Welcome to the world of Parker Posey
Indie actress-turned-author celebrates her very non-movie star life with some cherished friends
NEW YORK — Parker Posey is deep into turban territory. Turbanettes, really. Head scarves. She’ll say they’re for being witchy, but they also keep her head from exploding, or from floating away like a Thai lantern. Sometimes she feels as if that’s going to happen. It’s a side-effect of swinging between exhilaration and despair, of feeling out of step, out of place, out of time.
Her book party has spilled from a small banquet room onto the fifth-floor terrace of a private literary club in Manhattan. She’s hugging and posing and signing copies of her new memoir.
A couple of hours earlier, she had taped The Tonight Show with her old pal Jimmy Fallon. “We used to go dancing at Don Hill’s,” he reminisced to Posey, who is now 23 years removed from Party Girl, the movie that made the post-grunge generation want to move to New York and rave till dawn.
And after years of elevating other people’s material, starting as the wry muse of indie cinema, Posey is “at a place in her life when it was time to create a whole world of her own,” says her friend Jack Ferver, a director and choreographer. That world is this memoir they’re celebrating. Now she needs to give a toast in front of a few dozen friends. She stands on a chair in a corner of the crimson-walled room. This will be the acceptance speech she’s never had to give.
At age nine, she vowed to be a movie star, but a movie star doesn’t live here. Your Auntie Mame does. Long gone are her Chelsea days — those wild Tuesdays at B Bar on the Bowery and those A-list parties thrown by Interview magazine — so she makes pottery while listening to Brian Eno. She lives on a floor of a West Village brownstone, up a flight of stairs.
At home there is no visible evidence of her career. If she were a careerist instead of an artist, she would not have passed on the part in Girl, Interrupted that won Angelina Jolie an Oscar. She dodged a meeting about one of the Jason Bourne movies because “I simply wasn’t prepared to be scared in a car for a few months.”
If she were a careerist, she would not have written a memoir titled You’re on an Airplane that consists of digressions and interjections addressed to an imaginary seatmate. At Sundance in 1995, they called her the first postmodern actress, whatever that means, so maybe she’s written the first post-postmodern celebrity memoir.
“I had time,” she says. “I was just walking around being a depressive and being scared. And not feeling like I had a place.”
We talk about being raised Catholic. We talk about death. We talk about things that are amusing in person but stupid the moment you type them into a celebrity profile. We do not talk about The House of Yes, the zenith of her ’90s cool-dom, or the Christopher Guest mockumentaries, which everyone always wants to talk about.
Instead, we listen to “evening crickets” on one of her calming apps. On a digital art installation on the wall of her kitchen, we watch animated video of an iPhone burning.
It’s the pictures that got smaller, she writes in the book. Too small. Palm-sized. Wristwatch-sized. In the ’90s, on an independent set, you had to be careful about how many feet of film you had left. There was something precious about that.
Twenty years ago, Nora Ephron cast her in her first big Hollywood movie, the romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail, with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Posey stole her scenes because she was stronger than the genre.
“It seems like everyone is feeling lonely, in some way — left out,” Posey writes on the otherwise cheerful first page of the memoir. The book is a spiritual text about wonder, melancholy and fame, and how being a movie star is “either too boring or too much work.” It’s also about the desire to connect, even with a stranger on an airplane, and tell stories.
For every anecdote about celebrity there are three about her real friends, her beloved family, the Spackle that holds life together, questions that displace her. “Do you think that in another time, people enjoyed each other more?” she writes. When did we forget “that so much of everything is distraction, or a conspiracy, to keep us separate or guarded and locked up inside?”
She’s standing on a chair at her book party. The culture didn’t know what to do with her, she tells the room, and she didn’t know what to do with the culture. So she wrote this book.
She thanks her friends for their “desire to connect,” and she chokes up. She pays tribute to her parents, her lineage of drama queens. Standing at her feet is Liev Schreiber, her old friend and co-star in Party Girl and The Daytrippers, warmed by his own nostalgia for that run of indie cinema in New York. He learned something about film acting, about life, by watching her then, in their 20s. At 50, he remembers it.
“It’s about not being afraid to make a connection, not being afraid to be seen, not being afraid to be who you are,” Schreiber says. “About not being afraid to amplify life.”