Rosie O'Donnell's Electra Complex Issues Emerge In New Memoir
As our review copy of Rosie O'Donnell's memoir appears to have gotten lost in the mail, we've had to settle for the modest trickle of leaks available in press coverage, where so far we've learned of Donald Trump's molluskan qualities and of childhood tea parties in which the self-exiled former View panelist would horrify her stuffed animal collection by crushing her metacarpals with a croquet mallet. Now USA Today provides the most comprehensive preview yet, including an interactive feature that allows you to click on a celebrity to read what Rosie wrote about them (apparently we all killed Anna Nicole!), and a review:
[A]s the warring co-hosts tried to make up, O'Donnell told [Barbara Walters]: "... you did not defend me. And I have been a good, loyal daughter to you. And I want you to be a good mother to me. Don't let the bad man hurt me." [...]
She also has fuzzy recollections of a man climbing in through her window as a child to molest her — until her mother cut down the tree.
Too-much-information is not a concept O'Donnell embraces. You will learn how fame affected her bowel habits, that she "inseminated" her partner, Kelli, and that her son once told her, in the bathtub, that he didn't like her fat belly. (She told him she didn't like it either.)
While the details regarding O'Donnell's gastrointestinal distress and baster-based sex life might be enough to send readers scurrying to the relative comforts of watching a cadaver's testicles get squashed on a very special episode of Oprah, the psychoanalytical subtext alone make this a book worth reading. Clearly, Detox has much to reveal about Rosie's complicated and symbol-laden relationship with bad replacement mommy Barbara Walters, who failed to chop down the insult tree that could have kept the fearsome Trump giant out of her lush lesbian garden.