Me
Katharine Hepburn, 1991
★ 3.81 from 16.3k ratings on Goodreads
The actress turns her unsentimental eye on her own family — a clan of determined women, domineering uncles and inconvenient preachers' ideas — and tells it plain. Hepburn's voice is brisk, witty and plain, moving through family memories with tenderness and a dry, unsentimental eye.
Feels like tenderness, wonder and humor. About family, memory and love.
Who it’s for
You may enjoy this if you like conversational memoirs full of family anecdote, old Hollywood glimpses and a sharp, funny voice. Just expect a rambling, disjointed structure that skips around and stays guarded about personal depth.
Why read it
It gives you a plain, funny record of a stubborn family and a singular career, with memories that feel lived rather than polished.
A page from the book
A man writes a letter that is mostly a knife, and exactly correct about the sums.
Your income has always been ample, and you never ought to have borrowed any money, and Mary Towle did a great wrong in lending you any money. My opinion of you is the same as it always has been—that you are an extravagant, deceitful, dishonest, worthless person. You have squandered thousands of dollars and left your honest debts unpaid. But I do not think you are capable of comprehending the mistakes that you have made. Now that you are paying up Mary Towle, how would it do to pay the various other accounts that you owe? What readers say
Readers find the memoir conversational, funny, and affectionate, with vivid memories of family, career, and old Hollywood. Many are frustrated by its rambling, disjointed structure and lack of personal depth, especially about Tracy; reactions split between charmed and disappointed.
Katharine Hepburn.Hepburn won four Best Actress Oscars, a record that still stands, and never once attended the ceremony to collect one.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Me for me?
- You may enjoy this if you like conversational memoirs full of family anecdote, old Hollywood glimpses and a sharp, funny voice. Just expect a rambling, disjointed structure that skips around and stays guarded about personal depth.
- What is Me like?
- Hepburn's voice is brisk, witty and plain, moving through family memories with tenderness and a dry, unsentimental eye. Feels like tenderness, wonder and humor. About family, memory and love.
- What should I read after Me?
- If you liked Me, try Running with Scissors (Augusten Burroughs), The Greatest Generation (Tom Brokaw) and I'm Glad My Mom Died (Jennette McCurdy).
A taste of the feed
What a parent's accent does to the shape of a sentence.
My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron. Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.
Running with Scissors · Augusten Burroughs
What the anger is doing for you, and what it spares you.
I’m becoming an angry person with no tolerance for anyone. I’m aware of this shift and yet have no desire to change it. If anything, I want it. It’s armor. It’s easier to be angry than to feel to pain underneath it.
I'm Glad My Mom Died · Jennette McCurdy
The painful weight of a love that comes too late to change things.
I know it wasn’t the dinner wine that had me against the wall in a fit of remorse. It was the thought of my mother being so lonesome she had to sit on a street bench, so lonesome she missed the company of a homeless shopping bag woman. Even in the bad days in Limerick she always had an open hand and an open door and why couldn’t I be like that to her?
Tis · Frank McCourt
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