Tabloid Love: Looking for Mr. Right in All the Wrong Places, A Memoir [Paperback]

Harrison revives the plucky insouciance of love-challenged journalist MTM throwing her hat in the air in the opening credits of the '70's best TV sitcom -- although Bridget's hat would be drenched in the alcohol and tobacco smoke that, with her Rhoda-type gal pals, were her constant companions. Updating MTM, too, Bridget takes us into bedrooms and hotel rooms for her occasional besotted zipless one-nighters, and -- far cry from Mary dating Lou Grant! -- much of her story focuses on Harrison's pining for, bedding, and then splitting with her immediate boss at the Post. Bridget, too, shares MTM's cheerful let-it-all-out approach to life in sharing her romantic frustrations with the world via the NY Post dating column she wrote for two years. In the best breezy tabloid style, the chapters are short and punchy, and left me wanting so much more.

In her blurb for Tabloid Love, newswoman Linda Ellerbee writes, "You don't have to be twenty-nine to enjoy this story. You only have to remember what it was like and that you were once young enough to think twenty-nine was old." I'm well past twenty-nine, and chick lit isn't my normal read, but I loved Tabloid Love and Bridget Harrison! I wasn't familiar with Ms. Harrison's NY Post column, and I was delightfully surprised. Like other reviewers, I spent a beautiful late summer day indoors and neglected housekeeping because I couldn't wait to read what happened next to our real life Bridget Jones.

As a wordsmith, I appreciated the insider's view of the "glamorous" life of a news reporter--standing on a subway platform on a steamy summer day just to get a photo of a thermometer reading 100 degrees was one of my favorites. On the flip side, her tales of her summer covering social events in the Hamptons are hilarious; anyone with aspirations of life among the glitterati might think twice after seeing things through Ms. Harrison's eyes.

Hopefully readers who think the grass is greener will have a greater appreciation of their lives and loves once they realize that life as a sexy single in the big city isn't all it's cracked up to be. Overall, a great, fun, fairytale of a read where our heroine lands on her feet. Hopefully, we'll learn that there's a happily ever after in her follow-up book.

Subtitled "Looking for Mr. Right in all the wrong places," I missed the fact, at first, that this is A MEMOIR -- real-life! -- and that makes all the difference. TABLOID LOVE reads like fiction, and comes dangerously close to oh-so-familiar territory in the first pages, with a thirtysomething, single English girl journaling thoughts on career, love and marriage, with cute abbreviations ("...need to be thinking about babies v.v. soon...") and an obsessive focus on finding The One. Very Bridget Jones.

However, TABLOID LOVE is saved from the same old syrupy, chick lit formula by:
1) A really good Prologue; 2) A true-to-life story (not all perfect endings & happily-ever-after); and 3) Harrison, fortunately, quickly moves off the relationship focus and on to her adventures as a tabloid news reporter for The New York Post, on an exchange program from London. Oh, and 4) Harrison is funny, smart -- very much a Rebel -- and one heck of a writer!

TABLOID LOVE is readable, and highly enjoyable as a behind-the-scenes glimpse into tabloid journalism and living single in New York -- what an alternate reality!

Best-selling author Candace Bushnell sums up TABLOID LOVE on a cover blurb:
"A real-life Bridget Jones meets Sex in the City."

Candace Bushnell is the author of Sex in the City, as well as a number of other books, including Lipstick Jungle, published in 2005 (good -- not nearly as great!). I would have to go further, having read all of Bushnell's books (and having been a big fan of the HBO series), that TABLOID LOVE is better (gasp!), because it is more gritty, more realistic, more true-to-life -- and knowing that, Harrison's adventures as a London journalist on exchange, working in New York; as a talented writer with her own dating column; and then spending a summer reporting on celebrities and life in the Hamptons; not to mention her clear-headed, stark account of 9/11 in New York -- a Day in The Life as it happened all around her -- TABLOID LOVE is better than fiction!

I LOVED this book! Take it with you, and enjoy it as the perfect summer beach read. If you can't get away, go hide in the bathroom for an escape -- remember to lock the door!

-- Sherri Caldwell, Co-Author: The Rebel Housewife Rules (Conari Press, 2004)
Humor Columnist & Reviewer at [...]