"Wow" is about all I can manage (in a sort of disbelieving, horrified way....)

A few weeks ago I was wandering around Forever21 on a lunch break and happened to observe the, um, shopping equivalent of a roadside car accident. The kind of car accident with lots of flashing lights and emergency vehicles and maybe even an overturned car that makes everyone stop n' gawk at the spectacle.

This girl was trying on all sorts of "tell me she's not planning to wear that out in public" type outfits. Good enough, most of us have put on some sort of trashtastic getup in the privacy of a dressing room just to see what we'd look like if we woke up as Bomshell McGee one morning. Difference: most of us don't go skipping through the store in our painted-on vinyl strech pants in search of our friends looking to show off our camel toe gloriousness.

That said: I couldn't look away. I sort of lurked near the dressing room waiting for Our Lady of the Spandex to spring out wearing the next halloween costume in a long procession of ill-advised, ill-fitting "outfits." She'd spin around in front of the mirrors and ask her friends, "So, is this totally trashy, or is it cute in a kinda 'rocker chick' way?"

If you have to ask............

Anyway - we'll call Jennifer Love Hewitt's foray into, um........."literature" the publishing equivalent of that girl in the dressing room. "The Day I Shot Cupid" is now on the shelves. And just like that vinyl stretch pants girl in the dressing room, well.....it's, um:

Painful.

Heinously awkward.

Hard to tear your eyes from.

Sort of delicious in it's unabashed awfulness.

My new favorite.

Case in point: an editor somewhere allowed the Girl Who Shot Cupid to actually publish the letters "lol" in the middle of a sentence. Yes, she "lol-ed" when she said: "Guys hate to spoon -- they prefer to fork, lol!"

Just let that sit there for a minute.

"......."

No words. There are simply no words.

Voice Publishing has created a monster. Er, no. They've just released the monster. NPR's Linda Holmes tackles it best in her review titled "Ten Things I Read In Jennifer Love Hewitt's Book That Are Not Hallucinations."

In fact, she does it better than I could, so here's the entire text of the article:

Actress Jennifer Love Hewitt, who became famous on the teen drama Party Of Five in the late 1990s, made a lot of people really angry by playing Audrey Hepburn in a TV movie, made many terrible movies, and then found her way to The Ghost Whisperer, has written a book.



Called The Day I Shot Cupid, it is subtitled, "Hello, My Name Is Jennifer Love Hewitt, And I'm A Love-aholic." Yes, this means that her name is on the cover of the book twice. As you can see from the cover, this book is about very serious advice for women about how to be happy. Despite the fact that I feel like I am walking right into a trap set by a publisher who expects this book to sell with an Irony Multiplier of about 8.5, I simply cannot help myself. Here are ten completely awesome things that happen in this book.


1. On page two of the introduction, the word "TRUTH" (in all caps, thusly) is followed by 23 exclamation points. On page three of the introduction, the word "love" is followed by five question marks. Two sentences later, the word "CUPID" is followed by two exclamation points. Three pages into the book -- pages of the introduction, which comes after the preface -- you're already basically reading the late stages of an Internet message-board meltdown.


2. On her own press: "I cannot even tell you how many times I've been reading an article, happy with what they have written, focusing on all the right things, and then, like the clap, it appears: serial dater." It seems to me that there is a very unfortunate and obviously unintentional parallel being drawn here between what causes one thing to "appear" and what causes another thing to "appear."


3. "Guys hate to spoon -- they prefer to fork, lol!"


4. "This is embarrassing and personal, but once a month, since I was twelve years old, I go to my favorite jewelry store and try on my dream ring." She is 31 years old. If this is true, she has made roughly 225 trips to the jewelry store to try on engagement rings. I do not know where to go with this.


5. From the list of 20 Things To Do After A Breakup: "Make out with a stranger (he must be gorgeous or you'll feel worse)."


6. From the list of 10 Things To Do Before A Date: "Spray tan is a must."


7. From the list of "Strikes," where if a guy has three, you forget it: "He keeps saying 'That's so dumb' when you're talking." Oh ... Jennifer Love Hewitt. I'm so sorry that possibly might have happened to you once or twice or I'm assuming you might not have brought it up.


8. "Remember, your body is a temple, not a 7-Eleven."


9. From the list of "What A Man Should Know": "How to pick a diamond," and "To always have a coat for you." A coat for you? Always? He should always have a coat for you? And pick out diamonds? I am beginning to think that Jennifer Love Hewitt and I do not share exactly the same priorities vis-a-vis romantic situations and also who is in charge of choosing and transporting our clothing.


10. I really don't want to go into detail about the last one. I will just point you to a video where she explains it. Because ... apparently everyone had already heard about this except for me, so I was the only one completely weirded out by it. It is ... NSFWPOFR (Not Safe For Watching Party Of Five Reruns), to say the least.

Yep. That number 10 item is the much-discussed "bedazzling" of her female parts with swarovski crystals. Whatever makes her feel better. My only question: do ya s'pose she'd feel a little silly if she went to all that effort to get herself all disco-ed out and then ended up going to bed alone? I'd feel silly. Or maybe not. Maybe I'd feel amazing and beautiful and sexy and princess-ee while all by my lonesome, just me and my swarovski bikini zone. Maybe.

Honestly: this book will totally wind up on my Kindle and I'll act like I have no idea how it got there. BUT, in between my bouts of wide-eyed, innocent denial that I actually spent the $9.99 and my secret eagerness to rush off to my lunch break and kill this thing cover-to-cover I do suspect it will be great giggle fuel for party conversations... Must agree with the singular ODDNESS of that #9 item up there that men should know to "always have a coat for you." Um, doesn't she live in LA? And on the long list of things that we women assume men "must know" I really don't think "have a spare coat handy" would even crack the top 500. But that's another discussion for another day.

I don't think Ms Hewitt is actually doing herself any favors with this book, which is actually too bad because I sort of feel like she needs all of the favors she can wrap her pretty little relationship-loving fingers around....she's dangerously close to becoming a caricature of herself, of becoming some sort of pop culture joke. And that would be a waste of that famously good cleavage.
OR, maybe I should just be thankful that I've just gleaned one new piece of Cupid-Slaying Dating Advice from Lil Miss Been-There: always spray tan before a date.
 
I have so overlooked that particular man-winning tactic for, oh, my entire life. Maybe that should come with a little caveat: "Spray tan is a must......UNLESS the date is less than 12 hours after the spraying AND the date takes place in 100-degree temperatures AND you decide white linen pants would be a good idea for the date." Um, unless you want "orange sweat spots" to be your next fashion misstep: skip the spray tan.
 
I'm not necessarily speaking from experience there, but, um....there might have been an emergency trip into a target to buy a cheap dress to change into....might have been.