In 1982, when she was 16, Justine Bateman landed the role of Mallory Keaton in Family Ties. In the era of three networks and 'appointment television,' tens of millions of viewers saw Bateman every week; she became instantly famous. As she writes in Fame: The Hijacking of Reality, it was heady stuff for a teenager: backstage passes, freebies, a helicopter ride to the Super Bowl to skip traffic ... Bateman addresses the reader directly, pouring out her thoughts in a rapid-fire, conversational style. Cascading along in this stream of consciousness is a torrent of sentence fragments, f-bombs, myriad points made in ALL CAPS...But her jittery delivery suits the material.
In this collection of razor-sharp essays, prolific actor and producer Bateman meditates on the fear, trauma, and access of fame ...Rarely has anyone written so honestly about the experience of being famous. In the interest of better understanding the figures we claim to know and love, Bateman’s book is a must-read.
Producer and actress Bateman delivers a blisteringly honest analysis of fame and her years in and out of the spotlight. Perhaps best known for her performance as Mallory in the 1980s sitcom Family Ties, Bateman uses that period as a springboard to describe the darker sides of fame—stalkers, duplicitous reporters, and, later, being trolled on the internet ... Bateman’s impassioned narrative points out to those who relentlessly seek fame that rather than a blessing, it can be a curse.
Bateman insists from the outset that she has no interest in writing a memoir, though the narrative draws from her experiences and particularly from the emotions that those experiences elicited. Neither is it the book she originally intended to write, one that would have had more distance between the author and her subject and relied more on theory and research concerning the topic ... Instead of crashing and burning, Bateman has found a life outside the maelstrom, ably described in this sharp, take-no-prisoners book
