Sometimes the book sounds more like a supermarket tabloid than an insightful exploration of the forces that drive her forward, but surely that’s inevitable when your subject has appeared onscreen since she was a child, been married eight times, fought drug, alcohol, and food addictions for most of her life, made and lost millions of dollars, and overcome grueling injuries and surgical procedures. Despite its sometimes sensational details, Elizabeth is very much a story of survival - how one exceptionally stunning looking woman learned to find her inner beauty through her work fighting the AIDS epidemic.

Careful listeners might find the book repetitious with repeated references to Taylor’s mesmerizing violet eyes, confusion between illusion and reality, and habit for mistaking melodrama for romance/intimacy. Casual or intermittent listeners, however, may find the repetition of these key themes to be helpful reminders of what they heard on previous CDs in the set. Read beautifully by Lynne Maclean, this audio book has a total playing time of six hours (including a brief introduction and interview with the author) and comes on five violet-colored CDs, presumably to match Taylor’s mesmerizing eyes.