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Just when you think you've reached the celebrity saturation point, along comes a memoir that offers a fresh look at our star constellations, from Madonna to Bono to Mel Gibson.
Journalist Jancee Dunn has written a funny memoir called But Enough About Me ... A Jersey Girl's Unlikely Adventures Among the Absurdly Famous. A writer for Rolling Stone and other publications, Dunn also worked as an MTV VJ and was a Good Morning America correspondent.
Enough is not tabloid territory or an updated Hollywood Babylon. Dunn brings a fan's enthusiasm to her showbiz profiles. She charmingly weaves in stories about her own family members in New Jersey. Many readers might well find them more compelling than the bold-faced folk such as Brad Pitt (who played an air guitar while listening to Soundgarden with Dunn), or Ben Affleck (who pretended that Dunn was his girlfriend to torment the paparazzi).
But for the fame-hungry, here is a sampling of Enough's anecdotes:
*Dunn says she is obsessed with Madonna, studying any photo of her "with the zeal of a Talmudic scholar." But Dunn believed Madonna when the star claimed she feels insecure "every five minutes."
*On tour, Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones washed out his socks and hung them in the hotel bathroom "like an old British pensioner! This is a man who could have paid someone to lick them clean."
*Dolly Parton sliced a big chunk of Velveeta for Dunn as a snack while traveling. (Dunn keeps it in her freezer, a treasured memento from a great interview.) Parton also told her: "I have to have bacon grease in all of my houses."
*Kid Rock doesn't just have a home studio and a basement bar. He also has an actual stripper pole. With lights.
Dunn's affection for the old rather than new stars is clear. And who can blame her? She writes how she interviewed Justin Timberlake and Grace Slick in the same week. The former blandly droned on about how "it's not about the fame, it's about the work, and his appreciation of his fans."
By contrast, Slick explained how she couldn't enjoy an orgy at the Jefferson Airplane office in San Francisco because "she wasn't good at multitasking, added unapologetically that her lungs were 'two black bags' from smoking, and mused that her only regret in life was that she never nailed Jimi Hendrix or Peter O'Toole."
Sigh.
But Enough About Me ...
A Jersey Girl's Unlikely
Adventures Among
the Absurdly Famous
By Jancee Dunn
HarperCollins, 276 pp., $24.95
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