BOOKS: TABLOID LOVE by Bridget Harrison

"I LOVED this book...the perfect escape!"

TABLOID LOVE: A Memoir
by Bridget Harrison
(Da Capo Lifelong, 2006)

Hardcover, 369 pages, $24.00 U.S.

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 hell 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; 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!