All the Lives I Want Read online

  Copyright

  Certain names have been changed, whether or not so noted in the book.

  Copyright © 2017 by Alana Massey

  Cover design by Lisa Honerkamp

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: February 2017

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Massey, Alana, author.

  Title: All the lives I want : essays about my best friends who happen to be famous strangers / Alana Massey.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Grand Central Publishing, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016023351 | ISBN 9781455565887 (hardback) | ISBN 9781455565870 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women—United States—Social conditions—21st century. | Celebrities—United States—History—21st century. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Essays.

  Classification: LCC HQ1421.M345 2017 | DDC 305.420973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023351

  ISBNs: 978-1-4555-6588-7 (hardcover), 978-1-4555-6587-0 (ebook)

  E3-20170119-JV-NF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Being Winona; Freeing Gwyneth: On the Limitations of Our Celebrity “Type”

  Public Figures: Britney’s Body Is Everybody’s

  Run the World: Amber Rose in the Great Stripper Imaginary

  All the Lives I Want: Recovering Sylvia

  Heavenly Creatures: The Gospels According to Lana, Fiona, and Dolly

  There Can Be Only One: On Lil’ Kim, Nicki Minaj, and the Art of Manufactured Beef

  The Queen of Hearts: An Alternative Account of the Life and Crimes of Courtney Love

  Our Sisters Shall Inherit the Sky: On the Lisbon Sisters and the Misnomer of The Virgin Suicides

  Broken-Bodied Girls: On the Horror of Little Girls Grown

  Charlotte in Exile: A Case for the Liberation of Scarlett Johansson from Lost in Translation

  No She Without Her: On Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and the Singularity

  American Pain: The Suffering-Class Spectacle of Anna Nicole Smith

  A Bigger Fairy Tale: On Anjelica Huston and the Inheritance of Glamour

  Long-Game Bitches: On Princess Di, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and the Fine Art of Crazy Exing

  Emparadised: On Joan Didion and Personal Mythology as Survival

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  Newsletters

  For my sister Nova, the first star I ever wanted to be.

  We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in.

  —Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

  Being Winona; Freeing Gwyneth

  On the Limitations of Our Celebrity “Type”

  I SHOULD HAVE FORESEEN THAT things between James and me would end in violent chaos on the night of my twenty-ninth birthday when he, my best friend Phoebe, and I were each contemplating who our No. 1 most bangable celebrity was. Phoebe and I had declared our respective loves for Harry Styles and John Malkovich. Then James said, “You know, I’ve always had a soft spot for Gwyneth Paltrow.”

  “Gwyneth Paltrow?” I repeated back to him in horror.

  “Yeah, there’s something about her. I don’t know what it is!” And in that moment, every thought or daydream I’d ever had about our potential future together filled with broad-smiled children, adopted cats, and phenomenal sex evaporated. Because there is no future with a Gwyneth man when you’re a Winona woman, particularly a Winona in a world made for Gwyneths.

  Just as Phoebe and I wax poetic about which celebrities we’d let impregnate us, we’ve also devoted considerable time to the ones we feel our lives most resemble. It is from this game that I developed my “Winona in a world made for Gwyneths” complex. This theory positions these onetime best friends as two distinct categories of white women who are conventionally attractive but whose public images exemplify dramatically different lifestyles and worldviews. The interesting thing I’ve found about asking women whether they’re Gwyneths or Winonas is that self-assessments are almost universally in concert with external assessments. I’ve seen dramatic escalations when a self-identified Charlotte was told by friends that she was a Miranda, but for the most part, Winonas know that they’re Winonas and Gwyneths know that they’re Gwyneths. What’s more interesting is that people are usually happy about it, too.

  One lives a messy but somehow more authentic life that is at once exciting and a little bit sad. The other appears to have a life so sufficiently figured out as to be both enviable and mundane. Gwyneth Paltrow is, of course, the latter. She has always represented a collection of tasteful but safe consumer reflexes more than she’s reflected much of a real personality. I imagine that she writes the GOOP newsletter, her laughably out-of-touch dispatch about vegetables and fashion, wearing overpriced clothes in colors like “camel” and scowling at her staff. That is, when she’s not referring to Billy Joel as “William”1 and seeking nannies who know ancient Greek and play at least two instruments.2

  For girls of my generation who were awkward or a little bit strange, Winona Ryder was both relatable and aspirational. The few recorded interviews she’s done reveal that she is a bottomless well of uncool and discomfort.3 She stumbles over metaphors and laughs sincerely at bad jokes. She is also a movie star who is unreasonably beautiful, but there was always a sense that she still belonged to the Island of Misfit Toys.

  She epitomized the Mall Goth ethic and aesthetic in Beetlejuice long before Hot Topic was mass-producing the look, and in Heathers, she enacted high school revenge fantasies long before Mean Girls was either a movie or PG shorthand for “fucking bitches.” In the ’90s, she did her grungiest best as the Generation X poster child in Reality Bites but never met a corset she didn’t like and came at us with The Age of Innocence and Dracula. I can’t even talk about Little Women, because I’ll just start crying about the fact that I’m not currently sitting under a pile of kittens and sisters.

  Then there’s her romantic life, which reads like a who’s who of my sexual awakening. Val Kilmer, Rob Lowe, Christian Slater, Beck, David Duchovny, and a bunch of indie rock stars who are probably still in love with her. Gwyneth had a shorter and more predictable list of conventional handsome dudes, including Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck, before she married Chris Martin. But Winona’s love stories seem like a series of elaborate fan fictions come to life for the charming and constantly bewildered pixie of a p
erson. And I’m sure I don’t need to remind anyone that Johnny Depp wore her name on his bicep when he was still starring in daring, quirky films instead of predictable Tim Burton cash cows.

  But just as Winona’s legendary series of whirlwind romances wouldn’t last forever, neither would mine with James. Many of the tabloid stories reported that she was devastated by her relationships ending. I realize that celebrity breakup synopses often cast the woman as the sad sack who can’t catch a man with a net because it’s a neat narrative. But, good god, it was also my narrative and I needed a hero.

  As interesting as I always found her love life, though, it was still her personality and talent that drew me in. Rumor has it that Winona had the script for Shakespeare in Love and that Gwyneth saw it at her house and surreptitiously sought out the producers to get the role that landed her the Oscar.4 It is one of many Hollywood whispers that Gwyneth is not so sweet as she presents. And the long list of “best friends” she seems to have had over the years (Winona, Madonna, Tracy Anderson, Beyoncé) looks more than a little opportunistic.

  It would have all been fine for Winona, because she was starring in the adaptation of Girl, Interrupted. Except that turned out to be the movie that would actually work to catapult Angelina Jolie to stardom and earn her an Oscar. And then came her 2001 arrest for shoplifting. The incident revealed a more complicated, less whimsical Winona; she was actually unwell, an inconvenient reality better dealt with through punch lines than public sympathy. And while male performers have gone on violent and destructive benders and bounced back in the time since that incident, Winona’s reputation has never fully recovered.

  I loved Winona as a kid but grew even more affectionate for her in my late teens and early adulthood, long after the “Free Winona” T-shirts had cycled out of ironic fashion. She was wide-eyed and wistful but managed to find love from time to time anyway. I felt I could reasonably aspire to that.

  Like many men before him, James was more capable of getting into relationships than he had let on, just not with me. He was leaving me for someone else, and when he said, “I know you want me to mess this up with her, but I won’t,” I paused a moment before speaking. “No, but I hope that she chooses someone over you,” I told him, with a suddenly regained composure. He went to leave and with my back turned to him, I said, “I hope she chooses someone over you twice.” My voice cracked as I delivered these last words, adding to the drama of the whole encounter and clearly cutting him to the core. I sat there devastated, in a pile of my own tears without a sister or a kitten in sight, but at least I’d delivered a line to remember me by.

  An exceedingly quick search through Facebook revealed the identity of his new girlfriend. And there she was. A total. Fucking. Gwyneth. In addition to long blond hair, she had earnest gratitude posts featuring all the superboring emoticons. She posted photos of sunsets and filtered her selfies to hell and back with Instagram. On Facebook, she posted photos of a white SUV and nights out at a club. I couldn’t see her feet, but I joked cruelly to a friend, “She’s probably wearing espadrilles.” A quick Google search brought up a photo of her cheerfully giving what appears to be a presentation about industrial label makers. In sharp contrast to my online life, a collection of mostly drily despairing essays for online magazines and unfiltered Twitter jokes, her entire digital footprint accumulated into a collection of safe consumer reflexes more than a personality.

  And though I am easily given to fits of envy, I looked at her life and couldn’t find a single thing to covet. I was a haphazardly medicated bipolar twenty-nine-year-old stripper and I didn’t want anything she had. I felt the way I imagined Winona felt surveying the foreign landscape of GOOP, laughing incredulously at the appeal of such dull aspirations but also completely and utterly alone.

  I attached actively to my sense of Winona-ness in the months that followed the breakup. I shared the observation about how seeing this woman’s profile was how Winona probably felt if she ever read GOOP and left out the sad part at the end about being alone so that it could be a joke. If I was in on the joke, it couldn’t hurt me.

  Although I originally thought being unchosen was my moment where Gwyneth snatched up Shakespeare in Love, I realize now that her getting James was less like getting an award-winning movie script and more like getting that scary VHS tape from The Ring that eventually ruins your life. I’ve instead come to see the whole experience as my moment on a surveillance camera in Saks Fifth Avenue. It was the episode in which the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was revealed to be the Depressive Witch Nightmare Woman that she was all along. It brought to life my sadness and desperation outside the vacuum where being mentally ill was a fascinating quirk that had no potential to create real consequences. I was breakable and broken and would not be confined to the narrative that James, and the long line of men whose footsteps he had followed in, had in mind for me.

  The mythology I built around Winona Ryder saw me through heavyheartedness and I am grateful to have had her by my metaphorical side. But the deeper I dove into the archive of headlines about Winona, the more closely I read her interviews, and the more distance I got from my own postbreakup myopia, the more I realized that I had done Winona the same disservice that had been done to me. I had made her an avatar that represented my own suffering and refused to register both stated facts and notable omissions from the record that might suggest otherwise. The public discourse about Winona had trapped her as the long-suffering girl, and I was in collusion with it. The decision to actively disengage from that way of looking at Winona made me sympathetic to an unlikely ally: Gwyneth Paltrow.

  Giving Winona back her full humanity meant giving it back to Gwyneth, too. So as humiliated as I was to be left for someone I identified as a “Gwyneth” before, my thoughts about her turned mostly into hopes that she’s safe and happy. Because the thing about Gwyneth Paltrow that James couldn’t articulate is that there’s not really anything about her. Or at least there’s not anything about her public image that is especially unique or controversial. She’s a safe canvas onto which others can project their own desires, including the defiant and childish desire to define oneself as against the things she is alleged to stand for. I know very well that the woman James left me for is not an empty collection of label makers and earnest Facebook posts, just as I know that Gwyneth Paltrow is not her terrible newsletter.

  Her breakup with Chris Martin was widely mocked in the press for being identified as a “conscious uncoupling,” as though she could not bear to have anything so human and messy as what it was: a divorce. For months after the split, rumors flew that Gwyneth was terrified that details of their marriage would emerge, that the perfect filter she had chosen for the world to see her through would be ripped off to reveal all the blemished and broken parts. Such forms of protected and limited self-projection are calculated and intentional. And that seems like its own kind of solitude. Despite whatever loneliness, real or imagined, Gwyneth experiences, she seems steadfast in her commitment to being in on the joke in a way that I know well.

  I turned thirty the following June, the age Winona was when the shoplifting scandal went down. As I stared down the birthday, I feared that I’d be forced to turn the corner from wide-eyed and wistful to just sad and sick. And when you rely heavily on celebrities like Winona Ryder to make sense of your life, it is easy to stare down your early thirties as the period of darkness and uncertainty following a fallout. But just as I had clumsily retrofitted my life story with all the telltale signs of being a classic Winona, it was preemptive to fear my thirties. Though I write this from the earliest stages of them, they have so far contained an amount of joy and love thus far unprecedented in my life.

  The truth about the women who are forced to play these interesting chapters is that they are doing so in the memoirs of men who never deserved them. That the really good story, the story worth telling, has been theirs all along. They just have to survive to tell it. And that’s what Winona did. In the fall of 2014, just a few months after the end
with James, Winona became the face of the Rag & Bone fashion line and was featured in a series of promotional videos for the launch. She doesn’t appear to have aged a day since 1990, and she smiles through red lipstick as she plays arcade games at Coney Island. The arcade is dimly lit and deserted except for her. But she seems perfectly content to make goofy faces and have her own fun, telling herself a bad joke that no one else can hear, and laughing and laughing.

  Public Figures

  Britney’s Body Is Everybody’s

  WHEN PEOPLE ASK ME HOW much I weigh, they are often looking for a measure of distance more than a measure of weight. They want to know my weight in pounds, of course, but at the heart of so many inquiries about the weight of a small woman is a desire to know the difference between their bodies and mine. They want to know the distance between these two countries we occupy and the difference in area. As I write this, I weigh 110 pounds. It is a number that I am not uncomfortable with, but I prefer to be from one pound to four pounds lighter, between 106 and 109. The circles on the six and the nine are deceptive roundness, seeing as the body they represent is mostly defined by straight lines at this weight. The zeros in the middle of the number serve as numerical thigh gaps: a space to house the coveted nothing that I hunger in the direction of. But my eating disorder is a pathology that gives significance to arbitrary figures, both embodied shapes and numerical ones.

  Men often register low weights as normal. Their standard calibrations for the weight of petite women is between 100 and 115 pounds, average ones 115 to 125, and tall ones 125 to 135. These men are completely wrong, of course. But women, too, have a hard time adjusting for height and width to understand how another woman can appear slight but bear a substantial weight or how others can appear so ample but register on the scales at smaller numbers. Further exacerbating the disorientation we experience when faced with other people’s statistics that do not match our internal calibrations of them is the preponderance of celebrity programming featuring hypothesized weights and sizes for famous bodies. Exact weights litter fitness and celebrity magazines that seem off somehow but always carry the weight of our judgments, and an internal subtraction problem, to determine our proximity to their shapes. Weighing fewer than 100 pounds indicates too much weight lost, weighing more than 150 pounds indicates a calamitous embarrassment, and weighing over 200 pounds is nothing short of a mortal sin.