Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

WOW. What a great book and is worth a read. It’s sincere and everything that you would hope it would be. There are two aspects to this book, one is a candid conversation between a mother and a son, and the other is…well, a lot of the family gossip. It mirrors the conversations that many people hope that they have once in their lifetime with their own eldest family member, when they themselves are adults. It is a conversation, but done in the style of Anderson Cooper, almost being his own investigative journalist regarding his own family. However, unlike situations in which Cooper simply asks questions and keeps moving, he discusses his own responses, his own feelings, and explores elements from his own background and experiences. A great example is Cooper mentioning how he was afraid to tell his mom he was gay because of being afraid of how she would react because of the rumors that her own mother was gay. Instead the mother essentially responds with, “Yeah, I knew, all your friends were gay,” and does the motherly thing of refocusing on the question of her son regarding her own mother and discusses her mother’s sexuality and her own views on sexuality, which have changed over the years and views that it is fluid. There is also some really unique insights into the different family members, providing a history of each one as Anderson asks, going so far as to describe houses and ways that money was made. There is also a slight element of mother’s give a damn being broken at 91 and even letting her son know about sex and the firs time she no longer had to fake an orgasm, which was one of the attractive aspects of who she dated. This is also couched in the context on reflections of her own insecurities being a young girl and growing up, as well as why she stayed in some horrible marriages. The writing style of this book is easy and fluid. There are interjections in-between conversations that give a quick and easy reference to the backstory of a particular family member or some occasions of the family in general. There are also points where Cooper mentions that he watches a YouTube video that has a family member, or his mother, and it’s actually quite easy to look up that information and follow along. The responses of Cooper are often shorter, but pull in normal colloquialisms, something that shows a bit of a generational divide the two, such as YouTube; whereas his mother may respond with a quote, or just simply go off of the comment mentioned. Vanderbilt’s responses are much more elaborate, detailed, and a bit of a train of thought around an initial point Cooper asks and that his mother makes a winding way in telling a story, but this is for the best because it is in this portion you can see a lot of recollections about her life, where she has been, and her understanding in hindsight. There is a lot of brutal honesty as well, such as her own insecurities early in life, acknowledgement she probably was not the best parent, recognition that she and Cooper probably would have been closer if he was a daughter, the death of her husband (Cooper's father), and later the death of Coopers brother, Carter (her son). A great book all around, it gives insight into the family’s meeting of one another, Coopers’ own father, and clarifications on his own understanding of family gossip from years of growing up. There is a lot that may mirror experiences that some adults have been fortunate enough to have snippets of with a family member, but is the extended version of insight into a family that probably has a lot more gossip and rumors surrounding it than one’s own and a few more trips to Europe on whims than most people experience in a lifetime.