Review: Losing It

Valerie Bertinelli was an icon in the 1970′s  We girls wanted to be her.  Boys wanted to be with her.  She starred in the hit sitcom One Day At A Time and went on to become a movie-of-the-week darling, back when those were mainstays in TV programming.  She was sweet, likeable, had a bit of a weight issue (at least by TV’s standards) and just seemed like someone you could be friends with.

 Now, after publicly sharing her struggles with food, Bertinelli has released her autobiography, called Losing It: And Gaining My Life Back One Pound At A Time.  It’s not ghost-written, this is all Val and there are some sweet little insider tidbits about the sitcom and her life with Eddie Van Halen, from whom she is now divorced.  She also revels in what she feels is her greatest achievement, their son Wolfie. 

Bertinelli confesses to having affairs during her marraige and tattles on Eddie’s string of extramarital activities, his binge-drinking and the fact that they did drugs together when they were first married.  She wasn’t quite the angel we viewers thought she was and she was haunted by insecurities, mainly to do with body image and weight.  I found a lot of common ground with her on that front.  Like me, she can remember if her weight was up or down in any era or an any major event of her life! She also thought she was huge when she was at her slimmest, as did I. 

This book does have a few good nuggets but it’s all surface.  Perhaps a ghost-writer would have helped her dig a little deeper into some of the issues and stories.  It’s a breezy, quick read that merely skims the topics.  She’ll say, for instance, that Ed was moody.  Well, why? What did “moodiness” do to his behavior?  She mentions how hard the marital fighting was on Wolfie but she never really gets into what they fought about.  She mentions a couple of outbursts by Ed but they’re not very well explained.  More detail and just better storytelling would have made it a more complete read.

Still, it’s a first person account of the life of a woman who entranced a lot of us kids of the 1970′s.  Who would have thought she would be so amazed that Holly Hunter knew who she was? Or that she had a relationship with Steven Speilberg?  I only wish the book was a little weightier, ironic, considering its author’s lifelong obsession with her own weight.