Chapter 7
When we left you last time, still, almost nothing had happened. Still. Tookie is Tyra in disguise, her parents are jerks, and Myrracle is her sister, who is destined to be selected to go to Modelland, the magic place on the mountain where people are turned into models and also superheroes, somehow, for some reason.
In chapter 8 we get a heated, overheard discussion between Tookie’s parents regarding her parentage.
Duhn-duhn-duhn!
Tookie’s father claims that Tookie isn’t her daughter. The basis for his claim seems to be that he did not actually SEE baby Tookie exit her mother’s vagina during the birth. He was off earning the big bucks as a circus performer, supporting the family. His secondary, B-level evidence is basically that Tookie sucks.
I’ve never heard of this before, someone disclaiming his child as being from his seed because, well, she sucks. “This kid sucks. The only explanation for such a thing is that she isn’t mine!”
To drive the point home, he’s holding Tookie’s toothbrush, and he’s sort of threatening his wife, saying he’s headed to the DNA lab just as soon as T-DOD (The Day of Discovery, when models are selected for Modelland) is over.
If Tookie is NOT his offspring, he wants to sell her off to work in a factory, which is a thing that happens in this book but hasn’t happened to Tookie yet for basically no reason. They all hate her, they have no use for her, and yet they don’t just sell her off to make a few bucks. Why not?
This whole thing is a Cinderella story, and at least with Cinderella, even if it never made sense that she didn’t just say fuck it and run away or at least be drunk all the time, at least Cinderella was doing all the housework. You could totally see why they’d keep her around because it’s like, “I hate that Cinderella for being so hot, but goddamn, what I hate even more is doing one ounce of housework.”
Would I be annoyed if Chris Hemsworth was my brother and did shirtless housework all around my house? Sure. Would I be so annoyed as to be a dick to him and kick him out? I might politely ask if he could wear a shirt sometimes, but if I came home every day and the place was spotless, what do I care? So all my neighbors want to bang the guy who cleans my house before they want to bang me. Duh. No shit. As long as cleaning the cum off the linens is part of his duties, he can do whatever he wants, far as I’m concerned.
Disney movies have the craziest relationship with attractiveness. Like Maleficent. She has to be the NUMBER ONE hottest woman in the world? When the mirror tells her she’s the second-hottest person on Earth, she gets pissed?
My partner told me I was more attractive than a billion people. Which made me happy until I realized there’s like 6 billion people in the world, which means I’m still in the bottom 20%. But still, being hotter than a billion, that’s not too bad. That’s a big ass number. I can live with that.
Anyway, Modelland makes no sense because you’re just thinking, why wouldn’t the parents just ship Tookie off, or why wouldn’t she just run away?
Glad you asked that!
Tookie writes some kind of cryptic symbol on her door, which makes no sense as a reader, but let’s just go with it, it SOMEHOW signals her insane cutter friend that they should run away together first thing in the morning. I guess the door graffiti is sort of like the passover thing. Except not at all and instead of marking a whole door, she could just leave a Post-It or something. I could see why you wouldn’t want to do that on passover. I’d hate for a slight breeze or a light rain to damage the Post-It and then mean the death of my first-born. That’s worth tracking down some goat’s blood and ruining a door for. It makes me wonder how none of the Egyptians picked up on everyone in town painting goat’s blood on the outside of their homes, but from what I’ve seen of pyramids the Egyptians made some pretty strange architectural choices, so who are they to wonder?
I guess we’re to assume that Tookie’s nutto friend is checking Tookie’s front door every day on the chance that she’ll be ready to run away sometime in the next 12 hours.
And I guess she doesn’t just run away right now and go get her friend because…I don’t know. Isn’t that how running away is done? Do people really feel like, A good night’s sleep, then I’ll be ready?
If I was Tookie’s friend, her crazy friend who lives in a tree and cuts herself with found objects that aren’t even sharp, I’d probably say, “Listen, Tooks. I’m not exactly sharp in the brain, so if you could just come and get me when you’re ready to make a run for it, that’d probably work a lot better. I hear voices. Daily checkups on your property aren’t my strong suit.”
Of course, the runaway plan doesn’t work. What foils it all? What could possibly stop this juggernaut of a genius plan which consisted of wake up a little early and walk out the front door? Tookie’s parents are awake and they don’t want her to leave. Curses. It’s like a goddamn Ocean’s 11 movie, everything was in place just so, and one little oversight ruined it all. Who could have predicted that Tookie’s parents would be up slightly earlier than normal? How could we have expected Tookie to prepare for such a WILD twist of fate!?
Tookie can’t just leave when her parents are awake, which makes me EVEN MORE CONFUSED. Her parents wish she would fuck off, she wants to fuck off, all she has to do is say, “I’m getting the fuck out of here. Peace!” and walk out the door. Her parents high-five, Myrracle goes to Modelland, and that’s pretty much it and how I feel like 40% of people end up moving out of their parents’ house anyway.
It doesn’t happen. Tookie has to go along to assist Myrracle at T-DOD somehow, and as the De La Cremes drive away they see Tookie’s friend in the driveway, howling. Of course, Tookie’s parents comment on this urchin weirdo being in their driveway because they have to get in a couple jabs, just in case we as readers weren’t totally sold on the idea that these people are monstrous asshole dickfaces already. Although when you take a step away from the story, they’ve seen someone who is an acknowledged escapee from multiple insane asylums who has more voices in her head than she knows what to do with. Sooooo maybe they aren’t totally wrong to comment on that person being in the driveway? Just maybe?
And that’s Chapter 8.
The good news, Chapter 9 begins with us headed to The Day of Discovery! So maybe we’ll be on our way to Modelland (although we’re still about 70 pages from entering the gates, goddamn it).
I wanted to add a little meat to this chapter, to this review, because it’s so light. And what I wanted to talk about is negativity in reviews.
Famously, in 2013, Buzzfeed hired a new books editor who declared the site would no longer traffic in negative reviews.
From an interview:
“Why waste breath talking smack about something?” he said. “You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip.” Fitzgerald said people in the online books community “understand that about books, that it is something that people have worked incredibly hard on, and they respect that. The overwhelming online books community is a positive place.”
There’s a lot of debate about this. Should people review books negatively or should they go by that old thing about having nothing good to say and shutting their weeping shitholes (something like that, I can’t remember how my grandma put it, exactly).
And I do think there are a lot of times when negative books review are kinda bullshit. I do feel like there are many, many times when a negative review is kind of written by someone who expected to dislike the book, read it looking for flaws, and then feels the need to tear down something that’s pretty serviceable. This is probably most common in the literary fiction world, to be honest.
But let’s talk about what negative reviews are, at the core. Because I think there are two types, really.
One type is the type that may result in a low rating, but acknowledges that the book isn’t inherently bad. I gave A Tree Grows In Brooklyn a low star rating, I was pretty clear about what I disliked about it, and I was also clear about the “not for me, but maybe great for someone else” factors. Which is important in this type of review. It’s negative, but defensible. People are allowed to have opinions on things.
The second type is trashing a book up and down. Saying that not only is it not for you, but it’s a badly written book, and a bad experience. This is harder to defend, but it’s what I’m doing to Modelland. So I have to mount some kind of defense here.
If this book were written by a teenager, even a very young and inexperienced writer, I would feel differently. It’s the difference between trashing a low-budget homemade movie created by a few teenagers and talking shit about Transformers.
Critiquing a home movie would be pretty unfair. Especially to go negative on it. But critiquing Transformers is fine. And I think it’s fine because a big studio with a big cast and a big budget had every opportunity to succeed, and they failed miserably.
To me, it’s sometimes about looking at how close something was to its maximum potential. If the home movie was about as good as you can expect for what it was on paper, then it’s assholery to go negative. If Transformers was a 6/10, it wouldn’t warrant shit-talking. But all it needed to be was a 6, and all it really needed was giant robots fighting, and we didn’t get it.
Let’s talk about the potential of Modelland.
It was put out by a big publisher. It had a BIG marketing push, including a lot of talk on Top Model and in other outlets.
Within about 250 miles of there are 840 libraries that have the title, and I couldn’t tell you for sure HOW MANY copies they have. And I don’t live in a dense part of the country.
And while I can’t be sure what Tyra made for the book, she signed a 3-book deal with Delacorte, a sub-pub of Random House. She’s got people to handle contracts, and she’s no stranger to this shit, so I’m sure she came out A-Okay.
I’m not trashing this book because I’m jealous or think that what Tyra got should have gone to someone else. I understand the publishing world has to publish garbage sometimes because, hey, garbage sells. Why do you think Tori Spelling has FOUR memoirs in five years? Because that shit makes money.
I don’t blame the publishing world for this. Although I do feel like there must be a whole lotta people working in that world who have to wonder how far they’ve strayed from their original reasons for getting into publishing.
The reason I’m cool negging on this book is because, like a big-budget movie, there was POTENTIAL for it to be decent, at least inoffensively bad, and that potential was not realized. This book is under-edited on a very basic, story level. Nobody went back through and checked the continuity of this. Nobody went back through and explained to Tyra how to write a book that wasn’t flat, that emphasized certain important aspects and let the unimportant parts wither away so that a reader isn’t trying to hold so much in mind the entire time.
The money was there to hire editors who could have brought out the good in this story. Which, dare I say, is there.
I think there’s a good book, or the core of a good book, hidden in the whirlwind of shit that is Modelland. There’s a value to the messages Tyra is trying to send to young women, the messages about redefining beauty, about how the life of a beautiful person is not a life that is without struggle, and about the ways in which Tyra’s own experience was bizarre and unusual, and how that could be related to a young person.
That’s all IN here, but it’s the single pickle slice on the shitburger.
Here’s the other reason why I think negative reviews are important.
It’s 20-fuckin-15. Any idiot can type out a book and throw it on the Kindle store. I’ve done it. Which means anyone can. Technological advances mean that I have a worldwide distribution method available to me, same as a huge author.
And make no mistake, many, many people have taken advantage of this system, and many, many people write lots and lots of garbage.
I’ve recently come to feel like the tearing down of artistic barriers isn’t the best thing in the world. Photography was an early example. Now, anyone on the planet can take a picture, scroll through filtering options, and post it online. In seconds. While I don’t feel like this has de-valued or ruined photography, it does mean that you have a lot more to sort through before you can find what you’re looking for.
Movies. CG has gotten so inexpensive that it’s easier to put out a hundred garbage movies than it is to put out a dozen decent movies.
Look at something like Bandcamp. It’s a great spot for artists to post music, but it’s not an awesome way to find new music or artists. There’s just TOO MUCH STUFF, and too much of it is sub-par.
Imagine if there was no filtering process for Saturday Night Live. You tuned in every Saturday night to a crowd-sourced collection of sketches. How many episodes of that would be tolerable?
Books. Although the publishing world isn’t perfect and there are dozens of stories about things that were rejected and later went on to become classics, we still need SOME kind of filter. We do. I don’t want someone telling me what to read and what not to read, but I’m pretty cool with someone outlining the reasons that a book is a poor version of its own vision. Although I might be missing out on some hilarious SNL sketches because they don’t fit the SNL aesthetic, I also know that I’m being spared a whole lotta garbage too. If every movie had the ability to look like Avengers and if every movie had the same distribution, I’d waste a lot of time and money watching things I didn’t like.
The filter that was once in place by publishing houses is fading fast. They gotta make a buck. And other outlets are figuring out that, hey, if we charge people a certain amount to put up files, if we charge bands to put up files or take a cut of every sale, we can make money even if they barely sell a song. In those cases, there’s no incentive to filter whatsoever. The more the merrier.
Let’s make this all very simple.
When someone says that an artist spent a lot of time on something and therefore it can’t be criticized, I take issue. Writing is tough, and you have to BE tough. Commercially-viable art isn’t just about dumping the contents of your head into or onto a medium. It’s about pouring yourself onto something in such a way that others can understand your words, understand the emotion of what you’re painting, and so that the message of your photography is reachable.
This is why you’d be an asshole to walk into a garage where someone was painting and start critiquing their work. And it’s why if someone wanted to sell those same paintings in your gallery, you have every right to criticize them.
Yes, I’m taking a stance that adults, who are operating within their own faculties, open their art up to criticism when they put a price tag on it and sell it to you. I do think that putting your money, time, or effort into experiencing someone else’s piece of art affords you the opportunity to then discuss how you felt about your expenditure.
With Modelland, Tyra put a book into an enormous number of bookstores and libraries. She signed a 3-book deal having not written all the material yet, which means she knew this was a commercial endeavor, not just an artistic expression of inner feelings. If I can be so bold as to think of my mind as a gallery, or to think of my mind as an indie movie house, when Tyra put out this book, she was asking that people hang her work in their mental galleries. And that means people are allowed to explain why they would not do so, or why they might hang it for a time and then be allowed to explain why they took it down, why they regretted the decision to give her work that space.
I can see why Buzzfeed made the choice they made. They’re mostly about fun, no? And what’s not fun is to watch a huge media empire beat up on a single person. For Buzzfeed to rag on Jonathan Franzen, it’s stupid, it’s silly, and it’s pretty easy to ignore their opinion based on the fact that they’re a web site that lets you take a quiz that determines what kind of cupcake you are. There are so many great books out there, I could see the appeal of only steering people to good books rather than steering them away from the bad ones.
I’m a dude. Just this one dude. I don’t represent a media empire. I don’t make a decision that sets the tone for shit.
I’m reading Modelland, I think it sucks hard, and I think its level of suck is kind of astonishing considering the available resources and options that could have improved it.
As a final note, I say offensive shit on my web site, my podcast, and all over the place. Not horribly offensive, but things that I’m sure people get pissed off about.
The thing is, it’s not my goal to offend people. But I’ve also decided it’s not a goal, not an important aspect of what I do, to make sure that no one is offended. I don’t consider part of my work to police what I do and make sure nobody would be offended. In other words, if someone is offended, I don’t wear it as a badge of honor and say “I’m doing my job.” But someone telling me they found something offensive doesn’t necessarily make me think I’ve done something wrong.
Which is why I’m pretty comfortable in my position: Fuck this book.