Jen-X: Jenny McCarthy's Open Book

This book will chat your ear off, one gal pal to another. Arranged like a high-spirited scrapbook of quips and rapidly dispensed disclosures, Jen-X is somewhat of a surprise. In this completely entertaining tell-all, Jenny McCarthy has indeed packaged herself as an open book. This is a tale enamored neither by ambition or success; it's a BH/AH memoir--before and after Hollywood--sometimes raucous, sometimes coolly self-assessing. It's loaded with brash magazine and MTV-style graphics, cute pictures raided from the family album, and zany cartoons of friends, freaks, and phobias.

Jenny McCarthy tells you about growing up on the South Side of Chicago, about dropping out of college, about her breast implants at the age of 18 ("I mean, isn't that the American dream? To purchase fine new breasts on credit?"). Her advice on dating ("Rule #1: Fart immediately") is nothing if not empirical; her lessons learned as a Playboy Bunny, candid without being self-pitying. She talks about her life with comic grit: "Instead of becoming a campus honey, I was a bratwurst queen who sold sausage sandwiches for minimum wage over the counter at a Polish delicatessen in the same neighborhood where I grew up as a friendless geek. At nineteen, I'd already been turned down by every modeling agency in Chicago...." If McCarthy weren't a celebrity, Jen-X would still be worth reading. It's pop culture chronicled through the eyes of a Gen-Xer--fresh, self-deprecating, and silly, like a fun-house mirror.