DON’T I KNOW YOU?
Marni Jackson’s new book puts her protagonist up close and personal with celebrities,
The late American journalist, magazine editor and memoirist Mary Cantwell observed in her 1998 book, Speaking With Strangers, that “interviewing creates a spurious intimacy” — that “if one is a good interviewer and the interviewee is a willing talker, the two of you become, for several hours, each other’s best friend.”
This is why we buy magazines and watch talk shows and listen to podcasts. We crave these interludes of intimacy, however fleeting we suspect them to be. (Cantwell also noted that “when the interview is over, so is the friendship.”)
Of course, this form of flash-bonding happens less and less in an age when celebrities sit down with 20 journalists in a row, battle paparazzi all day and dodge online trolls all night.
But as anyone in the media can tell you, it still happens sometimes.
And when it does, it can feel like magic. The very magic that the public is forever hoping to stumble across.
In the celebrity era, after all, it feels nor- mal — inevitable, even — to project our fantasies onto the rich and famous.
One thinks: If I found myself in line at my local hipster coffee shop with Ryan Gosling, he’d know from the way I ordered my Americano that I love rap music and we’d wind up shooting the breeze about ’90s hip-hop for hours, would we not?
Or: If Nora Ephron were still alive and I bumped into her in the deli, she’d find my ingredient list fascinating and invite me home for lunch, right?
We want to be more than just another expectant face. We want to be special.
But what the celebrity wants — more than anything — is to be ordinary.
Toronto writer Marni Jackson tackles this quintessentially 21st-century tension in her debut fiction collection, Don’t I Know You? And she does it with striking aplomb. The book’s interwoven stories follow reporter-turned-novelist Rose McEwan (she works for her local newspaper, the Toronto Star) from her coming-of-age at 17 — when she embarks on a casual affair with her writing teacher, John Updike (Jackson was once granted a half-hour interview with him for the TVO show Imprint) — to middle age, struggling to stay in the media game (“a job in print journalism was soon going to be like working as a blacksmith, or a calligrapher”).
And finally to her twilight years at 67, a Cabbagetown divorcee writing catalogue copy for bathroom fixtures and canoeing with an ice-cream obsessed, Qi Gongpractising Leonard Cohen in Algonquin Park. Such a premise could easily fall flat. But with Jackson at the helm it is nothing short of brilliant.
Decades of award-winning journalism and non-fiction books ( The Mother Zone, Pain: The Science and Culture of Why We Hurt, Home Free: The Myth of the Empty Nest), crafting narrative arcs, cultivating a keen eye for detail, mastering the art of conversation — have prepared Jackson well for fiction.
Her prose here is beautiful: simple, streamlined, quietly honest. Funny in an understated way.
Jackson’s Rose stands a little apart from her own emotional landscape: calm, composed, self-contained.
Her detachment allows readers to suspend disbelief and dive wholly into her celebrity encounters.
Because Rose is no fawning fan. She treats Bob Dylan, a cottage guest outstaying his welcome, with a tenderness born of humanity, not adulation.
She finds Charlotte Rampling, who stalks her at the Cannes Film Festival, deeply creepy.
She debates gender politics with Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard. (“If a woman wrote one of your books, and went on and on about the horror of children’s birthday parties, she would be called a self-indulgent lightweight. But when a man does it, the personal becomes elevated, significant.”) She finds Meryl Streep’s attention suspicious.
As a result, we get to see our fantasy self in Rose. The self so different, we are sure, from the panting masses of autographseekers. The self that would immediately stand out to those singular beings we call stars. That would, like Rose, easily slip into celebrity friendships.
It’s these moments of spontaneous connection — of instant intimacy — that ultimately define Don’t I Know You?
The book highlights an important truth: we long for this effortless shift from small talk to things that matter — desire, death, loss, heartache, vulnerability. We long to yank down the cultural icon façade and reveal the sweet, sad, funny, annoying, occasionally boring human beings underneath. What a relief that would be for everyone involved. Tara Henley is a writer and radio producer.