Up for Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over by Cathy Alter
First line: “The noise was overwhelming.”
It’s a hard knock life for a single girl in her late thirties. Alter decided to do something about it, and found advice not on a therapist’s couch, but screaming out from the cover of magazines. How to Get A Man and Keep Him, How to Be Thin, How to Get the Room of Your Dreams. What are magazines, really, but calling cards for a better, glossier life? She pledged to take the advice of a set of magazines, Glamour, Real Simple, In Style, O the Oprah Magazine, among others, and do whatever the mags told her within a given monthly goal, including better health, adventure, sex and so on. Not only is the premise catchy, but Alter delivers on witty, well-written prose that doesn’t pull any punches. In real life she may suffer from a bad case of TMI, but in the pages of a book about magazines, we’d expect no less than some scandalous dirt on her life.
For: Self-help and magazine junkies who’ve wondered if you can really improve your life for the cost of a subscription. – Malena Lott
