Blonde Ambition

There are two things that might be said to define her from the off, and they are not the two things that one might expect. The first is that she is not American, but Canadian, an accident of her birth that seems unthinkable when one considers how American she seems from the outside—how blonde, how nominally plastic, how aspirational and saleable and generally designed to look just right rendered fourteen feet high on a billboard. The second is the fact that there was almost no “her” to begin with: in 1967, her father totaled his green Ford Fairlane while trying to outrun the police, and her pregnant mother was thrown face-first through the glass of the car’s windshield in a smash that might have claimed three lives but improbably ended with no casualties at all. In her recent memoir, she imagines how the scene played out, and the details she includes in her description (her mother’s “pretty head” going through the windshield; the “soft cream interior” of the car being “soaked in blood”) are suggestive of a glamourpuss with an illicit taste for the macabre. This combination—sweet and bitter, with a happy ending invariably following a cruel ordeal—characterizes the entire book, which has the feel of a Grimm’s fairy tale with added sex.