Review of Strait up and Dirty

I am so torn. I can't tell if I liked the book of not. On one end it was interesting, the story was engaging, and structurally well developed. The book spoke to the reader with a very bold voice but also presented the reader with a softer side of the author. However, her character is so shallow and judgmental that it was hard to move past that. Although she presented a lot of "life lessons" her values did not change much at all. How much of the story was even true? How much of it was left unpolished? Especially that super-polished-happily-ever-after where she changed her husbands name to fit the "Stephen & Stephanie" mark in the graveyard. That was a bit much. And I believed it. So how much of the story was fabricated? And, okay, the story flowed but why was there such a huge need to butter things up at the end? I do not know what to believe. I did enjoy reading the book after I got past the first half and after I accepted to ignore her very opinionated character. But, it is still frustrating. Ahhh.... Maybe I should take a look at what the story was trying to achieve and then argue for or against that. Was it not trying to be an interesting memoir? It was interesting... but to what degree is it a memoir if the memories are all molded and warped to fit together?
Had I not known that the ending purposely made to be as cliche as it was I probably would have argued that "despite dealing with a very difficult character, the book was structurally affective in creating sympathy." But now I don't want to give it credit for that because I don't know how much it deserves the sympathy. On my own, I would not have been able to read this book had it not been a memoir because I simply couldn't deal with her character in the beginning. But since it was a memoir it made it more interesting because it wasn't made up and I was dealing with a real person not a stereotype... but now its just annoying. Its dealing with a real person who is spinning things off to paint a nice portrait of herself.... ahhhhh!!! I really need to sit down and re-evaluate the book. Not knowing how much is true is really messing with me now.