'Melanin and Me,' er 'Melania and Me': Resist a read

Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is an updated and expanded version of my Goodreads review, where I said that I was torn between one and two stars.

I occasionally turn book reviews into blog posts, but much more commonly with in-depth intellectual books.

But, because The.Resistance.™ (I see what I did in this blog post's title) has touted this baby, this is the rare occasion where I do that with a political book.

Let me start by saying that, by the 50-page mark, I not only felt no more sympathy for pre-White House Melania Trump than before (which was basically zero), but was feeling less and less for author Stephanie Winston Wolkoff by the page.

I also switched from reading to skimming and grokking. No way I wanted to plow through this boring nightstand read word for word.

Wolkoff calls herself a people pleaser. I'd use two other, closely related words, instead. One is "suck-up" and the other is "sucker."

On the suck-up side? She worked for First Lady Melanin for free for a reason. Access, or beyond that, exposure. And, rich people can work for the coin of "exposure." You and I can't. The name-dropping of couturiers, etc., makes it clear to this reader that Wolkoff, with her Anna Wintour connections (also name-dropped repeatedly) that she liked this "exposure." And, since that's the way "society" New York City works, I have little doubt she hoped to turn this exposure into money. And, maybe, despite bemoaning her legal fees, etc., she DID! And, I'm sure that she's already making a penny off her getting dumped. She may not be a biological descendant of Harry Winston, but she got enough skin in the game.

On the sucker side? Not every people pleaser is a sucker. Actual or self-alleged people pleasers who are in a position to stop it, and keep doing it anyway, are suckers. They're even more suckers when they try to make excuses over being just a people pleaser. To put it more bluntly? Claiming you're a people person when you're really a sucker who's a busted suck-up is a high level of passive aggressiveness.

The fact that Wolkoff knew who the Donald was in advance and still voted for him speaks volumes, including that she almost certainly knew who Melanin was all along but thought "it will never happen to me."

Shock me, though, that media glitterati like Anderson Cooper and Madcow Maddow would be suckers for this book, per this review.

As for Melanin?

Not only do I not have any more sympathy for her than before, I have less. In Wolkoff's telling, she comes off as even more sociopathic in some ways than Donald. And that's hard to do.

As for other tidbits, like Ivanka supposed sabotaging Melanin's speech that plagiarized Michelle Obama? Somebody on Ivanka's staff might do that. Ivanka herself might have signed off, if she heard about it. But Ivanka's too dumb to orchestrate that. That said, the belief that she would says something, both about what Wolkoff thinks about Ivanka and about the lengths she would go to, to defend Melanin.

So, actually, the tidbits I learned are probably the only thing keeping this from a one-star rating.

Seriously, if you're a #TheResistance Dem, and you "need" this book to help fight Resistance battles, you're almost as bad off as Wolkoff.

Speaking of, in today's new era? With her having name-dropped the likes of Harvey Weinstein? How much "enabling" has Wolkoff done elsewhere? 

And, this good capitalist also wants to know how much of an advance Wolkoff got for this book, and how far in advance she and Simon and Schuster kept this thing on the QT with the early fall publish date as a target?

This good skeptic also wants to know how much of the book was actually written by SWW and how much is a ghosting product?

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