Status
Checked out
Due Jun 24, 2022
Publication
Little, Brown and Company (2018), Edition: 1, 288 pages
Description
Biography & Autobiography. Business. Nonfiction. Economics. HTML:A "gorgeous" (New York Times) memoir that braids the evolution of one of America's most iconic branding campaigns with the stirring tales of the women who lived behind its facade - told by the inheritor of their stories. In 1899, Allie Rowbottom's great-great-great-uncle bought the patent to Jell-O from its inventor for $450. The sale would turn out to be one of the most profitable business deals in American history, and the generations that followed enjoyed immense privilege - but they were also haunted by suicides, cancer, alcoholism, and mysterious ailments. More than 100 years after that deal was struck, Allie's mother Mary was diagnosed with the same incurable cancer, a disease that had also claimed her own mother's life. Determined to combat what she had come to consider the "Jell-O curse" and her looming mortality, Mary began obsessively researching her family's past, determined to understand the origins of her illness and the impact on her life of Jell-O and the traditional American values the company championed. Before she died in 2015, Mary began to send Allie boxes of her research and notes, in the hope that her daughter might write what she could not. Jell-O Girls is the liberation of that story. A gripping examination of the dark side of an iconic American product and a moving portrait of the women who lived in the shadow of its fractured fortune, Jell-O Girls is a family history, a feminist history, and a story of motherhood, love and loss. In crystalline prose Rowbottom considers the roots of trauma not only in her own family, but in the American psyche as well, ultimately weaving a story that is deeply personal, as well as deeply connected to the collective female experience.… (more)
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User reviews
LibraryThing member brangwinn
Jello was the staple of my childhood and the red, white and blue salad still is required at my 4th of July celebrations. It saddened me to read the story of a grandmother, mother and daughter whose wealth came from the sale of Jello, not to have a happy life. Money doesn’t make you happy. I liked
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the inclusion of the information about evolution of the Jello ads as the author moved forward with her memoir, comparing how her life matched what Jello was trying to sell. Show Less
LibraryThing member akblanchard
Author Allie Rowbottom, a fourth generation heiress to the Jell-O fortune, contends that her family is under a curse related to the time-honored gelatin dessert. This curse manifests itself in various ways, from squabbles over money to alcoholism, mental illness, incest, and even cancer. Drawing
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upon her mother's voluminous but unpublished memoirs, Rowbottom pieces together the evidence for such a curse, ultimately attributing it to the patriarchal system her family's signature product represents. Jell-O Girls is a compelling, if at times overwritten, look at the corrupting influence of family wealth and the price of women's culturally-induced silence about things that matter. Recommended. Show Less
LibraryThing member ecataldi
Beautifully written, albeit a bit meandering. This family memoir (memwah) is written by the daughter of a strong and spirited mother and grandmother. Born into the Jell-O money, they may not have wanted for material things, but their emotional and physical lives were never bettered by their
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family's wealthy legacy. Allie recounts her grandmother's tragic life and how it influenced her mother's and her own unconventional upbringing. Peppered throughout, is the story of Jell-O and it's deep ties with women, motherhood, and domesticity. Not exactly an uplifting read, but still an interesting one. The author then compares her tumultuous life with the girls from LeRoy (also ironically her mother's AND Jell-O's birthplace) who found their limbs inexplicably freezing up in 2012. Parallels are drawn, connecting her family history to Jell-O and the mysteriously frozen young women. It's an interesting and intense read. Show Less
LibraryThing member splinfo
The history of Jello in American, it's discovery, introduction, constantly changing marketing for 100 years is VERY interesting. The disfunctional women of the family got very old for me though. Too much angst and too much detail w/o a larger context. I barely finished it. Rowbottom is a decent
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writer, but nothing stood out to me as astoundingly insightful. Maybe I'm too old and she's too young. ;) Show Less
LibraryThing member CarrieWuj
There is a lot going on in this book. Allie Rowbottom covers the history of Jell-o and the way it is intertwined with her own family history (her great-great-great uncle bought the patent in 1899), so there is are those 2 threads. Then there is a treatise of sorts on Jell-o's role in constricting
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and constraining women in a domestic mold and how that impacted her grandmother and her mother (not well! Mental illness, cancer) and finally there is some reporting on a phenomenon from 2011 in which a group of high school girls came down with a collective illness/condition that involved muscle spasms and tics, twitching, jerking. They were diagnosed with conversion disorder and mass psychogenic illness, but there never was a determined cause or physical germ, toxin, virus to trace it to. The girls happened to be from LeRoy, NY -- the birthplace of Jell-o. Allie is frank about her own struggles too with mental illness and eating disorders and self-perception. The family lore was about a "curse" and the stories she tells bear that out, but whether that is the curse of being a moneyed family who can live off the Jell-o legacy, or a curse of societal influence, or just the genetic predisposition to addiction, depression and other debilitating illnesses remains to be seen. While it is all clearly linked in Allie's mind, I wish it had been examined more singularly. Show Less
LibraryThing member TheLoisLevel
The section about Mary is the best. The backstory about Jello is interesting, but not well researched. Is it bad if I say it's a lazy effort by a rich girl?
LibraryThing member smorton11
I’ve been in a bit of a book-finishing rut for the past month and a half. All year I’d been flying through books and then, as soon as my grandmother got sick and passed away, I haven’t wanted to touch a book. Until now. Part of getting back to my normal life it seems must include reading
If I were to write a memoir, it would be a lot like Jell-O Girls. The publisher summary doesn’t exactly capture the spirit of the memoir – it sensationalizes it more than needed. Allie Rowbottom faces an interesting inheritance – money from Jell-O which supported her artist mother her entire life, and a “curse” so to speak, which is basically her family trying to find a source of blame for poor genes. I was intrigued when I picked it up, and it held me captivated until I finished it – in 48 hours. And then I went to log it in Goodreads and see what other people thought about it. Oh boy.
I need to start holding off on looking a Goodreads reviews until I’ve finished a book. I adored Jell-O Girls and thought it one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. It seems, however, I am in the minority when it comes to most readers and I think that there are two primary reasons for this. Firstly, the integration of the Jell-O story with that of Allie’s family doesn’t always work particularly well. It’s nice, and a refreshing interlude at times, to see how Jell-O has changed over the years, but it really has very little to do with Allie, her mother Mary, and her grandmother, Midge, our three female protagonists of the memoir. Second, if you’ve never experienced any of the traumatic events and family situations the main characters experienced, it can be easy to discount them as Rich White People Problems, as most people in my book club, and on the interwebs of Goodreads, seemed to do.
Those two things considered, as someone who has been the primary caretaker to a family member slowly dying of cancer, just lost her grandmother, has had to handle the fact that her mother will most likely die of cancer given that she’s already a three-time survivor, whose parents are divorced, whose family has a long history of mental illness, when you’ve struggled with anorexia nervosa and developed OCD tendencies, passed out and not remembered the last time you ate because you couldn’t control anything in your life except what you ate, well. You could say Allie’s Jell-O Girls is the story of me and my mother’s family.
We’re all a little crazy, humanity proves this. And when you’ve experienced very similar situations to Allie and you want to convey just how magnificently she captures the feeling of waiting for hours on end in the surgical waiting room that you struggled for years to find words to describe, you want to share that with people. You want to talk about just how important this book is to you, not just because you think it’s good, but because it let you know that you are far from alone. That other people have experienced the same set of traumas, self-inflicted and otherwise, that you have. That it’s okay to feel like you’re losing your mind and that you are not alone.
Despite working in a bookstore and talking about books for a living and recommending countless books to people over the last few years, I don’t actually have the chance to sit down and talk about books in detail with many people. I get to give people my thirty-second elevator pitch on a book and hope they’ll buy it. And part of the success of the store I work at is that all of the employees have their own genres of interest – Su reads things dark and twisty, Pam reads contemporary women’s and historical fiction, Mary reads commercial nonfiction and fiction, Jennifer is our children’s buyer and can tell you anything and everything about all the picture books on the shelves, Kaz specializes in LGBT literature, PK reads business and history, Hadley reads the little known random books published by small, academic and indie presses, Staci reads just like my mom, thrillers and mysteries from Baldacci to Scottoline, and I read a little bit of everything in between. There’s not a whole lot of overlap. Therefore, enter book club – the perfect opportunity to discuss books with (mostly) like-minded individuals.
In my 29 years of existence and of the 220 books I’ve read since I started working at the bookstore in 2015, it is one of the best books I’ve ever read. I don’t care if the rest of the world disagrees with me. I will praise it for handling life situations that so many people find difficult to talk about. So please, ignore the plethora of poor ratings on websites. Ratings don’t capture the spirit of the book. If you think reading this book would benefit you, your family, please. Take a look at it.
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(which is very logical given my occupation, I just hadn’t felt like opening a book), and these days, reading means primarily nonfiction. It’s been a year of my near complete lack of interest in fiction and YA (my two staples for the past two decades), so when book club finally veered back to nonfiction, I was thrilled – I hadn’t actually finished a new book club book since, uh, January 2017.If I were to write a memoir, it would be a lot like Jell-O Girls. The publisher summary doesn’t exactly capture the spirit of the memoir – it sensationalizes it more than needed. Allie Rowbottom faces an interesting inheritance – money from Jell-O which supported her artist mother her entire life, and a “curse” so to speak, which is basically her family trying to find a source of blame for poor genes. I was intrigued when I picked it up, and it held me captivated until I finished it – in 48 hours. And then I went to log it in Goodreads and see what other people thought about it. Oh boy.
I need to start holding off on looking a Goodreads reviews until I’ve finished a book. I adored Jell-O Girls and thought it one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. It seems, however, I am in the minority when it comes to most readers and I think that there are two primary reasons for this. Firstly, the integration of the Jell-O story with that of Allie’s family doesn’t always work particularly well. It’s nice, and a refreshing interlude at times, to see how Jell-O has changed over the years, but it really has very little to do with Allie, her mother Mary, and her grandmother, Midge, our three female protagonists of the memoir. Second, if you’ve never experienced any of the traumatic events and family situations the main characters experienced, it can be easy to discount them as Rich White People Problems, as most people in my book club, and on the interwebs of Goodreads, seemed to do.
Those two things considered, as someone who has been the primary caretaker to a family member slowly dying of cancer, just lost her grandmother, has had to handle the fact that her mother will most likely die of cancer given that she’s already a three-time survivor, whose parents are divorced, whose family has a long history of mental illness, when you’ve struggled with anorexia nervosa and developed OCD tendencies, passed out and not remembered the last time you ate because you couldn’t control anything in your life except what you ate, well. You could say Allie’s Jell-O Girls is the story of me and my mother’s family.
We’re all a little crazy, humanity proves this. And when you’ve experienced very similar situations to Allie and you want to convey just how magnificently she captures the feeling of waiting for hours on end in the surgical waiting room that you struggled for years to find words to describe, you want to share that with people. You want to talk about just how important this book is to you, not just because you think it’s good, but because it let you know that you are far from alone. That other people have experienced the same set of traumas, self-inflicted and otherwise, that you have. That it’s okay to feel like you’re losing your mind and that you are not alone.
Despite working in a bookstore and talking about books for a living and recommending countless books to people over the last few years, I don’t actually have the chance to sit down and talk about books in detail with many people. I get to give people my thirty-second elevator pitch on a book and hope they’ll buy it. And part of the success of the store I work at is that all of the employees have their own genres of interest – Su reads things dark and twisty, Pam reads contemporary women’s and historical fiction, Mary reads commercial nonfiction and fiction, Jennifer is our children’s buyer and can tell you anything and everything about all the picture books on the shelves, Kaz specializes in LGBT literature, PK reads business and history, Hadley reads the little known random books published by small, academic and indie presses, Staci reads just like my mom, thrillers and mysteries from Baldacci to Scottoline, and I read a little bit of everything in between. There’s not a whole lot of overlap. Therefore, enter book club – the perfect opportunity to discuss books with (mostly) like-minded individuals.
In my 29 years of existence and of the 220 books I’ve read since I started working at the bookstore in 2015, it is one of the best books I’ve ever read. I don’t care if the rest of the world disagrees with me. I will praise it for handling life situations that so many people find difficult to talk about. So please, ignore the plethora of poor ratings on websites. Ratings don’t capture the spirit of the book. If you think reading this book would benefit you, your family, please. Take a look at it.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Daumari
I felt obligated to read this after Allie showed up on two of the podcasts I listen to (Gastropod's episode on gelatin/jelly, and the Sporkful posting a guest episode from Household Name). While the history of the Jell-O company is sprinkled throughout, like the subtitle says this is primarily
Family history, feminism, and Jell-O's marketing strategies throughout the years are deftly woven into a quick pageturner. Looking at other GR ratings, opinions seem pretty mixed, and I wonder if that's due to expectations. This isn't a microhistory of Jell-O, nor does it focus on the inventor's family (the man who sold it to the Woodwards, who Allie is related to by marriage). However, it's an alright piece for the mother-daughter genre.
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biography- first, of Allie's grandmother Midge, and then mostly about her mother, Mary. Family history, feminism, and Jell-O's marketing strategies throughout the years are deftly woven into a quick pageturner. Looking at other GR ratings, opinions seem pretty mixed, and I wonder if that's due to expectations. This isn't a microhistory of Jell-O, nor does it focus on the inventor's family (the man who sold it to the Woodwards, who Allie is related to by marriage). However, it's an alright piece for the mother-daughter genre.
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Awards
Language
Original language
English
Physical description
288 p.; 9.63 inches
ISBN
9780316510615