Lisa Rinna Audiobooks

You Better Believe I'm Gonna Talk About It: a Hollywood career told without the edit

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Who is Lisa Rinna?

Before the reality television, there was a soap opera and a long career in front of American cameras. Lisa Rinna, born in California in 1963, arrived through Days of Our Lives and Melrose Place, spent the 1990s as a fixture of network drama, and might have settled comfortably into that.

Instead she reinvented herself repeatedly: presenting, a run on Dancing with the Stars, a clothing line sold on television, a cosmetics business, and then the eight seasons on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills that made her a household name to a generation who had never seen her act. She has been married to the actor Harry Hamlin since 1997, and their two daughters have built careers of their own.

What she has always had, whatever the format, is a refusal to perform serenity. She is candid to a degree that has cost her, and it is precisely that quality her readers come for.

Lisa Rinna in audiobooks

Her memoir is called You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It, which is both a promise and a warning. It runs the whole arc: the years of auditioning, the soap sets, the reinventions, the business ventures, and then the strange machinery of reality television, watched from the inside by someone who understood exactly what she was doing.

The harder chapters are the ones that matter. She writes about ageing on camera in an industry with no patience for it, about a daughter’s illness, about her marriage, and about losing her mother.

She reads it herself, and that is the whole case for the audio edition. The voice is unmistakable, the timing is hers, and nothing has been smoothed out by a narrator being careful. Nearly seven hours in her company, and it is all below.