“I was born a cynical, suspicious, 45-year-old divorcee.” – Gabourey Sidibe

I have a confession: I LOVE celebrity memoirs.

I know. I know. Judge me all you want. I own two Tori Spelling books, Joe Esterhasz’s virtually unreadable Hollywood Animal, and Jane Hamsher’s Killer Instinct (the making of Natural Born Killers). I have plowed through Frank Langella’s Dropped Names and both of Howard Stern’s memoirs. None of them have felt so deeply personal as Gabourey Sidibe’s This is Just My Face.

Let’s get this out front: Gabourey Sidibe is not a great writer. Anybody looking for Alice Walker-level prose should know better. Most celebrity memoirs are written to be enjoyed on a lengthy flight between New York and LA, or laying out on a beach towel during the summer. That’s how I read Private Parts and that’s how I read This Is Just My Face.

What Sidibe lacks in style, she more than makes up for in intimacy. This Is Just My Face is a book about acceptance posing as a memoir about Sidibe’s outrageously fascinating life. From her father’s multiple marriages to her first career as a sex phone operator, Sidibe presents her life candidly while fighting her own defense mechanisms right on the page.

This is Just My Face is deeply about insecurity and anger. She talks candidly about her bulemia in such a flippant way that the detractors of I, Tonya would be aghast. She talks about her own inner contradictions, her initial inability to believe in herself, and her cycles of fear and anger. Her defensive millennial style belies a rawness that feels like you’re either pounding shots with her in the back room of a dingy bar or eavesdropping on her therapy session (don’t you feel dirty for doing that?). Hell, when she talks about Black Lives Matter in the final 10 pages of the book, she’s actually apologetic for it. The book is exposing her insecurities to the world and asking you to accept her for who she is.

The book drips with self-conscious recognition of the world’s racism and shallowness. She practically opens the book with overhearing a conversation between Lee Daniels and an editor for Vogue where the editor wants to put her on the cover and keeps calling her a “Fat Black Bitch.” Gabourey puzzles over the childhood insult of “African Booty Scratcher” while commenting “everybody’s booty itches.” And yet she recognizes that while the racism and body shaming is largely stupid, it still hurts and still matters.

Sidibe’s memoir is a witty breezy read providing a moment to step into somebody else’s shoes and see pain through somebody else’s eyes.