Tramps Like Us: A Suburban Confession

Front Cover
Cyan Communications, 2007 - Biography & Autobiography - 338 pages
From the screenwriter of How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days comes an irreverent memoir of growing up in the Garden State. A choppy, whirlwind tour of her dysfunctional childhood in the New Jersey suburbs, from the divorce of her parents when she was six to her victorious exeunt at age 17, bound for the Manhattan School of Music. Without any semblance of structure, Buckley flits from memory to memory, capturing a haphazard array of family arguments, personal embarrassments and lopsided adventures. Using excessive profanity, she describes her adopted Korean sister's bout with smallpox, her childhood home's rat infestation and septic tank problem (earning her family the unending disdain of the entire neighborhood) and the late arrival of her adopted sibling's long-lost brother, Nak. She waxes nostalgic about her crush on Sting, her obsession with the mafia and her early experiments with underage drinking, driving and dating. With a caustic, ironic tone, she picks out New Jersey's least appealing qualities (mall rats, big hair and bad jeans) and unapologetically exploits them for laughs. Though the average reader may find this flippant, often ribald narrative hard to get through, similarly-affected Jerseyites will find much to like in Buckley's slice-of-life pileup.

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Contents

The Five and a Half Stages of Grief
9
Fort Apache29
29
Taking the Bath
43
Copyright

13 other sections not shown

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About the author (2007)

Kristen Buckley is author of "The Parker Grey Show" and coauthor of the screenplay "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days." She lives in Los Angeles.

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