There are few things I love more than my-life-sucked memoirs, and celebrity-my-life-sucked memoirs is one of them. So when MacKenzie Phillips was out doing press about how she revealed her incestuous relationship with her father in hers, I was on board. I couldn’t wait to read it. Is it any surprise that it couldn’t live up to the hype?
In High on Arrival, teen star and daughter of The Mamas and Papas singer John Phillips, MacKenzie Phillips gives us her story–what it was like being in American Grafitti and on One Day at a Time, what it was like being raised one of the biggest stars and drug addicts of her generation, and what it was like becoming a raging drug addict herself.
What I learned is it is every bit as insane as you would expect. So insane, in fact, that it seems she couldn’t write about it coherently. Which I guess might be what happens if you spend the better part of your existence shooting coke?
Also, seriously, who actually shoots coke? Jeez.
The thing about this is, you sort of know the whole family is fucked up and in a world of drugs and excess. So it’s exciting to really see the curtain pulled back and hear about it. And it was crazy. I mean, she did more drugs than are humanly imaginable and her father had sex with her and she was raped and kidnapped and good lord knows what else.
And yet, she managed to make it a boring read. So boring that I was skimming for the good bits. She basically just likes to yap and yap, more interested in rationalizing who did what and why or berating herself for her crappy behavior. That might be well and good in therapy, but in a memoir you need some narrative structure, to tell us stories, to make it hang together and build and make sense.
This doesn’t do any of that. It’s is all “I shot this” and then “I smoked that” and “Hey I wore this funky green suede shawl,” jumping back and forth and all over the place in time, so the effect is scattered, overwhelming, and boring. Basically the narrative reads like she was still on coke as she wrote it, jumping over-enthusiastically and over-grandiosely from topic to topic without finishing anything up. Her marriage breaks up, but she doesn’t explore that relationship, it’s just at some point she’s like, “We weren’t getting along.” Is it that she doesn’t understand what makes her story interesting? That the exact brand of heroin and that your friends were really nice friends and what your cat’s name was doesn’t matter as much as the relationships? I don’t know.
What I do know is there’s a good story in there, she just needed a ghost writer or an editor. Or both. She might be a lovely nice person who has had a hard, messed up life, she might even be a decent actress and singer, but a writer she is not. Maybe she should have read Russel Brand’s memoir to learn how to write a celeb addiction story.
Disappointing.
aw, dang I wanted to read this. If the book can make drug addiction and incest boring, I think I may have to pass