125Pages

This Is Not My Beautiful Life: A Memoir by Victoria Fedden
Published by Picador on June 7, 2016

This Is Not My Beautiful Life by Victoria Fedden is a memoir touted as “hilariously funny and unexpectedly moving”. The true life tale of the daughter dealing with her parent’s indictment for fraud and their penchant for picking the most sketchy of all the sketchy characters around as friends; this was an interesting read but while I did find the tales amusing, hilarious it was not. It was almost as if the author was trying to show just how wacky her life was and in doing so took a lot of the emotion out of the story. Dealing with the Feds knocking on the door while you are a few weeks shy of delivering your first baby should have read like an emotion roller coaster, but instead was more like “poor me”. With her parents paying for her extravagant lifestyle, it seemed as if Fedden was more sorry to be losing her things than what her family did to others, and she put her family before her marriage and then wondered why her husband was upset. There were a few moments that I did really love, most notably when she spoke about the difficulties she had with depression after her daughter was born. These moments were raw and honest and I wish the whole book had followed this path. There were a few plot points that also were never finished and that drives me nuts, but it matched with the rest of the book having me excited to find something out and then slightly let down by how it played out

I received this book for free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.