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Confessions of a Recovering Slut: And Other Love Stories Hardcover, signed $19.95	Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood Hardcover, signed $19.95
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Watch and Listen

View Hollis on The Tonight Show (requires Windows Media Player)

View Hollis on Monica Kaufman Closeups (requires Windows Media Player)

View Hollis on Good Day Atlanta (requires Windows Media Player)

View Hollis on South Florida Today

View Hollis on Atlanta & Company

Listen to Hollis on The Royal Treatment

Listen to Hollis on Bill Thompson's Eye on Books

Reviews and Press

She's a Cool Mom — She was lost in experiencing the hugeness of the National Museum of Natural History with her five-year-old daughter when she missed our scheduled phone interview. "My senses were so overloaded," says Hollis Gillespie, author of Confessions of a Recovering Slut. Read the full article from Miami New Times

If you judge a book by its title, you might think Gillespie's latest collection of autobiographical essays features torrid tales of bed-hopping and boozing. You'd be half-right; the Atlanta-based humor columnist does her fair share of partying with her three male best friends, but "Confessions" proves to have a surprising amount of soul. "I choose titles because I think they're funny, shocking, slightly unseemly and challenging," says Gillespie, who also penned last year's "Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch." "In my third book, I promise to work the word 'whore' into the title, to complete the 'bitch-slut-whore' series." Read the 4 star review from New York Post

Hollis Gillespie shares a laugh with Jay Leno on her March 10, 2004 appearance on The Tonight Show

Hollis Gillespie deserves a Pulitzer Prize, if only for her titles. This (Confessions of a Recovering Slut: And Other Love Stories) is the screamingly hilarious sequel to her memoir Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch, an epithet a local crackhead yelled at her when she accidentally hit him with her car.

Gillespie, a flight attendant with an ear for the ridiculous, writes quick, chronologically challenged, colorfully profane essays on aspects of her life: her lunatic friends; the dangerous, drug dealer-infested Atlanta neighborhood in which she lives; her crazy family, which is about to grow, as Gillespie has suddenly found herself pregnant. ``My theory is this: one night my uterus had an out-of-body experience while I was sleeping and latched itself onto the nearest man, who was probably right there in my bed, like a big fertile squid.''

With motherhood comes worry. Gillespie tries to bulletproof baby Milly's room with cake pans and frets about taking the toddler to her buddy's home, which she calls ''Lary's lair of sharp edges and fire.'' Growing up with crazy Gillespie for a mom should provide young Milly with plenty of material for her own book in about 30 years. Miami Herald

Who could resist a book with a name like Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood? Read the full article from Writer's Digest — Breakout Author of 2004 special edition

In this zesty memoir, NPR commentator and flight attendant Gillespie riffs on everything from her work as a "bad German translator" to her belief that a lesbian ghost is haunting her house. Gillespie, a hard-living bleached blonde who yearns to own a house, is as charming as a friendly drunk who says one funny, impossible sentence after another. She chronicles her life in diminutive essays, with an appreciation for absurd, seemingly minor moments. Read the full review from Publisher's Weekly

Riotous NPR commentator Hollis Gillespie, alias Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch, shares rib-crackling funny tales of life on the road with her bomb-building mom and trailer-salesman dad. Vanity Fair

Hollis Gillespie swears she didn't make any of it up: Her mom became a rocket scientist after failing as a beautician, her alcoholica dad wore a beer-can hat while insisting on designer shoes, and her friend drove around with giant plastic biblical characters in his backseat. And when Gillespie almost hit a stumbling intoxicated neighbor with her car in her downtrodden Atlanta hood, his reply provided the title for her raucous memoir: Bleachy Haired Honky Bitch. Read the full story from Entertainment Weekly

This sassy collection of autobiographical short stories essentially revolves around Hollis Gillespie's desire to find a real home. Having moved around a lot as a kid, facing up to her bad credit and making a go at home ownership becomes a priority for Gillespie, especially after she's inspired by her friend Grant, who revamped an old crack house that was once literally filled with human shit. Read the full review from Bust

Hollis Gillespie used to be embarrassed about having an alcoholic, trailer-salesman dad and a bomb-making mom with broken dreams of being a beautician. If anyone asked about her family, she would tell them her parents were wealthy and that she came from a refined background. She never mentioned the time they lived in a mobile home two miles north of the Tijuana border. But all that was before she moved to Atlanta and became friends with Lary Blodgett, Daniel Troppy and Grant Henry. "When the four of us met, that's when I started to celebrate the things that made me who I am," Gillespie says over coffee recently at her bungalow in Boulevard Heights. "It was total honesty between us." Read the full story from The Atlanta Journal Constitution

Every week, Hollis Gillespie chronicles the misadventures of her crazy-quilt life in the pages of Creative Loafing. If you've read her Moodswing column or heard her on National Public Radio, you already know she was the child of a bomb-making mom and a traveling trailer salesman, whose union was soured by drink and disappointment. She spent her childhood on the move from one rented house to the next: California, Florida, back to California, even Zurich for a while. Read the full story in Creative Loafing

Hollis Gillespie, whose first book, "Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch," came out Tuesday, is on a media gravy train heading straight to Hollywood. The offbeat Creative Loafing columnist and NPR commentator received a shameless front-page cover story plug in her own publication two weeks ago, followed by an excerpt in Atlanta magazine and a blurb in Entertainment Weekly. Now comes "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno," which seldom books authors of any sort but found Gillespie's life story intriguing. Read the full story from The Atlanta Journal Constitution