Celebrities in Disgrace: A Novella and Stories

by Elizabeth Searle

Overview

Inspired by a society obsessed with celebrities, Searle explores the glittery-dark underworld of 'hopefuls,' those who have been given the slightest hint of success—or even imagined success—and who are hungry for an audience, of any size. Ranging from a woman's relentless pursuit to be an actress despite her tendency to faint onstage, to a disintegrating family who comes together if only to watch the imaginary lives in a soap opera, the stories in Celebrities in Disgrace capture the thrill and lure of fame and our insatiable need for it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555973247
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	04/01/2001
Pages:	186
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 9.04(h) x 0.51(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Searle is the author of the highly acclaimed novel, A Four-Sided Bed, and My Body to You, a collection of short stories that won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize. She lives in Arlington, MA.

Read an Excerpt

Celebrities in Disgrace

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By Elizabeth Searle

Graywolf Press

Copyright © 2001 Elizabeth Searle
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-55597-324-8

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Chapter One

The Tonya moment has passed. Newsweek, Time, and People have moved on to less important cover stories and we are left with an inner emptiness too deep to be fathomed all at once.-Matthew Gilbert, The Boston Globe, February 1994

He stapled his face over hers. In the subzero dawn of Skate-Off Day-7 A.M. in Lowell, 1 P.M. in Lillehammer-the staples shot back at him, the kiosk's corkboard as ungiving as ice. So Daniel reflattened his Xeroxed flyer over Kathryn Byrne's professionally printed flyer. All around Lowell, all winter, he'd stapled up his own name: Daniel Sanders. Today, Daniel was posting new flyers that displayed only his own face. Starting here, outside Kathryn B.'s pinkly lit window. He formed a mittened fist. Kathryn Byrne: so sweet-seeming last night on the local-yokel news. Daniel Sanders hammered his fist onto his stolen stapler. It bit.

In the beginning, in fragile clippings his mother had saved, there was Patricia Hearst (my terrorist-heiress, Daniel thought fondly) whom he'd loved most as Tanya (never more lovely and wanton than in those blurred bank-camera shots: "Tanya" wielding her SLA assault rifle, her red wig becomingly tousled, her wide formerly blank eyes wild); then: a valentine-faced murderess for his own times, Pamela Smart (Pame, Daniel knew her nickname to be, as in pain plus fame), and now: sweet-seeming dark-haired Nancy Kerrigan. Another ice princess poised, like Patricia Hearst, to turn Tanya? Daniel Sanders lowered his staple gun with a jerk. Was it mere coincidence that Nancy Kerrigan's archenemy skating rival bore that same fateful name? Tanya, Tonya.

Something wooden thumped. Daniel pivoted in the crunchy virgin snow. Ghost clouds-shower steam?-curled out from Kathryn Byrne's suddenly cracked-open window. Daniel stuffed his stapler into his backpack and reached for another Hershey's Kiss. Frozen like bullets. Half-accidentally, he pulled out too his foil-wrapped condom. Which he slipped into his jeans' front pocket. For easier access, tonight. Seventeen years old, and this his first condom. For courage, he thumbed another chocolate under his muffler, into his mouth. Hi, I'm Daniel Sanders and I'm "famous" too. Maybe you've seen my name? Sucking hard, he retightened his muffler over his new John Lennon goatee. Which made him look eighteen, at lest. Her steam spiraled in the cold air. Daniel shivered, picturing Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding aspin in their sparkly Olympic Skater skirts. Did Kathryn Byrne, who hoped to play Nancy K. in an upcoming TV movie, possess that same superhuman energy?

Daniel intended to find out tonight. What Kathryn B. possessed, inside.

Impulsively, he lurched down her unshoveled sidewalk. Halfway to her window, he stumbled. Like, he remembered as he fell, Kathryn's spastic sister. A Home Movie clip the news had shown with Kathryn's interview. Daniel pulled himself up. Shin-deep in snow, he drew a big breath the way he did before Groups. As he trudged forward again, he listed to himself the Groups he had duped, making those earnest folding-chair circles believe he was one of them.

Teens with ADD; Children of Convicts; Teens with STD; Phone Sex Anonymous.

He slowed his steps, bit his Kiss. Her marbled-pink window only a few feet away now, and open. With a rush of chocolate saliva, Daniel recognized the pink as terry cloth. A mere towel and a pane of steamy (inside) frosty (outside) glass separated him from her. He hugged his numb arms, wide awake for once.

Most mornings he killed sneak-reading People in Star Market, seeking out celebrities brought low enough for even him in his unwashed underwear to look down upon. His longtime pastime; his specialty. Claudine Longet, Pete Rose, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen. Celebrities in disgrace.

In cold, all sounds carry. Through the killingly still air, Daniel heard-more clearly than Kathryn in her shower? -Kathryn Byrne's phone ring. One elongated buzz. Daniel swallowed his dwindling Kiss. At the second buzz, he staggered into his last snow-slowed steps. Clumsy and urgent like that sister of Kathryn's who wasn't-what Daniel's mother said about him-all there. Nobody, Daniel thought as he halted under Kathryn's iced-up lit-up window, home.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Celebrities in Disgrace by Elizabeth Searle Copyright © 2001 by Elizabeth Searle . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

	Memoir of a Soon-to-Be Star	1
	What It's Worth	25
	Celebrities in Disgrace (a novella)	47
	The Young and the Rest of Us	119
	101	137
	Celebration	161

Editorial Reviews

These stories come to us wrapped in narrative forms that simply obey no rules but their own: a single glance exploding fractally into many lives. Kids, do not try this at home.” —Christopher Tilghman

“How well Elizabeth Searle knows her vivid characters and how cunningly she depicts their weird and wonderful lives. Celebrities in Disgrace is a sparkling collection by a writer with a unique and an utterly contemporary sensibility.” —Margot Livesey

“In clipped, poetic language, Searle skillfully unwinds a psychosexual narrative.” —New York Times Book Review on A Four-Sided Bed

“Her elegant prose and anythingbut-PC gender play are pleasing to the mind and to the loins.” —Boston Phoenix on A Four-Sided Bed

“Bending gender and conventional notions about love and marriage, Searle's bold, beautiful book reaches right past the sensationalism of a love triangle to offer us an intense and moving portrait of the different ways people can connect.” —Booklist on A Four-Sided Bed

“A powerful, unsettling first novel. . . . A bright, distinctive, haunting debut.” —Kirkus Reviews on A Four-Sided Bed

From the Publisher

Stories of people obsessed with fame loop through this collection like a scratchy strip of film. Searle's characters live in fantasy worlds and are motivated by the lights of imaginary cameras—from the woman in "Celebration" who envisions each small event in her life as a headline to the sad, decaying family in "The Young and the Rest of Us," whose members interact by discussing the goings-on of a favorite soap opera. Among the collection's highlights are "Celebrities in Disgrace," about a teenager who masterminds the downfall of a woman on the cusp of stardom, and "101," the story of a married couple who lure a young student into a twisted game of pretend. Searle's book examines the effects of pop culture on private lives. The pieces are unpredictable and ripe with unique prose, and often there's no telling how a story will end.
—Kristin Kloberdanz

Fame lies just out of reach for many of the characters in this latest collection from Searle, author of A Four-Sided Bed as well as My Body to You, an Iowa Short Fiction Award winner. And the more fame eludes them, the harder they chase after it. In the title novella, Kathryn tenaciously pursues an acting career even though she habitually faints onstage. Still, she tries out for a film role because she wants so much to be recognized beyond her New England hometown. In "What It's Worth," doctoral student Brigid says, "OK, I told myself: if my thesis becomes famous for nothing else, it'll be famous round Brown for being the ONLY thesis no one wanted to toast." Searle's writing brims over with dashes and parenthetical phrases, sentences that dangle on the edge of a cliff and change direction a number of times before they end. This gives her writing a jerky, choppy quality, which reflects the jumpiness and anxiety of many of her characters. The reading experience is not itself choppy, however, but energetic and unpredictable. Recommended for co temporary fiction collections. Lisa Nussbaum, Dauphin Cty. Lib. Sys., Harrisburg, PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A second collection from Iowa Short Fiction Prize-winner Searle (A Four-Sided Bed, 1998, not reviewed): five stories and a novella centering on two subjects not often linked: family and exhibitionism. In the eponymous novella, a 29-year-old actress named Kathryn becomes a local celebrity in Lowell, Massachusetts, when she's scouted for the role of skating star Nancy Kerrigan in a TV drama. Meanwhile, teenager Daniel tacks posters of himself over those announcing Kathryn's upcoming one-woman show at the Lowell Auditorium. Daniel is obsessed with the concept of celebrity, and with Kathryn as object of desire. Kathryn, whose excitement about the Kerrigan role is mitigated by her guilt over embarrassing her mentally handicapped sister in a TV promotion, unwittingly helps Daniel satisfy both his obsessions-with devastating consequences. Searle deftly slides between her two protagonists, showing the wobbly boundary between Kathryn's normal, if slightly neurotic, ambitions and Daniel's more twisted craving. The majority of the remaining tales deal with intellectually superior young women whose hunger for attention gets them in trouble. In "Memoir of a Soon-to-Be Star," a young girl pretends not to know that her retarded brother is watching as she takes an exaggeratedly sensual shower. A graduate student closing up her dead aunt's house (in "What It's Worth") flirts condescendingly with the hunky moving-man she's hired. The protagonist of "101" allows herself to be photographed by her teacher as she's having virtual intercourse with the teacher's husband. Sex is less central in these stories than the need to be desired and the power it offers as substitute for love. The final piece,"Celebration," about a couple trying to have a child, seems slightly out of place after so much dark neediness, though it's linked to the collection's leitmotif of less-mentally-able family members. Searle's Ivy League eroticism is only mildly disturbing in the stories, but her novella demands attention for its nuance as well as its wallop.

Kirkus Reviews