53 pages • 1-hour read
I'll Have What She's Having
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Themes
Finding Joy and Fulfillment in Personal Relationships
The essays and vignettes collected in I’ll Have What She’s Having trace Chelsea Handler’s work to find joy and fulfillment in her personal relationships. Handler includes anecdotes from her familial, romantic, and personal life to show how intimate connection is multifaceted and creates change. She introduces her desire to establish rich, complex relationships in Chapter 1 when she describes the woman she wanted to become as a little girl. In general, she imagines this woman as someone who will “be able to light up a room, and her light would spread, making others feel brighter, better” (3). By the end of the collection, she has become this woman, someone who has “cast a wide net” and made friends “all over the world” (4). The intervening chapters capture the steps she makes to form authentic connections and to create a loving social network.
The relationships that Handler has with her romantic partners, siblings, nieces and nephews, friends, and her friends’ kids transform her and give her meaning. Before Handler goes to therapy, her relationships are less grounded. She seeks love but hasn’t yet learned how to show others love. Once she learns to love herself, she’s better able to offer care and compassion to others. The way she describes her newfound outlook on relationships in the closing chapter “Woman” offers insight into this journey:
You heal people, and you healed yourself. You are valuable, and you are dependable. You’re always on time. You never leave people waiting, and you are generous—not only with your time, but with your love. You are kind. You care so much about people; about women, about children, about doing the right thing (298).
The construction of this passage shows Handler’s work to translate her self-love into her relationships. Because she has healed herself she knows how to heal others. Because she has learned to be generous, kind, patient, and gracious with herself, she learns to show this same empathy to others. The memoir thus suggests that the individual’s relationships will be more rewarding if they are balanced.
Handler’s connections with women and children are particularly crucial to her joyful outlook on life. With Shana, Simone, Jane Fonda, and Ange she learns how to give her time, sacrifice her comfort, and share her success. These women also bolster her—she often refers to them as sisters, likening their intense bonds to familial ties. With children like Poopsie, Whoopsie, and Oopsie, Handler adopts a pseudo-parenting role. She never oversteps the boundaries of their unique relationship but she does offer her time, wisdom, emotional energy, and support unconditionally. These relationships are all distinct, but they collectively grant Handler a support system and a sense of personal validation. Loving herself has let her love others better. Loving others reminds her of her own worth.
Pursuit of Authenticity and Personal Growth
Handler’s account of her personal and private experiences captures her ongoing quest to be authentic, strong, and ever-evolving. Handler has organized the memoir’s collected vignettes in chronological order, tracing her experiences from childhood through the present day. This timeline lends the narrative a neat navigational scaffolding and formally captures how Handler is changing over time. In the earlier chapters of the memoir, Handler lives with “this great sense of unease” which gradually begins to take over her mind; every time she “trie[s] to ignore it, the feeling only intensifie[s]” (32). She becomes increasingly angry, acting out in public arenas, or is overcome by anxiety when she has to perform. Her restless internal sphere is impacting the way she moves through the world. Around the time of her conversation with Jane Fonda, detailed in Chapter 7, she realizes “she “ha[s] to get help” (32). Her therapy journey thus launches her personal growth journey and search for an authentic sense of self.
Throughout the memoir, Handler incorporates passages of self-reflection to show how her self-care is healing her outlook on herself and her life. She often shares an anecdote from her personal life and then shifts into a retrospective, reflective authorial tone. In these moments, Handler considers how her behavior mid- or post-therapy compares to her behavior pre-therapy. Before therapy, Handler admits that she was volatile and self-absorbed; she was distracted and incapable of being alone. While in therapy, Handler learns that the person she’s become is not the person she wants to be. She thus starts “auditioning new versions of [her]self to see which one seem[s] like the best direction to head in” (34). This auditioning metaphor evokes notions of a casting director seeking out the best actor to play a role most authentically—it thus captures Handler’s desire to discover and embody the real her. Her capacity for self-reflection underscores her determination to locate this authentic identity and to embrace it without fear or shame.
Handler underscores the importance of authenticity and personal growth by likening her experience to a love affair with herself. Her musings on this personal relationship capture how she’s changed over time and offer a lesson to her reader:
This time we get with ourselves is when our most seminal growth occurs. In these moments, instead of spending our energy resisting the reality of the situation, we can accept the situation; we can remember that there is a bigger love story waiting for all of us if we pay close enough attention. You loving yourself. That is the story. You are the love of your life (171)
In this passage, Handler uses the first-person plural point of view. This narrative stance invites the reader into Handler’s personal growth journey, and encourages her onto a simpler quest for authenticity. Handler isn’t claiming ultimate authority over this journey but she is using her personal transformation to encourage her audience. Growth, she thus suggests, is possible for everyone.
Journey Toward Independence and Self-Empowerment
Handler’s work to claim her own strength and independence underscores the importance of women seizing autonomy over their own lives. At the start of the memoir, Handler asserts that she wants to be a source of encouragement to others. In particular, she wants to use her voice and platform to advocate for women and girls. I’ll Have What She’s Having is indeed a memoir, but it is also a self-help and self-empowerment guidebook that Handler is offering to her audience of women. The text combines the anecdotal, the humorous, the reflective, and the vulnerable to capture the challenges and joys of being a woman in contemporary society. Handler’s consistently honest tone endears her to the reader and thus engenders trust. Her use of the first-person plural, the direct address, and the second-person point of view further this intimacy between author and reader. These formal choices also highlight Handler’s work to infuse other women with the same self-pride and self-determination she’s found for herself.
Handler’s personal growth and therapy journeys facilitate her work to create strong, actualizing communities of women. Once she learns how to claim her own voice and to live in a more balanced way, she’s able to offer advice and care to other women. The way she describes building herself up applies to her positive influence on others, too: “I became for myself what I’ve tried to be for every important person in my life, my own best friend. My own cheerleader, my own listener, my mother, my sister, I became my own daughter” (162). This notion of Handler fulfilling all of these roles for herself evokes notions of strength and vitality. In loving, listening to, and encouraging herself, she is in turn compelling other women to do the same.
Handler’s relationships with Poopsie, Whoopsie, Oopsie, and her nieces exemplify Handler’s belief that women must empower one another. Handler is proud of her three nieces, who are all “secure about who they are,” “talented in different ways,” “read books,” “don’t care about social media,” and never get “led around” (186). In Chapter 29, she therefore connects them with Poopsie, hoping that they will help her to reclaim her autonomy. Handler also contributes to Poopsie’s growth—reminding her that “she is of value, with or without a husband, that getting married and divorced so young was going to turn into a blessing,” and that she has “her whole life ahead of her,” and “time to refocus on herself” (185). Handler offers similar lessons to Poopsie’s sister throughout their relationship. Just as she has encouraged her nieces, she encourages Poopsie, Whoopsie, and Oopsie to own their strength and to be proud of themselves. Handler doesn’t simply serve up these lessons in an empty way. She also applies these lessons to her own life and has learned to practice these forms of self-determination and self-empowerment.
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