Vanity Fair, “14 New Books to Read in September”
AV Club, “10 Books You Should Read in September”
USA Today, “5 Must-Read Books This Week”
All Arts, "6 New Books to Read This September"
LitHub, "18 New Books to Get Excited About This Week"
"An excoriating yet deeply comical collection of essays." —Bustl
"You must put down whatever is not thrilling you and immediately pick up this wildly original, laugh-out-loud, freakishly-incisive debut."
— Lisa Taddeo, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Three Women and Animal
“Betty Gilpin writes like an avenging angel, weaving a tapestry of light and darkness, hilarity, and pathos. This is a firecracker of a book, and with it, Gilpin has taken up residence with the rest of the women in my brain.”
— Dani Shapiro, New York Times bestselling author of Inheritance
"Betty Gilpin's voice is unlike anyone else's, in the best way. I laughed so hard, I cried, I gasped with recognition – I wanted to stay inside Betty's brain for as long as possible."
– Blythe Roberson, author of How to Date Men When You Hate Men
"With a mimosa in one hand and a hacksaw in the other, Betty Gilpin examines (and eviscerates) our preconceptions of womanhood, love, friendship, acting, Hollywood, and pretty much all other conventions that stand in her way. A writer of incomparable talent, Gilpin is real, raw, complicated—and mordantly funny."
– Phuc Tran, award winning author of Sigh, Gone
"Do you love Postcards from the Edge? Eve Babitz? Yourself, enough to experience joy? Then read this book. Betty Gilpin has articulated the mindfucks of being a woman and/or performer that I have longed to see explored, and found every gleefully absurd joke and profound insight hiding among them. I would follow her and her brainwomen to the ends of the earth."
— Tavi Gevinson, actor, writer, and founder of Rookie
"Working with the material of her own life as an actor... Gilpin critiques societal expectations that circumscribe creative women to docile beings, while suggesting that it’s the unruly parts of women’s minds that should be tended to as wellsprings of creativity."
— Publishers Weekly
"Gilpin is genuinely funny as a commentator on her own misadventures...The writing comes alive...when the author digs into the specific indignities she endured during her journey through the gauntlet of endless auditions and the merciless whims of those who orchestrated them."
— Kirkus Reviews
"Betty Gilpin, star of GLOW and The Hunt (and the upcoming series Three Women and Mrs. Davis), speaks her own creative language in this collection of thoughtful and often comic musings on identity, nonconformity, and what it means to make a living by pretending to be other people... Take the time to decode her metaphor-rich parlance and unique terminology, and you’ll find she has much to say." — The A.V. Club
"Through the 20 essays of Betty Gilpin’s All the Women in My Brain, the GLOW actor describes heartbreak and connection on and off set." — Vanity Fair
"Gilpin is deeply weird and very, very funny in this off-kilter collection of essays about her childhood, Hollywood, modern Hollywood and everything chaotic thought that enters her brain." — USA Today
"She invigorates well-worn debates about the pressures of being female, describing Hollywood’s appropriation of actress’s bodies with wryness and humour...The triumph of her narrative is in ‘learning to be a protagonist’; in regarding herself as an individual, she commands the ‘negative space’ to form her identity."" — Oxford Review of Books
05/23/2022
Emmy-nominated actor Gilpin, star of Netflix’s GLOW, explores in her animated if addled debut the disappointments and triumphs of being an artist and a woman in a world that’s indifferent to both. She grins and cringes through the different phases of her life, as the Marlboro-smoking child of actor parents in the 1990s who trudges through the pain of an eating-disordered adolescence in boarding school, then goes on to study acting at Fordham to make a career for herself. Working with the material of her own life as an actor—from familiar casting-call humiliations to overwork-induced muscle spasms—Gilpin critiques societal expectations that circumscribe creative women to docile beings, while suggesting that it’s the unruly parts of women’s minds that should be tended to as wellsprings of creativity. As she moves through reflections on loneliness, shame, and finding meaning in her work, she balances profundities with humorous looks at the more mundane parts of her life, including romantic blunders in an attempted open relationship (“I wasn’t the hardened, sex-positive, thousand-yard-stare poem I insisted I was”). Oftentimes, though, Gilpin’s quippy humor trips over itself, making it difficult to locate the point beneath the surfeit of zingers and extended metaphors that refer to her depression and self-doubt as nagging “brainwomen.” This one’s best left to the fans. (Sept.)
09/01/2022
"My brain is a room full of women who take turns at the wheel," writes actress Gilpin. Her memoir is more a series of essays where, in a stream-of-consciousness style, she riffs on female friendship, open relationships, getting married, buying a house, awards shows, the pitfalls of the acting profession, and more. Best known for her Emmy-nominated role on the TV series Glow, Gilpin came from old school showbiz parents, Jack Gilpin and Ann McDonough, both prominent theater and TV character actors. She toiled for years before hitting it big with Glow. She shares anecdotes about Glow, but more importantly, sheds light on how difficult it is to make it in show business though she admits there is a reward—"The Thing"—that moment when two actors really connect and the magic happens. Gilpin's prose is self-deprecating and often humorous but so metaphor-laden that it's almost laughable (though perhaps that was the point); readers may or may not find that annoying. VERDICT For fans of Glow and aspiring actors who want to know what they're getting into.—Rosellen "Rosy" Brewer
2022-07-26
A young, accomplished performer’s life in theater, TV, and film.
In this comic memoir, Gilpin (b. 1986), best known for her role as a female wrestler in the Netflix series GLOW, charts her journey as an actor and offers advice for other young women pursuing a similar path. The author chronicles her childhood as the daughter of show-business parents; awkward adolescence and struggles to reconcile self-doubt and artistic ambition; hard-won ascent in her chosen industry and routine endurance of humiliating tests of her professional resolve; and, finally, disappointment after the commercial failure of the film she hoped would launch her to superstardom. Gilpin is genuinely funny as a commentator on her own misadventures, though her style is sometimes overly clever and strained in its cultivation of zaniness. A challenge for Gilpin in telling her story is to present herself as an amusingly hapless underdog despite being blessed with good looks, a loving and prosperous family, and professional success. That challenge is best met in her descriptions of the ludicrous, and often grotesquely exploitative, environment of the entertainment industry, which she skewers with an insider’s wisdom. On the other hand, the author’s generalizations about cultural misogyny and gender inequities are somewhat trite and predictable. In noting an existential binary that has troubled her own self-identity for much of her adult life, Gilpin suggests, for instance, that “we womenfolk today are faced with a decision: Salem or Barbie”—i.e., a stark choice between stridently asserting one’s independence or submissively appealing to others as a sexual object. The writing comes alive, however, when the author digs into the specific indignities she endured during her journey through the gauntlet of endless auditions and the merciless whims of those who orchestrated them.
A quirky tale of lessons learned from the world of acting.