Hats & Eyeglasses: A Family Love Affair with Gambling

Hats & Eyeglasses: A Family Love Affair with Gambling
by Martha Frankel

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Book Summary Information

Author: Martha Frankel
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-02-14
ISBN: 1585425583
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Tarcher

Book Reviews of Hats & Eyeglasses: A Family Love Affair with Gambling

Book Review: She's Got Game
Summary: 5 Stars

Stopsmiling In her memoir, the hilarious, tragic and engrossing Hats & Eyeglasses: A Family Love Affair with Gambling (a title which refers to all that's left floating on the surface after a gambler has lost it all), Frankel writes, on playing in the casinos, "I'm wearing cleavage, attitude, and what might be, anywhere but here, a bit too much perfume." Now a self-proclaimed "poker slut," she kept doing her celebrity interviews, but with a new flair. She once talked actress Jennifer Beals into coming with her to the Hollywood Park poker room and got Beals to pull up a chair behind her, tape recorder in her lap, so that Frankel could keep shoving chips and winning hands of stud while conducting the interview.

Then one day Frankel discovered you could play online, in your pajamas. She became a self-proclaimed "poker junkie." She lost $60,000. She lied to her friends and family. She writes of online poker: "It's like crack cocaine -- very fast, very mindless, and impossible to stop. The perfect game for a generation that grew up with MTV, fast computers and instant messaging." A conversation with her beloved mother, who tearfully assumed her daughter's AWOL status was her fault, finally shocked Frankel into quitting. Frankel's memoir of addiction and loss is in some ways also a love letter to her late mother. "My mother smoked like a grand old dame, making it look glamorous, and even erotic," writes Frankel. "Every memory of my mother has smoke curling up around the edges." In the end, Hats & Eyeglasses is a redemptive but cautionary tale for all would-be poker players out there: Watch out.

From The Frankel Interview
by Annie Nocenti
StopSmilingonline.com

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Summary of Hats & Eyeglasses: A Family Love Affair with Gambling

A gloriously written memoir of growing up in a family of hard- core gamblers-Martha Frankel thought the gambling gene had passed her by, until she found herself addicted to online poker and knee-deep in debt.

Most weekends when Martha Frankel was a kid, her mother had a mah-jongg game going in the kitchen with her girlfriends while their husbands were in the living room playing poker. Once Frankel reached adulthood, however, while her cousins were making their way in the world as bookies and drug dealers, gambling didn't much factor into her life.

In the tradition of Five-Finger Discount by Helene Stapinski and Dry by Augusten Burroughs, Hats & Eyeglasses traces Frankel's love affair with poker. It was a passion that bit her in her mid-forties and remained harmless enough when she stuck to real cards. But everything changed one evening in 1998 in Atlantic City, when Frankel overheard one dealer bemoan the fact that his tips that evening were going to be small what with the meager crowd assembled. Another dealer mentioned that everyone must be playing online-"Why leave the house when you can play in your pajamas?" the dealer said. Why indeed? thought Frankel, who couldn't wait to get back to her computer. The next morning she took a deep breath, typed in her credit card number, and entered the world of online gambling. It was the beginning of what one of her uncles called "hats and eyeglasses," a term used to describe those times when you're losing so bad you're drowning (so all one can see is the poker player's hat and eyeglasses floating on the surface of the water). By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Hats & Eyeglasses is a tale of passion, addiction-and those times in life when we almost lose our shirt.

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