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I don't particularly care about Kelly Ripa - I used to watch All My Children when she and Mark were on it, so I've always liked her but I don't really pay attention to her life outside of what makes it to the tabloids. Before this came out, I happened to watch an interview with her where she mentioned "telling the stories that needed to be told," which I took to mean spilling some tea. Sadly this book was tea-less. I would have really liked a short story about how she was blindsided by Michael Strahan's departure since that was all over the news but instead we got a short story about how weird Regis was.

I know this wasn't a memoir and she doesn't claim that it's a memoir, but having it just be short stories, made it seem disjointed, especially because she didn't always tell the stories in chronological order so it was hard to keep track of what was going on. Perhaps the biggest issue for me is that I don't see what the point was for her writing this book. I think if you ask her, it was becoming an empty-nester, but lots of people become empty-nesters without writing books. Without it being a memoir, just a collection of short stories, that don't even center around a particular theme, the book just seems sort of pointless or the ultimate vanity project.

She credits Andy Cohen in the acknowledgements section for getting her to take up journaling, and having read all three of his journal-style books (though the first one was more of a traditional memoir), I prefer his style better.

Like others have mentioned, Flint misses no opportunity to remind the reader how fat her main character is. Not sure why she would make him fat, when she clearly has fat issues. He sweats through his clothes because he's so fat. He snores and keeps the whole house up because he's so fat. When he gets into a car, he has to put the seat back because he's so fat. Every chair he sits in creaks under his weight because he's so fat. Half the time he's not even introduced in a scene by name, just "the fat man." To say it was distracting is an understatement.

The other thing I found annoying about this was that the reader finds out clues before certain characters do so by the time we're reading the character finding out about a game-changer clue, it's no longer the mic drop the author might have intended because we had the clue revealed to us 5 pages ago.

Lastly, I'm not sure about the wisdom of building your whodunit around the murder of a person literally no one misses. I suppose his children miss him, but no one else was sad about this person's death and as a result, no one particularly cared about who killed him, it was more about who didn't do it. Weird way to structure your mystery.

I hated this book enough that I will likely never read anything else by this author. Not only was it fully boring until 50% when someone died, but I'm unable to express just how much I hated this author's writing style. I skipped entire parts because she would be describing a setting and then all of a sudden someone turned into a dog. I understand the intent was not literal, but I'm too much of a literal reader to be able to go along with this writer's whims. I'm sorry I didnt follow my first mind and DNF this but 1) I was reading it for AAPI month and 2) when the person died I got interested in finding out what happened (btw the characters "solve" the mystery but everything happens off the page so it's just one character saying to another "this is what I think must have happened"). Flabbergasted the author has such an impressive pedigree because this was terrible.