Books : Beautiful People : Excerpts

INTRODUCTION

When I was six years old, my mother sneezed and her dentures flew out. They hit the kitchen door with a sharp clack! and then rattled sideways across the linoleum floor like a fleeing crustacean. I have absolutely no recollection of graduation day, or my twenty-first birthday, or what I did last Christmas, but as long as I live, I will never forget those fugitive dentures.

Am I strange? Quite possibly.

I was born in 1952, the same year that Queen Elizabeth II ascended to the throne. In 2002, fifty years later, Queen Elizabeth and I both celebrated our golden jubilees. Naturally, we both took strolls down our respective memory lanes. While hers was doubtless strewn with ermine capes, bejeweled accessories, sparkling crystal toasting goblets, and well-fed corgis, mine was not.

As I wandered through the windmills and filing cabinets of my mind, I was taken aback by what I found, and did not find.

Where were the Hawaiian sunsets, the Easter bunnies, and the fluffy kittens? Where were those dreamy summer afternoons spent chasing butterflies through fields of daisies? Had they slipped my memory? Or did they ever exist?

What about all those romantic candlelit dinners sipping Rémy Martin with that special someone? Maybe I was too sloshed to remember.

Though devoid of Hallmark moments, my memory banks were, I hasten to add, by no means empty. Au contraire! They were teeming with vivid recollections. It's just that none of them were particularly pleasant.

Instead of heartwarming memories, what I found were fifty years of jarring occurrences, freakish individuals, deranged obsessions, public embarrassments, kamikaze outfits, unsavory types, varmints, vermin, and a ridiculous, lifelong quest to locate that mystical and elusive tribe, the Beautiful People. There were also hernias and food poisonings, cringe-making encounters with law enforcement, and stomach-churning regrets.

It was all quite nasty.

Woven throughout this tapestry, like a gaudy strand of hot pink silk, was my family, immediate and extended, in all its raw majesty. My mother, the feisty glamour-puss, my troubled and anarchic grandmother Narg, my blind aunt Phyllis, and Biddie, my showbiz-crazed childhood best friend.

Donning mental rubber gloves, I cautiously began to inspect this material and reacquaint myself with the events and the dramatis personae of my past. Here, preserved in aspic, were all the tarts, the trolls, the twinkies, and the trouts who had ever crisscrossed my path and left their nasty tire tracks on my psyche.

"Turn us into a confessional memoir!" they screeched like a goading Greek chorus.

My psychotherapist gave the thumbs-up. "Examining one's nasty memories is a complex and challenging psychological process," opined my shrink of eighteen years encouragingly. "Avoidance is a primary mechanism. Examining one's nasty memories and facing them head-on presents many opportunities for growth!"

Enthusiastically, I began to type. (At five feet four and a half inches, I am in no position to ignore any opportunities for growth.)

Revisiting my temps perdu proved both cathartic and entertaining. Sometimes I wept, but more often I chuckled. Before I was halfway through I had completely changed my attitude toward my nasty memories and nastiness in general. I now saw it for what it is: a vastly underrated commodity.

Nastiness is rich. Nastiness is fun. Who needs all that boring, cliché Hallmark stuff when you've got flying dentures? Nastiness has texture. Nastiness has the power to transform. Describing and embracing my nasty memories, as opposed to camouflaging them with baby's breath and doilies, has helped me integrate my past with my present and made me a more jolly and contented individual. I thoroughly recommend it.

By the time I handed in my manuscript I felt as if I had been the fortunate recipient of a massively purging psychological enema.

Hopefully my recollections will have the same effect on you!

Here, therefore, I proudly offer up, for your delectation, my nasty memoir.