Wishful Drinking

I tell you all of this as a newly made bystander. As I have been reintroduced into my world by electroconvulsive therapy (more commonly known as ECT for those oh-so-fortunately familiar with it and electroshock for those who are not)—reintroduced to my life at the ripe old age of fifty-two. My memory—especially my visual memory—has been wrenched from me. All of a sudden, I find that I seem to have forgotten who I was before. So, I need to reacquaint myself with this sort of celebrity person I seem to be. Someone who was in an iconic, blockbuster film called Star Wars. (How trippy is that?)

One thing I do recall is that one day when I was a toddler, I sat planted closely to the television set watching my mother in a movie called Susan Slept Here. And, at a certain point there’s a scene where my very young mother tilts her face up to receive a kiss from Dick Powell. A kiss on the mouth. A romantic kiss. So, she has her eyes closed, waiting. But instead of kissing her on the mouth, Mr. Powell bends down and kisses her on the forehead. I sit there, registering this and then look quickly over my shoulder to see if anyone else had seen what I saw. To see if I should be more embarrassed for my mother than I already was. I tell you this to illustrate that I didn’t know the difference between movies and real life. In my life, they tended to overlap. Cary Grant (yes, the Cary Grant) became a family friend, even though he wasn’t precisely that. And characters that my mother played in movies became confused with the person who was and is my mother. So in a way, movies became home movies. Home became another place on the movie star map.

Later on, I worked out that my mother’s appearance in the classic film Singin’ in the Rain was not unlike my own appearance in Star Wars. When she made that film, she was nineteen and costarred with two men. I was also nineteen when I made Star Wars and appeared opposite two men. How this is relevant, I have no idea. Maybe I was just grasping around for a sense of continuity.

I emerge from my three-week-long ECT treatment to discover that I am not only this Princess Leia creature but also several-sized dolls, various T-shirts and posters, some cleansing items, and a bunch of other merchandise. It turns out I was even a kind of pin-up—a fantasy that geeky teenage boys across the globe jerked off to me with some frequency. How’s that for a newborn-how-do-you-do damsel in very little cinematic distress?

To wit, one afternoon in Berkeley I found myself walking into a shop that sold rocks and gems.

“Oh my God, aren’t you

” the salesman behind the counter exclaimed.

And before he could go any further, I modestly said, “Yes, I am.”

“Oh my God! I thought about you every day from when I was twelve to when I was twenty-two.”

And instead of asking what happened at twenty-two, I said, “Every day?”

He shrugged and said, “Well, four times a day.”

Welcome to the land of too much information.

On top of all this celebrity parents and Star Wars stuff, apparently I was once married to a brilliant songwriter, a rock icon of sorts. I mean, this is a man who wrote an array of beautiful songs, and even a few songs that were about me. How incredible is that? And get this—I had always been a really big fan of his music. Huge. As a teen, it was just him and Joni Mitchell. And, as I couldn’t marry Joni, I married him. I loved this man’s lyrics. They were one of the reasons I fell in love with words.

How can you not love someone who writes “medicine is magical/and magical is art/think of the boy in the bubble/and the baby with the baboon heart”? The answer for me was I couldn’t. I couldn’t not love him. I apprenticed myself to the best in him and bickered with the worst. And to top it off, we were the same size. I used to say to him, “Don’t stand next to me at the party—people will think we’re salt and pepper shakers.”

And wait’ll you hear this—I’ve written four novels. Seriously! And two of them were best sellers. My first novel, Postcards from the Edge, was adapted into a film directed by Mike Nichols, starring Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep, basically playing a sometimes better, sometimes worse, dolled-up version of my mother and myself.)

I could go on and on—because there are certainly a lot of other cool things. The coolest being that I’m the mother of this amazing daughter named Billie. She’s my most extraordinary creation.

It occurs to me that I might sound as though I’m boasting. I promise you I’m not. It’s just that ECT has forced me to rediscover what amounts to the sum total of my life. I find that a helluva lot of it fills me with a kind of giddy gratitude. Some of my memories will never return. They are lost—along with the crippling feeling of defeat and hopelessness. Not a tremendous price to pay when you think about it. Totally worth it!

But now that we’ve established that I’ve had ECT, I have a list that I thought I’d share. A list of the electroshock treatment gang who have also benefitted from ECT.