I talked to a best-beloved friend about celebrity versus authenticity, how it’s impossible to expect people to be “authentic” in front of a camera, and yet it’s still possible to find moments of connection. We were contrasting Neil Gaiman and Anthony Bourdain.
And yeah, I don’t wanna drag Nail Gaiman shit out more than I need to–I’ve been talking about this on social media enough–but what was supposed to be a Really Short Post ran long enough that it needed to be a blog. So here we go.
Neil Gaiman
I used to look up to Neil Gaiman a lot. “That’s the kind of career I want.” Then I started to get disillusioned with his writing–which wasn’t nearly as good as his comics–and people started pushing back against comments to that effect.
I shrugged it off, still admired the guy, and then…he kept doing shitty stuff and passing it off as not shitty. And he was a “writer,” but he spent most of his time not-writing, not-creating new work. And Norse Mythology came out and it was just awful Marvel Universe fanfic. “Please hire me!!!”
Around the same time, I was typing in a lot of stuff by authors I admired, studying there work. I think I tried typing in one of his short stories, went, “Uh, well that was oddly sexist,” and stopped. How to Talk to Girls at Parties, maybe? I liked it when I read it, but not typing it.
And then during covid he broke quarantine because BUT MEEEEEE and I was done.
But I’m a writer, and to me he’s not a celebrity, but someone who’s part of my community, 2nd degree of separation, and the hurt is more immediate for being someone I wanted to model my career on, and haven’t–this fuckwad is raking in cash?
For my bestie, he’s just some lying scum celebrity.
Anthony Bourdain
To my friend, Anthony Bourdain is another celebrity, but he’s also a celebrity she can connect to. The past life he’s talked about–she acknowledges isn’t the full story–is something she can relate to.
And he…travels. And tries new things. And goes new places. And lets himself be less than perfect on the camera.
When you’ve shut your future down because of trauma, and then…stuff gets better? There aren’t a lot of people talking about how to move past hurt and thrive. I know this for myself. People talk about recovery in kind of patronizing terms, like it’ll be a miracle that you heal enough to function, don’t even worry about planning for a life of thriving, lol.
So maybe Anthony Bourdain was a lying scum celebrity. It’s possible that he was able to pull off that much of an illusion. And yet: he was deliberately putting himself in positions of saying unflattering things about himself, catching himself in raw moments. Those moments were later edited; it wasn’t like we were able to watch him 24/7 or (and this was part of my friend’s point) that he’d have been authentically himself even if we were.
But even if it was just a narrative, that narrative was about a flawed guy but human, who tried new things and who, even if he didn’t ever find a happily ever after, hey–he took the extra time he had and fucking lived it. He made choices, took chances, shared.
If his persona was all a lie, it was a pretty good one.
The Shelleys
I’ve been working on finishing a short story that was supposed to be an easy win, about a dragon made of burned books.
Yeah, no.
I wrote a section about the Qin Dynasty of ancient China (holy shit, I didn’t even scratch the surface of what a clusterfuck that was), a section about the Library of Alexandria (and am now sorta suspicious of anyone who beats their breast about the Library of Alexandria), and a section about Mary Shelley burning Percy Bysshe Shelley’s papers after he died.
Or at least I thought I was gonna do that last one. It turns out I couldn’t find any primary or even remotely reliable secondary sources (not even Wikipedia) where it was mentioned.
It was something I “knew,” since college. And it wasn’t true.
I fought with it. I looked and looked and looked, far past when I should have just realized that it wasn’t true enough to base part of a story on.
Because I looked, though, I ended up learning more about the Shelleys than I rally intended or wanted, and had to process that, too:
Mary Shelley’s diaries are full of complaints, whining, misery, recriminations. In ways that her personal letters are not. She worships PBS in just gaggingly maritorious* ways, at the same time that PBS is complaining to some new amour that his wife is cold to him in letters and poems.
It seems like Mary Shelley constantly held herself back and compartmentalized herself, polite and cold in company, and passionate and miserable in private. Which was the real self?
Ahhhh, it’s complicated.
For the story, I wrote the section from Mary Shelley’s point of view as a journal entry that she later burned, and I had her refuse to address the smoke dragon’s accusations of burning PBS’s papers. I fudged it: but I fudged it because she did, too. That was the compromise I came to. Her journals are full of whining and misery, but they also contain marks here and there that we have no idea what they mean for sure. Possibly they marked fights with other members of the household. But then again, maybe not.
Even in her most personal documents, Mary Shelley was not herself. All we have are those little black marks on the page, and some of them we can’t even interpret.
*I was gonna say “uxorious,” then went, “do I actually know what that word means?” and looked it up: it means the excessive love of one’s wife. The husband version is “maritorious.”
What We Can Know
Another friend of mine focuses on the fact that we can never really know another person: what we know about them is like unto a distant star, a single stream of photons stretching across the universe.
Me, I’m of the opinion that we get to know more than that: the closer a person is, the more photons that we receive direct from the source, and the more their light bounces around and comes at us from various directions: the way people change their environment, other people’s opinions of them, their reactions to us.
Celebrity is inherently false, I can agree with that. And we can never truly know other people (or ourselves, for that matter, because we can’t see ourselves from the outside in).
But the willingness of a celebrity to take chances with authenticity also seems worthwhile. Mary Shelley seems like someone I wouldn’t mind knowing, now that I’ve read her whining (and typed some of it in) and her sometimes falsely polite letters to friends who were actively backstabbing her, as she waited for them to come to their senses, aching at the betrayal.
Seeing both sides isn’t the full story. But it’s something I can resonate with. I appreciate the humanity of it.
Gaiman I could only admire, put up on a pedestal–then tear him down off it.
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