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Up For Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over | 
 enlarge | Author: Cathy Alter
Publisher: Atria
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
Buy New: $7.50
You Save: $16.50 (69%)
New (31) Used (17) from $6.98
Rating:  87 reviews
Sales Rank: 83539
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.9
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0743288408
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.602
EAN: 9780743288408
ASIN: 0743288408
Publication Date: July 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
By age thirty-seven, Cathy Alter had made a mess of her life. With a failed marriage already under her belt, she was continuing down the path of poor decisions, one paved with a steady stream of junk food, unpaid bills, questionable friends, and highly inappropriate men. So she sat down and asked herself what she truly wanted. A decent guy. A nicer home. More protein. When she took a closer look at her wants, she noticed something that seemed very familiar -- with the addition of exclamation points, her list could easily be transformed into the cover lines on every women's magazine: Find the love you deserve! Paint to the rescue! Eggs-actly perfect meals!So Cathy gave over her life to the glossies for the next twelve months, resolving to follow their advice without question. By the end of her subscriptions, she would get rid of upper-arm jiggle, crawl out of debt, host the perfect dinner party, run a mile without puking, engage in better bathtub booty, ask for a raise, and rehaul her apartment. Well, at least that was the premise of her social experiment. What actually happened was much less about cosmetic change and much more about internal transformation. Singular in its voice and yet completely universal, Up for Renewal will appeal to all who have ever wondered if they could actually make their life over.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 82 more reviews...
 12 Months to Change Your Life October 7, 2008
When I came of age and left home I was at that stage of life where I didn't trust (or want) my mother's advice. I found myself sitting in the break room at work nibbling on my bagel and being stared at by the flawless faces of actresses and supermodels while bright colored cover lines offered all the advice I was looking for. My uber strict, religious parents had never allowed magazines in the house, especially those where teens could read about sex or learn how to find the best bikinis. Here were whole guidebooks on how to find love, be a sex goddess and what to wear while doing it. Cosmo, Glamour and Marie Claire became my guidebooks into the world of being an adult woman.
Cathy Alter's experience might not have been the same, but when I read about this book months ago I felt drawn to it. Afterall, someone out there had taken all those articles I have saved over the years in hopes of one day using their tips, tricks and advice to trim down, do my eye make-up without looking like a prostitute, find the most flattering jeans for my body type, and put them into practical use.
In a very Carrie Bradshaw-esque narrative, Alter explains all the uglies in her life that lead to her year of subscriber madness. Her unhappy marriage and subsequent divorce. Her vending machine contents diet. Her sex with-all-the-wrong-men life. Maybe not everyone who reads this book has gone through the same fumblings but it was easy to relate to her feeling of needing a change. Like me, she couldn't rely on her mother for help so her turn to magazines made me feel a lot less silly for doing so in my younger years.
Cathy ended up subscribed to fourteen different magazines including Self, Real Simple, O (The Oprah Magazine), InStyle, Allure and Cosmo. Each month she chose an aspect of her life she wanted to make changes or improvements to and used her magazines to find ways to do each. From simply packing a home-made lunch to avoid vending machine junk food to keeping up a healthy appetite for sex with her long-term boyfriend. At times the seemingly superficial things she wanted to change actually became quite profound. For example, during her cooking month a close friend was diagnosed with a life threatening condition so she wanted to do something special for him. She wanted her friend to have something good before he went through the horrors of hospitals and tests, so she prepared a meal for him. The recipe ended up being so miserably spicy that it was impossible to eat and as they laughed over it she realized that it didn't matter what she had cooked, what mattered was that it had brought them together. It was the one time in reading this book that I got a little choked up.
By the end of her 12 months Alter was ready to move on from her magazine living experiment. She had reached a point where she no longer needed to run to them for advice. Her year as a subscriber had helped her make the improvements she sought and she had learned not only a lot of new things, like how to wrap a sandwich in plastic wrap, but also how to trust her own instincts.
All in all it felt like reading a woman's self-improvement blog. I think fans of Sex and the City would appreciate the writing style and even some of the subject matter. I think this would be a terrific gift for a newly divorced friend or college graduated who is going through a floundering stage of in-between-ness. I keep picturing it in a gift basket with the latest copy of Self, Real Simple and Allure, some dark chocolate, a copy of the Sex and the City movie, a bottle of wine and a pair of comfy slippers. Woah. I think I just planned out my recently-divorced mother's Christmas gift. Enjoy!
 Up for Renewal... naw, just leave on the shelf October 7, 2008
As a huge magazine reader I was really looking forward to reading this book. As I got further and further into the book I found myself rooting against the author. While the premise of the book was engaging the actual execution of the idea lacked any commitment. This is really a "novel" that would have made a good magazine article but lacked the substance necessary for a book.
Started out well, then fizzled October 6, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
At 322 pages, this book is about 200 pages too long. The book starts out with a very interesting summary of the newly divorced author's toxic romantic/sexual relationships and other self destructive behaviors, and describes her interesting plan to improve her life. Unfortunately, my interest waned rapidly as the book progressed. The writing style was inconsistent. Brilliant in places, incredibly boring in others.
Borrow this book from the library if you feel you must read it.
 A Cosmo Cover Comes to Life October 5, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
As an editor and book critic at PODBRAM, I have read a number of books aimed at women, and this is certainly one of the best of those I have read in that genre. I cannot speak for all male readers, but from my viewpoint, Cathy Alter is a highly competent writer in all respects. As I have sometimes done, I chose to read Ms. Alter's lighthearted poke at the frivolity and pseudo-seriousness of women's magazines sandwiched between a pair of books of much heavier subject matter, and Up for Renewal proved to be a very satisfying read.
Up for Renewal is apparently autobiographical and has been composed in a sort of real-time framework. Ms. Alter has been a contributor to some of the same magazines discussed in the book, showing off her insider expertise on a plotline of which she is intimately familiar. What I was most impressed with was her deft, yet compact, use of the characters, dialog, pacing, and language in the storyline. I felt as if I was being taken along on a slice-of-life joyride by a lady who really knows how to drive. Although this is only Cathy's second book, her extensive experience in magazine writing drips off the pages. Maybe that's why the storyline is so precise. The author knows how to truly make every word count, showing off some really tight editing. Do I have anything negative to say about Up for Renewal? I get a delicately queasy feeling that Ms. Alter has led a very easy, comfortable, upper-middle-class lifestyle that has left very little room for any angst to develop that cannot be solved by a little dose of feminist, pop psychology. Maybe that's just the impression I get when I read Up for Renewal between a morality treatise on the death penalty and the history of religious politics in America.
Cathy Alter creates a style that I strongly admire, one that I have diligently tried to impart in my own books, the concept of giving the reader the deepest and best experience possible in as few words as possible. Up for Renewal held my interest from the first word to the last, and I'm not even a member of the skirt-wearing target audience for the book!
Floyd M. Orr is the author of The Last Horizon: Feminine Sexuality & The Class System, Timeline of America: Sound Bytes from the Consumer Culture, and a few books on subjects that men like to read.
Better than the description sounds October 5, 2008
When I first read the description of this book, I thought it would be like the website chronicling following Oprah's every piece of advice. I was wrong.
The magazine advice is really just a structure around which the author builds her story of breaking her self-destructive patterns and creating a new life for herself. Each month, she focuses on a different area- diet (the author doesn't need to lose weight and isn't trying; she just wants to stop eating her lunch out of the vending machine), sex, clothing, exercise, etc. She chooses the subject based on what she needs in her life at the time, and she often uses the advice in a way that the original article does not always intend. For instance, an article about wardrobe essentials that is obviously meant to inspire readers to go out and buy becomes a guide for cleaning out her closet instead.
One word of warning- the author starts out as pretty unlikeable. Even her best friend wants to ditch her (one of the catalysts of this journey). She does some pretty stupid things, and initially makes it sound like she divorced her ex-husband because he gained 100 lbs. However, her sheer determination to fix her life by focusing on one small thing at a time is pretty gutsy and endearing. I was really prepared to hate her through the whole book. I did find myself rooting for her by the end, though.
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