Review: I Didn't Come Here to Make Friends: Confessions of a Reality Show Villain by Courtney Robertson & Deb Baer

Courtney Robertson joined season 16 of The Bachelor looking for love. A working model and newly single, Courtney fit the casting call: She was young, beautiful, and a natural in front of the cameras. Although she may have been there for all the right reasons, as the season unfolded and sparks began to fly something else was clear: She was not there to make friends.

Courtney quickly became one of the biggest villains in Bachelor franchise history. She unapologetically pursued her man, steamrolled her competition, and broke the rules—including partaking in an illicit skinny-dip that sealed her proposal. Now, after a very public breakup with her Bachelor, Ben Flajnik, Courtney opens up and tells her own story—from her first loves to her first moments in the limo. She dishes on life before, during, and after the Bachelor, including Ben's romantic proposal to her on a Swiss mountaintop and the tabloid frenzy that continued after the cameras stopped rolling.

For the first time ever, a former Bachelor contestant takes us along on her journey to find love and reveals that “happily ever after” isn't always what it seems. Complete with stories, tips, tricks, and advice from your favorite Bachelor alumni, and filled with all the juicy details Courtney fans and foes alike want to know, I Didn’t Come Here to Make Friends is a must-read for every member of Bachelor nation. 

ebook, 272 pages

Published June 24th 2014 by It Books

Terri's Thoughts

Ok, I admit it.  You found me out.  The Batchelor franchise is my guilty pleasure, any of them be it Bachelor, Bachelorette or Bachelor in Paradise.  I know, I know. How can a professional business woman be drawn in to such nonsense.  I say easy, if you want the easiest way to see a sociological experiment of people's behavior, this has got to be it.

While I am not one to want to extend any of the participants of this shows 15 seconds of fame, I couldn't help but pick this up to see if I could learn any behind the scenes information about how the show is produced.  This read was to me the same as being stuck in a line at the grocery store.  I never mind because I grab the gossip rags and catch up on the latest rumours while I wait.

This is the biography of Courtney Robertson who was the winner of the 16th season of the show.  For fans of the show, she was the one that everyone hated.  Myself included, to a certain extent.  I did not like her and didn't want her to win but on the flip side, she cracked me up and I didn't want her to leave.  She made things interesting and as many people should always know, these shows are edited so much in order to spin things a certain way that you never know what is really true in the correct context.  For this reason I wanted to see what she had to say.

The beginning of the story was total fluff.  I didn't care, nor do I think anyone else does, about Courtney's sexual history prior to the Bachelor.  I only wanted to know what happened behind the scenes of the show.  Things such as what really happened in the ocean when they went skinny dipping.  This does get answered by the way.  For this Courtney loses points to think that people might actually care how she spent her high school years or how many people she slept with.  I also didn't care about the name dropping that occurred in the story

The story picks up when it starts talking about the show.  We hear Courtney's side of what happened with the other girls in the house.  She admits that she was a bitch to some of them.  This scored her a couple of points back since she owned her mistakes.  What we did see, should we choose to believe, is that the other girls were not as squeaky clean and innocent as they were portrayed.  I had suspected this.  Going back to my experiment comment, I don't care how nice you are, if you are in a competition in which there is only one winner and have to live with all of your competitors, the worst traits in everyone will come out.  I believe that the girls were nasty to Courtney and tried to make her life miserable.  I also believe as she admits to some that she was just as nasty back.

This story also dives in to what happened after the engagement ring was given and the couple went back to "real life".  If everything Courtney says about Ben is true, I can say I knew it, he was not in it for the right reasons.  Then again, how many season have there been so far, 20+?  I would say less than 5 were in it for the right reasons.  I also believe her take on this part of the relationship.  The reason is because she didn't seem to go too far in trashing Ben.  She told it from her aspect of the relationship and her needs.  I feel she actually went easy on him.

As I normally don't read true stories, I don't really know how to rate this.  Who am I to judge Courtney for her life decisions?  I don't know her and have never walked in her shoes.  I wanted to read this due to a curiosity of what she had to say.  While the writing seemed underdeveloped in many spots and some thoughts never finished or returned to when it was promised, I was still entertained.  My expectations were never for a literary masterpiece and because of that my expectation were met.  So on that note, I have no choice but to rate the book according to my expectations which were honestly set quite low.  This story is getting a very guilty 4 stars because it filled by gossip rag, quasi celebrity curiosity.

 

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