keleighf 's review for:

Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain by Portia de Rossi

4.0

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I like Portia de Rossi for a lot of reasons. She's Australian, she was in Arrested Development, she's with Ellen, she's vegan...Now I like her a lot more because she's so devastatingly honest. "Unbearable Lightness" made me uncomfortable with its bare, brutal exposing of the lengths the mind goes to to keep one small - literally and figuratively. In Portia's case, she developed an obsessive internal "drill sergeant" to keep her in line, always under pressure, always falling short of perfection. I recognized in her my own fear of failure and "need" to be special, at all costs. Her story is like a hyper-exaggerated version of how a lot of us (especially women) feel about our bodies and our relationship to food, particularly as it relates to (the illusion of) control. Her writing style is easy and engaging - especially if you overlook the smattering of typos - and the peek behind the artifice of Hollywood culture is fascinatingly real. I commend her for sharing a deeply vulnerable story that likely resonates for many of us on a level far deeper than we might have expected.