Erika Jayne

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What a Beautiful Mess

I am completely guilty for watching reality tv. If I haven’t told you Real House Wives is my jam when I have time to kill in front of a TV. So, when I saw this one Scribd it was totally up my alley. If you know anything about the franchise then you know some of the women you love, some you love to hate and some you just have to applaud. Erika Girardi, I applaud you. This book starts from her childhood in Georgia talks about how she worked in Jersey and became a trophy wife all while being blunt and honest and true to herself. I think there are going to be many who will hate this book. Whether it be from jealousy or envy or they just didn’t want to get to know her the possibilities are endless and to them I say. So sorry!!! I enjoyed the background of her life and honestly, I liked the fact that she wasn’t ashamed of the choices she made. It wasn’t the best organized but it is worth the time if you are a fan.… (plus d'informations)

If you’re a fan of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, you know that this season is getting goooooood. Erika Jayne’s (aka Erika Girardi) husband, high-powered attorney Tom Girardi, has been accused of funneling over 20 million dollars of his clients’ settlements into Erika’s LLC, EJ Global. This is money that was supposed to go to the victims of a plane crash, including widows and orphans. Not good. The big question is…Did Erika know where the money in her LLC was coming from? The season started filming right before the story broke and more information comes to light every week. Bravo couldn’t have asked for more drama! If you’re not a fan of the show, you can watch the documentary The Housewife and the Hustler on Hulu if you want to get up to speed quickly.

Anyway, Pretty Mess came out in 2018 so there is no mention of any of that. However, I read it to see if there were any clues that Erika might have been in on Tom’s schemes. And the answer is, not really. However, Erika Jayne was never signed by a record label – she’s entirely self-funded and it doesn’t sound like she makes that much money performing. I would venture to say that she probably loses money because she is spending a boatload on costumes, and glam, travel and making music videos for her songs. Also, who knows how much she pays Mikey, her right-hand man and creative director. I’m sure he doesn’t come cheap.

Sadly, there is only one chapter about her experience on RHOBH and its light on details. She goes into a lot more detail about her time on Dancing with the Stars. I did enjoy reading about her pre-Housewives life though. I didn’t know much about her because she rarely talks about her past on the show. She opens up quite a bit about her relationship with her parents and grandmother. Fun fact: It was ghost-written by Brian Moylan, who wrote The Housewives: The Real Story Behind the Real Housewives that I reviewed a few weeks ago.

Pretty Mess was a quick, fun read that fans of RHOBH will enjoy. I checked it out from the library because I felt weird about giving her money while she’s in the midst of this legal scandal. If you’ve been following it, let me know what you think…Did Erika know??… (plus d'informations)

While the first half of the book circles around the author's adolescence, youth, growing up, and becoming herself, the second part lets this book down severely. Even though this book is written much in the same short and no-nonsense manner in which the author speaks on "Real Housewives", and there are a few real gems to be found here - notably on her relationship with her mother, and how her world turned once she became famous - there's a lot of filler here, e.g. far too many pages of faff from "Dancing With The Stars", which sums up what a far leap she is from common life. She even defines her own "me too", which has nothing to do with what you probably think it means. She gives no rich-person excuses for her lifestyle, while offering no true insight into it, which simultaneously lends a veneer to the book as a whole; I was hoping for more internal insights from this place, but got more pages of the times spent Erika gets flown in her Gulfstream private jet plane. All in all, if you chuck the book after the first 60%, I'll say the experience is probably the better for it.… (plus d'informations)