I read a spectacularly funny blog called Sex with George Clooney.  It was essentially Clooney kissing Hollis Gillespie on their introduction and again as they separated, and the writer morphed it into the funniest story about a non-sexual encounter I think I've ever read. 

George Clooney got my attention first, and her story was really FUNNY.  When I read the author's details, I learned Gillespie lives in Atlanta (so do I), writes for Creative Loafing, and her third book has just been published. 

That led me to Amazon, where I found both Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch : Tales from a Bad Neighborhood, and its follow-up, Confessions of a Recovering Slut: And Other Love Stories, which I immediately scooped up (even though I did hesitate over the choice of names . . . ) because if her little blog on GC was so good, I knew the books would be hysterical.  And how could I not support a hometown girl?

Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch (a name she was called by a street bum midway through the first book) was pretty sad.  Even though the Gillespie makes fun of her family (a mom who designs bombs and a dad who is a heavy drinking, out-of-work trailer salesman) it becomes obvious that she loved them a lot, and she knows they could have done better at what little parenting they attempted . . . allowing her to try smoking at two (is that a stretch?), which she continued til she was 13 . . . serving Halloween candy for breakfast... her mother moving out of the house when Hollis was 16, kicking her father out of the house, but not moving back (to live with and supervise Hollis and her 14-year-old sister).  They lived there for months, just the two girls, because her mother didn't want to leave the her new singles apartment complex.

Hollis does interesting work, as a flight attendant and translator for the airlines, and goes to all the places in Europe I haven't, but she does so with a trash mouth that gets fatiguing fairly quickly. I'm not a saint, but for someone who is told by her father that she is smarter "than anyone" Ms. Gillespie's vocabulary is severely limited to the four letter word list, and is occasionally sprinkled with one that makes you wonder if she looked it up just for that chapter.

Article Author: Trace

Traci is a Mom, a writer and an aspiring filmmaker. You may read her works at http://tracigregory.com and http://www.laloba.com. She is neither demanding nor didactic; she is a Scorpio, which should explain the confusion.

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