Good evening!
This won’t be a long one because I didn’t read much this week, but I still feel like writing something so here we are.
I’ve forgotten to mention that I’ll be interviewing author Elisa Shua Dusapin at Blackwell’s Manchester on March 13th -- you can get tickets here!
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My twitter/X is @jessf_white and my Instagram is @lunchpoems.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
True to my word, I started Anne Edwards’ biography of Judy Garland, which is called Judy Garland (1974) and am getting along with it quite well. It’s informative without lingering too long on certain eras of her life -- even though I love details, I do think this works as Judy had a very eventful life from an early age. Edwards clearly had a lot of material to work with (or contend with) and so her zippy approach allows her to cover a lot of ground. I’m kind of fascinated by how different biographers approach their subjects, even though I haven’t read nearly enough of them to be an authority. It’s just always interesting to me to think through how these writers gathered their information and how they decided to lay it out.
I will say that Edwards clearly has a lot of sympathy for Judy, which I appreciate because I also have a lot of sympathy for her. Edwards sometimes steps back to cast a little bit of judgement on the big players in their lives, which I don’t really begrudge her for -- I think it's fine to be a bit snippy about studio executives who put a child on a diet and give her a mix of upper and sleeping pills so that she could work 18 hour days without complaining she was tired. I am also always happy to see a bit of judgement placed at the feet of Louis B. Mayer, a man who is currently playing hopscotch across burning coals in hell. Edwards paints a good picture of Mayer, and the way that he manipulated children and young women by introducing himself as a new father figure in their lives, and then subsequently tearing them down on emotional and physical levels. Studio executives of his ilk appear in fictional texts like Gavin Lambert’s Inside Daisy Clover (1963), Paula Byrne’s Blonde Venus (2020) and Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde (1999) and it’s been interesting to compare the real life anecdotes of him against the fictional accounts, which really don’t deviate very much.
Despite this being a newsletter about how I am reading about Judy Garland, I’ve spent a significant amount of time on a powerful man in her life, and it’s now easy to see why he’s so prominent in Edwards’ text. To talk about figures like Judy, you also have to talk about the people who shaped her life, and, arguably, death. That seems quite a simplistic view of things but it’s true -- without Mayer she wouldn’t have worked with Mickey Rooney, or been cast for The Wizard of Oz, and so on and so forth. In this specific context, that’s not really a necessary evil because I don’t really think that exploitation is necessary for art.
Anyway, that’s all I have to say for now because I’m really not that far into the book so can’t place full judgement on it as a text just yet. More next week!
Books on my radar
The one I am reading!