‘Tell Me Everything’ is One of the BEST Celebrity Memoirs of 2023
Book Review: Tell Me Everything by Minka Kelly
Have you ever had a certain view of a celebrity and then were shocked to find out all the adversity they faced? In Tell Me Everything, actress Minka Kelly discusses her complicated relationship with her mother and all the shocking things she went through as the child of a broken home. Read on for a review of Tell Me Everything by Minka Kelly, published by Henry Holt.
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Trigger warnings: Domestic violence, extortion, miscarriage
Tell Me Everything starts off with a surprising prologue: Minka Kelly, age 17, starts work at a seedy peep show in Albuquerque New Mexico. Encouraged or forced to do so by her boyfriend (depending on how you look at it), Minka ignores her nervousness and prepares to do the necessary for her to remain in Albuquerque — dance for strangers behind a glass partition.
While Kelly tells herself that it will be easy, she soon experiences that the glass partition doesn’t make dancing any easier so she swallows her discomfort and proceeds with her new job.
Born to party girl Maureen and sometime musician Rick Kelly, Minka is brought into a world where her mother truly thought she had things figured out. Despite Rick not being ready to be a parent, Maureen decides to keep her pregnancy and agrees with Mika’s grandmother that they will raise the baby together.
When Minka’s grandmother passes away unexpectedly, her mother falls into a world of exotic dancing, partying, and neglect.
By the age of 10, Kelly found herself passed around to different families while her mom worked or partied. The two never had a stable living situation until they followed Maureen’s sometime boyfriend David to Albuquerque and found a Hispanic family who was happy to embrace Maureen and Minka.
By this time Minka is a teenager, desperate to fit in, and begins hanging out with her cousins who also happen to hang out with gang members. Minka finds herself fighting on a regular basis, spending time with coercive men but also finds a beautiful friendship with Angel, another girl at her school. When Maureen and David head to Boston to evade a warrant out on David, Minka refuses to go, instead moving in with an older man who convinces her to get into sex work.
The rest of the memoir follows Minka as she graduates high school and heads back to Los Angeles to live with her biological father, Rick. She does some modeling, goes back to school, and gets a job as a surgical assistant. Minka lands the role of all-American cheerleader Lyla Garrity on Friday Night Lights and heads to Austin, Texas to start her life as a working actress.
While Tell Me Everything is ultimately about the complicated relationship between mother and daughter, it also has some interesting details as Kelly pursues a career as an actress. She discusses her struggles in relationships without really naming names (her torrid affair with co-star Taylor Kitsch, who played Tim Riggins, is covered) as is the foul experience of her old peep show boyfriend trying to extort her with nude photos.
She discusses a traumatic miscarriage and the demise of a relationship with a man she thought she would grow old with. Kelly also goes into detail about the cancer that ravaged Maureen and how the mothering role was reversed as Minka stepped in as hospice caregiver to her own mother.
In Tell Me Everything, Kelly beautifully describes her childhood, comparing her relationship with her mother to that of a weather person, trying to predict her moods. There’s also something to be said about plans going by the wayside when something unexpected happens, and this book is a prime example. Kelly says that Maureen could have been anything; who knows what she would have become if she had the support of a stable community? Kelly articulates that while her mom was an addict, she also had a string of really bad breaks that had them sleeping in garages and moving in with a very abusive man.
Tell Me Everything is absolutely riveting and dives into the intricate web of mother-daughter relationships. Kelly’s story is a compelling narrative that demonstrates the resilience of the human spirit in the face of instability and adversity. As Kelly reflects on the complexities of her relationship with her mother, she learns to define her own path, breaking free from the cycle of instability that has plagued her family for years.
Ultimately, Tell Me Everything serves as a powerful reminder that even in the most complicated and challenging family dynamics, women have the capacity to forge their own way, find their identity, and rise above the traumas of the past.
Genre — Memoirs
Rating — ⭐⭐⭐⭐
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