The Wavelike Career (And Life) Of Janis Ian, Society’s Child

The Good: Informative, Mostly well-written, Entertaining
The Bad: A few gaps in the narrative
The Basics: Anyone who is a fan of music should pick up and read Society’s Child, the autobiography of Janis Ian which is a whirlwind of namedropping, professional victories and personal tragedies.


Today was a real treat for me; after months of having it on the nightstand, I finally sat down and read the bulk of Society’s Child. My wife gave me Society’s Child in hardcover for our five year wedding anniversary and as part of my goal for the year to read more, I started it several months ago. Until I committed today to being a reading day, I had not had the chance to devote the time and effort to focus my attention on it. I’m glad that I did; Society’s Child deserves the reader’s full attention for several reasons, not the least of which is that the autobiography’s subject, Janis Ian, has had a whirlwind life.

Society’s Child is the 348 page autobiography (plus the index pages) of singer-songwriter Janis Ian. Published in 2008, Society’s Child is a brutally honest personal narrative of a singer-songwriter whose works might no longer be at the forefront of the collective unconscious, but have far more enduring value than the vast majority of the music being produced and released today. Janis Ian is the writer and singer of songs from the late 1960s and 1970s when her career hit its worldwide peaks with the singles “Society’s Child,” “Jesse,” “Stars,” and “At Seventeen.” Society’s Child chronicles her professional resilience – while she has had many other charting songs between and since, she has certainly become more of a niche performer than a popular recording artist of the masses – and the erratic nature of her personal life.

On the personal front, Society’s Child is the story of a young woman whose trust was systematically destroyed almost from her earliest interactions with other people. Janis Ian writes frankly about her sexual abuse at the hands of her family’s dentist, her early attempts at songwriting and the relationships that formed the basis for many of her poems which she set to music. Ian writes about the effect having a hit song as a teenager had on her and her family, how her life at school dramatically changed and how her earnings contributed to her parents’ divorce. Janis Ian writes about the personal trials and tribulations that framed her life with an honesty that is uncommon in any autobiography, which makes for an engaging read and a deeply human narrative. It is virtually impossible to read Society’s Child as a fan of the works of Janis Ian, once pop superstar around the world, and continue to elevate her in the mind to superhuman status. First and foremost, Society’s Child makes a woman with creative gifts and lifetime earnings that vastly outstrip those of almost every reader seem incidental; she is first and foremost a person and her journey through life has not been easy. There is no other celebrity biography I have ever encountered wherein the subject of the narrative celebrates being able to get $20 out of an ATM to buy socks in chapters following being a superstar who ate live lobster sushi in Japan during a tour that made her rich.

Society’s Child casts Janis Ian as a woman who struggles with relationships and deep trust issues. Her trust violated at almost every turn (the FBI kept tabs on her family, leaving her father unable to get tenure during the Civil Rights Movement; late in the volume, she learns that her financial manager had been embezzling for decades, leaving her at the mercy of a zealous IRS agent who left her destitute), she took solace in romantic relationships that did not pan out. From a somewhat mundane first love to her first romantic relationship with a woman, Society’s Child illustrates how Janis Ian struggled to find love and acceptance regardless of her celebrity. Her first marriage is chronicled and is difficult to read (for the content, not the diction). Only a few pages after the relationship is loving and blooming, Ian faces the barrel of a gun and a situation written with such realism and tension that the reader forgets that the narrator must have survived it in order to write the book.

Fortunately, Society’s Child is not just the troubling tale of one woman who gets abused by a dentist, a husband, a therapist and the IRS. Acting in odd foil to her personal travails, both in terms of relationships and health, Janis Ian chronicles the story of her albums and recording career. After the initial stories, Society’s Child tells the story of Janis Ian’s life album by album. Ian writes about being a folk singer who is deemed “too young” by the established folk community in New York City. Not allowed to perform at some critical, early opportunities, Janis Ian is taken under the wing of luminaries in the pop and folk music fields. After befriending Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, Janis Ian’s meteoric career puts her on par with singer-songwriters like Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, Billy Joel, and Joan Baez.

Society’s Child illustrates the impossibly fickle music industry and how Janis Ian struggled as an artist against a machine that abhorred the art that made her initially marketable. Ian writes about how the industry cycle of touring, promoting and recording became virtually impossible to balance against the act of creating the music the record label demanded of her. The book describes well and in enough detail how the traditional paradigm for the music industry was oppressive and robbed her of the personal moments that she needed to be an artist.

For those who are not already fans of the works of Janis Ian, Society’s Child is a great primer. Ian’s work is not filled with gratuitous namedropping; just as she describes the difficulty of those who did not live through the Civil Rights Movement understanding the social turmoil of the early years of her life, her description of the process of meeting other artists and being recognized by the music community calls back to a very different time and place. Ian writes about the late 60’s club scene vividly and she writes with reverence about her contemporaries and her inspirations as they come into her life.

While there are a few sloppy moments of prose – on one point, Janis Joplin pops up in a story as “Janis,” making the reader think Ian has slipped into the third person – most of Society’s Child is well-written and engaging. Ian writes with a sense of humor where appropriate (her story about eating sushi in Japan and running into Bruce Springsteen on the street after he was charting are instantly memorable) and with a vivid sense of imagery for the rest. Her internal narrative is tormented and she chronicles it well as she describes her feelings of betrayal, her feelings of being affectless, and of coming back to being emotionally well-rounded exceptionally well. Janis Ian details being dosed with vivid and disturbing imagery. Her descriptions, late in the book, of some of her health problems like CFS get troublingly resolved. For example, at the height of her CFS story where she appears otherwise insensate, she finds herself interrogated by the feds in an incident that she recounts without any of the nebulous of the incidents that immediately precede or follow it.

Despite the very few moments when the writing is not as tight or clear, the bulk of Society’s Child reads as a tight, engaging personal narrative. Anyone who has ever had a sense of celebrity worship should read Society’s Child; it humanizes one extraordinary artist and reminds the reader that while the industry and popularity of musical artists and movements might be fickle, those who create the art we consume face the same struggles we do and more and they are bound to face those challenges with the same basic tools we possess. While there is certainly more of the story of Janis Ian left to tell, Society’s Child gives perspective on the portion of Ian’s life most people will be most interested in.

For other works by Janis Ian, visit my reviews of:
Concert - East Lansing, MI - March 8, 2013
Janis Ian
. . . For All The Seasons Of Your Mind
Society's Child: The Verve Recordings
Stars
Remember
Between The Lines
Aftertones
Breaking Silence
Revenge
Hunger
God & The F.B.I.
Billie's Bones
Live: Working Without A Net
Folk Is The New Black
The Best Of Janis Ian - 2 CD + Exclusive DVD Edition

8/10

For other book reviews, please check out my Nonfiction Book Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Uninspiring Anthology: Suck It, Wonder Woman! Is An Unremarkable Collection!

The Good: Conversational writing style is fun, Some entertaining stories
The Bad: Not terribly original, insightful or clever, Repetitive
The Basics: Olivia Munn’s autobiographical essays and collection of philosophies, Suck It, Wonder Woman!, adds up to nothing of consequence.


I like Olivia Munn on The Newsroom (season two is now reviewed here!) and that was my impetus for picking up her book Suck It, Wonder Woman!. After my first night of reading Suck It, Wonder Woman!, my wife asked me what I thought of it and I frowned and noted that it wasn’t adding up to much. Her response was one of anything but surprise and she reminded me how much Olivia Minn rambled on the commentary track on the first season of The Newsroom (reviewed here!). I had forgotten how Munn dominated the audio track bonus feature on The Newsroom without, ultimately, saying much at all.

Outside The Newsroom, I had no experience with Olivia Munn until reading Suck It, Wonder Woman!,so I cannot offer a comparative analysis of how the book stacks up against her performances on Attack Of The Show. But, if Suck It, Wonder Woman! is any indication, Aaron Sorkin has seen a potential in Olivia Munn that is not at all evident in her writing. In other words, anyone hoping for a Sorkin-esque level of wit, depth and thematic sophistication will not find it from Olivia Munn, at least not in Suck It, Wonder Woman!. On The Newsroom, Munn is articulate and she delivers her lines entirely convincingly.

That voice is entirely absent from Suck It, Wonder Woman!

In Suck It, Wonder Woman!, Olivia Munn rambles from subject to subject; it begins as an autobiography and interspersed between stories of Munn’s life are her philosophies on various things. Her subjects of contemplations range from why one shouldn’t mix tequila and painkillers (it leads to homoerotic showers, apparently, which is not exactly the strongest argument against, despite the fact that it comes after nearly drowning) to why you should get a threesome out of the way if your boyfriend has not already had one. None of the passages are particularly insightful or authoritative, save the autobiographical bits. Munn describes her lonely childhood, early experiences in Hollywood (like meeting with a famous director who masturbated in front of her) to her rise to prominence on G4’s Attack Of The Show. Her story is hardly unique, though the story of the worst day of her life (when, during an admittedly bratty phase, she treated her grandmother poorly on the very night of her grandmother’s death) is heartbreaking and easy to empathize with.

Munn’s writing style is conversational and she repeats quite a bit of information. In Suck It, Wonder Woman!, aided by Mac Montandon, Munn writes like a high school girl talks. She writes enthusiastically, tells her stories in a rambling manner with little points and the stories are easy to read and get through. So, for example, when discussing her Playboy cover shoot, she writes “Playboy then said that if I flash the same amount of skin that Heidi had, they would pay me a certain amount – I’m not gonna reveal too much here (it’s a trend!) but suffice it to say it was a very good amount of money” (119). That type of voice with its own interjections is very common in Suck It, Wonder Woman!.

Moreover, there is an irksome trend in Suck It, Wonder Woman! where Munn oscillates between namedropping (like Evander Holyfield) and protecting the identities of those to whom she alludes (a famous movie director whose bedroom she visited, yet remains unnammed). As well, references to her show, Attack Of The Show come out of nowhere and she assumes readers are invested in the work. She spends a lot of time writing about a petition that led to her and her co-host jumping into a giant pie while wearing french maid outfits. This incident includes Munn complaining about hitting a support bar and getting hurt on it and her co-host leaping in minutes later to the same fare, leaving the reader baffled as to why she did not warn her co-host about the peril!

Suck It, Wonder Woman! has moments of entertainment value, but on the whole, the book does not stack up as a memoir, an autobiography or a book of philosophies. Instead, it is a meandering narrative that never becomes anything cohesive. Munn might have something to say, but in Suck It, Wonder Woman!, she does not land her message, nor does she stick to her personal story enough to make the reader care about the woman behind the words. In short, Suck It, Wonder Woman! is a not-unpleasant volume that undersells itself on all counts.

For other books that have memoir, philosophy or autobiographical aspects, please visit my reviews of:
The Autobiography Of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Stories I Only Tell My Friends By Rob Lowe
Keeping Faith By Jimmy Carter

3/10

For other book reviews, please check out my Book Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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(Not Really) The Autobiography Of Martin Luther King, Jr. Is An Informative Biography On The Leader, Not The Man.

The Good: Well-written, Strong narrative, Organized and readable to present a clear story of how one man changed the civil rights movement.
The Bad: Very little personal information/insight into the man
The Basics: The Autobiography Of Martin Luther King, Jr., compiled post-mortem, is an engaging narrative of the Civil Rights leader, with little insight into the man.


Honestly, when I sat down to consider reviewing The Autobiography Of Martin Luther King, Jr., I was at a bit of a loss. The 366 page hardcover is an engaging narrative, but it is remarkably straightforward with its strengths and its weaknesses. The Autobiography Of Martin Luther King, Jr. was edited by Clayborne Carson after the death of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and it represents the most concise narrative in (mostly) Martin Luther King, Jr.’s own words.

The Autobiography Of Martin Luther King, Jr. tells the story of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. After a very brief exploration of his youth, being raised by a pastor, Martin Luther King, Jr. meets Coretta Scott and marries. After extensive studies, he went to Montgomery, Alabama, where he became a minister who was at the flashpoint of the bus boycott there. After helping to organize the bus strike which was a pivotal moment in American history for civil rights, Martin Luther King, Jr. leads the Civil Rights movement to bring equality for black people in the United States.

And if one wants to read a book that is essentially a blueprint on how to organize a civil disobedience campaign, The Autobiography Of Martin Luther King, Jr. is an engaging way to get such information.

What is not strong in the book is anything personal about Martin Luther King, Jr. Throughout the book, Martin Luther King, Jr. focuses on the movement with almost no ramifications to his personal life. The Autobiography Of Martin Luther King, Jr. mentions Coretta Scott as more of an afterthought than a co-leader of the movement. In fact, as the trials and tribulations of Martin Luther King, Jr. increase, Coretta Scott King is marginalized and there is almost no affect on the subject of the biography.

The Autobiography Of Martin Luther King, Jr. is good, but one is left with a somewhat inhuman portrayal of the civil rights leader. He stands for his people, but has almost no emotional depth and that level of sacrifice reads as very sad, even though he delivered the necessary results.

For other memoirs or biographies, please visit my reviews of:
Keeping Faith – Jimmy Carter
The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin
When You Are Engulfed In Flames – David Sedaris

7.5/10

For other book reviews, please check out my Book Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Surprisingly Droll Memoirs, The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin Is A Mundane Businessman’s Journal!

The Good: Generally well-written, Moments of engaging storytelling
The Bad: Largely uninspired and uninspiring, Ends before the personal narrative becomes relevant/juicy, Bogged down in dull details, Lack of compelling voice
The Basics: The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin explores the growth of an English colonist into a successful businessman.


This year, I am reading more. I am doing my best to balance my pulp with my literature as I go through my personal library at home and that means reading a lot of new-to-me volumes that have been sitting on the shelf for years. For example, I have had The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin on my shelf since college, when I got a copy from a book giveaway the college did each year. It was never required for any class I was in, so my sitting down to read it was all about attempting to enjoy myself and learn something about one of the nation’s forefathers.

Sadly, wrestling through the 197 pages of the actual autobiography quickly turned into a gutwrenching chore and it became very difficult for me to summon the will to actually finish reading the small volume. It also left me with remarkably little to write about the book when I was done.

The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin is the story – told mostly in the form of a long rambling letter that was begun in 1771 and was resumed in 1784 and 1788 – of Benjamin Frankin in his own words. Written as a letter, Benjamin Franklin recounts his life in a winding story that includes coworkers, masters, and employees with whom Franklin did business over the course of fifty years. The story follows how Franklin, as a young protégé, became engaged in working a press, then went into business to start his own newspaper and then used that newspaper in the earliest acts of resistance against the British Empire.

Herein are the two main faults with The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin: 1. It is so focused on the life of Benjamin Franklin as a businessman that he does not explore much in the way of philosophy and thought and nothing even bordering on emotional attachment to those who are near him, and 2. It ends rather abruptly – Franklin is in the middle of recounting events from 1757 when the narrative ends – long before it gets to any of the interesting things that one might actually wish to learn about one of the key forefathers of the United States Of America. This would be like a presidential memoir including the story of the president’s life up to the decision to run for an elected office (but not the results of said contest, any subsequent political life, nor their actual presidency).

The result is that The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin is boring. There is the implication that Franklin spent decent money on prostitutes, but other than that there is nothing eye-opening or even intriguing within the pages. In fact, Franklin spends much of the early book discussing establishing his businesses, with great detail paid to the politics of the time . . . for who else had presses, how they maintained them, and what the effects of competing against them might be. There is a lot of namedropping, but many of the names are historically irrelevant.

Throughout The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin, I kept looking for examples of wit, stories that were rich in voice, and anecdotes that spoke to higher ideals. Instead, the closest Franklin provides is a lesson on debate and antiquated notions of the printing business. The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin leaves the reader desperate to read something interesting about Franklin written by anyone but Benjamin Franklin; the hyperbole of not wanting to toot his own horn makes his own autobiography virtually unreadable.

For other memoirs or biographies, please visit my reviews of:
Keeping Faith – Jimmy Carter
The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed In New Orleans – Andrei Codrescu
When You Are Engulfed In Flames – David Sedaris

2/10

For other book reviews, please check out my Book Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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An Enjoyable Memoir From An Actor I Barely Know: Stories I Only Tell My Friend Works.

The Good: Very funny, Insightful stories, Generally well-written, Voice.
The Bad: No thematic unity, I realized quickly much of my enjoyment was based on outside appreciation of Lowe.
The Basics: Rob Lowe’s autobiography, Stories I Only Tell My Friends is an enjoyable romp that makes it seem like working with Martin Sheen on The West Wing was an inevitability.


A few weeks ago, I was at my local public library and I overheard a patron talking with two of the reactionary evangelical librarians (they exist! I was so shocked!) who work there. The patron was asking about Rob Lowe’s book and neither of the librarians had heard of it. The patron sneeringly told them that the book, Stories I Only Tell My Friends was all about how Rob Lowe was telling secrets of Hollywood. I knew of the book’s existence, but had pretty much vowed not to read it when I caught my wife checking out Rob Lowe shirtless on the cover of Vanity Fair. I knew enough about the book to correct the librarians when, two patrons later, they were still saying how horrible a man Rob Lowe must be for telling secrets. I pointed out that that book would be “Stories My Friends Told Me” and I left. I was shocked when last week, Stories I Only Tell My Friends was on the shelf, which makes me think someone liberal still works at the library.

Eager to show whatever closet liberal might still be working at the library that their efforts are appreciated, I immediately took out Stories I Only Tell My Friends. I was actually surprised at how fast the 306 page memoir read. Lowe has a decent narrative voice and the book is often funny and frequently poignant. But, it is worth getting right out of the way what I didn’t like about the book.

Lowe begins his memoirs stunningly, with the story of the photo shoot for George magazine that JFK Jr. fought to have . . . right before Kennedy died. Right off the bat, Rob Lowe is mentioning The West Wing (reviewed here!) and frankly, that’s why I had any interest at all in the book. For sure, it should not be a detraction that Lowe actually met consumer demand and wrote about his experiences on The West Wing! But the fundamental problem was that all I truly found myself caring about in Stories I Only Tell My Friends were the stories tangential to The West Wing. Ironically, in a book I recently read, I did not enjoy the namedropping; in Stories I Only Tell My Friends, I found I did like the references because I knew who Lowe was writing about, frequently before he made the references explicit.

So, for example, it was very easy to thrill upon reading that when Lowe moved to Malibu, he began hanging out with a child director, Chris Penn – with a reference to the subjects of his film, his brother Sean, friend Charlie and Charlie’s big brother Emilio (40)! As Lowe moves up in the acting world in Malibu, there are frequent near-misses or allusions to Martin Sheen. This makes, for people like me who were fans of The West Wing, thrilled because the inevitable meeting between the young Lowe and Martin Sheen a real treat to read.

Unfortunately, between those scenes and until the book moves into the sections on The West Wing Rob Lowe writes about his family, random Malibu surfer kids who died horribly and the struggle of becoming a young actor when you have an agent almost immediately and live right near Los Angeles. The book isn’t so much a “rags to riches” story as it is the story of a boy becoming a man on an inevitable ascent into superstardom. Rob Lowe writes about his young acting life with a matter-of-fact sense that reads with the very clear truth that professionally, acting was his sole passion in life.

The story also picks apart the personal foibles of Lowe, who was tabloid fodder in the late 1980s and early 1990s at a time when I didn’t care one wit about celebrity gossip. It tells of his early blooming and the seduction of women and booze in Hollywood before he got his act straight and fell in love with Sheryl. This section, much of the book, was in no way an atypical story or memoir and it became much more interesting to read about what parts Lowe passed on than the narratives about family or the like.

That’s not to say the book is bad in any way, but I can say that if I had no interest in Rob Lowe from The West Wing, this memoir would not have made me a fan. The reason is simple; all of the best parts put Lowe on the track to get that role of the lifetime and are in one way or another connected to it. Regardless, throughout Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Lowe has a distinctive narrative voice. He writes just like he speaks and that is fairly erudite, though the diction in the book is unchallenging to anyone who is fifteen years old or older.

It is hard not to appreciate his lines, though and he has some real beautiful prose. But more often than not, one can see him as Sam Seaborn smirking through some of the best moments. In that way, Lowe makes the mundane interesting again, like with his lines “As always, I want to keep my head down and assume all is well. If there is an eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, I won’t be the one to point it out, lest I be eaten by it” (57). There are very few contemporary actors or writers who can truly get away with using the word “lest,” but he does it.

Ultimately, anyone who likes The West Wing, actor gossip, or Rob Lowe will find something to like about Stories I Only Tell My Friends. It’s an interesting memoir, even if it reads more like an archetype of the Hollywood story than any memorable exception to it.

For other memoirs, please be sure to visit my reviews of:
Role Models – John Waters
Keeping Faith – Jimmy Carter
A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway

7/10

For other book reviews, please visit my index page on the subject by clicking here!

© 2011 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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John Waters Entertains And Unsettles With Role Models!

The Good: Very funny, Great narrative voice
The Bad: Something of an acquired taste, Opens with a lot of namedropping.
The Basics: John Waters beautifully exposes the outsiders in the United States in Role Models, his latest book which is overall an intriguing anthology of character explorations.


A few months back, my wife and I were up late watching - of all things - Jimmy Kimmel Live, which we had been catching more and more since his hilarious post-Oscars episode. John Waters was on plugging his book Role Models and my wife was getting a kick out of him, while asking every few minutes "Who is this guy?!" I knew of John Waters, more than having any familiarity with his work. Indeed, the most I had seen of any of his movies had been snippets from the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated. But, I enjoyed the snippets and the interview and for an anniversary afterward (due in no small part to the local Borders getting closed down and discounting everything drastically), my wife presented me with a copy of Role Models.

How this book hung around long enough to be discounted 75% with a store closing (not a Stephen King book in sight, what the hell?!) is a mystery to me, though the experience my wife and I had with it might be part of the reason. Role Models is a collection of character studies and each chapter has a different focus, told through the distinct voice of John Waters, and the opening of the book might seem like a lot of namedropping. My wife started reading Role Models aloud to me as I drove her around - too bad she didn't make it to the later chapters on Marine porn and Zorro the stripper! - but she became very frustrated reading the references to people she was unfamiliar with. Opening with Johnny Mathis, whose work neither she nor I were familiar with, Role Models became a painfully convoluted series of namedrops that distracted from many of the points Waters was trying to make. So, for example, after asking Johnny Mathis who his role model was, Mathis responds "Lena Horne" (10). The question and answer are literally a single line on page ten, with a one line follow-up. What follows that is not any sort of reflection on Mathis or his answer, but rather an eighteen line digression on Waters's thoughts on Margaret Hamilton. Reading John Waters' namedropping tangents is like wrestling with the perspective issues from the narrative technique of Thomas Pynchon (V is reviewed here!).

But, I soldiered through on my own and having finished Role Models, I think I am feeling exactly like John Waters wanted me (and other readers to feel). I feel like my life has been underlived and somewhat pointless. After all, I've written novels - two of which have been published -, have the first ten episodes of a one hundred episode television series written, and I've met a crapton of celebrities, but usually in the hustle and bustle of a convention atmosphere. I've done nothing. My life has been waiting for the opportunities, the pop, which Waters writes about on virtually every page. He writes about artists who have created undying works, dangerous pornogaphers who have made half a million dollars selling outsider erotica in a single year and stippers who inspire thirteen full pages! They are all original, interesting and had their own weird big break that brought them to the attention of John Waters. It's enough to make anyone who has never been to the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party weep at how banal life can be.

In all honesty, reading Role Models makes me wish I could be a beggar in front of John Waters' house. Sure, I'd flatter him (and because I am genuinely interested!) by asking him to screen his movies for me, but then I'd want to have the resources to take his advice (or some of it, anyway!). In his chapter "Bookworm," he recommends his indispensable books. Well, Mr. Waters, you sold me on wanting to read In Youth Is Pleasure, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Darkness And Day [admitting that probably excludes me from ever running for public office again, though possibly reading a John Waters book did that already!] and even Two Serious Ladies, but my wife and I spent our disposable income for books on yours, can we borrow your copies? Waters makes us yearn for more time to read and live rather than press ridiculously through the day to day like we are all bound to.

Because the book is a series of essays, there is a hit-or-miss quality to Role Models. Some of the chapters do not add up to much, like how "Little Richard, Happy At Last" is more self-referential about getting and participating in the interview with Little Richard than the content of the interview. In other words, the chapter is more about meeting Little Richard than anything Waters learned about him by interviewing him. Waters discusses rumors or preconceptions he had based on Little Richard's life, but they do not get debunked or clarified through the interview.

But what makes Role Models a salivatingly-good read, outside of Waters's distinctive voice with lines like "Today Bobby is renting or maybe squatting in a run-down home surrounded by jail-strength industrial chain-link fencing. As I pull up in a ridiculous Mercedes-Benz that I didn't order but was upgraded to by the car rental place, I feel a sickening sense of entitlement" (203), are the virtual unknown subjects in the book. Bobby Garcia, a gay man who loathes having sex with gay men and instead made a living (for a long time) making videos in which straight Marines jerk off for him and the camera and occasionally get involved with oral or anal sex with him. Yes, it sounds like an absurd plot for some strange gross-out comedy, but these are the personalities John Waters uncovers and explores in the book, in the process revealing to the reader an entirely different reality than the mundane norm where , well, shit, I can't think of what we're "supposed" to be like now that I've read this book!

No, reading Role Models will not make you into a pervert or seduce one to the "gay lifestyle," but it is enough to open one's mind to a world much larger than the Hollywood heteronormal, everything-is-easy-to-understand-and-feel portrayal of reality. That is the gift of the outsider and John Waters is a wonderful guide!

For other books of essays, please visit my reviews of:
Letters From The Earth - Mark Twain
When You Are Engulfed In Flames - David Sedaris
Politically Incorrect - Ralph Reed

6.5/10

For other book reviews, please check out my index page by clicking here!

© 2011 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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