On parties, a reality TV masterpiece, Andrea Levy, Robert Skinner and a literary assassination
Greetings, fellow children of god!
I hope everyone is enjoying July—objectively the best month of the year, featuring as it does a magical 24 hour period during which everyone is required to give me presents and feed my compliment goblin all day long (ie my birthday). In case you’re wondering why I didn’t invite you to my party, it’s because I didn’t have one. In fact, I haven’t had a party since my thirtieth birthday, when I threw a Mad Men themed party at my house and spent over a decade’s worth of party hosting energy in a single night. Don’t get me wrong, it was a fun night, incorporating all the things required of an enjoyable and sophisticated adult soirée (an immense quantity of liquor; strangers having sex in the bathroom; a cake in the shape of a packet of smokes; intense weeping; someone throwing up in a chip bowl and leaving it under the bedside table) but I haven’t subsequently felt the urge to repeat it.
That said, I met my publisher this week to talk about marketing stuff and have obviously demanded a massive book launch at which all of the above things also happen, especially the vomiting.
Television
I feel a bit torn about writing about television this week, because the truth is, I have only been watching one show, a show that is so intense and multifaceted, with so many things to process from every single episode, that I’m not sure whether I’m emotionally or intellectually ready to write about it.
The show I’m talking about is, of course, the legendary reality TV masterpiece, Vanderpump Rules (VDPR). I must confess at the outset that there are 10 seasons of this show, and I’m only up to the beginning of season 5, and I might need do a second instalment once I’ve finished the whole thing (NB if any of you are tempted to spoil the next five seasons for me, I’m sorry but I will have you killed).
If you haven’t yet taken a sip of these foul and yet somehow immensely delicious waters, the show is based around the staff of a Los Angeles restaurant, SUR, run by Lisa Vanderpump. Lisa is British, and the most exciting detail from her Wikipedia entry is that she starred in the film clip for ABC’s classic 1980s pop song, Poison Arrow:
My other favourite thing about Lisa Vanderpump is that her house has a moat with live swans, including two white swans called Hanky and Panky.
Lisa bringing Hanky back from the vet, where he was being treated for depression. I did not make that up.
Lisa’s role on the show is to dole out advice and a kind of ruthlessly tough love to the many glamorous morons who work for her. All of the bartenders and waitstaff at SUR are models, actors or musicians on the side, and they all have a certain kind of high-maintenance, catalogue-model hotness that I assume is the base standard if you live in LA. They are the true heroes of the show, sacrificing their self-respect and dignity by providing the most superbly stupid drama you could ever imagine: sleeping with each other, lying to each other, cheating on each other, cheating with each other, bitching about each other, psychologically destroying each other, physically attacking each other—and then becoming best friends again the next season. None of them seem able to engage in even the most basic forms of moral reasoning, and there is not a single person to root for—they are uniformly presented as drunks, villains, and absolute idiots.
It sounds awful, and it is—god, it is so awful—and yet, every day, I find myself just waiting for my kids to go to bed so I can flop on the couch and snort up another few episodes of unrelenting vileness.
Me, at 11.55pm on a school night, hitting play on my fourth episode of the evening
The amount of content generated by these puffed up balls of aerated narcissism is truly spectacular. It’s the complete opposite of most reality shows, where nothing much usually happens—I seem to remember Real Housewives of Melbourne once generating a whole season of storyline out of a single incident in which Gina showed up late to a tennis match. In VDPR, so much is going on that you almost need a map, a list of characters and a diagram of their current relationships at the start of each episode, like in Lord of the Rings.
Me, trying to remember the root cause of Stassi’s latest beef with Scheana,
and which of the SUR hostesses has most recently slept with James
Another similarity with Lord of the Rings is that the early seasons of VDPR are set in a fantastical historical period that requires a leap of the imagination to properly visualise (2013-2017). Do you remember what it was like to be alive back then? I sure don’t!
I only got into VDPR this year because I kept seeing references to some major scandal that went down in the latest season, and the part of my brain dedicated to gossip-mongering (all of it) couldn’t bear not knowing what was going on. Because I am a serious person, who likes to do thorough and meticulous research, I went back to the very beginning of the show so I could fully understand the complex psychological and moral dynamics between this group of oversexed scumbags—but I didn’t fully reckon with what that would actually entail. The seasons each go for twenty main episodes, after which there are three reunion episodes, plus an extra episode full of bonus fluff they couldn’t fit on the show. Getting through just one season is a mammoth task, and I should definitely get some certificate once I reach the end of all ten, possibly at a formal ceremony involving a gown and a mortarboard.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that this stupid/incredible show is kind of ruining my life—it’s an obsession, it’s a vocation, it’s a mental illness that should be recognised in the DSM V. If the main character of my next novel is now a kleptomaniac bartender called Jax who has had three nosejobs and who keeps getting tattoos of girls’ names on his big beefy arms immediately before cheating on them with a Vegas hostess and/or his best friend’s girlfriend, then I simply cannot be held accountable.
Books
What, you think I have time for reading, with my VDPR schedule??? Are you nuts??? I mean, I could perhaps take some time to read one of the cast member’s books, of which there are several…
Kidding, kidding—I have actually read quite a bit over the last couple of weeks. I am currently reading Small Island, by Andrea Levy, a historical novel about post-war Jamaican immigrants to Britain. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Orange Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize back in 2009, and I can see why—Levy has created these fully-realised historical characters, each with their own distinctive voice, and she writes about them with such kindness, imagination and generosity. It begins with Hortense, a young Jamaican woman who is arriving in England to meet her husband, Gilbert—and then takes us back to the beginning of their lives, where we begin to understand the oddly hostile dynamic between them. Levy explores the relationship between Britain and its former colonies in a direct, yet light-handed way—by zooming in on individual experiences and writing such intensely real characters, she allows the reader to emotionally connect with the real-life consequences of colonialism, and the experience of immigration, without it ever feeling like a lecture. I am loving it.
I’m also reading Robert Skinner’s I’d Rather Not, which is an endearingly crackpot collection of autobiographical essays, which I am enjoying a lot. It is very funny, and it also has one of my favourite book covers of the year:
Other Things
I recently read and anxiously enjoyed Ursula Robinson-Shaw’s essay on Paul Dalla Rosa’s short story collection, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, in the Sydney Review of Books. It is long, funny, and merciless—I particularly enjoyed this passage:
Do I ask too much of this book? Yes. When I was a teenager, a girl I knew was pilloried online for making a poll about her Halloween costume; the options were ‘porn star lesbian’ or ‘bull dyke’. After being roundly condemned, she made a defiant post: I think you’ll find it’s about having fun at a party. We didn’t know it at the time, but this was her triumph. A decade has passed, and these words are dearer to me than any immortal line of poetry, the soft nothings of my beloved, the noise my phone makes when I receive a payment. Nine times out of ten, Chrissy is right. It is about having fun at a party. If everyone focused more on having fun at a party and less on scrutiny and reprobation, puritanical introspection, the Protestant ethic of scabbing and pissing and bitching, everything would still be awful, but we would have better parties and better books.
The essay paid incredibly close attention to the book and was, at times, pretty brutal. As someone who is about to publish a novel, this both thrilled and terrified me. It made me ponder what sort of critical engagement would be more painful to a writer—eg would this kind of passionately argued take-down be worse than, say, a review that spent 500 words describing the plot, getting the character names wrong, and then finished with “it was alright”? I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect there must be something a little flattering about being stalked, kidnapped, and slowly murdered by a highly skilled literary assassin. I mean, I’m not saying that when my novel comes out I want Ursula Robinson-Shaw to step on my face…but I guess I’m not not saying that, either.
Finally, I should note that I hope to have some exciting book cover related news early next week. If you’re interested, do keep an eye out in your inbox/on ze socials!
Until next time,
Eleanor xoxo
PS I still don’t know what this year’s big VDPR scandal involves. PLEASE DON’T TELL ME.
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