Rosie lets it all out in 'Celebrity Detox'
By Jocelyn McClurg
USA Today
In her new book, Rosie O'Donnell says she and Barbara Walters are friends who have found "a way to love" each other.
But it's doubtful Walters will feel the love when she reads "Celebrity Detox: The Fame Game" (Grand Central, 209 pp., $23.99), due in stores Tuesday.
After suggesting Walters, 78, is too old to keep up with the demands of "The View," O'Donnell says her co-star betrayed her during the infamous Donald Trump blowup last season.
"You're a liar," O'Donnell recalls shouting repeatedly at Walters before they went on the air.
Later, as the warring co-hosts tried to make up, O'Donnell told her mentor: "You did not defend me. And I have been a good, loyal daughter to you. And I want you to be a good mother to me. Don't let the bad man hurt me."
Paging Dr. Freud.
This is a train wreck of a book — part self-help psychobabble, part searing memoir — by a grown woman who lost her mother as a child.
It's baffling and fascinating and brutally honest, although some stories defy logic.
As a child, O'Donnell says, she broke her own hands and fingers with a wooden coat hanger and a small baseball bat. And nobody noticed?
She also has fuzzy recollections of a man climbing in through her window as a child to molest her — until her mother cut down the tree.
Too-much-information is not a concept O'Donnell embraces. You will learn how fame affected her bowel habits, that she "inseminated" her partner, Kelli, and that her son once told her, in the bathtub, that he didn't like her fat belly. (She told him she didn't like it either.)
Score one for Rosie: She's the rare star willing to reveal her own insecurities and hubris. She writes openly about her ambivalence toward fame and money. She says she felt like an outsider on "The View" ("I was hugely threatening"), which she left after an on-air spat with Elisabeth Hasselbeck.