Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Roseanne Barr’s daughter recounts living with the glamour and chaos of her mother’s stardom. Before her mother became famous, Pentland lived a blue-collar suburban life in Denver with her eccentric yet intact family. “Aside from being half-naked and feral,” she writes, “we were also being raised part atheist, part Jewish, and part Wiccan, with a touch of paganism and voodoo thrown in.” She watched as her homemaker-turned-waitress mother found unexpected acclaim in Denver’s alternative comedy club scene and then moved to Los Angeles to do stand-up. Pentland navigated an increasingly unstable home life as well as her own struggles with overeating and acting out while her mother built a career. Too busy to attend to her daughter, Barr hired a series of live-in counselors, private chefs, and hypnotherapists and sent her to “Fat Camp.” The author’s childhood also brought with it scrutiny from the media and seemingly everyone around her. In adolescence, she went through a series of psychiatric hospitals, wilderness-based “self-improvement” camps, and Synanon-affiliated schools with mandatory therapy sessions that were “borderline abusive and violent.” Barr’s highly publicized divorce from Pentland’s father, relationship with “abusive addict” Tom Arnold, and midlife pregnancy by her bodyguard only added to the turbulence. The author eventually met and married a set dresser whose steady presence brought balance to her tumultuous world. Yet even after she started the family she always wanted, her life continued to intersect with her mother’s. When Barr bought a ranch in Hawaii, Pentland and her husband moved in as caretakers. Several false starts later, the author and her husband finally began an island farm life, finally free of Hollywood. This complex, scathingly funny memoir about dealing with the toxic glow of fame offers an intimate look at a woman’s struggle to shape a life on her own terms. Pentland also provides a unique angle on the cult of celebrity and how its effects ripple out far beyond just the celebrity. A mordantly poignant memoir of finding oneself amid hectic external forces. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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“My life is a sitcom.... I know everyone’s life is, but mine is literally,” writes Pentland in this immensely affecting and hilarious debut about growing up with her mother, comedian Roseanne Barr. Pentland recalls her childhood in working-class Denver in the early ’80s, when her mother—tired of playing the role of suburban wife in a strained marriage—began doing stand-up. After finding minor success and moving the family to Los Angeles in 1984, Roseanne catapulted to fame with an HBO special in 1986 and, a couple of years later, her eponymous hit series on ABC. Though the show was based on her family, Pentland reveals their home life diverged wildly from what she saw on the screen. The characters “were lightweight, PG versions of us with no complicated backstories,” she muses before recalling story lines that didn’t make the show: her stepfather’s struggle with substance abuse, Pentland’s time spent in psychiatric facilities, and her sister Jessica’s drug overdose. Like her mother, Pentland has a scathing, unapologetic wit, and it’s on full display throughout her chronicle of navigating the “parallel-reality version” of her tumultuous adolescence and eventually finding her real-life happily-ever-after with her husband and sons. This intimate portrayal of the dark side of Hollywood is hard to put down. (Jan.)

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

The daughter of comedian Roseanne Barr recounts her unusual childhood with humor and self-deprecation. Pentland’s early years in the late 1970s was spent in Utah, where her father worked as a postman and her mother stayed at home raising her, her older sister Jessica, and younger brother Jake. All of that changed when her mother decided to pursue her dream of being a stand-up comic in Los Angeles. When Roseanne skyrocketed to superstardom with her eponymous sitcom, the Pentland kids became the subject of paparazzi attention, and Jessica and then Jenny found themselves shipped off to fat camp and then reform school for what, at least in Jenny’s case, amounted to little more than typical teen antics. Though she often takes a comedic tone when describing the ups and downs of her time at many different reform schools and a survivalist camp, when Pentland grows up, marries, and has a family of her own, she finds that she has lingering PTSD from her experiences. This offers plenty of heart and laughs, especially for children of the 1980s and 1990s.