Meet Rosellen Brewer, Sno-Isle Libs., Marysville, WA Review count: 425 From her oeuvre: Rue McClanahan’s My First Five Husbands...and the Ones Who Got Away Rosie O’Donnell’s Celebrity Detox: The Fame Game Alan Alda’s Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself

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Rosie O’Donnell, Rue McClanahan, and Alan Alda may not be the most literary memoirists, but their sagas are embraced by Rosy Brewer, a branch manager for Sno-Isle Libraries near Seattle, who’s been reviewing gushy tell-alls for LJ for nearly a decade. She began reviewing first novels for us in 1975, during her first library job, before moving over to performing arts books. Keeping her finger on the pop-culture pulse (with two TiVo®s, no less) takes a bit of creativity: "I read at the gym. Reading gets me to go there. I put on my iPod, and I have this really cool little device, it’s a plastic thing you hook on the elliptical or the bike and it holds the book open." She’s been reading Shirley MacLaine’s Sage-ing While Age-ing, which she dug until the three chapters on UFOs. And what does she listen to while reading at the gym? "Mostly 1970s and 1980s rock. The classics: Jackson Brown, Joni Mitchell, Journey," she says with a laugh. She calls celeb autobiographies her guilty pleasure (MacLaine’s book wasn’t even an LJ assignment). "As soon as I start reading one, I know where it’s gonna go. But they’re not all the same. True stories are actually more dramatic and interesting than novels because that’s life. You can always tell the ones that are ghost written. They’re not better. They don’t tell everything—kind of like a puff piece—or they’re too overdramatic." Wait and see what this ace has to say about Julie Andrews’s forthcoming Home: A Memoir of My Early Years.