Unsentimental and intermittently engaging, but you’ve probably heard it all before.
Balbirer’s debut recalls her scrappy formative years as a serious thespian scraping by on the margins of America’s empty, celebrity-worshipping culture.
In the early 1980s, she was an NYU student, one of hotheaded playwright David Mamet’s prize pupils. (“Take your shirt off and cry” is derived from a Mamet witticism about what’s expected of the average Hollywood actress.) After winning her expletive-dispensing instructor’s approbation, she dallied with off-Broadway bohemianism and then sprinted off to bigger things—i.e., demeaning money jobs. Her years as a full-time actress were marked by tiny victories and, more often, nagging failures, both professional and romantic. In New York, the once high-minded Balbirer soon found herself groveling before TV-biz hustlers whose biggest concern was that her breasts might be too small. She ended up playing a succession of floozies on MTV’s Remote Control, and her Debra Winger impersonations landed her a grueling set of dead-end auditions with Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels. In Los Angeles, she nabbed a bit part on Seinfeld, and her career began to show signs of actual progress. But low self-esteem, sexist boyfriends and lame-duck agents seemed to lead nowhere except to obsessive bra stuffing and debilitating diets. Some of Balbirer’s late-career lowlights included being rejected for a role by Luke Perry and being mysteriously fired from an unnamed popular sitcom by her “friend” Jane (no last name, though we’re assured she’s now an established Hollywood commodity). Later chapters show the author engaging in some tough-minded self-assessment and finally hitting upon a way to transcend her ill-fated acting career—become a writer. Balbirer’s angst-filled prose is sometimes feisty and observant enough to mask the fact that this is basically a depthless memoir of obsessive success-chasing and the agony of defeat, Hollywood-style.
Unsentimental and intermittently engaging, but you’ve probably heard it all before.Pub Date: April 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59691-478-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
A beautifully written, pensive, and restorative memoir.
A quiet meditation on art and life.
Matar’s Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir, The Return (2016), was about his Libyan father who was kidnapped in Cairo and taken back, imprisoned, and “gradually, like salt dissolving in water, was made to vanish.” His father’s presence reverberates throughout this thoughtful, sensitive extended essay about the author’s visit to Siena, where he ruminates and reflects on paintings, faith, love, and his wife, Diana. Matar focuses on the 13th- to 15th-century Sienese School of paintings which “stood alone, neither Byzantine nor of the Renaissance, an anomaly between chapters, like the orchestra tuning its strings in the interval,” but he discusses others as well. First, he explores the town, “as intimate as a locket you could wear around your neck and yet as complex as a maze.” Day or night, the “city seemed to be the one determining the pace and direction of my walks.” In the Palazzo Pubblico, Matar scrutinized a series of frescos the “size of a tennis court” painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338. As the author writes, his Allegory of Good Government is a “hymn to justice.” Matar astutely describes it in great detail, as he does with all the paintings he viewed. When one is in a despondent mood, paintings, Matar writes, seem to “articulate a feeling of hope.” He also visited a vast cemetery, a “glimpse [of] death’s endless appetite.” Over the month, he talked with a variety of Sienese people, including a Jordanian man whom he befriended. One by one, paintings flow by: Caravaggio’s “curiously tragic” David With the Head of Goliath, Duccio di Buoninsegna’s “epic altarpiece,” Maestà. Mounted onto a cart in 1311, it was paraded through Siena. Along the way, Matar also ponders the metaphysics of rooms and offers a luminous, historical assessment of the Black Death.
A beautifully written, pensive, and restorative memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-12913-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
This lengthy biography of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy reveals lives as melodramatic and star-crossed as one of their movies—without the happy ending. Author Rich (president of one of four MacDonald/Eddy fan clubs still extant in the US) reveals more about the two lovers than even the most avid fan might want to know, including Nelson's descriptions of Jeanette's ``little nighties.'' The question it leaves unanswered is how the feisty soprano and the lusty baritone, certainly among Hollywood's most popular stars during the late 1930s and early '40s, managed to make such goulash of their love affair. Although both singers regularly denied it, according to Rich, they were attracted to each other from the moment they met. MacDonald was characterized as ``an ambitious career gal with a bad reputation'' and was rumored to be one of Louis B. Mayer's couch tomatoes. Mayer, in fact, frowned on the singers' relationship for professional as well as personal reasons, but cast them in Naughty Marietta, their first film together. It made the duet stars—and brought them to bed after nearly a year of stolen kisses. It wasn't romantic. In a jealous rage, Nelson raped Jeanette, according to Rich. But she forgave him, beginning a cycle of reconciliation and rejection that went on for 30 years, and included suicide attempts and miscarriages. In a rejection phase, MacDonald married actor Gene Raymond (who, she discovered, preferred men as sexual partners) while Eddy wed a possessive woman who refused divorce, in spite of his numerous infidelities (MacDonald was not the only liaison). A source for much of the material, including intimate details of the couples' private meetings, is Eddy's mother, Isabel, via her son's diaries and letters. A filmography is included. A bonanza for MacDonald/Eddy fans, a pan full of nuggets for aficionados of Hollywood and MGM, but an encyclopedic struggle for the less dedicated. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1994
ISBN: 1-55611-407-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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