You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up: A Love Story Book

Our engagement also proves the old adage that there's someone for everyone. The caveat is that the "someone" isn't necessarily someone who is perfect. It's someone whose eccentricities compliment your eccentricities and then, fingers crossed, over the years you don't outcrazy each other...

I can see why there are many negative reviews of this book. Neither author comes off as very likable. They are both vain, shallow, self-obsessed, whiny, emotionally-needy people...and you can TOTALLY see why they are together.

I have been married forever 22 years. That's a huge chunk of your life to spend with just one other person. (Especially when THAT person gets up each morning, goes in the bathroom, and makes sounds like he is attempting to expel a grapefruit-sized hairball. Imagine "A-heck! A-heck! A-heck!" Every morning. For 22 years.)

Gurwitch and Kahn (or Gurkahn, if you wanna get all Brangelina on it...) are both writers and actors that you might have seen in something at some point in your life. We're not talking A-List Celebrities, here. BUT, they have been married since 1996 and they're STILL together. (How many A-Listees can see that?) So, I think it's worth letting them have their say.

Each chapter is comprised of He Says/She Says segments, where each writer tells his or her own version of how they met, their courtship, wedding, etc. They also manage to squeeze in plenty of zings, barbs, stinging nettles and poisoned arrows...in a good-humored way, of course. They are both brutally, sometimes painfully, honest. (They also share, perhaps, too much information about personal fetishes and Brazilian waxes...) I have been married too long 22 years. This is what marriage is like. The good, the bad and the really, REALLY ugly.

Jeff and I aren't marriage boosters. I would never dream of telling anyone they should get or stay or stop being married--unless they were attached to the idea that they were going to live "happily ever after." Then I'd tell them they were out of their minds.

I got quite a few laughs out of the book. Even when KERPOW! (Sorry. I'm currently reading a book about the old Batman TV series.), their son is born with massive and multiple birth defects, I ended up laughing. When told their newborn had no anus, Gurwitch supposedly said, "No anus? What happens if he's gay?" "We'll be making him a new one," our doctor informed us. "Great," I answered. "My son was born in Los Angeles and they're already making him an asshole!"

Here is a couple that laughs, cries, argues and has sex (albeit, not as often as Kahn would like), all while raising a pretty neat-sounding kid.

I think we should all be so lucky.

I'm not sure if I can finish this book. I picked it up because it's got a clever title and I was wondering what advice a funny married couple might dish out about marriage. Obviously, they get the tone of mine with their title. But a few chapters into it, I'm feeling like I would not hit it off with this Jewish Hollywood couple. I find their self-deprecating remarks a little fake. It seems obvious to me that Annablle is a diva and Jeff wants her no matter how much crap she puts him through. In one breath, they'll tell you how CRAZY they can be, and in the next they are talking about how successful they are (She was in a Seinfeld episode! He produces and writes TV shows! John Cusack crashed at his house!)


When they started talking about kinky sex involving a lobster claw-shaped oven mitt, I unfortunately looked at the authors' photo on the dust jacket. I don't like to imagine these two having sex, as I do not find either of them attractive.

So I am slogging through half-heartedly because it's either this or essays about science on my bedside table and my brain would rather go with the junk food book just before bed.