Book talk: “But Enough About Me”

But Enough About Me: How a Small-Town Girl Went From Shag Carpet to the Red Carpet (or A Jersey Girl’s Unlikely Adventures Among the Absurdly Famous)
Jancee Dunn
Harper Collins, 2007 (paperback) (ISBN 0060843659 / 9780060843656)
Memoir, 288 pages
First Sentence: Approach with caution.
Book Description: New Jersey in the 1980s had everything Jancee Dunn wanted: trips down the shore, Bruce Springsteen, a tantalizing array of malls. To music lover Jancee, New York City was a foreign country. So it was with bleak expectations that she submitted her résumé to Rolling Stone magazine. And before she knew it, she was backstage and behind the scenes with the most famous people in the world—hiking in Canada with Brad Pitt, snacking on Velveeta with Dolly Parton, dancing drunkenly onstage with the Beastie Boys—trading her good-girl suburban past for late nights, hipster guys, and the booze-soaked rock ‘n’ roll life. 
Riotously funny and tremendously touching, But Enough About Me is the amazing true story of an outsider who couldn’t quite bring herself to become an insider. 
Comments: There are some books that make you feel like you’re just hanging out with the writer – laughing, sharing stories, spending an enjoyable afternoon. For me, this was one of those books.
Jancee Dunn (class of ’84) has spent quite a few of those afternoons herself, but they were with people like Dolly Parton, Madonna, and Christina Aguilera. She’s not a name-dropper, though. Her memoir of her years writing for various magazines, among them Rolling Stone, GQ (as a sex columnist), Vogue, and O: The Oprah Magazine, shifts between celebrity anecdotes – framed as proven recommendations for getting to the heart of an interview with a famous person – and her memoirs of making the big leap from New Jersey to Manhattan to pursue her writing ambitions. A lucky encounter with a Rolling Stone staffer at a party leads her out of the ad-agency job she landed after college and into the rock and roll lifestyle, starting as an editorial assistant and working her way up to the big cover-profile stories.
But the charm of this book is that Dunn never fully embraces that rock and roll lifestyle, even though she tries, and her most serious attempt to do so does not turn out well. She can’t – and doesn’t really want to – break out of the embrace of her friends outside “the business” or, more importantly, her close-knit New Jersey family, and as long as she has that, she stays just a bit too grounded, and a little too geeky, to be a true “Rock Chick.” Eventually, she comes to embrace that truth about herself.
I don’t talk about it often, but I harbored quite a few youthful “rock chick” dreams of my own, and writers for Rolling Stone hold some small fascination for me (which is one of several reasons why Almost Famous is among my very favorite movies) – but I’m pretty sure I’d be far less of a success at rock-chickery than Jancee Dunn; for one thing, I’m a lot too geeky. However, Dunn is an engaging storyteller, and I enjoyed this glimpse into her life and work. Her intermittently-updated blog has links to some of her articles, and mentions that her first novel, Don’t You Forget About Me, will be out this summer; I’ll keep my eye out for it. I hope her fiction will be as much fun to read as her real story.

Rating: 3.75/5

If you’re a Weekly Geek who has read and reviewed this on your blog, please e-mail the link to your post to me at 3.rsblog AT gmail DOT com, and I’ll link back to you!

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2 comments

  1. Sounds like an interesting book. I checked out the blog, too. I might add it to my ever growing list of things to read when I should be doing something else.
    I noticed the Twitter link. How’s it going? Is it totally sucking you in? That is my fear.

  2. Mike – The “ever growing list of things to read when I should be doing something else.” I like that! It is SO true.

    Twitter is going OK so far. IM actually is a bigger time suck, I think – Twitter messages are very short, and it’s not intended to be for chat. think one way to keep it from taking over your life is not following a huge number of people. But I would like to add some more to my list, so get that Twitter account of yours active, would you please? 🙂