Forty years ago a massively popular performer died from a drug overdose. Judy Garland was 47 at the time. Her fan base was enormous. Some 20,000 people lined up to view her body at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on Madison Avenue.
Susie Boyt, who was born a few months before Garland’s death, has recently written a book about her passion for the star, and my short write-up of My Judy Garland Life is at Newsday. During my reading I thought often of Wayne Koestenbaum’s writing and the way in which one’s passionate fandom doesn’t have to be divorced from criticism but can actually fuel it. (In her bibliography she cites Koestenbaum’s Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon under “Hero worship.”) Boyt’s book, though, is not positioned as criticism. Its subtitle is clear: a memoir. Still, the author is the daughter of Lucien Freud and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, and there’s a strong sense of interrogation, of Boyt turning her adoration over and over as if it were an object that you might see from all angles.
I’ve also been reading Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums that Changed Their Lives, an anthology edited by my friend Peter Terzian. So far I’ve read Stacey D’Erasmo on Kate Bush and Clifford Chase on the B-52s and I’m loving how the memoir genre is refracted through the authors’ meditations on sound, how the essays turn inward toward the writer and at the same time outward to the music itself. From “Beautiful Noise” by Stacey D’Erasmo:
We quilled our hair into stiff spikes and spent our paychecks on leather jackets. We felt like survivors. We knew about the trains, which car to ride in and how; on dark streets, you carried your keys poking between your fingers, weaponlike. We stayed out late in places where punky strippers danced on the bar.
So I thought Kate Bush’s sixth record was naïve. She made so many strange noises: beeping, hooting, ringing, sighing, screeching, impersonating, invoking, murmuring like someone rolling over in bed.
On another note, last week at the book launch for Heavy Rotation, Martha Southgate talked about her girlhood love of the Jackson 5 and passed around her own LPs, artifacts that then took on an eerie significance a few days later with the news of Michael Jackson’s death.
Memoir and music
Forty years ago a massively popular performer died from a drug overdose. Judy Garland was 47 at the time. Her fan base was enormous. Some 20,000 people lined up to view her body at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on Madison Avenue.
Susie Boyt, who was born a few months before Garland’s death, has recently written a book about her passion for the star, and my short write-up of My Judy Garland Life is at Newsday. During my reading I thought often of Wayne Koestenbaum’s writing and the way in which one’s passionate fandom doesn’t have to be divorced from criticism but can actually fuel it. (In her bibliography she cites Koestenbaum’s Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon under “Hero worship.”) Boyt’s book, though, is not positioned as criticism. Its subtitle is clear: a memoir. Still, the author is the daughter of Lucien Freud and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, and there’s a strong sense of interrogation, of Boyt turning her adoration over and over as if it were an object that you might see from all angles.
I’ve also been reading Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums that Changed Their Lives, an anthology edited by my friend Peter Terzian. So far I’ve read Stacey D’Erasmo on Kate Bush and Clifford Chase on the B-52s and I’m loving how the memoir genre is refracted through the authors’ meditations on sound, how the essays turn inward toward the writer and at the same time outward to the music itself. From “Beautiful Noise” by Stacey D’Erasmo:
On another note, last week at the book launch for Heavy Rotation, Martha Southgate talked about her girlhood love of the Jackson 5 and passed around her own LPs, artifacts that then took on an eerie significance a few days later with the news of Michael Jackson’s death.