Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

by Carrie Brownstein

In the back of the teen magazines I was reading, like Bop or 16, were addresses for all the film and TV stars I loved—not home addresses, of course, more like Ralph Macchio, c/o some studio or agency, or a PO box where you could ostensibly reach Ricky Schroder. So I started writing letters to them. But the plan bombed. I wasn’t getting letters back, not even a stamped signature on an 8 by 10. The venture soon became less about competing with my peers and more about my own sense of invisibility and need for validation. I was so desperate to be noticed that I gave up on Hollywood’s Brat Pack, as they were known, and started in on those I imagined to be less fatigued by fame: the stars of daytime soap operas. And those people wrote back. Genie Francis from General Hospital, Drake Hogestyn from Days of Our Lives, Doug Davidson from The Young and the Restless. Handwritten notes on postcards! Smiley faces! Autographs! The niceties were even more notable because what I had written to these actors were inappropriately long letters explaining how I didn’t get along with my mother, or about her illness, three or four pages, all of it maudlin.

Haha! 😖