As someone who gets antsy watching YouTube clips more than two minutes long, I’ve somehow managed to sit through three unabridged audiobooks in the past month. At roughly seven hours apiece, that’s nearly a day’s worth of total listening. Okay, so I was strapped into a chair in a vehicle that was moving 70 miles per hour, but I’ll still take that pat on the back, please.

I did this not to brush up on the Great Books, but to keep current with that other classic text: the Celebrity Memoir. With several long road trips ahead of me, I needed entertainment that was engaging yet simple. Music tires my ears. Podcasts are unreliable. (Dear Marc Maron: Please interview fewer musicians.) And since being behind the wheel ain’t the right time to break out some Cormac McCarthy, I instead dove into the vast, if not deep, reflecting pool of famous people narrating their own life stories.

I started with Kim Gordon’s Girl in a Band and immediately got excited. Not only does the former Sonic Youth member have the perfect narrating voice—self-effacing yet sultry—but she cuts right to the chase, immediately dishing the deep, dark, dirty details of her divorce from bandmate Thurston Moore. Hearing Gordon explain how it feels to stand on the sidelines as your adulterer husband strikes bogus rock-star poses in front of thousands of festivalgoers, I was locked and loaded, ready to follow this woman anywhere.

Unfortunately, the book left me feeling duped. While Gordon has done a lot of cool things with a lot of cool people, her life is actually pretty boring. And her persistent sizing up of other women—Lana Del Rey, Courtney Love, Moore’s new girlfriend (only referred to as “her” or “the other woman”)—made me highly suspicious. For all its talk of art and authenticity, Girl in a Band is a pretty dull soap opera—Mean Girls for the jilted-mom set.

Next up was Amy Poehler’s Yes Please, which I turned off after two hours. I adore Amy Poehler, but her book annoyed the living f*ck out of me. Did she really think a whole chapter on how writing a book is “really, really hard” was the proper way to open a memoir? Did Seth Meyers really have to contribute his own section, which is so fawning and goopy it should’ve been titled “Why I Love Amy (And You Should, Too)”? Did the (not really) inspirational vignette of how she learned to apologize for offending a disabled person need to last 45 minutes? Perhaps reading the book myself would’ve been more bearable, and less like eavesdropping on Poehler as she aurally pleasures herself.

The last book in my iPod was Anjelica Huston’s A Story Lately Told, a classy telling of a remarkable childhood lived in Ireland, London and New York City. Now in her mid-60s, Huston has no scores to settle, and she comes off as genuinely wise, not some multitasking dilettante typing up funny tidbits. I have two complaints: 1. As a narrator, she sounds so maternal and comforting that she often almost read me to sleep, and 2. The book ends just as she heads to LA. But Watch Me, Huston’s second memoir about her Hollywood years, is already loaded up and ready for the next road trip, so …