Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
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Often painted as the Cruella De Vil of the magazine industry, Bonnie Fuller does some serious image-sprucing in her new book, The Joys of Much Too Much.
Though the book's cover sells it as a self-help guide to grabbing life with gusto, the most interesting parts peek into Fuller's personal life.
A volatile veteran of publications such as YM, Cosmopolitan, Glamour and Us Weekly, and now American Media editorial director overseeing gossip mag Star, Fuller has never come off very well in interviews. Steely and cool, this gal doesn't give much.
But the voice in Too Much is one of a tough-but-chirpy working mom juggling four kids, a husband and a career in the competitive world of New York magazines.
Fuller, 49, contends that the current obsession with simplifying life is boring and pointless. An over-the-top, jam-packed, crazed life is the secret to happiness, she says. If you've got that, stop fighting it and embrace it.
Besides, the alternative is somewhat sparse and lonely -- and who wants a mere three pairs of shoes, anyway?
The problem with this how-to is that once the basic premise is established, Too Much isn't enough.
It's little more than a collection of Fuller aphorisms that read like cover lines from one of her magazines, complete with exclamation marks.
Ignore the odds: Find your passion and Go for it!
Cancel that Guilt Trip!
Take off the blinders!
It begins to feel as if Fuller jotted down fleeting flashes of ideas on scraps of paper while she was between meetings or on the treadmill, her busy life leaving no room for deeper thinking.
Skim through those tiresome tidbits and instead ferret out Fuller's frank revelations, including that her architect husband of 22 years, Michael Fuller, wasn't love at first sight, that he later developed varicose veins in his sperm-producing areas and that her first pregnancy was an "accident. "
Juicy stuff!
But when she details how daughter Leilah was diagnosed at age 5 with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and daughter Sophia had a brain tumor at age 3 (both are fine now), Fuller's frantic life turns a bit tragic.
Michael, she writes, quit his job to take care of Leilah, because Bonnie had been at Us magazine for only three weeks.
Though people in the press "seemed to think it was crass or unseemly of me to keep working long, hard hours," she writes that she had to maintain her health insurance coverage, bring in a paycheck and reboot her career after being fired from Glamour (she was "disloyal," she says, as she entertained a job offer from a rival magazine group).
"My husband and I did what we had to do to cope, day to day," she writes.
Fuller's full life has maybe left its mark -- she concedes she doesn't care much for pleasantries.
"I just don't have time, for instance, to ask my staff how their weekend was," she writes. "Sometimes people perceive me to be cold or uncaring because I don't indulge in chitchat."
Maybe having too much isn't such a joy after all.
The Joys of Much Too Much
By Bonnie Fuller
Simon & Schuster, 214 pp., $24
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