Wow. If you don’t know a thing about MLMs or pyramid schemes besides the fact that they’ve ruined many lives… Paulson will be your guide (but don’t worry “hun,” she promises that she’s retired from that mess).

In some of the most straightforward yet amusing & beguiling writing I’ve come across in years, this memoir/cautionary tale comes across like a friend catching up over brunch. It’s very personal, yet still very insightful about the biz. Taken from her copy/paste messages that began “Hey Hun,” Paulson zooms along on the ride of her life. The amazing intro alone is all you need to read (and learn from) if you wanted to know that even successful MLMs (and their members) are not the panacea they’re touted to be. A line about how this convoluted type of company enables & rewards women to hurt other women under the guise of empathy — quickly stuck in my head like glue (not sure if I could share the actual sentence, but it’s great). Characters from the AmazonPrime doc “LulaRich” make appearances & you can almost see this prose on the same screen.

Weaving in a story of her substance abuse journey (she’s now successfully sober!), of the past she writes of how her GPS goes wildly off course as she reaches the height of the MLM pyramid (while 97+% of enrollees lose money, if you do well enough, for a time, there’s a (literal) white car waiting in your name). It’s no surprise the author was able to sell, as this truly entertaining production her storytelling salesperson skills are on full display, page after entertaining page.

From joining a MLM company, making $30,000 a month to quitting it all...

This is a fantastic memoir that really allows the reader to get a sense of the life and thought process of a MLM top sales rep. Emily does an excellent job sharing MLM tactics and her experiences.
Emily's story also heavily focuses on alcohol abuse.

Thank-you NetGalley & Row House Publishing for the advanced reader copy (ARC) in exchange for my honest review of the book.

This was such a good and eye opening read. I loved the writing style and the flow of the book. It captures the reader and makes it hard to put the book down! The cover art is also stunning.

Thank you to the publisher for allowing me to read this eARC!

This is a book you need to read if you've ever thought about joining an MLM. DON'T DO IT. The author details her own experience and it's so sad to read about. I also liked that each chapter had an excerpt from someone else's own story from joining a scheme and it makes you understand how many people were taken advantage of and how they had to step on others to try to get to the top.

Wow! I saw so much of my own story in Emily's book. Hey, Hun could have been Hey, Girl, Hey! She writes truthfully and from her experiences. I appreciated her direct way of telling her story of involvement with multi-level marketing. So many of the conversations are ones I have had during my own time in MLMs. I want everyone to read this book and to be aware of the things that are happening to a ton of stay at home moms.

Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book for the purpose of this review. 5 stars from me!

This is a book detailing the author's experience rising to high levels in an MLM (not specified) and eventually making the decision to leave it. It shows her journey starting before she was introduced to the company all the way through the present day. I felt like it was very empathetic to those who are involved in these companies while also calling out the issues and manipulation involved in the industry. She also brings up the connections between white supremacy and MLMs (and there are a lot).
While a lot of the information will be familiar to anyone who has done research on the problem of MLMs, it's still really fascinating (and heartbreaking) to read about one person's experience so vividly. I felt like this book did a great job capturing small daily interactions and the endless quest to "get to the next level". The end of the book moves brings Covid and the 2020 election into discussion, and I felt like these topics could be entire books but they were put into just a few pages and felt a little rushed compared to the detail of the rest of the book.
I couldn't put this book down even though the topic was pretty familiar, which is credit to the writing and the engaging tone. However, it doesn't necessarily add a lot of new information to the conversation. I'd recommend this to people who are very new to reading about the subject of MLMs, those who are currently involved and want to read something that is empathetic, or those who just really want to read as much as they can about this issue.
3.5
CW: alcoholism (detailed as part of the author's journey to getting sober)

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.