Book Review: "Approval Junkie: Adventures in Caring Too Much" by Faith Salie

I need to stop reading biographies of people who I don't know who they are. It has literally, never turned out well. But nothing else really was appealing to me at Blogging for Books so here we are.


Honestly, this book made me sad for Faith.


I'm obviously not a mental health professional, that is my disclaimer. But she makes a lot of comments about how she barely ate a lot of the time, and comments about how skinny she was and how super conscious she was of what she ate and how it was kind of an obsession. And then she says something like she was almost anorexic. If you're that obsessed with your weight and think about food as much as she did than you have some kind of mental disorder.


Some of the stuff that she did perplexed me. Like for days she agonized over what to wear to her divorce from her terrible first husband. Something that said professional adult but also with some sex appeal. I thought "wow, I think I'd be so happy to get myself unhitched from this jerk that I'd show up in my jammiies because I'd be so excited that I couldn't sleep!" But then the more I thought about it I got it.Things in your life aren't going as planned and you probably feel a real sense of lose of control, but you can certainly control what you wear so you throw yourself headlong into it.

I think the best thing about this book is the story of the author's mother. She sounds like a hilarious, but still serious lady who was a big influence on Faith (she did sit ups while doing her rosary, so maybe the obsession with fitness and weight came from there). And the cover is fun. But still, with maybe a slight personal bias I'm going to say  2 stars.

This book was provided by Blogging for Books in exchange for a fair and honest review