- Narration: Chrishell Stause narrating her own memoir brings the warm, unaffected delivery that makes a four-and-a-half-hour listen feel like a conversation rather than a reading.
- Themes: resilience through unconventional adversity, celebrity and authenticity, career reinvention from scratch
- Mood: Warm and candid, with a pace that trusts the listener to keep up
- Verdict: A breezy, honest celebrity memoir that earns its self-help framing because the resilience it describes is specific rather than generic.
Chrishell Stause narrating her own memoir is the only version of this audiobook that would work, and she seems to know it. Under Construction covers a life that goes from homelessness in small-town Kentucky to luxury real estate in Los Angeles to reality television, and the production's authenticity depends entirely on whether you believe the voice telling the story. Stause's voice, delivering her own material, answers that question within the first few minutes.
How Under Construction Holds Up
The memoir's scope is broader than the Selling Sunset framing might suggest. Stause's childhood, marked by periods of homelessness and her parents' addiction struggles, is covered with specificity and without melodrama, she writes about managing the local Dairy Queen as a teenager and dreaming of daytime soap operas with the same matter-of-fact tone she brings to the celebrity sections that come later. That tonal consistency is one of the book's genuine strengths. It does not pretend the early years were grimmer than they were, but it does not minimize them either. The through-line is resilience, and the book earns that word by actually documenting the conditions that required it.
The memoir's dual function is evident from the opening chapters: this is both a personal story and a practical guide to resilience and career navigation. Stause explicitly offers "tangible advice based on the lessons she's learned over the years," and the book delivers on that promise without making it feel like a self-help manual stapled to a memoir. The advice emerges from narrative rather than being imposed on it, which is not always the case with celebrity memoirs attempting the same combination.
Why Under Construction Works as an Audiobook
The self-narration here is a genuine production asset. Stause's delivery is warm and unaffected, she sounds like someone telling you a story, not reading a manuscript. The humor she is known for on Selling Sunset is present in the narration itself: she knows when to pause, when to let a line land, and when to move quickly through material that would be ponderous at a slower pace. At four hours and thirty-four minutes, the audiobook is brisk, and Stause's narration contributes to that energy rather than fighting it. The book never drags, in part because she is not performing a version of herself, she is simply talking.
The behind-the-scenes content from Selling Sunset and her years in daytime soaps is the section most likely to draw listeners who come from her television work, and she delivers it with the candor that reviewers have praised. "Never-before-told stories from her life in soaps" and insight into the Selling Sunset dynamic are present, and the book does not sanitize the reality television experience into something uncritically positive. Her "highly publicised love life" is addressed with honesty and proportion, she discusses it, she does not dwell on it for its entertainment value.
Weak Spots in Under Construction
Listeners who come to this book without any prior familiarity with Stause, without having watched Selling Sunset or followed her career, may find the television sections require some contextual patience. The book assumes a baseline familiarity with the show's premise and cast that fans will have and others may lack. This does not make those sections incomprehensible, but the emotional resonance of behind-the-scenes revelations depends somewhat on having the on-screen version as a reference point.
The memoir's handling of the years in daytime soaps is underappreciated in most coverage of the book, and it deserves more attention from listeners who come for the Selling Sunset material. Stause spent significant time in soap opera work before reality television found her, and the picture she draws of that particular creative ecosystem, with its rhythms of production, its specific professional culture, and its surprisingly demanding requirements for emotional range under schedule pressure, is the section of the book that feels most distinct from what other celebrity memoirs in her space offer. It is specific and unaffected in the way the rest of the book is, and it is worth the time it receives.
The book's length, at under five hours, means it covers substantial ground efficiently. That efficiency occasionally means moments that could sustain more space are given a single chapter rather than the extended treatment they might warrant. Some reviewers have noted this as a characteristic of celebrity memoirs, and it is true here: the childhood material is honest but not exhaustive, and the career sections move quickly. Listeners who want deep psychological excavation of any particular episode may find the pace breezy. Those who appreciate a story that trusts its reader to fill in some gaps will find the brevity satisfying rather than thin.
The Right Listener for Under Construction
Selling Sunset viewers are the obvious primary audience, and they will find what they came for: candor, warmth, and material that goes meaningfully beyond what the show's cameras captured. The memoir also works for listeners interested in unconventional career paths, resilience narratives, or the specific world of luxury real estate as Stause navigated it from the outside in. Readers who have no interest in reality television or celebrity memoir as a form will not find this book converting them. But for the audience it is aimed at, Stause's self-narrated version of her own story is the format the content was always meant to take, and the warmth and humor that make her a compelling television presence carry directly into the audio performance without any apparent effort.
