🎭🎭🎭🎭🎭
Love, Lucy
Lucille Ball
286 Pages
Berkeley Publishing Co.
October 1, 1997
I admit: I was predisposed to loving this. I am in my I Love Lucy obsessed phase. I have been watching old episodes of the show like mad and watched a documentary about Lucy and Desi. However, I also read this right on the heels of another memoir and I had trouble comparing the two. I am not sure how much help Lucille Ball had with writing this, but this memoir or autobiography (I have seen it classified as both) is eminently readable, and does not suffer from excessive wordiness, like many other books in this genre. If anything, I wish there had been a little more detail about her later years because I felt like it glossed over that period. However, if I have to choose between telling everything and leaving a little back, I would choose the latter. While in a book about someone so famous in Hollywood, there will be some namedropping, it was all in context and was not overdone.
Obviously, this kind of book will be for a true fan of Lucille Ball, though I have trouble understanding why anyone wouldn’t be unless they don’t know the show (and I cannot speak for other parents, but I made sure my daughter had a thorough grounding in I Love Lucy), but this book while not overly long, did contain many details about Lucille Ball’s life that I did not know previously (even from the documentary I just watched). Finally, even if someone helped her polish the book, the flavor of it seems very consistent with her voice. There was some humor in it but there was also a work-ethic (which she had in spades) and candor that was refreshing. She managed to reveal herself, without denigrating others, even when things did not always work out (as with Desi). I recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of Lucille Ball or her work.
Leave a Reply