Real Housewives star Lisa Rinna dishes on co-stars, reality TV and Melania Trump

MEMOIR
You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It
Lisa Rinna
HarperCollins, $55

During taping of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, it wasn’t uncommon for Lisa Rinna’s husband, Harry Hamlin, to consult his copy of the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). He was looking for the “personality disorder” that best captured the latest pathology Rinna reported from her mercurial castmates.

The fiery reality TV star, known for her “iconic” hairstyle and forthright personality, wields these labels and other barbs in her new book, You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It. Like most celebrity memoirs of this mould, her breezy, conversational exercise serves plenty of dish, a bit of venom and some tough lessons from the coalface of reality TV’s most popular franchise.

Take former Real Housewives colleagues Denise Richards and Garcelle Beauvais: both are given the moniker “full-blown narcissist”, with Rinna self-appointed as the “Narcissist Hunter of Beverly Hills”. Assessments of other celebrities encountered are less clinical: Dionne Warwick is a “nasty piece of work”, Star Jones a “twat”, Melania Trump simply a “robot”.

Rinna’s memoir, which also covers ageing in the public eye, grief and parenting, is an attempt for the 62-year-old to reclaim her “narrative”, one she claims she lost during her final year on Real Housewives that reframed her as the show’s “villain”.

During that period, Rinna raged at co-stars on-camera and ranted online about fashion houses and Donald Trump. Such histrionics, she now says, were fuelled by unresolved grief at her mother’s death and anger at the apathy of both the network and her castmates. “I had so much repressed anger from my mother’s death then … I really lost my mind,” she writes.

But before Rinna enjoyed the public spotlight thanks to her eight-year-run on Real Housewives, she was “hustling” everywhere: carving out a career in soap operas Days of Our Lives and Melrose Place, attracting controversy by appearing pregnant in Playboy magazine, spruiking incontinence briefs in TV commercials and hawking women’s clothing on home-shopping network QVC.

But reality TV, a “blood sport” according to Rinna, is where the actress solidified her public image and became one of the genre’s more popular – and polarising – figures. During her time on Real Housewives, she regularly fought with peers including Kim Richards (almost choking the actress at one point), once suggested an ill co-star was suffering from Munchausen syndrome (and not Lyme disease) and questioned if another star was doing cocaine off-camera.

Rinna’s retelling of her family’s many trials is where the memoir holds its emotional heft. There is her father’s decision to pursue assisted dying alongside her mother’s inspiring resilience, one borne after surviving a near-fatal attack by a serial killer. In July 1960, Rinna’s mother was bashed in the head with a hammer by David Carpenter (the “Trailside Killer”) but rescued from death by a police officer on patrol. (Carpenter raped and murdered many women across San Francisco a decade later.)

Rinna’s husband, Hamlin, meanwhile, has been alleged to be a “closet case”, a claim fuelled by his “brave” decision to appear as an openly gay man in the 1982 movie Making Love, about a man coming to terms with his sexuality. To put the “gay rumour” to rest, however, Rinna writes: “Harry’s heterosexual. He is not a gay man in any way, shape or form.”

After now escaping the “gangsters” running Real Housewives, Rinna is now enjoying a “Rinnaissance”, a rare feat for a woman in her 60s in the entertainment world. High-end fashion designers have booked her to appear in Paris runway shows, several dramatic movie roles have arrived and she has even become the public’s darling again with a popular appearance on The Traitors.

Her brazen – and now bestselling (in the US) book – memoir has also helped rebalance the scales.

You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It captures the firebrand housewife at her most delectable: shameless, unapologetic and simply “owning it”. “Bravo is the casino, we’re the players and the house always wins,” she writes. With this self-critical and frank project, Rinna recoups more than lost earnings – she now gets part of her story back.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.