Deep thoughts and celebrity memoirs

I've been listening to Nora Ephron's works on audiobook. If you're like me, the name 'Nora Ephron' sounds familiar but you can't quite place it. She's a columnist from the seventies and eighties and she wrote about people. Just people--that's enough.  I started with her personal account of growing older, I Feel Bad About My Neck, and graduated on to Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble: Some Things About Women and Notes on Media. Sometimes she's a feminist, sometimes a humorist, oftentimes a political observer--but she is always, always smart.  She seems to be completely intolerant of stupidity in all its societal manifestations.

Most recently I read her review of a book written by a transsexual person who underwent a sex change operation. Her book reviews aren't just book reviews--she does a good bit of outside research on her subjects, the times in which they lived, and the opinions of their peers. Her major criticism of this particular book is the writing style that the author adopts as a woman--the trite descriptions and overuse of the adjective "blush" in silly ways--but then she hits on the point of it all: the person's shallow understanding of what the female life he has undertaken really means. Jan Morris describes how good she feels when the men in her life feed on her helplessness, patronize her and then give her extra trading stamps, or smile approvingly at her in the streets; she feels absurdly elated and knows that she is becoming a true woman. She says she knows it is nonsense, but can't help it.


Ms Ephron writes this:
The truth of course, is that Jan Morris does not know it is nonsense. She thinks that is what it is about.  And I wonder about all this.  Wonder how anyone in this day and age can really think this is what being a woman is about. And as I wonder, I find myself thinking a harsh, feminist thought: it would be a man, I think. Well it would, wouldn't it?

 I apologize if this looks like I've given away the punch line of the author's best joke--I haven't. She's got a whole lot more.

I've learned something important from Ms. Ephron--when I decided to stop saying anything bad in my book reviews, I stopped being honest. Awhile back I was criticized for something I wrote, and it made me rethink why I was writing at all. What I had written wasn't mean or dishonest, it was simply shallow. I hadn't thought things through and I was embarrassed at having written it. My writing was negative, however, and that's why the person pointed it out to me.  If I'd written a shallow but positive comment, no one would have bothered.

So I decided that if I couldn't write something good about a book, I'd write nothing at all. I didn't want to disparage another person's feelings; I didn't want to criticize anyone's life decisions or dismiss their experiences just because I wouldn't have done things quite the same way.  But--and this is the big Nora Ephron but--that doesn't mean I have to pretend to be stupid and swallow any tripe people feed me.

And all those deep thoughts lead to celebrity memoirs. Enough with the celebrity memoirs!
A memoir can be funny--do you know Pat McManus and his best friend Retch Sweeny, his wife Bun and his favorite old man Rancid Crabtree? If not, you should introduce yourself.

A memoir can be chatty and reveal all the daily doings on a movie set, like Cary Elwes' As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales From the Making of The Princess Bride.  Great fun! Highly recommended.

But if it's neither funny or chatty, it needs to be deep...or I'm not reading it. I will say only this--


Amy Poehler's Yes Please is a celebrity memoir. If you're a diehard fan of all things SNL, you may want to read it. Don't expect too much.