Clara’s Verdict
Lisa Rinna is not a literary figure in the conventional sense, and she would be the first to tell you so. What she is, and what makes this memoir more interesting than its title might suggest, is a woman who has spent thirty years in the public eye navigating an industry specifically designed to chew through women of a certain age – and who has emerged from it with her personality intact, her sense of humour operational, and rather more to say about the whole experience than most of her contemporaries have been willing to admit. Narrated by Rinna herself and running to just under seven hours, You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It holds a rating of 4.0 out of 5 from 420 Audible listeners, which tells you something about the breadth of its audience.
This is not a great work of prose. It is, however, a genuinely entertaining one – and in the audio format, it is something else again.
About the audiobook
Rinna’s career spans decades: soap opera icon, reality television fixture, fearless social media provocateur, runway presence at the catwalks of Paris. The memoir covers all of it, but it is most valuable – and most candid – in the sections that depart from the celebrity highlights reel. She writes with real feeling about what it means to grow older in an industry that treats ageing women as a problem to be managed, about the specific difficulties of parenting a daughter with a chronic illness, about keeping a marriage alive and real when the whole apparatus of tabloid attention is trained on it.
The Real Housewives material – the behind-the-scenes mechanics of how the show actually works, her account of her departure from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the famous glass-smash moment in Amsterdam – will be catnip for Bravo fans. But Rinna is canniest when she writes about her parents, particularly her mother Lois, whose death became unusually public given the show’s timeline, and about what it means to grieve while cameras are still running. There is genuine vulnerability here beneath the self-mythologising, and it is more affecting than you might expect.
The narration
Here is where the audio format earns its keep. Rinna narrating her own memoir is a completely different experience from reading it on the page. Her voice carries the exact register the material needs – the wit, the self-awareness, the moments where she is laughing at herself, the moments where she clearly is not. As one listener put it, the audiobook adds a whole new dimension to the story, and that is simply true. The timing of a Rinna punchline, the particular way she delivers a piece of gossip, the slight catch in her voice during the harder passages – none of this translates to text. This is a book that benefits substantially from audio.
What readers say
Listeners broadly divide into fans who found exactly what they came for and sceptics who wanted more genuine self-examination. Bravo viewers have been warmly enthusiastic: several note that Rinna’s account of how The Real Housewives operates is genuinely illuminating, and that her candour about her departure is braver than the edited television version suggested. Critics counter that the book too often deflects from difficult questions, that the “owning it” persona can function as a shield rather than a window. Both responses seem honest. What the more critical reviews cannot dispute is that Rinna’s personality makes this an entertaining listen; even a one-star review focused on a packaging complaint rather than the content itself. The audiobook holds a solid 4.0 out of 5.
Who should listen?
Reality television enthusiasts, particularly fans of The Real Housewives franchise, will get the most from this one – the insider perspective is genuinely valuable, and the audio performance elevates the gossip considerably. But this is also a useful listen for anyone interested in the experience of women navigating Hollywood in their fifties and beyond, and for memoir fans who appreciate candour over polish. If you have always been vaguely curious about Lisa Rinna but never sure where to start, her own voice makes this the logical entry point. Listen to You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It on Audible UK and decide for yourself whether she has earned the right to talk about it.
