3 Buzzy Books on Living Your Best Life – With a Little Help From Liza Minnelli
These nonfiction gems help you find joy and astonishment in trying times
1KIDS, WAIT TILL YOU HEAR THIS! by Liza Minnelli as told to Michael FeinsteinAuthor’s Home Base: Los Angeles
Author’s take: “Now, in these pages, I’m going to share what I’ve kept secret in my heart for years. Not to make a dollar. I am finally financially secure, thank you very much! Not to settle scores. I’ve decided that you deserve to hear the truth once and for all. And you deserve to hear it from me, with the help of my very best friend.”
Favourite lines: “You never know what will happen in life, and marriages can be a crapshoot. But anything would be better than the insanity I went through with David Gest.”
Review: It seems misleading to suggest that Liza Minnelli is having a moment, given that she has been in the spotlight – and the tabloids – since birth. Yet with the 2024 release of Bruce David Klein’s excellent documentary, Liza: A Truly Terrifically Absolutely True Story, and now with the publication of her memoir – both piloted by Minnelli’s longtime friend and ad hoc archivist, composer Michael Feinstein – the singer-actor and Warhol-certified icon is very much top of mind. Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! unfolds chronologically as Minnelli, now 80, reflects on every stage of her career and personal life. “It’s been a lifetime of high notes and low notes, baby,” she writes. “And I want you to know, with more days behind me than ahead, it’s been a life very well lived. I have no regrets. None. The only thing I’m truly sorry about is the pain of anyone I’ve ever hurt.”
Minnelli speaks fondly of her famous parents, singer-actress Judy Garland and director Vincente Minnelli, though Garland reads as manipulative, often sabotaging her daughter’s ambitions to serve her own interests. Even so, Minnelli makes clear that Mama, as she calls her, was depressed, addicted, suicidal and relentlessly pursued by the press; no picnic for her or an aspiring young performer struggling to craft her own identity. The bombshells are few, but punches land as she goes through a life stacked with self-described dubious choices. Still, Minnelli’s thumbprint on 20th-century pop culture, intersecting with everyone from Bob Fosse to Charles Aznavour, Halston to Sinatra, simply cannot be overstated.
Author’s Home Base: Los Angeles
Author’s take: “Now, in these pages, I’m going to share what I’ve kept secret in my heart for years. Not to make a dollar. I am finally financially secure, thank you very much! Not to settle scores. I’ve decided that you deserve to hear the truth once and for all. And you deserve to hear it from me, with the help of my very best friend.”
Favourite lines: “You never know what will happen in life, and marriages can be a crapshoot. But anything would be better than the insanity I went through with David Gest.”
Review: It seems misleading to suggest that Liza Minnelli is having a moment, given that she has been in the spotlight – and the tabloids – since birth. Yet with the 2024 release of Bruce David Klein’s excellent documentary, Liza: A Truly Terrifically Absolutely True Story, and now with the publication of her memoir – both piloted by Minnelli’s longtime friend and ad hoc archivist, composer Michael Feinstein – the singer-actor and Warhol-certified icon is very much top of mind. Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! unfolds chronologically as Minnelli, now 80, reflects on every stage of her career and personal life. “It’s been a lifetime of high notes and low notes, baby,” she writes. “And I want you to know, with more days behind me than ahead, it’s been a life very well lived. I have no regrets. None. The only thing I’m truly sorry about is the pain of anyone I’ve ever hurt.”
Minnelli speaks fondly of her famous parents, singer-actress Judy Garland and director Vincente Minnelli, though Garland reads as manipulative, often sabotaging her daughter’s ambitions to serve her own interests. Even so, Minnelli makes clear that Mama, as she calls her, was depressed, addicted, suicidal and relentlessly pursued by the press; no picnic for her or an aspiring young performer struggling to craft her own identity. The bombshells are few, but punches land as she goes through a life stacked with self-described dubious choices. Still, Minnelli’s thumbprint on 20th-century pop culture, intersecting with everyone from Bob Fosse to Charles Aznavour, Halston to Sinatra, simply cannot be overstated.
2JOYFUL, ANYWAYby Kate BowlerAuthor’s Home Base: Durham, North Carolina
Author’s take: “The newspaper headlines will agree that there is nothing worth being joyful about. Everywhere is cancer, hurricanes, stock market disasters and teenage anxiety disorders … But then again, has anyone looked closely at the eyelashes of babies? Ridiculous. I mean, useless. But delightful.”
Favourite lines: “The poet Anne Sexton was right: ‘I am a collection of dismantled almosts.’”
Review: Manitoba-reared Kate Bowler is a superb example of just how capricious life can be. A decade ago, at age 35, Bowler had “married my high school sweetheart, finally had a son after years of infertility, and secured my dream job as a university professor,” teaching American religious history at Duke in North Carolina. Then she was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer, which readers of Joyful, Anyway will surmise was ultimately treatable but no cakewalk. So, Bowler knows zeniths and nadirs. And as she argues in this witty diaristic “sort-of” memoir, joy, slippery as it is, is worth doggedly pursuing. D’uh, right? But Bowler makes the case with lively dips into pop culture, philosophy and analysis. Plus, she throws in inventive rethinking – explaining how “girls’ weekends should be replaced by the more accurate description immersive therapy weekend because of the exacting nature by which women can expertly take each other’s problems apart in any location and concurrent with any activity.” Such as … group salsa! Compact chapters dotted with snappy lists (eg: “Things I Worry I Will Not Survive,” “Recent Filings to the Complaints Department”) keep things breezy despite flashes of genuine sorrow.
Author’s Home Base: Durham, North Carolina
Author’s take: “The newspaper headlines will agree that there is nothing worth being joyful about. Everywhere is cancer, hurricanes, stock market disasters and teenage anxiety disorders … But then again, has anyone looked closely at the eyelashes of babies? Ridiculous. I mean, useless. But delightful.”
Favourite lines: “The poet Anne Sexton was right: ‘I am a collection of dismantled almosts.’”
Review: Manitoba-reared Kate Bowler is a superb example of just how capricious life can be. A decade ago, at age 35, Bowler had “married my high school sweetheart, finally had a son after years of infertility, and secured my dream job as a university professor,” teaching American religious history at Duke in North Carolina. Then she was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer, which readers of Joyful, Anyway will surmise was ultimately treatable but no cakewalk. So, Bowler knows zeniths and nadirs. And as she argues in this witty diaristic “sort-of” memoir, joy, slippery as it is, is worth doggedly pursuing. D’uh, right? But Bowler makes the case with lively dips into pop culture, philosophy and analysis. Plus, she throws in inventive rethinking – explaining how “girls’ weekends should be replaced by the more accurate description immersive therapy weekend because of the exacting nature by which women can expertly take each other’s problems apart in any location and concurrent with any activity.” Such as … group salsa! Compact chapters dotted with snappy lists (eg: “Things I Worry I Will Not Survive,” “Recent Filings to the Complaints Department”) keep things breezy despite flashes of genuine sorrow.
3THE ASTONISHING LIVES OF OLDER WOMEN: HOW TO CREATE PLEASURE OVER PERIL IN PEAK LONGEVITYby Moira WelshAuthor’s Home Base: Toronto
Author’s take: “The goal of this book is to help women chart a forward course by sharing both uplifting and cautionary tales, so that we can prepare for the potentially exciting time that lies ahead. I also provide financial fundamentals, which we often do not consider during the crush of careers and caring for busy kids or aging parents.”
Favourite lines: “The curse of loneliness has attached itself to the gift of longevity, giving us more years to disappear into the basement.”
Review: Look closely at the title of veteran Toronto Star reporter Moira Welsh’s excellent new nonfiction work. The “astonishing” part of the lives of older women is a double entendre, referring both to the enhanced lifespans Canadian women now enjoy and the shocking gender inequities they face in a male-centric health-care system and with pensions dwindled by maternity leave and ongoing childcare, marriage and stubborn wage disparities, not to mention the disappearance of jobs offering defined benefit plans. Welsh fastens her narrative to three educated and successful senior women — Susan, Pat and Elizabeth – all facing unanticipated housing precarity and, no less insidiously, emotional or existential loneliness exacerbated by that precarity. Their stories are bolstered by hard-won wisdom younger readers can and should absorb, especially since Welsh notes that “By the early 2030s, nearly one in four Canadians will be old, at least by official standards. In two decades … roughly 2.5 million will be 85 or beyond, with twice as many women as men.” Astonishing Lives is loaded with startling stats like these filtered through Welsh’s astute journalistic gaze and presented in accessible prose. This is critical reading for any woman hoping never to face homelessness — or its ugly cousin, invisibility — which pretty much means us all.
Author’s Home Base: Toronto
Author’s take: “The goal of this book is to help women chart a forward course by sharing both uplifting and cautionary tales, so that we can prepare for the potentially exciting time that lies ahead. I also provide financial fundamentals, which we often do not consider during the crush of careers and caring for busy kids or aging parents.”
Favourite lines: “The curse of loneliness has attached itself to the gift of longevity, giving us more years to disappear into the basement.”
Review: Look closely at the title of veteran Toronto Star reporter Moira Welsh’s excellent new nonfiction work. The “astonishing” part of the lives of older women is a double entendre, referring both to the enhanced lifespans Canadian women now enjoy and the shocking gender inequities they face in a male-centric health-care system and with pensions dwindled by maternity leave and ongoing childcare, marriage and stubborn wage disparities, not to mention the disappearance of jobs offering defined benefit plans. Welsh fastens her narrative to three educated and successful senior women — Susan, Pat and Elizabeth – all facing unanticipated housing precarity and, no less insidiously, emotional or existential loneliness exacerbated by that precarity. Their stories are bolstered by hard-won wisdom younger readers can and should absorb, especially since Welsh notes that “By the early 2030s, nearly one in four Canadians will be old, at least by official standards. In two decades … roughly 2.5 million will be 85 or beyond, with twice as many women as men.” Astonishing Lives is loaded with startling stats like these filtered through Welsh’s astute journalistic gaze and presented in accessible prose. This is critical reading for any woman hoping never to face homelessness — or its ugly cousin, invisibility — which pretty much means us all.
