Cameron Tuttle, author of The Bad Girl’s Guide to the Open Road, put out The Bad Girl’s Guide to Getting What You Want in 2000 with San Francisco’s Chronicle Books. Illustrated by Susannah Bettag, and packaged in a slick silver plastic dust cover, the book is so amusing it is sure to make any bad girl laugh so hard that milk will come out of her nose.
Tuttle writes on the first page that “Being a girl is your ice cream sundae- being a bad girl is the cherry on top.”
The table of contents, aptly titled “
A Bad Girl’s Wish List” (complete with check boxes for “
want it” and “
got it” next to each subsection) is as follows:
- The Bad Girl Swirl- which includes subsections like “A Typical Good Girl’s Transformation” and a quiz to determine if you are, in fact, a bad girl.
- Getting A Date- which includes subsections like “How to Make a Bad Girl Cocktail,” “How to Score More Free Drinks,” and “Brazenly Bad Pickup Lines.”
- Getting a Job- which includes subsections like “Paving Over Your Resume Gaps,” “The Secret Power of Post-its,” and “Great Ways to Get the Axe.”
- Getting a Life- which includes subsections like “The Bad Girl Party Planner,” “How to Be a Bad Influence,” and “Parking Place Princess.”
Also included in the book is a helpful series of “Things to Do with…” list, that offers suggestions on creative uses for “your boss’s business cards,” “photos of your evil ex,” and “Pantyliners.” (For example, she suggests sticking pantylines to your feet and using them as shower shoes at the gym.)
Other extras that make this book worth the $14.59 price tag include the “I want” statements that run in a small, red font across the bottom of most of the pages. Some of them just make you giggle, but some of them spark your mind and you start to remember all of the little things you’ve said over the years about what you want out of life.
If this book can’t turn you into a bad girl, then it will at least make you wish like hell that you were one.
Tuttle and Bettag also run a web site (www.badgirlswirl.com) where they, and other bad girls, can be reached.