Flirt's unnamed interviewer, like so many celebrity interviewers we know, love and sometimes loathe, is more interested in telling her own story than in listening to those of her subjects. With Ian Tyson, an old Yamuki guitar leads to her story of a family tragedy and the dumbstruck grief that guides her through places and men and inadequate landscapes, addiction and two suicide attempts; Bobby Orr's knee problems lead her back to a decades-old fall on the ice that shatters her knee and gives her the attention-getting injury she'd secretly hoped for when she was twelve and ignored, her father shell-shocked and missing and her sister dying on the loveseat; in Markus Naslund she looks for someone to teach her what is and is not holy; the topic of Janet Jones-Gretzky's past boyfriends and unreturned sacrifices she's made for Wayne digs up an old guitar-player boyfriend of her own whose dad shot himself in the basement, Michael Ondaatje warns her not to see his book as a prototype for her own relationships and she tells him that the music she played for drunk losers in bars wasn't jazz, and nobody cared when she gave it up. Flirt explores the narcissism of celebrity obsession and questions what is being asked in celebrity interviews. Are these real people or just extensions of ourselves? What do we hope to get from them? To know how to be loved and admired in a world that dulls and depresses and takes away? In a steadfastly selfish and dishonestly original voice, the narrator's sole project is to get closer to herself by inching nearer to the people who matter most to her, but to whom she means nothing. In Flirt: The Interviews, Lorna Jackson has unleashed something new onto the world of literature, a series of short linked fictions exploring love and fame and longing, and the language we use to express them. The book might be a long comic essay on adolescent grief, or an essay on creativity, but mostly it's a collection of short fictions meant to mock real interviews and to question the sort of information we find in them.
Flirt's unnamed interviewer, like so many celebrity interviewers we know, love and sometimes loathe, is more interested in telling her own story than in listening to those of her subjects. With Ian Tyson, an old Yamuki guitar leads to her story of a family tragedy and the dumbstruck grief that guides her through places and men and inadequate landscapes, addiction and two suicide attempts; Bobby Orr's knee problems lead her back to a decades-old fall on the ice that shatters her knee and gives her the attention-getting injury she'd secretly hoped for when she was twelve and ignored, her father shell-shocked and missing and her sister dying on the loveseat; in Markus Naslund she looks for someone to teach her what is and is not holy; the topic of Janet Jones-Gretzky's past boyfriends and unreturned sacrifices she's made for Wayne digs up an old guitar-player boyfriend of her own whose dad shot himself in the basement, Michael Ondaatje warns her not to see his book as a prototype for her own relationships and she tells him that the music she played for drunk losers in bars wasn't jazz, and nobody cared when she gave it up. Flirt explores the narcissism of celebrity obsession and questions what is being asked in celebrity interviews. Are these real people or just extensions of ourselves? What do we hope to get from them? To know how to be loved and admired in a world that dulls and depresses and takes away? In a steadfastly selfish and dishonestly original voice, the narrator's sole project is to get closer to herself by inching nearer to the people who matter most to her, but to whom she means nothing. In Flirt: The Interviews, Lorna Jackson has unleashed something new onto the world of literature, a series of short linked fictions exploring love and fame and longing, and the language we use to express them. The book might be a long comic essay on adolescent grief, or an essay on creativity, but mostly it's a collection of short fictions meant to mock real interviews and to question the sort of information we find in them.