Cherie Curie, "Neon Angel"

[sub_divided]

I read this several months ago, after seeing the Runaways movie, and I am writing it up now so that I can add the link to my recently read books. Since I already reviewed the movie, I'll focus on the things in the book that were not in the movie:

First of all, I was very relieved to get to the end of the book and find that it is the expanded version of Cherie Curie's 1989 co-written YA memoir (with Philip Shusterman! I love him!), since if there had been an even darker version of this memoir floating around, I'd have been worried. XD; This book already has Curie's rape at the hands of her sister's BF before joining the Runaways, "Kim's Sex Education Class," records of her many experiences with downers and uppers, that time she was kidnapped, raped and tortured by an insane fan[1], and oh yeah, her crack cocaine addiction. -_-

(You know that scene in the grocery store in the movie, where Dakota Fanning channels "herself in 20 years time" (Sabina's words) to stagger around the aisles, dead drunk? As it turns out this happened not when Cherie first quit the Runaways, and was forging checks in her dad's name for cocaine money, but much later, after she has become the live-in girlfriend of a rich drug dealer in the Hollywood Hills. What happened was that Cherie needed the alcohol to cope with the withdrawal after smoking or snorting all the crack in the house.)

What else. I thought it was verrrrrrry interestinggggg (insert chin stroke here) that in every film where Cherie starred opposite a young, up-and-coming film actress in her post-Runaways career - not just Jodie Foster, although that was her best-received role, accomplished under her mother's enthusiastic supervision ("my mom found her true calling as a stage mother") - she wound up "very close" to said actress during filming. I guess when your first "best friend" is your twin sister, and your next best friend is the other vocalist in the band run by your abusive manager, you form an idea of what "best friend" means which is far, far more intense than what most people mean when they use that term.

Speaking of the Jodie Foster movie, there's an hilarious scene that takes place during the production when Cherie finds that Benzedrine is making her hair fall out, so she makes the responsible, adult decision to switch back to coke. XD As a matter of fact, this book is quite funny in general - and the parts written solely (?) by Cherie, without Shusterman's rewriting, are fully as funny as the parts written in collaboration with him - not as grammatically tidy, but more natural, with more of an oral feel. She is probably really funny in person.

Cherie's take on her solo career, BTW, was that she was getting a lot of offers, but because their father insisted that she do something together with her sister Marie, she had to turn most of them down. Then, because Marie brought her soon-to-be husband and all his band friends on board for the recording, their album became "a glorified Toto album," and it was promptly shelved when Marie decided that she didn't want to tour to promote it. Cherie accuses Marie of being unprofessional, f'instance when she had a job as Cherie's body double and couldn't deliver because she was passed out from a coke hangover. But this is her only example, which she "guesses" must have been how Marie felt every time she was too drugged up to perform, so really... there's a bit of a double-standard and a denial here.

In general there were a few parts like that where I didn't really believe Cherie, and thought that she was probably rewriting history a bit to make herself look better or to minimize the effects of her addictions.[1] But I did believe her at the end, when she reformed: and not just because there's objective evidence that she worked as a drug counselor and then as a fitness trainer and artist. It's the way these chapters are written. There's a marked contrast between the emphasis on humility and simple pride (in staying sober) in Cherie's book and, for instance, the jokes and self-aware egoism of Carie Fisher's /Postcards from the Edge/.

It's not to say that one is better writing than the other, because Carie Fisher quoting her psychiatrist telling her that she has too much invested in being a mess to ever be anything else is hysterical, but Cherie's conversion is sincere. She proudly tells a former co-star, who finds her working in a mall for minimum wage, that she's been sober six months. She sounds like an AA handbook come to life. And it's a reminder than AA actually does work, but only if you really believe in it and don't hold yourself ironically apart. In other words, Cherie is saved, funnily enough, because she always saw herself as a kind of square who loved corny music and her family.

The crack cocaine chapter is also really scary. Stuff like "I replaced God, my career, and my family with coccaine." It's telling, right, that the deterioration of her relationship with her sister wasn't enough to get her to stop - only the disintegration of her second career as an actress does that, and then only barely.

All in all, this is a compulsively readable book, like a slow-motion train crash with an unexpectedly uplifting ending. XD In the "where are they now" section at the end, everyone is doing well![3] Like, her brother founded his own company, and she's started a third career as an artist, and stuff.


[1] Cherie escapes by acting along with his crazy fantasy. It's like a plot twist from a movie. ^^

[2] Some things I don't believe Cherie about: Lita being "a fatass" because she doesn't sanctimoniously eat only fish and vegetables like Cherie - gimme a break! Meanwhile, Jackie is supposedly a "downer" because she just reads books and complains about the money all the time - to me it sounds more like Jackie was the smart one and the rest of them were in denial. Also, the scene where she, Jet, and Sandy are thrown in prison for not returning hotel room keys - a flimsy excuse for the cops to get back at a "punk" band they don't approve of - Cherie swears up and down that the cocaine vial in her bag isn't hers, she's holding it for their tour manager, Ken. I'm sure! (BTW, this prison scene shows the more vulnerable side of Joan Jett - locked up apart from the rest of them, she screams and cries until she's let out... I thought it was quite funny that the three of them ended up sharing a cell, while the more careerist members of the band cursed them for being so irresponsible.)

[3] Except, tragically, Sandy, who died from lung cancer before the movie came out.

Final note. R wanted to know whether Cherie admits to a sexual relationship with Joan Jett in the book. The closest she comes is in a paragraph about a third of the way through, when she says there was a "sexual attraction" and they had "many close moments that leave me quaking to this day". XD; And, in the meantime, Joan Jett's introduction to the book is surprisingly dry, reading more like a letter of recommendation than an emotional reconnection. But possibly that's just because Joan Jett is an undramatic person, unlike Cherie Curie.

On the other hand, R was somewhat mollified to hear that Joan Jett's business partner, Kenny Laguna, was the driving force behind the legal battle to obtain royalty rights for the members of the Runaways. She was bummed out that Joan had shacked up with a guy, but if Kenny is a Runaways fan, that makes it a bit better.