Addicted to Judy Garland

She describes My Judy Garland Life as, “a high-spirited book about loss,” and she’s absolutely right, except that it’s also endearing and funny and very readable, and not the slightest bit self-pitying. She takes Garland seriously, but not herself. While admitting that she feels a “madly strong connection” with Garland, she points out that as pastimes go, a fascination for Garland is, after all, “a bit more interesting than hop-scotch,” which is true enough, and that although she was a fan from childhood on, she was never the kind of who “stole money from my mother’s purse to buy Judy Garland records,” which is the entry-level definition of totally dedicated fandom.

What the book is really about, Susie says, is “all the different ways in which family life can go wrong,” and as she says it, I can’t help thinking, yes, she’s right, isn’t that precisely the stuff of all good memoirs and biographies (this book is both) and how clever to have conflated her own ups and downs with those of Garland. She wanted to write about “the way we handle grief, and the way we handle love and fame,” and of course nobody is a better example of how not to handle those things than Garland, who is right there beside Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley in the pantheon of those who have been destroyed by gaining just the things the rest of us all want: glamour, fame, money, success.

Susie Boyt is a natural writer, but unlike most writers she’s bright and smart when she talks about herself. She spent four years at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford (she matriculated in 1988), and “wrote short stories a bit,” then, the day after she took her finals, she got down to work immediately and started a novel, she says in an admirably no-nonsense tone of voice.

When she talks about Garland it sounds, from time to time, as if she were talking about herself, but of course that’s the point. “Difficult people interest me,” she says, and of course Garland was famously difficult, even by the standards of stars, multiplied by the fact that her upbringing as a child star turned her out into the world as a grownup, “utterly powerful, but totally lacking in even the most basic skills,” something which is true of an amazing number of stars, but particularly those brought up in the “studio system,” some of whom never learned how to dial a telephone by themselves, let alone keep a checkbook, cook, or buy groceries.

Garland, Susie says, “was never motivated by money,” but that’s not altogether true; much of her later life was spent trying to earn enough money to keep on living like a star, and the men in her life were very often there because they claimed to understand all about money (Sid Luft) or because they siphoned off her earnings for themselves.

“She could make ordinary people feel glamorous, and glamorous people feel ordinary,” Susie says of Garland, and it’s true. It’s the mark of a great star, and Garland could do it even at the lowest, saddest points of her life.

“Afflictions can be positive experiences,” Susie observes shrewdly, and I have to turn that one over in my mind, and agree that it’s sad, but so. “Judy couldn’t be more out of fashion now, in some ways,” she adds, and that’s true too, partly I suspect because she has been flash-frozen as a victim by the hard-core fans, when in fact she was tough, smart, funny, brave, and at the same time ruinously self-destructive.

Instead, she has been enshrined as the poster child of celebrity victimization. And it’s a multigenerational emotional cliffhanger, too, with Liza Minnelli’s fans waiting, holding their breath, for her to go the same way her mother did. The adulation of the crowd is always a blood sport, not a pretty sight.

Anyway, this is a brilliant little book, sincere, funny, and sharp-minded, and it’s impossible to read it without liking Susie, which, one suspects, was the whole point of writing it. What next, I ask? Has she gotten Garland out of her system now?

Susie pauses, long enough for me to guess that the answer is no. “After I finished writing the book,” she says, “I used to freeze every time I heard Over the Rainbow...” Another pause, and she adds: “Writing the book has made me toughen up a bit, made me feel more resilient.”