My Judy Garland Life

March 23, 2009
By turns clever, hilariously ironical and sweetly earnest, English novelist Boyt’s paean to the legendary singer and actress elevates hero worship to the role of self-improvement. As a sensitive, conscientious, overweight youngster growing up in London, Boyt—painter Lucian Freud’s daughter, although her parents split up before she was born in 1969—learned early on through listening to Judy’s thrilling, moving singing that “the person with the strongest feelings in life is to be the best.” Boyt (Last Hope of Girls
) moves through Judy’s rich, complex career and increasingly unraveling personal saga while sounding important themes that resonated in Boyt’s own life: being early stagestruck (Boyt reckons she attended “almost 2,000 dance classes” as a youth); feeling unwanted; needing to rescue others in crisis and to console; and dealing with the drama of drug addicts. Boyt has managed to interview many of the survivors in Judy’s story, such as Liza Minnelli, Joe Luft and Mickey Rooney; she pilgrimaged to Judy’s birthplace in Grand Rapids, Minn., and her burial site in Westchester, N.Y., and sifts obsessively through questionnaires she gave to fans to understand better Judy’s personal connection with people. While lavish, Boyt’s hagiography proves poetic and endearing.

March 15, 2009
Fashion columnist/novelist Boyt (Only Human, 2004, etc.) obsesses over a life obsessed with Judy Garland.

"[Judy] was my life in purest form," writes the author,"encapsulating and refining all the things that interested me most." Like Garland, Boyt had a traumatic start. She was born into a broken home and was often overweight and overwrought. She also liked to sing and, as she flirted with a performing career, longed for the stage mother she didn't have. (Garland's daughter Lorna Luft later suggested to the author that children should not be robbed of childhood.) Like millions of others, Boyt was transfixed by an early screening of The Wizard of Oz, identifying intensely with the film's star. Her memoir tends to circle in adulatory generalizations about Garland, occasionally getting specific to make somewhat tenuous connections between the two lives. Garland's"flicker of lip and eye" in a frame from Meet Me in St. Louis launches the author's recollections of her own Christmases. A telling essay about Garland's schooling between takes at Metro leads to Boyt's ruminations about emotional and physical hunger. Boyt's insight into Garland's work is mostly uneven, but she scores with an analysis of the failure of Garland's TV series in the mid-'60s. The author posits that the devastation wrought by the cancellation contributed to the singer's demise. Along the way, Boyt offers sharp but too-brief profiles of Garland's fans and co-workers, including cabaret performer Mary Cleere Haran, who comes off as rather testy, and a quickly glimpsed Mickey Rooney, who appears grumpy and enigmatic. Boyt's anxieties prior to an interview with Liza Minnelli may exhaust reader patience, but the interview itself, however sketchy, rewards with its quick, telling details. The author's parting observation—"I have navigated my life under her [Garland's] star"—comes as no surprise.

Even die-hard Garland fans may wish Boyt's ardor had limits.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 11, 2009
Filled with pages of earnest and unreadable odes to Judy Garland, this mystifying first memoir chronicles Boyt's inadvertently creepy, stalker-like obsession with "the greatest entertainer of the twentieth or any century." Her attempts to find connections to her own life come across as strained and unnatural. Boyt glosses over what is arguably the most interesting thing about her-she is the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud and the daughter of painter Lucien Freud. No one but an equally obsessive Garland fan could possibly appreciate this. Readers looking to gain insight into obsessive fandom would be better served by Michael Joseph Gross's Starstruck: When a Fan Gets Close to the Fame.-Lauren Gilbert, Cold Spring Harbor Lib., NY

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