Kelly Ripa Thanks Kathie Lee Gifford for Saying She Won’t Read Her New Book

Kelly Ripa has found the silver lining to end all silver linings. The soap actor and talk show host recently released her memoir, Live Wire: Long-Winded Short Stories, and took the highest of roads when she found out fellow TV doyenne Kathie Lee Gifford won’t be reading it.

“I am a person that tends to take a negative and turn it into a positive,” Ripa said on a recent episode of the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast, per People. Ripa replaced Gifford on Live! in 2001 as Regis Philbin’s co-host; in her memoir, per Page Six, Ripa said that Philbin referred to her as “it” on set. She added that they were not friends outside of work.  

Reacting to headlines about Ripa’s characterization of her and Philbin’s realtionship, Gifford said, “I went, ‘I hope this isn’t true. I just hope it isn’t.’ Because what’s the point? I don’t get it. I don’t get it.”

As for Ripa, she sees any brouhaha as free publicity. “It’s really hard to sell a book, right? And this is like, week three of the book, right? And I mean, honestly, I’m not gonna lie, I was not reading any headlines anywhere. And suddenly all of these headlines pop up and there’s all of this attention on my book,” she said of the dust-up around Gifford. “So I am a person that tends to take a negative and turn it into a positive. And so my ultimate comment is, thank you.”