There are two literary genres (I use the term "literary" very loosely here) that I love with an embarrassing passion. The first is the alcoholism-and-recovery story, which I mostly consume in the form of films but which I have also been known to indulge in through the medium of dating people who are recovered alcoholics. I once went out with a woman who had formerly been the kind of drunk who takes her first drink before she gets out of bed, uses a hundred ruses to maintain a low level of inebriation throughout the day, and accelerates the drinking after work until she passes out, only to wake up and do it all again the next day. I liked hearing about her days as a boozer so much that it annoyed her, and although she was sad when I stopped dating her, if she had any sense at all she probably soon saw that she was better off without me.
I have no idea where this fascination comes from. I can't even formulate any plausible theories (yours are welcome, so long as they don't reflect too poorly on my psychology). But my other fascination, I can at least speculate about: I love Hollywood stories. Movies like The Player, books by screenwriter William Goldman, celebrity autobiographies as long as they're at least thirty years old. I like movies, and I'm interested in the highly dysfunctional process by which they get made, but I think I also like these kinds of stories as proof that people who have achieved the ultimate lifestyle of wealth and consumption are not actually better off than I am in my humble 3-bedroom ranch , worrying about making the mortgage payment.
My friend Scott, knowing of this love, gave me Roger Ebert's Book of Film as a gift way back in 1996. This is an 800-page anthology of writings about the movies, everything from actor interviews to exceprts of novels that have been made into films to film criticism to exceprts from directors' autobiographies. I pulled it off the shelf the other day, half expecting to weed it despite its status as a gift, but it's a keeper. I did a lot of picking and choosing this time, rather than reading the whole thing, but the excerpts from early autobiographies, of people like Charlie Chaplin, make me wish to read entire books long out of print, the excerpt from The Godfather is what got me to read that book for the first time six years ago, and there is no shortage of the kind of story of despair I find so comforting. Rex Reed's interview with Ava Gardner (pages 126-138) is heartbreaking for how clearly worthless she considers her life and her work; mayby it's simply the prerogative of the star to complain about the crap deal she's gotten, but there's got to be a nugget of truth in her lament that she'd never been allowed to do any work she could be proud of.
This book gets to stay on the shelf for its future possibilities in whiling away an idle hour, or for showing an interested friend a particular piece of writing. It's not just a big trashy collection of gossip to satisfy my meaner appetities; it's a resource.
Posted by Su Penn at August 9, 2003 08:34 AM | TrackBack