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The Impostor's Daughter: A True Memoir (2009)

by Laurie Sandell(Favorite Author)

3.49 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0316033057 (ISBN13: 9780316033053)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Little, Brown and Company

review 1: I loved reading Sandell’s wonderfully honest memoir. I’m not normally the graphic novel type, but when I saw Sandell on Stacked Up, I knew I had to check it out. There’s something so fascinating about the vulnerability Sandell illustrates here. No topic is too delicate: she starts by examining the lies her father told her, but focuses on her personal relationships, her often unhealthy work/life balance, and her battle with addiction. The book was too large to carry with me, but it made for an insightful bedtime story. (Side note: if anyone has any graphic novel recommendations — memoirs in particular — throw them my way.)
review 2: If this gossip columnist had simply stayed the course of the story about her scammer dad, as advertised, this would have ... morebeen a 4-star book. However, she wanted to tell us about problems with prescription meds, her failed relationship with a perfectly nice guy who was somehow holding her back, and her Lifetime Channel version of rehab. Well, yeah, mistakes were made...in the editing of this graphic novel, that's for sure. These distracting side stories are common. Lots of people go to rehab. But very few people have a crazy con man of a dad who claims to have personally parachuted to Vietnam with General Westmoreland and who claims to have been field promoted to Green Beret status (it just don't work that way, folks)! How could she not know this? Did she really think we were going to be more interested in her experiences interviewing B-list celeb Carmen Elektra, or in learning of the crazy poppa who left for months at a time and only communicated with the family by ham radio? C'mon, these are questions even someone who edits portions of a fashion magazine can figure out. When she does zero-in on what should have been the main focus of the book, she herself is the weak link. I never really believe it when she chooses the journalistic credo of truth over familial loyalty. Puh-lease. She went through all the drama of a therapeutic forgiveness session with her entire family present...and later she decides to write the book skewering her father. What could have made this better? She could have found the family who invested $350k into one of his scams and shown us how they're doing after having their world shattered by her father. Find the members of his old military unit and discover why he went AWOL decades ago. You know, actually use some journalistic skills rather than just hiding behind its platitudes. The art does the job in a breezy, I-don't-have-a-full-book's-worth-of-material-so-I'll-make-it-a-graphic-novel sorta way, but even going into it with this understanding you'll still think it's sloppy. This insecure author draws her 40-year old self as if she was still a button-nose teen while everyone around her ages (imagine that). Everything looks like it was presented as drawn the first time around with no sketches, no prep, no art studies whatsoever. The author, who is or was some sort of editor at Glamour magazine at one time, would never use illustrations of this quality in her mag. The author provides us with actual pictures she drew in elementary school, and there is no appreciable difference between those and her modern drawings about this, a project she believed was the central memoir of her and her family. less

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