Lippman

    Narrated by Laura Lippman

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    About this audiobook

    New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman, a journalist for many years, collects here her recent essays exploring motherhood as an older mom, her life as a reader, her relationships with her parents, friendship, and other topics that will resonate with a large audience.  Her voice is wry and relatable, her takes often surprising.

    Meet the Woman Behind the Books…

    In this collection of new and previously published essays, New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman offers her take on a woman's life across the decades. Her childhood and school years, her newspaper career, her experiences as a novelist—Lippman finds universal touchstones in an unusual life that has as many twists as her award-winning crime fiction.

    Essays include:

    ·         Men Explain The Wire to Me

    ·         Game of Crones

    ·         My Life as a Villainess

    ·         My Father’s Bar

    ·         The 31st Stocking

    These candid essays offer long-time readers insight into the experiences that helped Lippman become one of the most successful crime novelists of her generation.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateAug 4, 2020
    ISBN9780063017757
    Author

    Laura Lippman

    Since Laura Lippman’s debut, she has been recognized as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the “essential” crime writers of the last 100 years. Stephen King called her “special, even extraordinary,” and Gillian Flynn wrote, “She is simply a brilliant novelist.” Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty-five languages. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her teenager.

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    Reviews for My Life as a Villainess

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    • 4/5
      A charming collection of essays about aging, parenthood, marriage, divorce, friendship and careers and regrets. The author is a keen student of her own experience and the reader will find much to relate to as well as thoughtful meditations upon mortality and meaning. The author shares vulnerably but also lightens the mood with biting wit. A very pleasing read.
    • 3/5
      New York Times bestselling crime novelist, Laura Lippman, dazzles in this sparkling essay collection. Readers will finally get to meet the woman behind the novels in this unabashedly poignant collection of personal essays. From motherhood to her early career in journalism to love and loss and Twitter - many facets of Lippman's life are candidly broached, often with humorous and astute observations. Essays can go from laugh out loud funny to achingly sad in a heartbeat - but the tone always remains insightful and optimistic. Brilliantly narrated by the essayist herself, Lippman is great at controlling the levity and seriousness that each essay demands. A wonderful balance of essays- readers will feel like they get far more than a glimpse into the life of crime writing legend. Not just for fans of the author, these essays broach far more than her work and should have a wide appeal
    • 4/5
      Shortly after the release of her first book starting Tess Monahan, Baltimore Blues, I had the pleasure of meeting her at ALA. She was gracious and kind, handing out signed book. I took it home, read it and loved it. She has been on my must read list ever since, though I admit to being a few behind.I was so curious to see what she would choose to write about in her life, a chance to see into a favorite author. Get to know her a little better. I was not disappointed. She writes about a wide range of topics, such as her first job, her dad, mean girls, issues with weight and self image. How it is to be sixty and raising her nine year old daughter. I can't even imagine that, or rather I can but it makes me tired just thinking about it. More power to her!She writes with humor, honest about her faults and foibles and is at times self deprecating in things she wished she had or could do better, or differently. Finishing, I took a moment to wonder about what I would write about in my life if I would write such a book. I'm not, however s popular author so I doubt anyone besides my friends or family would care. Definitely not a bestseller.ARC from Edelweiss.
    • 3/5
      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.