INVASIONS OF PRIVACY: Notes from a Celebrity Journalist

Christy, a Boston Globe reporter and syndicated columnist (""Conversations""), takes a self-help, Me-generation approach to celebrity interviewing--determined to prove that ""mutuality works, that a columnist can be involved and involving"" when writing about famous people ""who shared intimate feelings with me and allowed me to share mine with them."" Here, then, after a brief, amusing account of her beginnings as a slightly irreverent fashion.reporter, Christy interweaves her celebrity-encounters with some of her own attempts at self-analysis--in loose, vaguely thematic chapters. She empathizes mightily with women who beat the odds--sharing ""antipatriarchal motivation"" with Diana Nyad, seeing her mother in Mrs. Anwar Sadat's ""peaceful approach"" to feminism, even finding something to like in unpleasant interview-ee Nora Ephron. (""I wrote a story about her courage."") A sticky section on love--""I have always loved love""--includes Jacob Javits opening up about his career-obsessed neglect of wife Marion. (""He put his feelings in my hands. . ."") Interviews about the price-of-fame--Barbara Walters, Peter Fonda--lead Christy to muse on her quest for byline fame, her choice of career over domesticity; Polly Bergen's insecurities are just like Christy's, it seems; an interview with super-coroner Noguchi becomes a discussion of Christy as a ""success slave."" (""Dr. Noguchi convinced me that I could do things for myself, things that were simply pleasurable, and my success wouldn't vanish because of it."") And, along with this frequently off-putting Me-too-ism, there are slightly crisper confidences about interviewing techniques, about one-upmanship (how to outchutzpah David Susskind) and the politics of celebrity journalism. An odd mishmash, then, with some sharp tidbits (celebs at their most infantile) amid the general mushiness.