Pissed Off: On Women and Anger: Finding Forgiveness on the Other Side of the Finger

Spike is a very engaging storyteller and writer! I laughed my butt off at some of the escapades she has found herself in, not because they were so hysterically funny, but because I walked in those shoes a few times myself and I could (embarrassingly) relate so well. Definitely not a "self-help" book, and yet somewhat of an autobiography, Spike's tales are about how easily she can fly off the handle, and how she has learned over time to put out the fire before it starts to burn. Read it!

If you grew up with an angry parent, this book will sound familiar. You may see yourself between the lines if you've run away from a discordant home. Anger is not only our power, but also our teacher, and the author has been on intimate terms with her subject for a very long time. Pissed Off is the third book of Spike Gillespie, whose rage-aholic father set her up for a fiery life with All the Wrong Men (her first book). Although Pissed Off is the author's memoir, short essays are interspersed throughout it from other women writers who diversify the author's powerlessness and fear by their own stories. The book is divided into three sections--Part I, where anger begins, Part II, where anger festers, and Part III, where anger yields to forgiveness. Spike leads us through road rage, spiteful colleagues, manipulative bosses, cruel in-laws, and an addicted spouse on her way to meeting forgiveness. With clarity and directness, we travel from New Jersey to Texas where the author realizes that her father's anger is still running her life, even as he is slipping into Alzheimer's. "I don't know what made [my father] so angry so long ago, but I'm done letting his anger rule my life--and I feel bad for him whatever it was that took him down..." The author, who is known for her bumper stickers, might print "mellow with age instead of rage" as this book's adage. We would do well to read it and heed it.

An enjoyable read; I couldn't put it down last night! She gives some background on her dysfunctional family dynamics, being accused of over-sensitivity, her difficulties with professional jealousy, and relationship problems and interpolates her essays with other women's writings on anger, forgiveness, and other related emotions. Talks about her substance abuse and social pressure to stifle her negative feelings. Although the reader's anger may have different sources, she'll find much she can relate to in this great little book. The book has funny as well as belligerent parts; and she doesn't preach or turn into a counselor. A great quote quoted by Gillespie, (I'm paraphrasing): "A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person."