I really want to like Rosie O’Donnell. She’s an outspoken, intelligent woman who doesn’t seem to care what others think, and I admire those traits. However, after reading this book, I’m not really sure what to make of her, or her sanity.t“Celebrity Detox: The Fame Game” is Rosie’s first-hand account of her life between when she quit her own talk show to just after she finished her one-year contract doing Barbara Walters’ talk show “The View.”tAt times incoherent, always jumping from thought to thought, Rosie loosely follows a timeline that begins with one of her childhood idols, Barbara Walters inviting her to her home and asking her to co-host “The View” and ends with having just wrapped up her last show with Walters and the rest of “The View” ladies.tRosie talks about how her mother dying at such an early age has shaped her life, making Rosie believe that if she had celebrity she would be loved, and also making her search for surrogate mothers even in adulthood. Rosie talks about how Walters was her surrogate mother for a while, yet it’s difficult to tell if at the end of the book Rosie still worships Barbara, or hates her. What a fine line it seems to be with Rosie.tRosie also talks about her relationship with her other childhood idol, Barbra Streisand, and the documentary Rosie was making about Streisand, and a few of the personal experiences she’s had with Streisand. tYellow is Rosie’s utopia. If life is perfect, she is yellow. When she’s stressed out, she can’t find her yellow. Rosie had her yellow by meeting Barbara Walters, but by the time she wrapped her year-long stint with “The View” Rosie couldn’t find her yellow anywhere. tYellow includes spending time with her four children, her partner Kelli, painting, crafting and reading; but not celebrity and the fame it brings, according to Rosie. She says she would give it all back in a heartbeat, then in the next breath says that’s not true, because while she has all the money anyone could ever need, she knows that if she didn’t have it she would not be able to have the luxury to chase her yellow.tBlog entries are interspersed among the story telling, making it even more difficult to discern the story at times. Rosie’s blog and her free flowing thoughts and impressions have all gotten her into trouble at times. tRosie talks about a few issues where she was in hot water due to something she said or did while on “The View” and this book almost seems like a vehicle for her to defend herself in these situations. tOverall, I get the idea that Rosie wants to be a stay-at-home mom who is able to drop off and pick up her kids at school. During the day she would hole up in her crafts room and create. At night, she would spend dinnertime, then storytime and bedtime with her family. She would never turn on a television. She would travel more. She wouldn’t want to be recognized out and about, wouldn’t care if no one noticed her ever again.tHowever, this is not the path she has chosen to take. tWritten with a bitterness that she may regret years from now, she both loves and hates the people she worked with on “The View” and feels the same about her own celebrity. tAnd she apparently has a very difficult time organizing her thoughts, although she has no difficulty with expressing them.
From dust jacket:"That's the thing about fame. If you live like a famous person, you will pay the price. And it's a high price, and a dangerous game, because fame, the drug, can sneak up on you in increments. You don't notice the increments, that they're increasing, until you're so far away from ever making eye contact with another human being and being 'real' that you don't even know you're not 'real' anymore.When Rosie O'Donnell's mother was diagnosed with cancer in 1973, ten-year-old Rosie believed that fame could cure her. Though she was still a kid, she had already grasped the cultural connection between talent and money. If she could become famous, the funds would pour in - and buy her Mom the miracle cure that could save her life.Rosie's mother died, but the bond in her daughter's mind between stardom and hope survived, propelling O'Donnell into a career as a talk show host and passionate philanthropist. At times funny, at others heartbreaking, but always intensely honest, CELEBRITY DETOX is Rosie's story of the years after she walked away from her top-rated TV show in 2002, and her reasons for going back on the air in 2006. In it, she takes you inside the world of talk show TV, speaking candidly about the conflicts and challenges she faced as cohost on ABC's 'The View'.Along the way Rosie shows us how fame becomes addiction and explores whether or not it's possible for an addict to safely, and sanely, return to the spotlight. She reveals her everyday interactions with her family, and the pressures of being both an ordinary mom and a 'personality'. She tells of the lifelong admiration she has had for an entertainment icon and of her complicated friendships with her TV colleagues...and talks openly about some dark passages from her own past.Chronicling the ups and downs of 'the fame game', Rosie O'Donnell illuminates not only what it's like to be a celebrity, but also what it's like to be a mother, a daughter, a leader, a friend, a sister, a wife...in short, a human being."
Do You like book Celebrity Detox (2007)?
Some years ago a friend gave me a copy of Christopher Ciccone's "memoir" Life with My Sister Madonna as a joke. I decided to leaf through its pages before consigning it to some obscure corner of my library. Two hours of noncommittal leafing later I realized I had accidentally read the entire book. I approached Celebrity Detox under similar circumstances.O'Donnell's account of her controversial first stint at The View is interspersed with childhood recollections and broad ruminations on fame (repurposed from an earlier, aborted manuscript that was intended to bookend her eponymous late-nineties talk-show run). The confessional tome is surprisingly light on gossip (imagine if someone had declawed Joe Eszterhas' Hollywood Animal) and covers a very specific and ephemeral moment in popular culture; nevertheless, O'Donnell's go-to ghostwriter, Lauren Slater, manages to shape the various free-verse blog excerpts and longer narrative anecdotes into something resembling a professional and publishable whole. That may be faint praise but it's more than I was expecting—which is also paradoxically less than I was expecting, since there isn't a whole lot of celebrity score-settling or axe-grinding to rubberneck at.
—Raza Syed
I have always enjoyed Rosie O'Donnell so when I saw this in a thrift store, I grabbed it. This book was not what I thought this was going to be about. It also showed a picture of Rosie that I have never seen. It is not that she is a bad person just her thought process in this book rubbed me the wrong way. I guess everyone is human and she does make good points but I felt like there was really no substenance to this book. It was a short quick read but nothing really happened and there didn't seem to be any clear defined path or thought to this book. It was almost like a collection of thoughts thrown togeher. I wouldn't recommend this book.
—Bridget Conroy
I read this because Rosie is coming back on "The View," and saw it on the library shelf. Interestingly enough, she talks about her time leading up to her last stint on the show and says she will never do the show again. Hmmm. Never say never, I guess. A lot has transpired in Rosie's life in the 7 years since this book was published. She has a new wife, she had a heart attack, and Barbara Walters is no longer on "The View." However, Whoopi Goldberg is. So it will be interesting to see how it goes for Rosie, who seems from the writings in "Celebrity Detox," to be a damaged bird. This book is an interesting insight into her life after "The View." How she retreated into her role as wife and mother. How she feels she was mistreated. So I still wonder, why did she agree to do it again?
—Jill Pearson
