Staight Up and Dirty

Stephanie Kline writes her memoir to truly live up to its title. Without skipping a detail , Kline gives her readers a play-by-play of her life after her painful and heartbreaking divorce. Through numorous trysts with men, cocktails, and a phone therapist, Kline is eventually about to learn how to love herself, before anyone else. Kline's wit is sharp, and her humor transcends throughout the whole book. Although Kline's humor and "game face" in getting back into the dating game and the NYC lifystyle is impressive and even inspirational (as Kline's self-earned wealth allows her to enjoy a fantastic lifestyle even when down in the dumps) many people find her blunt descriptions and shameless secrets to be insulting and inappropriate. Personally, I give Kline a lot of credit for putting so much of her life into writing for the world to see. Overall, I feel that Kline deserves a lot of respect for pulling herself through a divorce and rediscovering love, but on the other hand, although her materialistic-ness decreased as the novel progressed, her somewhat overbearing references to money took away from the overall experience, making her struggles harder to take seriously. Maybe this is because her lifestyle has encouraged this sort of behavior, but I constantly had to remind myself that this was real, and not fiction. As a whole, the book was really enjoyable, but something that can only be relatable if the setting were extracted, and only the feelings remained- put together though, the high class city life is not something that can apply to every woman (or man), making the memoir seem a step up from something from the real life.