sTORI Telling

By Tori Spelling, with Hilary Liftin
Simon and Schuster

As a TV show runs into multiple seasons, careful viewers often catch trivial contradictions. Some backstory from Season One disappears or reverses altogether, or two characters who hated each other at the end of last season are suddenly childhood friends reunited (ahem, The L Word). Television viewers excuse these continuity issues as inherent to the form. In movies and books, however, the beginning of a story can be tweaked to match the ending before anyone has to see it. Therefore, it's disappointing to find these “Season One” contradictions throughout sTORI Telling, the recent memoir by actress and celebrity Tori Spelling. Often I would read a sentence, and then find the opposite sentiment a few chapters later.

In sTORI Telling, Spelling describes her complicated relationships with work, fame, money, and family. But rather than a thorough retrospective or revealing memoir, sTORI Telling is snapshot of how a young celebrity interprets her past from the modest vantage of her mid-thirties. The contradictions reveal as much as they obscure about Spelling’s life and how she views it. In this way, sTORI Telling is more like a revealing self-portrait than an incisive memoir.

The most startling contradictions come in the most ambitious and interesting part of the book, where Spelling explains her complicated relationship with wealth. With a legacy of stunted earning power, and constant encouragement to rely on someone else, women's financial biographies are often tortured and difficult. Spelling is brave to take it on at all.

After she was cut off from her family’s wealth, Spelling had to square the lifestyle she was accustomed to with the reality of her finances. It did not go well, and Spelling quickly fell into debt. Trying to explain that she hadn't been living on family money as a young adult, Spelling writes, "I'd been living independently since I moved out of the Manor, except that I paid rent to my mother for the ten years before she evicted me.” Later she fumes, “I’d been working hard to support myself since I was sixteen.” While earlier on she had corrected a popular misconception by stating that she didn't even move into the Manor, the famous Spelling mansion, until she was 17. Then she writes, “Look, I’m not complaining; I’m just trying to explain what it feels like to think about money for the first time in your thirties.”

Spelling's fans will find plenty of interesting stories in the pages of sTORI Telling, some very familiar to devotees of So NoTORIous, her autobiographical sitcom that lasted one (glorious) season on VH1. Readers who are ambivalent about Spelling may come to this book out of guilty pleasure, but they too will leave happy, fully briefed on the details of her first wedding, divorce, new relationship and new family. Media criticism enthusiasts will enjoy reflecting on how far the teen market has come since Beverly Hills 90210 broke the mold to become the first hour-long, primetime, network drama with a teenaged cast. That said, sTORI Telling probably won’t make many converts.

Whatever she was going for, Spelling’s screw ups and work-in-progress reflections paint a more honest portrait of American women of her generation than the jacket copy gives her credit for.

Review by Ann Raber