Tamblyn’s dark plunge into stars’ deaths
Dark Sparkler poems about dead actresses
NEW YORK — Actress Amber Tamblyn writes about dead Hollywood actresses in her new book of poems. But Dark Sparkler is more than that.
“The book is about the lives and deaths of celebrity women in a certain way, but it’s also about voyeurism, it’s also about projection, it’s also (about) ... what it’s like to be an object for a living,” Tamblyn, 31, said.
Each poem is about a female celebrity who died before the age of 40, including Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Rebecca Shaeffer. Tamblyn said she focused on women because “that’s what I know. ... I understood the lives of these women more personally and in a deeper way.”
Dark Sparkler is the third book of poetry by Tamblyn, who starred in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants films with Blake Lively, Alexis Bledel and America Ferrera and on TV in House and Joan of Arcadia.
She talked about the book, published by Harper Perennial, her Sisterhood friends and actress Lindsay Lohan in a recent interview. Q: What impact did writing this book have on you? A: Studying your dead peers will get to you. Plain and simple. Reading autopsy report after autopsy report and listening to interviews. ... It’s hard not to get obsessed and absorbed into that to the point where you start to lose your mind a little bit. Q: Why this dark topic? A: If anything, I wanted other young women to see how much (of) our interior pains are the same and at the end of the day what you feel is what I feel and it’s very similar, but often times actors don’t really get to express that in a true manner. ... Q: Was any story particularly hard? A: Dana Plato (who starred in TV’s Diff’rent Strokes and died in 1999 at 34 from an overdose) was really difficult for me. ... That was a really hard one and kind of the moment I went, ‘I just need to take five. Need to take a minute and remember I’m still alive.’ Q: Do you think your next poetry will be lighter? A: I actually have started working on my next book which will be a collection of love poems, so it will be the opposite. Warm and cosy.