lover’s spit
here’s a few excerpts from an article what a journalism student did on your hero recently:
The lone bartender detaches herself from the bar, where two men are singing drunkenly, comes over to the table, and asks if anything’s needed. White orders a vodka soda, and squeezes the lemon slice before dunking it in her drink. The Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize?” pounds over the speakers, and White has to lean and yell to be heard. White writes many beginnings of fictional stories, but hardly finishes them, she says. One story she did finish, called “I Like The Crazy Girl,” was put up on her blog and later printed in “Marketable Depression.” The thousand-word story is about an autistic girl named Melinda. “I incorporated from my memory some character traits in an autistic character in a Baby-Sitters Club book,” she says. “It’s kind of beautiful, the way you visualize the crazy girl. She wears crazy dresses and it’s sort of charming, but she can’t access her beauty because she’s fucked.”
White views her blog as a vital launching pad to something next – she mentions that the “something” may be TV, acting, writing another book, or a movie based on the Raymi persona, which she says she has already been working on. “Even when I don’t want attention, I want people to view me under a microscope,” she says. Of her blog, she says, “I undersell it. Eight years, and it’s transcended what other people think of blogs. It’s an online journal, it’s artistic bullshit, I document my entire life.” Wilen quips, before going out of the bar for a smoke, “it’s sometimes risqué, sometimes ordinary, but interesting. You’re going into someone’s head, with anyone’s blog.” Wilen then gets up and lights her cigarette on the Jameson candle flame. White makes a funny face at her.
“Knowing her, and reading her blog, I’m sometimes surprised. I forget she’s as good a writer as she is,” says Phil. Phil has known White since 2004, when they met in Oakville, Ont. White In her memoir, White writes, “in many ways he has saved my life.” Inside Ted’s, White responds to Phil’s compliment, “You should tell me that. Sometimes I need…” then she pats herself on the back.
White says she’s succeeded because “people are starved for meaning. Blogging is a saviour these days.” Though she says blogging is “a little of everything and a lot about nothing,” she hopes to be remembered for being funny and inspiring, for making people “feel okay about being depressed” and letting them know that “there are good things in this world, more colours than just the colour grey.” Near the ending of her memoir, she writes, “I’m that someone who is forever going to be something someday and that’s what my something is. You know how everyone has a something, well mine is that girl who is going to be something, maybe nothing, but maybe something.”
