#69 Growing Pains by Billie Piper

When I first heard there was a book deal on offer, I was pretty reluctant about it. I’ve learnt a lot about the value of privacy. But some arse was putting adverts in the local Swindon paper asking for stories about me and my family. He was writing a book about a person he’d never met. It pissed me off. Even though it’s my story to tell, my thoughts, my feelings, I felt quite odd about doing it. But actually it’s been an amazing experience.

Billie Piper’s life since becoming an English pop star at the age of fifteen has been lived in tabloid headlines. In the minds of the British public, there is a very defined idea of who she is. As the quote above shows, Piper is well able to speak for herself and took the opportunity to set the record straight. She’s been a heavily marketed teeny bopper; a makeshift rival to the chart dominance of Britney Spears; a hate figure for her relationship with a male pop star; a teenage wife and the onscreen companion to a time-travelling alien. Plenty of material for a biography, despite the subject at the time of writing not having left her twenties yet.

The structure of Piper’s biography is broken up by a odd timeline, opening with her swift rise in the pop charts and then telling the story of her life with her family before fame came calling. A devoted fan of Madonna from a young age, Billie hoped to imitate the American icon. Instead she found herself facing mounting debt at a young age, still at fifteen years lacking a proper parent in her life, with her management team a poor substitute. It is a bizarre world of extremes. On the one hand she is meeting with celebrities and getting sex tips from her backing dancers when living the pop star life. Then she returns to Swindon to cook fish fingers for her younger siblings and getting hits off a bucket bong with mates on the weekend. Her growing romance with Ritchie Neville from 5ive transforms the pop princess into a hate figure for the teen fan base of her celebrity boyfriend. Eventually she found herself growing further and further apart from her family and finding no stable emotional ties to anyone else in her new life. As a result she finds herself slipping more and more into anorexic behavior, euphemistically referred to by people in the entertainment industry as ‘old faithful’. With failing record sales, a well-documented reliance on laxatives and a suicide attempt while promoting her music in America, the teen star was swiftly approaching a breakdown.

Billie credits her meeting with Chris Evans for her recovery. A hugely successful British television and radio personality, the two soon married shortly after meeting. Evans caught her eye by delivering a Ferrari race-car to her doorstep. The romance that followed was not so much a whirlwind, but a retreat from the entertainment industry and glitz of London. The couple relocate their life to a cottage in the English countryside and try to find themselves. The media responds by painting Evans as a cradle-snatching pervert and bemoan the end of Billie’s music career. Ironically for her, this is the happiest period of her life to date and in leaving her pop star past behind, she reinvents herself as an actress. A return to a more controlled fame and the role of the Doctor’s companion is just on the horizon.

While this is a very honest piece of writing, the telling of it feels telegraphed throughout. In a break with tradition, Billie thanks her ghost on the acknowledgements page at the end of the book. As such there are occasional slips during the book. There is a regrettable reference to a quote from the Sopranos – with neither Billie nor her ghost writer seemingly aware the line is a parody of Al Pacino’s famous outburst in The Godfather Part III. There is little naming and shaming in the book and music promoters, studio crew and production assistants on Who are fulsomely praised. Throughout Billie pitches herself as an ordinary woman who just happens to be living an extraordinary life.

I was never a fan of Misery Lit and so found her descriptions of lonely hotel rooms and anorexia quite depressing. Nevertheless this is an intimate and winning account of a life trapped by fame.

#47 Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O’Malley

This is a very pleasant review for me. I have been following O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim books for several years now. Some criticized the art. I loved how the manga stylings soften the reader for the all-out video game inspired craziness of the climactic ‘versus’ battles. Then there were complaints that Pilgrim fans are nothing more than hipster doofuses. For that read it is a comic where the characters don’t wear their underwear over their trousers. I feel the reviews I have written for this blog don’t give proper due credit to the collaborative spirit of matching dialogue to sequential art in comics. With Scott Pilgrim there is no disjunct. This is O’Malley’s vision, from the words to the pencils, the complete package.

Scott is a twenty-four year old slacker living in Toronto, who plays bass in his friend Stephen Stills’ band Sex Bob-Omb. He shares a one-bedroom apartment with the sardonic Wallace Wells. Throughout the series he continues to experience strange flashbacks to a fight with a shadowy figure named Gideon. When he falls for American delivery girl Ramona, he becomes a target for the League of Evil Ex-Boyfriends. As the series progressed, with each volume ending with a versus battle against a videogame boss ex of Ramona’s, it became clear that Gideon is the mastermind behind all of Scott’s problems.

As this is the final volume of the series, I feel I cannot detail exactly what happens in this book. This is a spoiler free review. I will say that we finally find out why Scott cannot remember much from his past. What Ramona’s relationship with Gideon actually is. Will anyone ever notice Young Neil? Why does Ramona’s head suddenly light up with a mysterious glow?

The fifth title Scott Pilgrim Vs The Universe ended on a sweetly melancholic note, so I was curious as to how O’Malley would wrap this up, with a bang, or a whimper? I should not have worried. Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour ties up every loose end in a neat little bow. O’Malley’s art also continues to impress. There are plenty of references to old Nintendo game titles for nostalgia’s sake. I guess you either get the associations O’Malley packs his panels with, or you don’t. His pencils are deceptively childlike, similar to Nicholas Gurewitch’s Perry Bible Fellowship (which has also flirted with video game nostalgia), or Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha.

My only remaining concern now is, how will Edgar Wright top this for his film, which is due to be released later this month? See Bryan Lee O’Malley still had not finished writing the series when Wright came on board for the film version. So Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World starring Michael Cera as our slacker hero and Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Ramona Flowers, was scripted with a different ending. From what we have seen in trailers so far, Wright has nailed the video game visuals. The characters are also excellently cast, with Chris Evans as the egotistical actor Lucas Lee particularly inspired. However, I wonder if Wright realized that O’Malley intended for Scott and Ramona to team up, their romance finding its ultimate expression in a co-op battle with the Final Boss of the series.

With the final pages of this book Scott Pilgrim achieves that perfect balance between sentiment and fantasy. It’s a work of bathos, wryly humourous and packed with enough cartoonish violence to satisfy any action junkie. Like it, I loved it!