Normally I never read books about suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, eating disorders and other such self-destructive behavior.
I suspect that these are primarily secular problems. I find it hard to believe that religious homes that do not have a television have the same percentage of daughters with eating disorders (I understand that anorexia nervosa and the like is primarily a white disease).
I heard Dennis Prager citing his wife Fran as saying that anorexia nervosa and the like are primarily attempts to avoid growing up and taking on adult responsibility.
For months now, I've been enjoying Lori Gottlieb's columns in the Jewish Journal. It's the best stuff these days in the Journal.
I had the privilege of meeting Lori last week. So when I was at the library this week and saw her memoir unabridged and on tape, Stick Figure: A Diary Of My Former Self, I checked it out.
One night when I couldn't sleep, I began listening.
It starts out thus: "I'm Lori Gottlieb and what you are about to hear are entries from my diaries when I was eleven years old."
I immediately thought, "No way!" No way could this book be entries from her diaries when she was eleven years old.
As I got caught up in the book's vivid scene-by-scene construction, I was renewed in my belief that there is no way that there is more than a paragraph or two in what I had heard that was unchanged from her diary. This book, as many reviewers point out, reads like a novel. As many of the customer reviews on Amazon put it, it reads like the sensibility of an accomplished woman in her twenties writing a novel.
So I arose at about 3 a.m. and Googled the book. In all the press about the book, I couldn't find any examples of a reporter looking at Gottlieb's original diary and comparing it the published book. Instead, in every interview on this, Gottlieb sticks to her claim that the writing is from when she was 11. It was then edited by her to form a narrative.
Then I thought - what's the big deal? Memoir is a genre that exists between fact and fiction.
But it still bothers me that the book presents itself as the diary of an eleven year old girl when it reads like the novel of an accomplished writer of, say, 27.
Maybe I am so bothered because I'm jealous. Because I still can't write as well as Lori does in this book, let alone when when I was eleven.
Lori writes on Salon.com: "Does writing a memoir give people carte blanche to analyze your life?"
She relates this comment from somebody looking at her book: "Wow, this picture's so glamorous. It doesn't look like you at all."
While that remark was rude and I don't think I would ever say something like that, Lori does look completely different in person from her press photos. In her press picture, she has chubby cheeks. In person, she's slender (which is why she still gets bothered by boors asking if she's eating enough).
The pictures I use on the top of this blog and in my books are all from 1994-95 (the last time I was professionally photographed (for my acting head shots) and got a copy). When you put yourself out there as much as I do, and Lori does, one has to expect comments on one's looks and if one's pictures are misrepresenting one's reality.
I wholeheartedly agree with Lori that just because one publishes intimate and touchy information about oneself, that does not make it ok for others to throw it in your face. Publishing sensitive information about oneself does not make it significantly less sensitive for oneself. Good manners requires that you use the same tact in dealing with a person's personal stuff whether it is published or not.
Now I'm off to read Lori's latest book -- Inside the Cult of Kibu.
