Still Hating Thynneth, But So Loving Paradise

Just when you think it’s time to stop trashing poor Thynneth Paltrow, her blonde T-rex head erupts from the cover of (what else?) Self Magazine and—bam!—you have to—HAVE TO—trash her again. I know I shouldn’t have opened it but when you’re waiting to see your Neuro-Chiro in a room awash with just the one Self and 50 Golf Digests--and you happen to suffer from Unabated Acute Anhedonia—you have no choice but to open said Self and see what new Thynnie-Horrors await.

It was, trust me, the usual fare: an excerpt from her Oedipal Cookbook (The Food Daddy Fed Me While Mommy Worked), the latest update on the state of her butt, and a few tips on How To Spit-Roast Mr. Batali Without His Noticing/Getting Upset. 

This last bit, of course, requires abusing oodles of alcohol, which we all know Gwyneth knows nothing about, but let me just say that the next time she gets the urge to portray human frailty on the big screen, she can leave poor Robert Downey, Jr. alone and put her hard-working hands on a book. 

And I don’t mean a cookbook written for morons, but a novel by a Scottish genius, a woman genius, named A.L. Kennedy.  A novel called, rather perfectly, Paradise.

You know how it is when you discover the world’s best writer and wonder how it was that you, a person bent on reading everything good before the macular degeneration sets in, managed so dumbly to miss her before?  Were my well-read friends (two out of my four Pretend Husbands, never mind the cat and the cowboy) just not telling me? Or were they just too busy not reading girls? 

Never mind, I’m reading her now, and let me just say that as astonished and edified as I’ve ever been by the memoirs of women who’ve tortured themselves via alcohol (Mary Karr’s Lit and the late Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story stagger to mind), they are nothing compared to what this writer imparts in every sentence in Paradise.   Plus, of course, she is funny.

The good news is that she has published other books too (I’m reading one now called Everything You Need and so it is) and, due to not being dead yet, can keep right on writing. 

If you care about either writing or drinking or, perhaps better, both, do yourself a big favor and Google her now, and (Brief Note to Self:) Do Not Google The Dreaded T-Rex.