According to her, producers had previously asked if there were any parts of her life she considered "off the table" for the show, and she mentioned her husband Juan Dixon's personal business and financial issues. If a cast member seemed to get off easy, I would bet you'll find a photo of the author and the cast member together within a ten-second Google.

The fight, which The Real Housewives of New Jersey cast has never publicly spoken about before, somehow ended, but the next morning, the police arrived to question everyone.I think it would have been better to do a chapter about casting all the cities, one about iconic fights from every franchise, one about why some cities have evolved into juggernauts, etc.

A decent amount of tea is spilled, nothing earth shattering, but I like the behind the scenes stories, particularly the never-before-told one about the RHONJ cast in the DR. Both admitted in Not All Diamonds and Rosé that their tiff had less to do with what happened at the reunion—namely, Carole accusing Andy of being "afraid" of Bethenny—and more with the aftermath. some women are relentlessly criticized and just outright trashed, while other women who have done the same things or worse are barely even spoken about. This stunning anthropological study lacked for me in a few ways: first, not all of the housewives history was accurate. Of course, that's not how Real Housewives works, and Ashley insisted in Not All Diamonds and Rosé that she didn't know about any sort of conversation.

But keep in mind that this makes it more like government-mandated propaganda versus a true tell-all. The author is also clearly very good at interviews and can ask the right questions to get a fun story. This exhaustive oral history features dishy interviews with 185 cast and crew members behind the Bravo phenomenon. Frances Berwick: The network was just coming on the other side of the huge hit that had been Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which changed everything for us. Kelly, too, seemed to want the cameras off, revealing in the book that she was just repeating a producer's name over and over again at one point.