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I’m always amazed at how books find us at the time we need them, as if there’s some omniscient, benevolent librarian in the sky.
It’s only temporary: you either die, or get better. —Something we used to say about life in general, feeling sophisticated and amusing in bars, back in the days when we thought how you behaved was the fault of other people.
Sometimes I think that jealousy, like skiing, is only for those with enough youthful stamina and energy to endure it. As people get older, they finally give jealousy up, or at least they put it off for as long as possible
Extreme weariness can make you rise above a lot of things that youthful exuberance would have tossed one into headlong, like shooting the rapids over Niagara Falls.
Anything difficult, as far as I’ve been able to determine, seems to work, and anything easy is just kidding yourself.
In the balm of those sunshine days, in a land where winter never raises ugly questions about survival and canning vegetables, fun was all the truth we needed.
She had lost fifteen pounds over this—which I always envied in a person, someone who got a broken heart and lost weight instead of mainlining See’s semisweet Bordeaux.
“Can’t you see,” he said, “that life is too short to be miserable? You have to be with people who love you. The people who care about you. You are too fabulous, darling, to be miserable!”
As George Orwell said, “Fiction is history that didn’t happen and history is fiction that did.”
Still, if you ask me, some parts are just as beautiful as my dream version—even more beautiful if you subscribe to the Tennessee Williams decadence-as-poetry theory that ravaged radiance is even better than earnest maintenance.
The idea of middle age—never mind old age, God forbid one hundred years!—is the violent opposite of everything Hollywood is based upon, which, as anyone can see, is and has always been beauty: youthful, feminine, saintly beauty like Mary Pickford, or disillusioned, lost beauty like Greta Garbo; beauty without a whisper of fading, sagging, or wrinkling, although real girls do age, of course, no matter how self-enchanted they are. And age is disaster.
We live in a world where whoever sedates us with the most glamour and captures our imaginations with the greatest intensity becomes history.
Vicky Lake that way.
I think one of the reasons it seemed in the seventies that we couldn’t lose was Watergate. There was Nixon, this man my father had been insisting was a crook for so long, who actually was a crook. And then we were getting rid of Nixon and were getting out of Vietnam and women could have abortions and the CIA was found to have illegally kept records on three hundred thousand citizens. It seemed a shoo-in that we’d won. And if we’d only had a dashing leader, we might have.
Zack, if only he’d stuck to the point, could have had everything. But they always change what “everything” means or maybe the concept of “success” just keeps changing when you reach a certain point.
But the trouble with life is, just when you think you’re having a happy ending, things are changing, because there are no endings except death.
Sometimes I look at pictures of me from those days when I looked so beautiful and wonder what I might have looked like if I hadn’t abused drugs, alcohol, and tobacco as I did with such a vengeance.
au courant
I’ve always noticed that once you let your looks take over your life, you’re going to spend all the livelong day talking about being too fat, having the wrong hair, and otherwise reducing yourself to the most sluglike common denominator—and if you ask me, someone looking back on the middle class of America during the twentieth century might be horrified to know that all the beautiful girls did nothing but hate their asses, legs, stomachs, and breasts. And what really is shocking about it all, too, the men who committed incest on their own daughters told a lot of them “You’re so fat, no wonder
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once I began to make sure only sweetness and light got a foot in the door, men who were horrible ceased to thrill me as they once had,
I was overwhelmed by the feeling that there was something I could have done—some more flash and charming way I could have been, that would have sprinkled magic dust on her and kept her from letting Wolf in the front door.
dowdy
Joan Didion, who knew how to wear clothes, was too brilliant and great for anyone to write like and too skinny and sultry to look like. I thought if I couldn’t be Joan, then I’d have to be dowdy and/or crazy, like Virginia Woolf. Of course, there was always Colette, but then she was French—not living in L.A.—and even she scared men.
By the time dawn came and I was nearly finished with his book, I was in love with him. And I was in love with his book, which I felt I could have written myself. Which is one of the troubles with writing; people who love your writing already think they’re you. They think if they sat down and wrote, it would be your book. Exactly what I thought about Walter.
All I took was speed, painkillers like Percodan and Demerol for fun, and painkillers like codeine and Fioranol for cramps. And I never took downers, except if anyone happened to have any Quaaludes or Mogodons. Oh, and LSD or mushrooms or mescaline if it was a nice day. As far as I was concerned, since I didn’t smoke cigarettes, this made me a fine human being.
Whatever my personality might be, I had no idea, and as far as I was concerned, if I wasn’t on Ritalin at least, my reply to the world was “no one is home.” Ritalin was my personality.
Fucking people’s husbands is for people from Ivy League colleges who read too much John O’Hara.
He’s the only person I know who still considers swimming in the Pacific Ocean at Venice Beach fun. I haven’t been swimming in that water since my friend Bob-the-Surfer came down with the same leukemia a group of lifeguards from that area died of. The bay we have here that looks so beautiful is a deadly black swan after all.
