Review: ‘Bad Baby’ by Selma Blair


When Blair makes her cross country pass, her book loses some of the magic the early chapter did. At one point, he uses the phrase “all the attractive people I’ve shared something with in my Hollywood life” – that’s the mood of these pages. Blair sometimes acted when he drank in public. She went through a phase of greeting people or biting affectionately she; Kate Moss pulled back a little.

This was the behavior he now saw through the lens of his illness; it was also an expression of his incompetence. People can’t always get Blair who wants to be seen. As she settled into her career, the makers used her time and again as another version of the brutal doll. But the fashion photographers who shoot it see beyond the label. (Blair cares about clothes and is prone to pretty designer similes: The black eye patch she wore as a child has a dot in the middle, “A bit Gaultier like Madonna’s cone bra”; a giant moth revealed by her years later. there are swirls of “Proenza Schouler print” in the pool .)

As Blair enters her 40s, the symptoms that have plagued her for years — nerve pain, lethargy, depression — worsen. “I’m in pretty intense pain,” she posts on Instagram, and her friend Elizabeth Berkley sees the posts and suggests Blair see her brother, who is a spinal neurologist. She sends him in for an MRI, and eventually, someone actually sees Blair—inside his skull. Imaging shows MS-related lesions in his brain. Scanning is her “new fortune teller,” and diagnosis is her new label, “this time the appropriate one.”

The rest of the book chronicles Blair’s life with MS, including her dedication to speaking openly about her experience of the disease, including a punishing stem cell transplant. Early in the memoir, Blair quotes Didion’s famous maxim: “We tell ourselves stories to live.” These days, we tell ourselves stories on multiple platforms for a living. Blair also told herself in a recent documentary:Meet, Selma Blair” is an intimate film that does some work that the book doesn’t. Just from the memory, I couldn’t get a gut feeling for Blair’s symptoms—like what a feat it was sometimes to even climb the stairs for her.

When Didion wrote about why we tell stories, she was thinking about our need to add meaning to our experiences – to impose “a narrative line on disparate images.” MS is the line Blair imposes in “The Average Baby.” The disease that attacks his spine forms the backbone of his story and offers a perspective as well as structure. “I don’t have the ability to edit. I can only pick one moment at a time,” writes Blair, describing how his mind works these days. Where the book reflects this is also where it is strongest, in Blair’s individual recollections.

“People with MS spend a lot of time in their homes,” says Blair. And that’s where this generous, poignant book finally returns. Here he intuitively, confidently navigates between the present and the past. A reflection on bathing, immersing yourself in the water, and feeling “cool and youthful” reminds Blair how much her mother loved baths and instructed the housekeeper to always leave an Ajax trail at the bottom of the tub. But Blair’s mother also feared she would die in the bathroom, especially during storms. She would ask Blair to wait outside the bathroom, where Blair would stay awake, “ear against the door.” “This is my life: waiting for the lightning,” she writes.

In the movie, Blair points from her brain to her mouth and says she “lost access from my brain to my speech in order to get it to you.” Although Blair described a symptom of MS, a disease I do not have, this feeling was symbolically familiar to me; I have often felt as if I had a faulty connection between the brain and speech, and that is part of the reason I am writing. Blair looked to astrologers, psychics, and healers for years to tell her story. “She was looking for the right person to narrate the drama of my life”. He is the right person. That’s a sign of a writer, I thought, as he made this move from his brain to his mouth..



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