This book of essays by author Laura Lippman starts off strong and hilarious with plenty of girlpower, and slowly weakens until it concludes with a worshipful essay about her husband, who is some guy in television who made some show I've never heard of. Lippman is sure that his art will outlast hers and is more brilliant than hers. Is it a given that "The Wire" will go down in history and the Tess Monaghan series will be forgotten?

In fact, Lippman might write for a good twenty-five more years and "The Wire" will be so dated that it won't even popular for streaming or mainlining or whatever we'll do in 2045.

Previously published essays can be very tricky to expand into an effective book: when putting together old material with new material and fleshing it out with explanatory material, while trying to wrestle it into topical sections, the result is sometimes underwhelming and uneven, and this is the case with "My Life as a Villainess."

As the book slips into dull decline, Lippman declares that she's a goddess (great), she's an excellent mother (very good), she's a terrible friend (huh?), she's a moron compared to the man of the house (even if true, why say so)?

Lippman opines that she might even be, as a friend of hers accused before ghosting her, a narcissist. She then adopts a refrain about everything being "all about Laura.". This comes across as either creepy or whiny, but definitely not funny.

Lippman actually writes that there isn't room in her house for two geniuses, herself and her husband, and it doesn't sound like a joke. I'm not sure that her husband's absence, mentioned several times, is supposed to loom as large as it does in the book. It feels as though his genius must be praised to the skies in order to justify the fact that the author is 60 and raising an eight-year old daughter alone. It's okay if he's AWOL. He's a MacArthur Fellow.

I was interested in Lippman's flashes of autobiographical material (childhood, career, Twitter, menopause) but bored by her father's bar (another staggering genius, her father) and bored by her fabulous nanny. Her nanny is absolutely perfect but Lippman is not the least bit threatened by the prospect that her daughter loves her nanny more. Okay, fine. So what?

Ideally, from a marketing perspective, this book of essays would be so sharp and clever and witty that a reader would be inclined to read Lippman's fiction. Unfortunately, it flops in the middle like a souffle.

I received an advanced readers copy of this book from the publisher and NetGalley and was encouraged to submit an honest review.