Seriously…I’m Kidding – Ellen DeGeneres

Ellen DeGeneres, does she even need a surname or will one name do?

It’s really hard to say what sort of book this is. I feel it’s a combination of autobiography and comedy with a whole heap of works thrown in that sounded good at the time.

I found this to be a fascinating book. DeGeneres makes this book embody some of the things I’ve learned about writing. There’s the paragraphs with the mixed sentence length, some short, and some long. There the chapters with the mixed lengths, some short…with just a Haiku. You know, things to keep the reader’s attention on the book. And then there’s chapter on Kale. That’s all you get is the word ‘kale’. It’s very easy to read with lots of white space…easy on the eye.

There’s one chapter where she’s discussing words and how to use them. It’d be really good for authors as a teaching tool. She even makes up her own word ‘ostentaneous’. Or maybe her fingers did what mine do and just mashed two words together.

There is a whole chapter that discusses cats and being gay. Apparently Degeneres isn’t ‘not gay enough’, or ‘too gay’. She seems to be as perplexed as me about these two phrases. What is ‘not gay enough’, or ‘too gay’? Maybe she goes out and doesn’t party enough, or parties too much. How does one be ‘gay enough’ but not too much? I’m taking answers in the comments section below. What do you think?

DeGeneres questions some basic things in life. The one that struck home was ‘curl up and read a book’. But what position is ‘curl up and read a book’? I generally don’t ‘curl up’. When I’m lying down I’m flat on my back doing exercises, or on my side getting as comfortable as possible, curling isn’t part of that. When I’m sitting reading, that’s exactly what I do, sit and read. Maybe we’re emotionally curling ourselves around a book.

Essentially, what DeGeneres does with this book is to take something and look at it in a different way. She asks lots of questions about it and encourages us to look at things differently. She illustrates what she’s saying with how she words the paragraphs or displays it in the book. It is an easy book to read, with my poor reading habits it still only took a couple of days. A book I found hard to put down. Should you wish to purchase your own copy of a down-to-earth style of book a link is here.