Book Review: We're Just Like You, Only Prettier
Author Celia Rivenbark Offers Amusing Southern Hospitality
Oct 19, 2009
National bestseller and award winning book We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier: Confessions of a Tarnished Southern Belle (2004) attempts to explain to all non-Southern folk just what particulars it is exactly that makes a Southerner – well, a Southerner. Author Celia Rivenbark then sets out to explore the many intricacies of womanhood from her sharp, sarcastic Southerner’s point of view: married life, motherhood, and even menopause.
Good Ol’ Fashion Southern Hospitality
The book’s essays are divided by themes of Southern family, kids, couples and anything else that crosses the path of Rivenbark. Nothing is off-limits for this humor columnist who coaches her then preschool-aged daughter to tell her teachers what nutritious foods she’s fed for breakfast rather than the Nutrigrain bar or SweetTart she eats on the way to school. Or she describes how her ungrateful giant green trash cart tried to swallow her as she was cleaning it one day.
While the first few essays are rooted more in the Southern theme, Rivenbark strays to more common topics – those that even Yanks can relate to. To her credit, Rivenbark does make a “disclaimer” in her introduction that not all “essays may seem particularly Southern at all, but they are a Southern woman’s take on those irksome little yuks in daily life.”
She spends most of the book amusingly grousing at things such as stubborn baby dolls that refuse to work, the benefits of science cloning Russell Crowe, or why husbands can’t figure out how to make the kids’ outfit match. (“Men think this is cute, even endearing. Women think that taking their child out in public looking tacky is grounds for divorce.”) But she also throws in some more surprising and affectionate thoughts that move you to call your mama.
Any mother can relate to those charming Mother’s Day gift making efforts put forth by their child. In her essay "Mother’s Day Memories: Make Mine Macaroni,"Rivenbark reflects on her child’s enthusiasm to making her a surprise gift and longs for the days when she shared the pleasure of gluing glittered elbow macaroni onto a plate she made for her own mother when she was a child.
That simple eagerness displayed by her daughter caused Rivenbark to consider being more grateful for being a mother or daughter especially in the “sandwich generation” of fast pace life.
Several passages read like stream of consciousness that meander too far before making their way to the joke which can get confusing, but those are few and far between. Each short essay is like a conversation with a girlfriend who loves to laugh and poke fun at the “little yuks in daily life” and momentarily take a breather from the stresses of being too serious.
The Author
Celia Rivenbark worked as a reporter and editor for several years before deciding to stay home to raise her daughter. She began using her daughter’s nap times to write humor columns which still run weekly in the Sun News in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
She is the author of five books of essays, including her latest You Can’t Drink All Day If You Don’t Start In The Mornin’.
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