Title: Scrappy Little Nobody
Author: Anna Kendrick
Genre: Autobiography
Pages: 271
Category: 30. Listen to an audiobook
Format: Audiobook
Date Started: January 7th 2017
Date Finished: January 13th 2017
Okay, so it’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I totally love Anna Kendrick. If I wasn’t gay already I would absolutely go gay for her. Of course, that was never a guarantee that she could write. Luckily, she can.
This was actually my first foray into the wonderful world of audiobooks which I’ve never been a huge fan of for reasons that lead back to my own childhood. Do you remember when your teachers would read out loud to the class? I hated that, my brain would switch off and the words would go in one ear and out the other. That’s still the case, with the exception of the autobiography apparently.
I think anyone reading this book (or listening to it) will find some part of it to identify with. For me it was Kendrick’s experience growing up and feeling out of place, different to the other girls in her school. She was the tiniest kid growing up, I was the biggest, we both stood out. This feeling is summed up so perfectly by Kendrick describing a moment with her mother as a child in which she told her mother:
It’s like, it’s like I have a different heart. The other girls have one kind of heart, and I have a different kind.” My mom was understandably confused. “Are you saying they’re mean?” “No . . . I don’t know.” Saying other kids were mean felt like I was saying I was more kind, which definitely wasn’t it—more anxious maybe, more sensitive. I guess all I was feeling was that I was different.
There was a lot I didn’t identify with too, I’ve never performed on broadway, I’ve never been trapped with a dozen or more actors with nothing for entertainment except a couple of boardgames.
Kendrick reminds us that the celebrities we know and love are just like us, struggling to find a job and pay our bills, figuring out who to have relationships with, what is important to us and what isn’t. Their grandparent’s die, they have emergency dental surgery, they experiment with drugs and they don’t have enough hours in the day to get everything done either.
I’ve read a few autobiographies in my time from Portia de Rossi to Chely Wright and Drew Barrymore (both her recent release and her teenage reflection). This one is probably the funniest one I’ve come across and kept my attention from beginning to end with entertaining anecdotes from youth right through to Pitch Perfect.
If you haven’t already pick it up and give it a read. You won’t regret it.
Rating: 4/5
Middle Earth to Wonderland 