Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood

by Hollis Gillespie

Book Overview

Drawing on her peripatetic childhood as the daughter of a travelling salesman, and her adult residence in one of Atlanta's seedier crack neighbourhoods, columnist and NPR commentator Hollis Gillespie... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060561998
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.7" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Awesome book. Buying for a friend

Very funny

Has enormous talent, but doesn't flesh out the stories

I was really looking forward to this book. I enjoy Southern Women who have a mouth on them that works. Unfortunately, what I got was 1 or 2 page essays and the truly needed to be fleshed out. It real like a series of standing up comedy one-liners.

You GO, Girl!!!

Hollis Gillespie is a modern-day...I can't even come up with a comparison. She is hysterical, and above all things, honest; at times, poignant, painful. The books are essay format, much like her column in Atlanta's Creative Loafing: collections of musings, incidents, and anecdotes from her colorful life. Her books celebrate life, friendship, and dysfunction, out loud, in the midst of cold, hard reality, as if to say: Everybody is broken, but somehow, if you find the pieces of yourself in other broken people out there in the Big World, you'll still be dysfunctional, but you just might be all right. Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch, the psuedonym by which she is known in her edgy, crack neighborhood (the price was right), is about finding her place in the world, and buying her first home in an up-and-coming (although not nearly fast enough) intown neighborhood in South Atlanta. She introduces her best friends, Grant, Lary, and Daniel, and relates their eccentric misadventures and relationships. She is brutally honest about her itinerant past, the broken dreams and dysfunction of her parents, an alcoholic traveling trailer salesman (Dad) and a bomb-building rocket scientist/hippie artist (Mom), who carted her and her siblings all over the world. In Atlanta, as an adult, she finds family in her collection of misfit friends, settles down, buys her first home...and continues her outrageous tales of life in her second book, Confessions of a Recovering Slut & Other Love Stories. (Buy them together!) Sherri Caldwell, co-author, The Rebel Housewife Rules: To Heck With Domestic Bliss!

Quick Sketch Artist

I read this book for all the wrong reasons, and you probably will, too. The cover is colorful and cheerful. There are photos of the author, Hollis Gillespie, making silly faces on many of the pages. The reviews compare Gillespie to Erma Bombeck. The author bio says she is a flight attendant and language specialist, jobs that lend themselves to comedy routines. In short, this looked like a quick, funny book. Gillespie is no Erma Bombeck. I like Erma Bombeck, but Gillespie is better. When Gillespie wants to be funny, she can leave you hiccuping with laughter. Her chapter on a trip to X-rated Amsterdam with her family and another on her adventures as a bad translator are priceless. But most of the time, Gillespie is talking about her offbeat friends and downscale neighborhood, or about her unconventional childhood and her, um, eccentric parents. If she were inclined to dwell on how she was denied a normal childhood (whatever that is) and blame her parents for their faults, she would have plenty of ammunition. Instead, she refuses to be the victim. She looks back on the mistakes her parents made and seems to understand. The essays in BHHB are very short, most are only two pages. What Gillespie manages to pack into these short pieces is amazing. Gillespie is like one of those artists who paints a few strokes and you think, well, that wasn't much, but then you realize how much those few strokes reveal. The genius is in knowing when to quit and to let the viewer, or reader, fill in the blanks. So if the kicky title, the irreverent design, the promise of a laugh riot pull you into reading this, fine. You will not be disappointed. And you'll get a lot more besides.

Hollis Gillespie is talented beyond all mortal boundaries

The title and the author photo spurred me to buy this book (that should tell you something about me) without knowing anything about Ms. Gilespie or her work. Thank God I did because I don't know when I've enjoyed a book more. Ms. Gillespie reminds me of David Sedaris in that she has an interesting past, an engaging and very funny sensibility, and each story brilliantly blends an undercurrent of sweetness and poignancy with the humor. I think Sedaris fans will like Hollis' work as well. Gillespie is a genius at being authentic and funny and with tying together Life's insanity and beauty. If all this makes the book sound mawkish then I'm being misleading because while I was moved, mostly I was vastly entertained. I even laughed out loud in parts which I promise you I NEVER do. I worship you Hollis! So buy the book already!

Hilarious "scripts" for a 1st rate standup commedienne!

Hollis Gillespie is one of the funniest, wittiest, brightest writers around. BLEACHY-HIRED HONKY BITCH: TALES FROM A BAD NEIGHBORHOOD reads like hearing a standup comedienne play to an audience for all its worth. Though I have never heard her on her gigs as NPR commentator on "All Things Considered" or read her "Mood Swing" column for Atlanta's CREATIVE LOAFING weekly, I am in awe of her craftsmanship with words, her outrageous analogies and metaphors, and her ability to find humor in the most mundane of circumstances and events. Yet despite the corrosive title, Gillespie does not come across as a weirdo to be avoided at all costs: if all that she writes is based on truth then she has to be one of the most endearing friends and observers around. Perhaps this richness of material comes from the fact that in addition to her 'cultural side' as an NPR commentator, she actually is a flight attendant and a linguist, so put all that background together and the sky is not even the limit for this talented writer's imagination. She peoples her 'memoirs' with friends (gay Brian and Grant whose own lives are rich in hilarity, Lary who is looney and plies her with drugs, her rocket scientist mother - who dreams of being a beautician! - and alcoholic ne're-do-well trailer salesman father, and her brothers and sisters who provide material from her incredibly weird childhood to her normalcy-challenged adulthood. The book is an easy read: chapters are rarely more than two or three pages and peppered with photos of her friends and family. Because of the nature of the layout of the book, it is a terrific traveling companion or bedside icon for chuckling the day's troubles away before sleep. I'd like to see Gillespie write a full-fledged novel, so keen is her word craftsmanship. Examples: "I never had a pussy-pet dog. Once I temporarily inherited two Labradors named Gracie and Amber. They were sisters, and both of them were the most comical, slobbery, eye-booger encrusted, walking wads of psoriasis you ever saw. Having birthed three litters, they each had hefty leftover dugs that dangled from their underbellies like big balls of soft warm dough. Amber had a problem with her left ear too, which occasionally swelled up like an eggplant and stuck straight out from her skull, making her look like she had a furry party balloon taped to her head. etc." and "There must be something really wrong with the world when you can't get a buzz off your codeine cough medicine. Christ if that doesn't just suck all the fun out of being sick." You get the picture. If there are episodes of repeated information, read them like reminders of some of the previous laughs in the book. Oddly, too, for a book format such as this, the quickie memoirs hang together with clever continuity: Gillespie usually sums up each short remembrance with an introspective bit of tenderness. This is a refreshing, well-written bit of welcome satire of our world "and welcome to it!"

So Honest it Hurts

Sadly I knew not of Hollis Gillespie until I happened upon a taping of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno while vacationing in Los Angeles. She happened to be on the show, and from the moment she spoke, I knew that I was going to have to pick up her book.Well, I did, and I consider myself very lucky that I happened upon that taping. Her words are like a Ginsu knife, with a lifetime guarantee of being sharp. She's so honest with her past it's almost painful (in a good way.. if that makes sense. And no, I'm not into BDSM).Hollis has this amazing ability to start out writing on an idea, expand upon it to the point where you're wondering if she lost track, and then she wraps it up so beautifully. It's a rare talent that few authors posses, but all desire.I find this book amazing, and I find Hollis to be a remarkable woman who has overcome obstacles and still come out strong.