All the Wrong Men and One Perfect Boy; A Memoir

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 271, [1] pages. Publisher's ephemera and photograph of author laid in. Spike is the critically acclaimed author of eight books and countless magazine articles. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Real Simple, GQ, Esquire, Elle, Smithsonian, National Geographic Traveler, and many other publications. Spike also provides commentary for Austin's NPR affiliate, KUT. She is the President of the Office of Good Deeds, an informal group of Austinites who enjoy performing good deeds for those in need. Spike went to college at the University of South Florida, and spent some time in Knoxville, Tennessee and St. Louis, Missouri before arriving in Austin in 1991. Initially she thought Austin would just be another stop along the way, but before long she realized this was the place she truly belonged. She raised her son Henry Mowgli here and, not at all surprisingly, thanks in large part to being raised in such a creative city, he grew up to be a musician and visual artist. In addition to performing weddings, Spike leads memoir writing workshops and retreats. A frank and moving memoir of a lifetime of failed relationships with men--and the redeeming power of motherhood--from the cyber celebrity who pioneered the on-line confessional. Some women have trouble with men. For Spike Gillespie, a widely followed online journalist, those problems started early with her father -- the first and most important man in any child's life. Spike's relationship with her emotionally distant parent was so flawed that she has had an unending series of disasters with men...from the day she first noticed them to the day she made one of her own -- her perfect little boy, Henry. In a memoir of sometimes lacerating honesty, Spike Gillespie tells us the story of her life with men -- a blunt, moving, and profoundly revealing account that asks all the hardest questions about love between the sexes. All the Wrong Men and One Perfect Boy isn't a memoir of abuse or tragedy. But it is about the lack of connection -- to family, to lovers, to the world -- that defines much of modern life. Most importantly, however (and here Henry comes in), Gillespie also tells us a story of hope and resolution, of reaching out to touch the world with the newest tools, the computer and the Internet -- and in the oldest way -- through one's children. And it's about the deepest mysteries -- how we love the ones we love, and how we stop loving them when they're destroying us. Spike Gillespie first began chronicling her thirty-year adventure of love and heartbreak in a weekly online column, and within a few months she was being described by USA Today as the queen of the online confessional. Gillespie has continued to feed her stream-of-consciousness biography to thousands of readers via her website. After years of publishing to the online community, now she is ready to tell the whole tale. Gillespie is a natural storyteller, a writer with a marvelous ability to immerse her readers in a flesh-and-blood world of her lovers, her family, her friends...and above all, her son. This is a writer unafraid to tell the truth -- about human nature, men, family, and motherhood. The result is a memoir of unadorned and refreshing power from a woman on the most intimate terms with passion, anger, love -- and herself.