Book 'em, Danno

 

I still haven't broken my reading habit, so here's the latest:

Having only consumed Joan Didion's two late-in-life memoirs -- "The Year of Magical Thinking" (about her late husband) and "Blue Nights" (about her late daughter) -- I thought it would be fun to read stuff from her heyday. I ended up picking "The White Album," and while I certainly wouldn't say the writing isn't good, as a collection of (then) timely essays it doesn't really hold much interest in 2026. (Not since "Chinatown" has someone been this fascinated by L.A. water, only Joan's no Faye Dunaway.) 

I had asked for a recommendation from an older friend who reads a lot but came up short when she told me that she'd never actually read anything by the acclaimed writer because "Joan Didion always seemed like someone you were supposed to read, which was a big turnoff."

 

From there I finally read Scotty Bowers's infamous "Full Service," which was loaned to me nearly a decade ago by the same friend, who actually heard about it via my blog. When we discussed "how much of it do you think is true?" my friend said she had a hard time believing there were men who would PAY OTHER MEN to perform oral sex on them(!) or that Katharine Hepburn would be a whore for young women. (Um.) 

I didn't have a hard time believing the book's contents so much as stomaching them. Call me a prude -- my tags are "vanilla," "vanilla" and "vanilla" -- but after the first few encounters I was kind of getting grossed out by it all. 

Suffice to say that I wasn't too surprised to realize upon closer inspection that the copy my friend had loaned me -- which she'd bought used online -- had been "withdrawn" from Cedar Mill Community Library in Portland, Ore., not exactly the censorship capital of the world but even they can only stomach so much. (Sorry, but the shit sandwich was a "kink" too far.) 

And then I picked up David Spade's 2015 memoir, which my brother Terence had quasi-recommended because we're both fans and the comedian shares our Detroit-Phoenix upbringing. I'm probably the only person who has read not one but two autobiographies by "Saturday Night Live" alums but wasn't very interested in the "SNL" angle of it all. (Table reads and Lorne Michaels gossip don't really excite me.) But I've always enjoyed Spade -- especially on "Just Shoot Me," which doesn't even get a mention -- and some very strange things have happened to him over the years that made for a fun read. 

I also finished my friend Tim Anderson's "Tune In Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries" -- about his time teaching English in Japan -- and it is HYSTERICAL! 

UPDATE: A kind reader just gave me three Didion recommendations -- "Play It as It Lays," "Where I Was From" and "South and West" -- and I'm thinking of starting with the middle one as it's a straightforward memoir, which seems to be my sweet spot these days -- although I must confess this review is already giving me "White Album" flashbacks!. I'm also a Patty Hearst nut dating back to my childhood, so I might give "South and West" a shot, too.