Mama Mia!

As a devoted fan of Mia Freedman's, I was tickled pink when I found out she was releasing a new book. I had torn through 'The New Black' like a kid in a candy store a few years back and when there was no sequel, prequel or movie deal to satisfy my sudden addiction, I was left to twiddle my eager thumbs waiting for her to release a new installment.

And finally she has and it is everything I anticipated. The perfect mix of Mia's addictive dry-wit, sassy attitude and love/hate relationship with magazines, all squished into one lolly bag titled Mama Mia: A Memoir of Mistakes, Magazines and Motherhood.

I've always harboured a secret suspicion that Mia Freedman and I should be best friends and reading Mama Mia from cover to cover only further confirmed this. The book follows Mia's initiation into the Land Of Magazines, a glossy world of freebies, front covers and fake tan and where she is quick to learn there is more to the glossy veil than meets the eye. Eager to become the editor of Cleo by the age of 25, Mia goes on to take the magazine world by storm, becoming the youngest editor of Cosmopolitan and eventually, the editor-in-chief of Cleo, Cosmo and Dolly.

Listening to Mia describe her love and disgust for the magazine world felt a little like deja vu, but it was the sub-story of her personal life that really moved me. Her honesty about her struggles falling pregnant, the descriptions of her repeated miscarriages and the blow-by-blow accounts of her three labours are brutal on the emotions, but all delivered with the quick wit we love her for.

With her musings on magazines, media and motherhood, there is little bit in this book for everyone who either dreamed of working for a magazine, managed to survive it or who is prying a copy of Cosmo from the hands of their 13 year old daughter. Mama Mia a bit like an honest conversation over Cosmopolitans - a little shocking, laugh-out-loud funny and can sometimes result in the need for a tissue. Well worth the $27.99 from Harper Collins, although I got mine for free, and no, you can't borrow it.