All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers
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In sharp contrast to my online life, a collection of mostly drily despairing essays for online magazines and unfiltered Twitter jokes, her entire digital footprint accumulated into a collection of safe consumer reflexes more than a personality.
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And though I am easily given to fits of envy, I looked at her life and couldn’t find a single thing to covet. I was a haphazardly medicated bipolar twenty-nine-year-old stripper and I didn’t want anything she had.
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It brought to life my sadness and desperation outside the vacuum where being mentally ill was a fascinating quirk that had no potential to create real consequences. I was breakable and broken and would not be confined to the narrative that James, and the long line of men whose footsteps he had followed in, had in mind for me.
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Because the thing about Gwyneth Paltrow that James couldn’t articulate is that there’s not really anything about her. Or at least there’s not anything about her public image that is especially unique or controversial. She’s a safe canvas onto which others can project their own desires, including the defiant and childish desire to define oneself as against the things she is alleged to stand for.
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That same year, RadarOnline published a slideshow of female celebrities and their weights, some estimated by fitness experts and several culled from a website called Whattheyreallyweigh.com, presumably owned and operated by a deeply happy human being.
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I rarely purchase these magazines. It is not because I am ashamed of my predilection for gawking at famous flesh but because I feel it would draw attention to my own body. I fear that looking at other bodies would magnify the existence of mine, making me somehow more material than I had been before.
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It is common to say that “the years were unkind” to a person, but in the case of Britney Spears, it is irresponsible to blame nonsentient time for unkindness when there was a wealth of people being unkind to her.
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night was really behind me. Then I found myself with a $900 prescription to fill and no insurance to soften the blow. I have fallen victim to memory lapses during manic episodes that make me think I can live without antipsychotic medications, but I was blessed to be in a depressive state at the time. Another winter approached and I was sad to stubbornly be living the life into which I was born. I felt death lingering near the ends of my own fingertips. And with an in-box full of rejections and silence from the seven hundred jobs for which I had applied in the previous year, I knew that the ...more
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covering a quarter of my body.
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I suspect this is often the case for people who have witnessed only the physical of domestic violence in that particular event.
Leah
Is there a word missing?
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Amber Rose is more than an unofficial mascot for strippers, she is our patron saint. Her rise to mainstream visibility was a testament to the fact that there was life on the other side of the club that would require neither repentance nor denial.
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Most famous ex-strippers tell tales of redemption from these sordid ways. More gratingly, several claim they were no good at it, which is really just code for “too good for it.” (I see you, Diablo Cody.)
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And it is a promise that if we didn’t want to, we wouldn’t have to do a happy little dance on their behalf forever.
Leah
This doesn’t really make sense.
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Sylvia has become the most recognizable stand-in for the tedious, ill-advised twentieth-century confessional author. Despite her coming of age among a cohort of men describing their own venereal disease as if the pustules themselves were matters worthy of the canon, it is Sylvia’s interior life that is so often pointed to as a case of something crass and self-indulgent.
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To this day, even as Sylvia is long dead by her own hand, her cautionary tale is not about lives poorly lived but about feelings too earnestly expressed. Nearly half a century after her death, we remain more interested in girls’ being kept palatable than being kept alive.
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As brightly as these girls shine, there remain wet blankets around every corner attempting to extinguish the flames in their hearts. They are dismissed as excessively feminine and juvenile, two words that mean the same thing in the hearts and minds of critics who would sooner praise a six-volume gaze at a Norwegian man’s navel than consider the possibility that there are treasures in the hearts of girls.
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In the years following her death, she has been accused of culpability in suicides that took place fifty years after her own, along with single-handedly ushering in the idea of suicide as glamorous by people who have apparently never heard of Ernest Hemingway or Jesus Christ. The fact of the matter remains that young women are easy to destroy and doubly easy to destroy if they are already dead. Fortunately, it is also historically the habit of young girls to practice witchcraft, and so the girls keep bringing Sylvia back to life.
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are small portraits of Sylvia in the style of a cameo. I imagine these pieces strewn across young necks throughout the world, standalone best-friend necklaces for the kind of girl who prefers the company of ghosts.
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It is clever and spooky indeed, but it is hardly fair. That Castle uses the same piece to accuse Sylvia of making “a sensation still (sometimes) among bulimic female undergraduates” is but one of the scores of dismissals of life-threatening illness among young women as frivolous lifestyle habits.
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Yet somewhere along the line, the literary establishment lost sight of the genius because they saw it as too wrapped up in girlishness, a niche interest that half the world endures.
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I fell in love with Sylvia in that scroll of disjointed quotes and fell with an enthusiasm I had not felt since college when I discovered the especially unforgiving love songs of the Magnetic Fields and the renewed rage of a mid-career Fiona Apple.
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resist transmitting a cutting word from Simone Weil or Flannery O’Connor or passages from that lonely grouch of a poet, R. S. Thomas, into the digital world.
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Glitter is the unbridled multitudes of shining objects that have no predictable trajectory and no particular use but their own splendor. A glow is contained. Its purpose is to offer a light bright enough that those who bear it will cast a shadow, but not so bright that their features will come fully into focus.
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They are good witches in the wilderness and sages and romantics regardless of any present romance. And they know they are not drawn to the bulb at the back of the oven, but by the flare signals sent out by their fellow travelers. They are flashes of light and recognition, momentary reflections of the sun onto a shred of glitter. But they are something vital nonetheless.
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Fiona’s only reported request was to not include “Apple” in the name. She told Rolling Stone in 1998 that in the end, her contract arrived and her stage name was unceremoniously declared “Fiona Apple” before she was able to object. She said the metaphor didn’t strike her immediately: “The apple: the thing that starts all the knowledge, but that also starts all the trouble.”
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Both women are preternaturally beautiful in that way that makes them hard to look at for too long.
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In both of these fragile but well-constructed worlds, the ultimate manifestation of the male gaze is to be witnessed by God.
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From a marketing standpoint, they made an excellent choice. The perverse brand that rendered the teen Fiona the commissioner of her own exploitation was one that girls of a certain age and disposition were enthralled by. We were the kind of girls who fantasized about looking beautiful at our funerals instead of our weddings.
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Whereas the happiness of former idols like Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins has made me lose interest, I remain invested in Fiona as a person.
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Fiona was accused of glamorizing child porn in the Hollywood Hills; Lana was accused of pornifying authentic Hollywood glamour.
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Those who accuse these women of fraud in their image craft seem not to have heard of David Bowie’s successful alter ego Ziggy Stardust or even Bob Dylan, the folksy creation of a genius named Robert Allen Zimmerman. There is a tradition of male artists taking on personae that are understood to be part of their art. It is as though there is so much genius within them that it must be split between these mortal men and the characters they create. Women who venture to do the same are ridiculed as fakers and try-hards; their constructed identities are seen as attention-seeking stunts more than new ...more
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It is also not unlike her old buddy Thomas Paine’s remarks in The Age of Reason: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”
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bounden
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“It was almost as if Josephine Baker and Al Capone had raised their lovechild in the wild and then unleashed her on the rap world,” wrote critic Terry Sawyer of Hard Core’s over-the-top imagery that mixes gangster authenticity with expert feminine seduction.
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It culminates in Grigoriadis asking Nicki if she “thrives on drama.” There is a record scratch of silence, which Nicki breaks by saying, “To put down a woman for something that men do, as if they’re children and I’m responsible, has nothing to do with you asking stupid questions, because you know that’s not just a stupid question. That’s a premeditated thing you just did.” Nicki says, “Do not speak to me like I’m stupid or beneath you in any way,” before asking Grigoriadis to leave.
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Nicki who is most able to publicly push back against the failure of white female artists and the media that pander to them to acknowledge the tremendous cultural influence of black women artists like Kim.
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on something that affects black women makes me feel like you have some big balls. You’re in videos with black men, and you’re bringing out black women on your stages, but you don’t want to know how black women feel about something that’s so important?… If you want to enjoy our culture and our lifestyle, bond with us, dance with us, have fun with us, twerk with us, rap with us, then you should also want to know what affects us, what is bothering us, what we feel is unfair to us. You shouldn’t not want to know that.”
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decades since the album’s 1994 release. Love’s signature guttural moan sounds as much like desire as it does pity, and the accompanying image casts her as the impulsive girl child inside a grown woman’s body, a physically and emotionally clumsy brute.
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However, pegging Courtney as the gluttonous girl on the delicious brink of her own self-destruction is a mistake. And more and more, I am dissatisfied with the prospect of Courtney’s legacy being linked to a girl rather than a woman. I am even dissatisfied with the idea that her legacy will be linked to a human at all. Courtney Love, you see, is a witch.
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Those cries broke our hearts—not just for our newly appointed queen but also for our future selves. A world of women’s blood and tears was the one we were on the brink of inheriting and would soon have to live through as well.
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that Live Through This is thick with witches. The music videos for the album’s tracks are shot through with the particular sadness of working-class school dances, and Courtney’s commitment to dressing like an overripe figurine during that era links the album to macabre children’s games and girls who bleed too early.
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It is in these moments that I see Courtney’s vicious bile as a rational reaction to the public’s attempts to keep her on trial in perpetuity. Now when I conjure the outsized specter of Courtney as a venomous witch, I see the woman I aspire to be rather than the clumsy girl I have so often been.
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I have learned that I crave the myth of a formidable woman rather than a little girl rotting from the inside out, and the witchcraft at play on Live Through This is but one example of how Courtney always had a stronger taste for blood than for cake.
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“I love you more than my mother. I would abort Christ for you.
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People do not, of course, necessarily announce their trigger-sad intentions when they buy their suicide weapons, so who is to say, really?
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I realize, of course, that the cruel and supernatural Courtney Love I have fashioned in my mind is a fiction.
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When given a choice between the girl with the most cake and the liar at the witch trial, I choose the witch every time.
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We endure claims that the most profound kinds of pain are the exclusive possessions of men, that they are best equipped to make art from this suffering. Instead of bearing witness to it, we are asked to be killed by it, quietly if possible. But Courtney did nothing quietly. She said in 1995, “The American public really does have a death wish for me. They want me to die. I’m not going to die.”19 And she has made good on that promise. The word “survivor” comes up often in sympathetic profiles of her. But “survivor” has connotations of thriving, of some conquering of life’s wreckage rather than a ...more
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I have loved the kind of man who loved only certain things because he loved to see them break, to borrow a phrase. I have not seen a fraction of the cruelty that the world is capable of, but I have trembled often enough in the aftershocks of my own resistance to a world built to break me to know that female brutality is not just an acceptable response, it is the most sensible one, too. But my heart is home to docile rage because I am afraid: afraid I don’t know how to wield my own viciousness with any expertise and afraid that once I do know how, I won’t stop until the fire I set can be seen ...more
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I recall a craving to be precisely this kind of object of infatuation when I was a teenager reading the book. I wanted a boy to look at me and see the mystery of my suffering and, instead of being repulsed by my emotions, to want to draw closer, to know more.
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