Abraham Lincoln, the financial meltdown, Ellen DeGeneres, Herman Cain, and Jackie Kennedy, in order those are the top five nonfiction bestsellers this week. Ellen debuts on the NYT list at #3 with her third collection of elliptical musings, Seriously...I'm Kidding
[[Kindle
]], after her 2003 The Funny Thing Is...
and her still-closeted start, My Point...And I Do Have One
from 1995. Not straying a millimeter from her successful formula of breezy thoughts, airy fonts, and roomy page design, the new book delivers the expected ratio of genuine humor to somewhat forced fun, or pure filler. Just how silly your mood is at the moment will determine your reaction to the chapter titled "The Longest Chapter in This Book," which discusses her wish to prove she can write a long chapter and ends, at the same length as many other short chapters, with the sentence, "Sorry, maybe I shouldn't have written this chapter."
The apology is misplaced. It ought to appear in the chapter "Labels," in which she becomes indignant about the assumption that because she is a lesbian she would also be a cat owner. She goes on to mention the demise of her steadily descending sitcom, which was canceled after five seasons, in 1998, one year after her character (and she) came out. Thirteen years later, she still trots out her old line, "Some people thought the show was too gay, some people thought it wasn't gay enough." Surely by now Ellen could acknowledge the opposing motives of those two camps of critics. It's a disgrace to put the people who wanted to censor lesbian visibility on equal balance with viewers who finally, finally (after so much ratings-grabbing hullabaloo) expected to see queer life in prime time. Obviously, in our image-driven world, her public wedding to Portia, her mentions of her wife on her daily talk show, and their constant red carpet hand-holding far outweigh a tired old phrase. But if she's going to continue to address the question, she needs a friend to turn her toward a fresher answer.
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