I so wanted to like this book. The concept is great and the author is a undoubtedly a great talent. However, she's also so freakin' in love with her giant literary brain and apparently hotness that I had a hard time liking her. That's a problem when you're reading a memoir. there were times when I laughed out loud but more often I was groaning inwardly at her meek tries to be charmingly self-depreciating. Self-depreciation only works when you actually think it's kinda true. Her attempts read lik...

Now I understand all those empty-headed women in college who majored in dating. Headley dates and dumps a long string of men, pausing only to cobble together a book full of her weirdest experiences, minus any self-reflection. It's freakily interesting, until she meets a man as ruthlessly self-absorded as she is, who dates and dumps her. The book then devolves into self-pitying garbage. Until, of course, she accepts a proposal from an older man, who rescues her from her self-imposed misery, pover...

I read this book when it first came out and totally enjoyed it. Funny it's getting so many unfavorable reviews -- do they even understand that the author was not sleeping with all her dates? Meanwhile a book like My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands is well-recieved. Huh? My guess is that most people who judged this book didn't really read it. Personally I'm not comfortable rating books that I didn't read to the end. If I cannot finish a book, it simply means that the book is not...

So this books sounded good in theory. A woman decides that for one year she will accept date from anyone who asks her, man or woman, homeless crazy person, 60 year old man who does not speak English, it doesn't matter, she'll date them. I found the author annoying and a lot of the book ridiculous. I wanted to finish is (or maybe I just wanted it to end!) so I figured I'd give it 2 stars, but really not that great.

This book is 275 pages of masturbatory, pathological nonsense, an ill-conceived love letter to herself that should have stayed scrawled by ironic quill in Maria Dahvana Headley's coffee-stained moleskine journal. Maria Dahvana Headley has tried to convince the audience how incredible she is and succeeded only in irritating and enraging me.This is the most self-indulgent, ridiculous, racist, appallingly idiotic, pretentious, and misguided memoir ever written. The shaky and dubious premise aside,

The premise is very interesting: a young women decides that her standards for dating are too high (and thusly leading to her overall unhappiness and lack of love). She decides that, for a year, she will abandon all of her ideals and simply say 'yes' to every man (and woman!) who asks her out.The problem with the books premise is, of course, a sort-of catch-22. In one sense, The Year of Yes is empowering to read as a single woman: to see another woman throw caution to the wind for love and happin...

Fun

I enjoyed this book simply because it was so far outside of anything I would ever want to experience!At the age of 20, the author was living in NYC. In the hopes of finding true love, she decided that for an entire year, she would go out with ANYONE who asked her. (She did put a FEW limits on this.) She went out with some truly bizarre guys, some of whom you'd pretty much only meet in a place like NYC! She did end up finding a prize, but not in New York.The one thing I found disturbing was how q...

“I’d decided, in the moment, to do with men as I’d done with books. Read them all.” A promising premise, a lackluster execution. Maria is all of 21, from Idaho to NYC, and, alas, no true love yet! So for a year she decides to date any person that asks from cab driver to crazy. Clearly she is the wrong person to write this book—name-droppingly well-read, poor NYU theater student and apparently a smiling, short, heartbreaking beauty in NYC. Though she meets a terrible parade of neurotic guys, her

Maria Dahvana Headley's persona in this memoir, where she describes a year in which she goes out on dates with anyone who asks her, is at once charming and irritating. There's a series of really bad choices, only some of which she clearly identifies as such. At the same time, I found myself liking her. She seems fun, if immature. The time period she writes about is during her time as a college student at NYU, so her general immaturity and ego makes a good deal of sense. One thing that's a little...

In theory, The Year of Yes sounded interesting and inspiring. In practice, it's 300 pages of a 21-year old bemoaning her love life while attempting to be witty. The only time Maria felt real was when she reminded us that people do crazy things when they think they're in love and especially when that love is gone, and that it's normal, if not necessarily "okay." Otherwise, her self-alienation (too smart for the normal people, too "real" for the intellectuals, too normal for her classmates, too we...

My book club chose this with the expectation of a fun, light read as we approach warmer weather. At the time of this writing Headley, an NYU student, decides to spend a year saying "yes" to all offers of dates for a year. As one would guess, she ends up dating a lot of weirdoes. Headley's writing gave me the impression that she's a smart-alecky know-it-all who's desperately trying to flaunt how intelligent she is. She certainly lacks commonsense at every turn. Her over-the-top forced attempts at...

I wasn't expecting much out of this book (grabbed it off my roommate's bookshelf as I needed something to read to sleep) but found the premise and the first 50 pages witty and amusing. And then things got bad. Her literary references, which announced "I'm a smart, well-read girl" and made me feel like part of the club, were not enough to prevent her cute tangents from becoming annoying, somewhat irrelevant, and a bit poorly written. She also sounded more and more naive and unforgivably air-heade...

I really liked the premise of this book. Maria is 21, in Nyc, and unhappy with her love life so she decides to say yes to every offer for a date for an entire year. True story! It's really funny and parts are sad, and overall you feel like you really get to know the author well and relate to her neuroses. Because I have too much time on my hands and am a dork, I made a soundtrack that would go well with the book and the character.New Soul...Yael NaimThe First Cut Is The Deepest...Cat StevensSlee...

This was a cute, fast read. Not to be confused with "Yes, Man", which was developed into a movie. This dealt with Headley's year of yes as it relates to dating in New York. Now, if you decide to read this book - please keep in mind that you are reading a work by a woman that loves witty wording, obtuse historical cross cultural references and attended NYU. So, if you don't like Gilmore Girls meets pretentious wittiness on a New York level - take a shot of Jack D before you sit down and start tur...

It's not a big story or a happy story or even an important story or, I hope, a common story, but I liked it. Maria, after years of experiencing romance horror stories, decides to accept every invitation for a date for the next year. And she winds up on some doozies. Fun. (I've decided to name a new genre, a genre that seems to be popular right now: the challenge book. Into this category, I'd place Julie and Julia, The Know-It-All, and this book. I like this genre.)

This book is really badly written. Each sentence is crammed full of as many cutesy pop fiction references and elaborate adjectives as possible. It's very affected and it just ended up irritating me to the point where I only read 3/4 of the book before giving up. And I only spent $1.19 on it, too, because I got it from Goodwill. Don't bother.

oh what a disappointment!ok it's a memoir & not a self-help guide. but really, it's an unevenly written & erratically paced ride in an early twenty-something's love life. the year of yes focuses so much on the inner agonies & dramas of a young, self-involved college kid one cannot take it seriously. the book is not light & frothy reading. yet it doesn't offer substance either. instead, one feels like the author's tale of collegiate self-discovery & gradual dawning of self-awareness & increased s...

One of my college professors knows the author, so that's only 3 degrees of separation. And I like the idea of saying yes in life, even if I'm not dating.I really enjoyed this humorous memoir. Lots of food for thought, particularly after listening to "Think Out Loud" on OPB about the recent trend of fictionalized memoirs. This is certainly written from the author's point of view with a healthy dose of poetic license, but I throughly enjoyed it.

DISAPPOINTING. Great concept--a year of something, a quest...I like that kind of thing. But here's a secret for all you writers out there: I hate the narrator/author. I could care less if she finds happiness, she is weird and unsympathetic in every way. I feel a little sad about this whole thing.