Easy Street

Starred review from November 22, 2021
Rowe (Sin Bravely), actor and television writer for shows including Arrested Development, proves that things aren’t always as they seem in this funny and touching memoir. Despite her happy marriage, successful career, and life on “a smooth road lined with jasmine” in L.A., she admits she’s had a bumpy run “beset by envy and petty rivalries of all kinds.” Plagued by her inner critic and battles with OCD, she relates how she came to resent anyone who had what she lacked—from Krista Tippett, host of NPR’s On Being (“Boy, did she play her cards right”) to even “wise old women on their deathbeds.” But those feelings took a turn when Rowe’s husband, former Golden Girls writer Jim Vallely, introduced her to Sunny and Joanna, a mother-daughter panhandling team who later became their close friends. While Rowe was initially skeptical of them, she traces how letting them in led to an intimate, at times tumultuous, relationship that began with a Golden Girls marathon and stretched over years and holidays singing ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.” Eventually, their company led her to feel a fragile but real sense of contentment. Rowe’s bluntness about her mental health struggles, combined with her account of her imperfect but enduring dedication to Sunny and Joanna, makes for a heartstring-tugging and charming story. Readers will find it hard to put this one down.

December 1, 2021
At first glance, television writer Rowe's latest memoir, after Sin Bravely (2017), appears to be an entrant in the seemingly bottomless genre of essay collections by the rich and mildly famous. What seems to be an exercise in self-deprecating observational humor, however, proves to be an unexpected story of friendship, privilege, and obligation after Rowe's husband befriends two women soliciting spare change outside of a chicken restaurant. Easy Street explores Rowe's relationship with these women, the cheerful and elderly Sunny and her likely autistic adult daughter, Joanna. The two become fixtures in Rowe's life, despite Joanna's romantic fixation on Rowe's husband and her resentment that Rowe is the one who has been "chosen" by her wealthy husband to live on "Easy Street." When Rowe goes off her medication, she finds herself plunged into a mental-health crisis of her own, even as Joanna reaches the crisis point at which her cobbled-together ability to get by collapses. This is a compelling exploration of the obligations and limits of privilege, though it never fully grapples with the chasm between the wealthy and the poor.

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March 11, 2022

Rowe (Sin Bravely) takes readers into another chapter of her life in this midlife memoir. A chance encounter brings a quirky mother and her adult daughter Joanna into their lives. Rowe will eventually become largely responsible for Joanna's affairs. But it isn't easy. Joanna is blunt, stubborn, and jealous of Rowe's life on "easy street" in a beautiful home with a loving husband--which she makes sure to point out she doesn't deserve. Rowe navigates this complicated relationship while confronting her privilege and sense of being as she struggles with her mental health. Readers of Rowe's previous works will appreciate her acerbic wit, mostly directed at herself, while tackling some dark subjects with forthrightness. Although not a necessarily uplifting read, many readers will be able to identify with the challenges that come with living in the modern world and keeping appearances while managing one's mental health. VERDICT Fans of Rowe's dark humor and previous memoir will enjoy the next chapter in her life. Caregivers and relations of semi-dependent adults and those struggling with mental health will identify with the tussle of making it through, day by day.--Kelly Karst

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2021
The acclaimed Hollywood writer's second memoir, following the well-reviewed Sin Bravely (2017). Rowe opens by explaining that even though she is blessed with a wonderful husband, career, and home in LA, she is tormented by "a seething system of covetous rivalries and discontents" as well as an insidious form of OCD called looping, which involves being unable to stop repeating a word or phrase in one's head--e.g., "Auschwitz." "As the repeating voice gains confidence and asserts itself more boldly--Auschwitz, Auschwitz, Auschwitz--the panic that creeps through my skin does not compare itself to any other," she writes. These troubles might have been enough to keep her busy, but then her kindhearted husband, Jimmy, made two new friends, a mother and daughter panhandling outside a restaurant, both of whom were huge fans of his work as a writer on The Golden Girls. After several months, the author joined one of the trio's monthly lunches; not long after, she found herself watching a Golden Girls marathon with the ladies in her home. While the mother, Sunny, was a likable jokester with fairly normal boundaries, her middle-aged daughter, Joanna, was not. She had an elementary school education, poor personal hygiene, and numerous odd tics, obsessions, and fixations--among them, her ever growing crush on Handsome Jim, as she often referred to Rowe's husband. As Sunny and Joanna's situation took several turns for the worse, the author took on increasing responsibilities for them. Jimmy, on the other hand, had his hands full taking care of his wife. Rowe is a cleareyed, disarmingly honest, wonderfully funny narrator of this trial by fire, which almost seems to be a "test" of the sort the hero faces in a fable or a Bible story, ironically set in one of the most self-involved places on Earth. If you've ever gotten in over your head trying to be a good person, get ready to wince, laugh, and scream. A great read.

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