For years friends, knowing of my interest in autobiography and biography, told me that I should check out the collection of master improviser and Annoyance Theatre founding member Susan Messing. Each time I ran into her she urged me to come over, and when I finally called her to do just that she immediately screamed, “Get your beautiful white ass over here fast because all these books are going into boxes!”
So you were a little girl.
On top of Patti Davis and Pat Nixon. Pat Nixon rocks but her daughter wrote that book. Pat wouldn’t’ve written it, but it was a good one because I’d just read Chuck Colson’s autobiography–there’s another born-again Christian who fucked up. Or, well, he was born-again after he fucked up.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Somewhere around college. I just realized that I’d stopped buying fiction and started buying stories of real people. It’s not only autobiographies in the sense of they have to be a political person or a Hollywood star. It can also be–well, we’ve got the Babe Didrickson story right here, we’ve got Frida Kahlo. That is a good Frida. I’ve got here, for example, Dreams and Nightmares of a German War Bride. Always good if you’re escaping from the Nazis. Del had everything from Leni Riefenstahl to Goring.
Del Close?
And there’s Mommie Dearest right across the way. [Survivor] is even worse than Mommie Dearest because in this one she has a stroke and all sorts of shit. Oh, there’s Michael Reagan with Nancy and the gang–he’s on the outside looking in there. Everybody coexists. If you read Debbie Reynolds, you gotta read Eddie Fisher because you don’t believe her until you see his side of it too, and then you go, “OK, you guys are ridiculous.” Then you read his version of what he thought Liz Taylor and his romance was and then almost everybody else who knows Liz will tell you something else about Eddie: that he was a cock and an idiot.
I have not.
