5 Reasons why I read Brooke Shields’ “Down Came the Rain” even though I avoid celebrity memoirs
by Jerry Waxler
I was cruising the web recently and came upon a contest to write the best blog with a list of five things. Just to see if I could win, and to experiment with a different style than my longer essay entries, I thought I’d try my hand. Here’s my first attempt.
- I want to learn what it’s like to be inside all sorts of minds, and I’ve never been inside the mind of a supermodel before. (It wasn’t bad.)
- Even though this was a celebrity memoir, it felt very different from others I’ve flipped through. There wasn’t much name dropping, and the psychological journey of having a baby carried the book.
- It turned out to be a sort of parenting guidebook, and there was a lot of information in it that could help both members of a couple prepare, including a lot of details about In Vivo Fertilization, which I was pretty sketchy about. I like memoirs that teach.
- Postpartum depression is more than just the blues. I have a friend who is writing a fictional representation of her own postpartum mental breakdown, and a good buddy of mine used to joke about his mother thinking he was the devil. Upon further discussion, it turned out not to be so funny. After he was born, she was hospitalized with postpartum psychosis. I wanted to learn more about what it feels like from inside the experience of a mom.
- I think I saw her once, so that means we have karma. When she was in college at Princeton, I went out to a restaurant with friends. I didn’t want to gawk but my friends said it was definitely her a few tables away. (I saw Natalie Portman in a play once, so I’ll be on the lookout for her memoir, too.)
Notes:
To read the full essay I wrote about Down Came the Rain, click here.
To see the blogging site that offers the contest, click here.
Tags: reading celebrity