Actress Posey writes new chapter of her career
Actress and author is celebrating life with 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 sideeffect 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 fifthfloor terrace of a private literary club in Manhattan. She’s hugging and posing and signing copies of her new memoir, You’re on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir.
A couple of hours earlier, she had taped the 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.
“Back when you could dance like no one’s watching,” she said, “because they weren’t!”
The undertow of nostalgia has Gen X by the ankles. The 21st century is an adult. The ’90s are an entire childhood behind us. Everyone’s turning 50. 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 stand son a chair in a corner of the room. This will be the acceptance speech she’s never had to give.
She collects kindred spirits. She turns strangers into friends and friends into mothers, therapists, siblings, twins.
At age nine, she vowed to be a movie star, but a movie star doesn’t live here. Your Auntie Ma me 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 postpostmodern 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.”
“It’s so different now,” she says. “My experience is nostalgic. The book is a nostalgic way of looking at it. Which I realized while I was writing. Most people — I think there’s — I mean some people —” She stops herself on theed geo fa fake sound bite. “What do I know. You know? I don’t know. This is why doing press — I don’t know these things. Why even ...”
We talk about being raised Catholic. We talk about death. We talk about what to say during a toast at a book party. 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.
Shortly before her death in 2012, Ephron emailed Posey. “No one has a career like yours,” she wrote. Feeling insecure, she wrote, is part of having an unconventional life. Posey memorized that email. It keeps her company.
“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’s subtitle is “A Self-Mythologizing Memoir,” but really it 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 — flipping over in a hammock at one of Charlie Sheen’s parties in L.A. — there are three about her real friends, her beloved family, the Spackle that holds life together, the 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?”
It’s dinnertime, so she boils rice for her poodle mutt, Gracie, who is 14 and senile and a Libra.
I ask what kind of rice, as if this matters.
“Carolina,” Posey says, turning the bag. “Enriched! Write that down, Dan.”
And suddenly this is just one more celebrity profile.
I try to commiserate by saying that I dislike celebrity profiles, because they’re formulaic. “I don’t think any celebrity profile is about the celebrity,” I say. “I think it’s about the meaning of life through the prism of that person.”
“Well,” she says, holding an American Spirit near the open kitchen window, toward the rain, “that says more about you.”
“I loved meeting you,” she says, but I don’t really hear because I’ve put my guard back up. We’re just writer and subject, separated by scrutiny.
“Say again?”
She repeats it slower, softer, with a Chekhovian tremor: “I loved meeting you.”
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.
“I’d make something of my stories,” she says. “I’d put myself in an airplane and cast the reader as a passenger. I’ll create the set: The airplane, that in-between place of reinvention and nostalgia.”
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.”