Hilariously Scathing Review Rips Into Jenny McCarthy's New Book

Did you know that Jenny McCarthy has written 10 books? Ten! Her latest, Stirring the Pot, is intended to be a “mix of storytelling, sisterly advice, sex appeal, and self-deprecation,” but an early review calls it “unfunny,” “confusing” and a “contradictory mess” that’s “like having a Day-Glo, dumb-feminism-for-dummies megaphone blasted into your ears.”

Tim Teeman, who reviewed McCarthy’s new book for The Daily Beast, is not one bit amused by McCarthy and what he calls her “special, bright, just-a-regular-mom knowledge crackling saltily” schtick—to the point of hilarity.

Teeman calls her out on her inanity:

“I believe there is a certain magic, a powerful power, in negative thinking,” she tells us after a hundred-plus pages of telling us to be positive.

Her self-righteousness:

McCarthy doesn’t really address the anti-vaccine crusade she has become the figurehead of, except to mock experts who think they can “explain the difference between laboratory statistics and what a mother sees with her own eyes.” There you have it: Being a mother trumps all. Darn to heck all those scientists with their dumb-ass specialties and studies and laboratory learning, centuries of endeavor and innovation and helping save lives bullshit.

Her chapter on period blood:

This play-acting of disclosure is fascinating. This kind of explicit writing is aimed at being leveling between author and reader, but it reads rather as a cover for a lack of true self-examination. Instead, there are more numbing lists, like “If my bed could talk.” “Signs that your man may be cheating on you” include him claiming the smell of cheap perfume was from a tango lesson—both immediately implausible and unfunny.

Her pointlessness:

She’s made mistakes. She doesn’t regret them—the nude shots, the crappo relationships, the professional shames—and hey, she’s not saying she’s learned from them, not totally. But she’s been through them, and McCarthy’s big thing is experience: Once you go through something, that’s big. And if you go through enough of it, this accumulation comes to be your calling card of wisdom.