Bitch Is the New Black audiobook

You had to have been living under a rock over the last several months if you didn't catch the media’s obsession with letting the world know that black women are undesirable. If so, I submit Exhibits A, B, C, D, E…Z – and I’ll stop there even though there’s much much more. Well, in the midst of this ridiculous craze, a young woman named Helena Andrews made the spotlight. A single, educated, successful and attractive woman, she was featured in a Washington Post article about her, then, upcoming memoir entitled Bitch Is The New Black (aka #BITNB). The article focuses on Andrews’ life as a young black woman dating in DC and the frustrations that many like her feel trying to meet suitable companions in the city. While the article was interesting, it didn’t do the book justice. I couldn’t be happier that I stepped out of my used-books-only (or-seriously-discounted-bookstore-books-only) norm and ordered myself a copy. I absolutely loved it, and let me tell you why.Her wit is razor sharp and her writing style is engaging. He’s the Nigerian E-mail Scam of ex-sorta-boyfriends, trying to seduce me over cyberspace with promises of riches in the real world. Problem is, I’m black and I have a vagina, so my Waiting to Exhale intuition tells me this shit ain’t for real. The memoir is a collection of 16 essays with titles such as ”Perfect Girl” and Other Curse Words and Riding in Cars with Lesbians. Nuff said right? It gets better, though. Andrews uses each of these essays to chronicle her past, smoothly jumping back and forth in time in many of them. She gives us insight into everything from her childhood to her professional endeavors post graduate school. She has a really intriguing childhood growing up with a lesbian mother who made them move around quite a bit and an even more interesting adult life filled with dating trials and tribulations, a friend/line sister who commits suicide, a best friend on the west coast, and a blossoming career in DC.Her mother is awesome. See, Frances does this. We’ll be talking about something FCC-approved for mothers and daughters, like, say, vaginal itch, and she’ll bust in like the emergency broadcasting system with a ‘What kind of birth control do you use’ or and ‘I’ve been celibate for almost a decade’ or an ‘Oh, so you two are just fuck buddies then. Beeeeeeep goes the filial flat line. Dead. She’s got mommy Tourette’s. Simply put: Frances, Andrews’ mother, is awesome. Not more awesome than mine, of course. But on a scale for non-my-mothers, she hits the top. Beside the fact that she calls her daughter “little brown eyed girl” – my mommy calls me “precious” *smile* – she’s just an amazing fun-loving woman pulling Andrews through a childhood filled with unpredictable turns while working hard to raise her the best way she knows how.She’s me. At the very least, she’s like my bff. I don’t feel almost twenty-eight. Not an actual adult, I’m more adult-ish. See, I’m just a girl. An awesome one, of course, but just one. And like so many other little brown girls my age, I believe the problem of loving, lusting, or even “liking liking someone can be solved with a simple equation: x + y = gtfohwtbs (if “x” ≥ 28 years old and “y” = socially retarded men). I connected to Helena like she was a new girlfriend telling me her story over sushi and way too many bottles of Riesling. She laughs. She curses. She complains. She gets excited. She struggles. She seeks love while still holding onto pieces of relationships that aren’t worth more than a penny. She’s a twenty-something. She’s me.It was so exhilarating for me to read a candid and completely relatable memoir written by someone not much older than me. It’s like being in eighth grade and listening to the older kids talk about their daily lives, both in junior high and high school. You listen to the joys, the heartache, the triumphs with excitement for times to come while wondering how to avoid the future heartbreaks that are inevitable.She and her best friend are hilarious.‘Dude, what is your life about!?’ quizzes Gina every morning over IM like the opening bell of a boxing match, startling me into the ring of another Monday. The alarm to starting the day off single. Frequent use of DUUUDE! and play by play accounts of online IM chats and texts with her BFF and various guys were enough to make me giggle like a little girl. Now, my daily gchat convos with one of my girlfriends have never been the same since we put this book down. A convo just doesn't feel right without at least one use of the word. What did we ever say before to express our feelings? "Dude" just seems so much more fitting now for every situation.She’s real. I don't think Michelle [Obama:] minds bein our new muse. I think she gets it. We little brown girls - drunk off The Cosby Show, sobered up by life, and a little suicidal - we need her. I love how willingly she shares her imperfections. In an effort to tell her life story she provides the reader with a view into her mind and allows us to laugh with her as she reflects on her moments of insanity, pain, confusion and joy. To judge her would be to judge both my current and my future selves. She makes mistakes, deals with broken hearts horribly, has terrible days and denies her need to emotionally release all while cherishing her family, friends and dog and living life as best she knows how. All of these things I know too well (except the dog part…).After all, isn’t that what the twenties are about? If not, then I guess I’m doing it wrong.

If you've been paying attention for the past few months, you would have heard about conversations, TV shows, books, and even town hall meetings dealing with the subject of single, successful, Black women and their difficulty in finding suitable partners (and somehow how it is their own fault). I have stayed out of these conversations for the most part because although I am single (waaaay too single) and Black (I actually prefer African-American), what I'm decidedly not is successful. Now as a moderately enlightened person, I know that successful is in the eye of the beholder. But for the purpose of this national conversation, successful means educated (possessing one or more university degrees) and making a high 2 figure or 3 figure salary in a career with an upward trajectory and therefore not needing a man to take care of you. I, on the other hand, dropped out of college (ran out of money & motivation - I learn way more from just books) and have no desire to return and I have a JOB not a career. And while I do have 2 nickles to rub together, if I lost one I'd be in trouble.In this memoir, told in the form of essays, Helena Andrews chronicles her life so far - an only child raised by a lesbian mother between Catalina Island and Compton, graduate of a prestigious East Coast university, successful career in journalism living in our nation's capital. Being a single woman in DC is notoriously difficult because of several things: the transient nature of the population (they come & go every 4-8 years, and it's a company town driven by dreams of power, not very conducive to romance. Andrews relates her dating dilemmas hilariously and doesn't hold anything back. I see Bitch is the New Black as an answer to the above national conversation that seems to blame Black women for our inability to find a "good man". She is putting a real life face to it and shows that there are no cut & dried answers.My favorite thing about the book though are her friendships with her girlfriends. A lot of their conversations remind me of ones I've had with my friends (but we didn't have Facebook & IM-ing, we did it the old-fashioned way on the phone). Despite our apparent age and lifestyle differences, I could really relate to Andrews and her adventures navigating the adult world of dating and careers. You will find yourself laughing out loud in several places and crying in others. Definitely worth all the hype.

In a world of half-hearted and/or half-assed apologies, Helena Andrews gave me 241+ pages of straight, no chaser, unabashed honesty, and I adored every word of it. She's not every girl and ain't fidna be the every girl speaking for all young, black, single ladies, but she's definitely that girl--the one that all-kinds-of-loud says what you and your finely arched eyebrow have been thinking about career-ishness, pop culture, friendship, menfolk and love (or the lack thereof). If you appreciate honesty--in all its heartbreaking, hilarious and hell yes forms--read this book.It's a collection of stories standing akimbo in the face of all those who too quickly assess black women as being too much of everything bad and not enough of anything good. As raw as the Eddie Murphy of old and worldlier than your 'round the way girl, BITNB manages to unearth a bit more of the much-hyped mystique surrounding us pigeon-holed BBFs today with sass and great heart.

This book is phenomenal. It really drew me in from the first couple pages. The way Helena writes about her life and what she's gone through is mesmerizing. She is an awesome writer and she's been through very interesting and intricate things in her life.

HILARIOUS!

Had you suggested to me two weeks ago, civilised Englishman that I am, that I could possibly read a book littered with the word 'awesome' to describe anything less than a visitation from God and the entire heavenly host on a chariot of fire; or that I could read the word 'dude' without throwing the document containing it at the nearest cat, I would have taken you up to my balcony to admire the view of the hills of Guilin and then pushed you off, taking great delight in the Jackson Pollock effect you created on the pavement six storeys below.Consequently, I curse Helena Andrews for putting me in the position of reviewing such a book and giving it four stars. (Yes, four. In the understated Englishman's mind, four stars is the American equivalent of 23 awesomes and a yee-haw. Five stars is for Shakespeare. (William Shakespeare? (Wrote Hamlet? (Okay, forget it).This is such an American book I frequently wished it had come with subtitles. Cultural references abound - some bloke called Obama kept popping up, pop star I think - and so many TV shows that never made it across either the Atlantic or the Pacific that I found myself relieved we'd been spared the full horror of it all.So, why the four stars?For an American, Andrews seems incredibly human. Talking about the petty day-to-day of approaching decrepitude - 30 - without a man in steady tow; an eccentric mother; the death of a friend; and the private hell that is social media, this could so easily have been the misery-memoir of a self-obsessed pubescent, but then aren't - or, in my case, weren't - all our twenties just that in so many ways? A little more serious, and Andrews would have had me wanting to slap her face and telling her to snap out of it. A little more relaxed, and it would have been farce. Andrews, though, and it's straight-down-the-middle without so much as a wobble. She may not understand the world, who does? But she knows herself lost in it far too well to take herself too seriously, and that's a talent most people lack. Her casual observations bear reading and pondering upon. Thus, on men's avatars in social media, On the guys’ side there were Douglas, Van, Raj, Chris, and Stu—all super cute in miniature, like doll-house furniture. Looking back, the black-and-white glamour shots should have tipped me off. Who takes a picture of just their eye? Well, quite.Strangely, the less Andrews has to write about, the more she excels. She's at her best with dull, tired themes, losing her edge a little when she has something solid to hang on to. This is a woman who turns trivia into an art form, showing us her life - thereby revealing our own lives - in a wryly affectionate light.It's a frightfully awesome book, me ol' dude. Check it out.

I don't usually read memoirs and I tend to prefer a full-length narrative to essays, but I decided to try something out-of-character for me in Bitch is the New Black ("BNB" b/c I'm lazy). BNB consists of a number of essay-style memoirs from Helena Andrews. Since they are autobiographical, there is obviously overlap between the pieces (especially in the players) but they can stand fraily independently. Many of the chapters are focused on relationships including the author's relationship with her mother, men, and close friends. Weaved throughout is the idea of being a single, young, professional black woman at the turn of the millenium. I like the author's voice and appreciate her prose. She is clearly telling her story...she doesn't suggest this is the life of everywoman but still serves as a voice for some level of shared experience (I feel like I can't get the words I want for that sentiment...it is HER experience but calls upon shared experiences while not suggesting all are identical). I enjoyed "meeting" some of the key characters in BNB and the consistency of the friendships that support the author from youth through college and adulthood. BNB avoids preaching about wonderfully strong women who don't need anything or anyone but still manages to present a woman the reader can admire...even while acknowledging her imperfections.It is a pretty quick read and gets my thumbs-up. This post is based on a copy of the book provided to me by Harper Collins.

Upon reading the author's profile in the Washington Post in '09 I was ready to dismiss her as some obnoxious Jack and Jill type I'd probably shove into a pool at a dinner party and thusly swore off reading anything bearing her name. Thankfully curiosity (and my iTouch Kindle app) changed my mind. Andrews has a helluva voice, and you find yourself laughing, crying, and cringing along with her as she chronicles her personal tragicomedy. A must-read for every Black girl who has been "the only" in the office and "one of many" in a guy's booty call rolodex.

This is the first book I've read in a long time where I felt I could truly idenitfy with the narrator. There's just not too many memoirs being written by & about young black women. So this whole experience was new for me. I generally don't like books that jump around, so at times I would get a little annoyed. But overall, I really enjoyed the book and admire Helena for being so raw and honest about her life & experiences in a way that many people simply can't.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Glad I didn't read the poor reviews prior to picking it up or I might not have read it. Andrews' writing is current and witty, and I laughed out loud more than once.

Helena's voice is so witty and fun, it felt like I was listening to a friend talk on the phone! Her words and problems are relateable and though she's saying things we may have heard before about relationships, life lessons and general gripes, she writes about them in a voice true to our generation. It's Sex and the City with some backbone. I heard that she's working on a screenplay with Shonda Rhimes of Grey's Anatomy and I simply can't wait!

this is the book I hoped "I Was Told There'd Be Cake" would be. Funny/poignant autobiographical essays by a late 20s individual. It's marketed as being about the experience of young black women but it's more the story of this girl, who is black. This woman lives in D.C. so it was fun to read the book, knowing a few of the locations she describes.