Goodreads Book Review - High on Arrival

High on Arrival by Mackenzie Phillips

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


This was just woefully underwhelming. Yes, she went through horrible things in her life, and I sympathize... but that doesn't mean the book is any good. It's boring. It lacks details. It's ridiculously repetitive; every few chapters she tries to pass off some big revelation that she learned about life through her drug use, but when it's the same revelation from a few chapters ago that she's "learned" six or seven times already... well, it gets old fast, not to mention how ridiculous it makes her and her credibility look. Yet another sparkling example of why I hate memoirs.



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The Recommended Reading Challenge is eight books old now, and this is the second one I demonstrably hated. Like the first one, it's a memoir, so maybe we should stay away from those! I still have a few books on the list: The Reluctant Fundamentalist, The Fuck-Up, and Motherless Brooklyn, but I haven't been able to get my hands on copies of those yet, so I'm going to skip ahead to the newest recommendation I've gotten, 11/22/63. It'll be the first Stephen King book I've read in a long time, so I'm kind of excited about it. We'll see how it goes. In the meantime, if you have any recommendations, let's hear 'em!