Molly's Game: From Hollywood's Elite to Wall Street's Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker
By Molly Bloom
Publication Year: 2014
Type: Non-fiction
Genre: memoir, crime
Read on 2021-02-10
★★★★☆
Devoured this in a day after re-watching the movie recently, because I was interested in Molly Bloom and also wanted the dirt on the celebs she names. Really well-written and paced. Tobey Maguire is a real dick, played brilliantly as an un-named celebrity by a perfectly cast Michael Cera in the film. Not quite as self-critical as I personally would’ve preferred and more than a little self-congratulatory/self-absolving in the end. Definitely reads like a book written by someone who wants to retain full authority over what she discloses and wants to frame in her own story - as is her right in this medium. I leave wondering exactly what she left out and if she really was as innocent and naive as she claims. I am critical not of the writing style or storytelling (memoir more so than biography always spells a degree of fiction) but more so of the general air of scrappy #girlboss, American Dream, rags-to-riches ideology underpinning her character arc that kind of slyly glides over the very privileged upbringing she had as a child of a distinguished professor father and devoted stay-at-home (?) mom who both wholeheartedly funded and supported her and her brothers’ education and many extracurricular pursuits.
There is no resolution as this book came out before her case was concluded, but the movie fills in the gaps. I was pretty surprised by just how many scenes in the movie were lifted pretty close to verbatim from the book - a testament to the cinematic and dramatized (can also call it edited or streamlined) way Bloom wrote. Highly entertaining. What the movie omitted were her several romances as well her genuine friendships, which I get from a story POV but these lent a lot more sympathy to her as a person with a personal life in addition to her ambitions.
