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Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood
by Hollis Gillespie
Product Group: Book
Publisher: William Morrow (2004-03)
ISBN: 006056198X
EAN: 9780060561987
Dewy Decimal #: 070.92
Hardcover: 288 pages
Edition: 1st
Release Date: 2004-03-02
SKU: BX045-070508004
Condition: Used: Very Good Firs
Comments: SIGNED/INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR --To Heidi and Justin, my fellow honkies! Love H. Gillespie-- Stated First Edition, 1 on # line. Very minor wear, near new, not pricecut. Pgs crisp, clean, tight, unmarked. No remainder mark.
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Editorial Reviews
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Book Description
NPR commentator Hollis Gillespie's outrageously funny -- and equally heartbreaking -- collection of autobiographical tales chronicles her journey through self-reckoning and the worst neighborhoods of Atlanta in search of a home she can call her own. The daughter of a missile scientist and an alcoholic traveling trailer salesman, Gillespie was nine before she realized not everybody's mother made bombs, and thirty before she realized it was possible to live in one place longer than a six-month lease allows. Supporting her are the social outcasts she calls her best friends: Daniel, a talented and eccentric artist; Grant, who makes his living peddling folk art by a denounced nun who paints plywood signs with twisted evangelical sayings; and Lary, who often, out of compassion, offers to shoot her like a lame horse. Hollis's friends help her battle the mess of obstacles that stand in her way -- including her warped childhood, in which her parents moved her and her siblings around the country like carnival barkers, chasing missile-building contracts and other whimsies, such as her father's dream to patent and sell door-to-door the world's most wondrous key-chain. A past like this will make you doubt you'll ever have a future, much less roots. Miraculously, though, Gillespie manages to plant exactly that: roots, as wrested and dubious as they are. As Gillespie says, "Life is too damn short to remain trapped in your own Alcatraz." Follow her on this wickedly funny journey as she manages to escape again and again.
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Customer Reviews
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Get on with yer bad self, Hollis!
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-06-27
I loved this book, as you may have guessed from my rating... the author is alternately funny, touching, and insightful, sometimes all in the same sentence. A good read that you can pick up and put down without too much commitment- I like the vignette style which suits my "read a little before bed each night" style. Hollis had me laughing out loud more than once as I read this one... and that's unusual for me with a book. Funny stuff!
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Here Comes the Neighborhood, Hollis Gillespie Has Arrived!
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-02-14
People compare Hollis Gillespie to David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell and even Erma Bombeck, and I love all those writers, but I have to tell you, I love Hollis Gillespie even more. Do not expect any cutesy little acerbic observations all packaged in a palatable wrapping. This book is raw, funny, enlightening and delightful. It is also sad, maddening and heartbreaking at times. In the end, you don't want it to end, and that is the sign of a good book.
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By and far one of the the most amazing autobiographies EVER
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-11-28
I couldn't put this book down for the 2.5 weeks it took for me to finish it-- I've read lots of biographies and autobiographies, but hardly any of them ever captivated me the way that Hollis' twisted madcap humor and sarcasm filled outlook on her own life experiences did. Some of the instances I can't relate to at all or simply can't imagine it, other ones I related to perfectly...though I bet with these book sales she indeed has found her own true home after all, truly making it all poetic justice.
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okay, till i read the author's thank yous
Rating  (1)
Date: 2006-02-08
3 out of 28 customers found this reveiw helpful
Ugh, she's friends w/ Sean Hannity's wife. Nuf said...
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You GO, Girl!!!
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-11-05
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
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!
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