Your new best friend
Houston ‘Green Beans’ blogger-turned-author can relate
It was just an email. That’s how it started, anyway: Lincee Ray fired off an email to six friends back in 2003, offering a few thoughts on the previous evening’s episode of “The Bachelor.” She filled the message with zippy one-liners and a little bit of hopeful sarcasm. Then she forgot about it.
“The next week, they asked, ‘Where’s our recap?’ so I wrote another one for that episode,” the Houstonian said during a recent interview.
She also added a few more friends to the list and decided to write a recap each week, sending them from her desk at her daytime public relations gig. About a month later, she got an email from someone she didn’t know, asking to be added to the list. This reader, Tiffany, had been receiving the recaps from a friend who’d been forwarding them along. But she didn’t get them until a few days later and wanted her dose immediately.
“I’d never thought this was being forwarded on. So jokingly, on the next email I was like, ‘Hey, everyone. Meet Tiffany. She wanted to be on the original list.”
That’s when the floodgates opened. Dozens — then hundreds — of other members of Bachelor Nation began emailing, asking to be added to Ray’s distribution list. When the number of recipients hit 1,000, her company’s IT department contacted her and told her she was clogging the system.
So she started a blog. And her following continued to grow. Now, Ray has a podcast, gigs writing recaps for big outlets including Entertainment Weekly and, coming in February, her first book, “Why I Hate Green Beans.”
The book is named for her blog, iHateGreenBeans, where she still recaps every episode of her favorite show. That will help her thousands of followers find and recognize the book easily, she said.
“One of the first questions people ask me is, ‘Do you really hate green beans?’ And the answer is yes. They smell like feet,” she said. “It’s just this weird thing. People ask me if I’m the green-bean girl. And sometimes, they can’t remember if I love them or hate them, but they remember I have strong feelings about green beans.”
She dives right into why in the first chapter of her book.
“It’s called ‘Green Beans’ because that’s what my mom made me eat when I was younger to lose weight,” said Ray, who grew up in the small East Texas town of Hallsville. “That’s where the insecurities started.”
She launches into this at the very beginning of the book, ticking off the first of a long list of am-I-good-enough fears in the first chapter. Throughout the book, she keeps asking that question. And by the end, readers will nod along with their answer for her.
“The whole book is about insecurities,” she said. “So I organize it about insecurities: how you look; being a woman in a man’s world; in marriage; in motherhood. I’m not a mother. But I’m 42, and I have always wanted to be a mother, so I’m insecure about that.”
For those who read her blog or her recaps elsewhere, they’ll know these heavy topics can feel light and hopeful when Ray delves in.
Like when she candidly brings up a topic that stirs fear in many women’s souls: rogue chin hairs. It’s a body-image hangup most women only admit to the tweezers in their top drawer and maybe, maybe, a best friend. But Ray dives in.
“I’m sure most of you have an unspoken agreement with someone you trust that she will bring tweezers to your funeral and pluck anything and everything unruly on your exposed body parts, should the service be open casket. It’s OK to admit you have that friend on standby. I do. Plus three backups,” she writes.
During the three months it took Ray to write this book, her goal was to create something that dug deep into shared experiences, through a voice that could easily belong to a best friend. Something along the lines of a Mindy Kaling book.
“Mindy Kaling is hilarious; she’s one of my favorite authors. She and Tina Fey, their voices are how I hope my voice is,” she said. “I always do the disclaimer that it’s about insecurity, but the goal is for it to be funny, and you’re poking fun (at) yourself.”
In her eyes, it’s a way to remind whoever may stumble upon her book that “We’re all in this together.” She laughed. “We’re all women,” she said. “And if you believe you have figured this out, please share it with me.”