Hilaria Baldwin is a mom of seven, a wife to Alec Baldwin, a limber yogi and a fake Spaniard. Now, with the release of her latest book, she’s a two-time author — and an all-time attention hog.
Part memoir, part self-help, but mostly self-pitying, “Manual Not Included” is the book that no one asked for. And it acts as a companion to “The Baldwins,” the TLC reality show that no one watched.
That’s a lot of spotlight for a couple who really just want to be left alone.
In between writing about her adventures in breast-feeding and how she moved away from “gentle parenting,” Hilaria moans about the media’s red-hot pursuit of the endlessly fascinating couple.
The one-time “Extra” correspondent claims to be completely unmoved by the idea of fame.
She benevolently writes in the intro how she doesn’t “blame those who gossip; I feel for them, because they are a product of a system that most of us play into. We fear that if we question the system, we will get hurt and be ostracized.”
When she’s not complaining about the intrusion into her privacy — while simultaneously begging us to come in — she’s dropping inanities that made me wonder if Kamala Harris was her ghostwriter.
“I think there is a tendency for humans to reject the old and think that our contemporary world is the most evolved. It is probably why we constantly strive to grow and invent and change,” Hilaria writes in reference to nothing in particular. “How humbling it is to think that we all just exist in a moment in time and what is ours and new will soon become old.”
Speaking of old, she writes about her 90something grandfather, who was a veteran. And straight. But “he had one flag flying outside his home — the LGBTQIA+ flag. He wanted all to know that everyone was welcome and that straight men didn’t have to be so insecure about their own sexuality.”
Sure, lady.
Then, there’s the love story with her 26-years-older husband which, she claims, got her pegged as a gold digger.
“No matter who dated Alec Baldwin, she was going to be picked apart,” she writes.
But Hilaria was not picked apart. Doors were opened for her. She was given a gig with “Extra” and regular appearances on morning and daytime TV. During which, no one even questioned her “Spanish” background. People simply took her word for it.
If anything, she was treated well and — as she loves to point out — as a good influence on her notoriously irascible husband.
The tide only turned in 2020, when a Twitter user revealed the truth: She wasn’t Hilaria desde España. She was Hillary from Boston.
The book finally explains it all. She has ADHD and dyslexia, you see, which accounts for her bizarre Spanish-ish accented English.
“Labels such as multicultural, multilingual, third-culture kids, culturally fluid, are attempts to capture what it is to belong and not to belong in a world that just wants to put every one in one simple box,” Hilaria writes. “We often gravitate toward one another. We sound different because we naturally code switch between
different languages and mannerisms.”
Then, my favorite line of the book: “I had a crash course in how some monolingual people really struggle with how I speak.”
Yes, the poor slobs who speak only one language are simply unable to grasp the singular gifts and enigmatic brain of the ever-versatile Hilaria. Perhaps this unique “code switching” of which she writes skipped my bilingual family and all the others I grew up with.
But thankfully, we don’t know her pain.
“I’ve always wondered what it would be like to just belong,” she writes wistfully. “My father called me once when I was going through a particularly hard time and said, ‘I’m sorry I brought you up in such a complicated way.’”She seems to forget that her well-deserved public ridicule stems from the fact that her own husband told David Letterman “my wife is from Spain” — and at every turn, she’s perpetuated this vague Iberian origin story to obscure the fact that she’s a boring ol’ Yankee.
She can’t back out of the lie, so she’s keeps offering absolute nonsense. Hoping the monolingual morons will think it’s them, not her.
And what would a Hilaria Baldwin tell-all be without a dive into her family’s side of the horrific accidental “Rust” shooting that left cinematographer Halyna Hutchins dead — and her continued reminders that her husband suffered too, physically and mentally.
“The tabloid media will likely create headlines from this chapter,” she writes. “It’s what they do. But I ask that we all have the decency to look beyond the headlines and remember what happened — someone died.”
Indeed, this did catch my eye. Because she’s used it as fodder to film a reality show and write a self-serving book. And her constant public picking at scabs does no good for anyone’s healing.
Hilaria claims to not need anyone’s approval, but begs for it at every turn.
