Sharing Secrets, Yes or No?

I was going to post a piece about Chinoiserie today. Instead I am disturbed.

Mimi Alford - Once Upon a Secret - Please discuss....

Many of you have probably seen the interviews with Mimi Alford who has written a book sharing a secret she has kept for fifty years.

It boils down to a young woman having an affair with a powerful famous man, so famous that she didn't publicly talk about it until someone outed her in another book written about the famous man in 2003.

The woman is no whore. Patrician, educated, and elegant with a velvety modulated speaking voice, and a sincerity that is beguiling, she weaves her story like an aging Scheherazade. The man is so famous, as is his family (many of them still very much alive) that we the public devour every book or movie about him and his family.  Most of the principle characters in this story are dead. The extravagant fame and the love for this man and this family makes one linger far too long to listen to Mimi Alford's story.

It's nothing new. We've heard it before, but never from a participant. My discomfort is not at what happened. Many inexperienced women of Mimi Alford's age at the time, have gone through similar scenarios in far less glamorous settings. Women of that generation were not taught self esteem from their standpoint. They were schooled to build their lives around a man, preferably via marriage. But whether in or out of marriage, the message was that the man came first and the woman was the supporting role.

I am a little younger than Mimi Alford, but came up in the same times. Values were changing. Women were trying to find some kind of equality, some kind of balance, some alternatives that would be respected and valued. Sexual freedom was certainly one very important vehicle.

Things have shifted again. With free thinking comes responsibilities and consequences that are both good and difficult. Right now society is pushing back to a repression. We are certainly more open and exposed to a wider variety of human experience, for the better or the worse of it. We are more free to express ourselves. We are like children who want it all ways - freedom, but when it gets messy, we revert.

When I was a young writer, I wrote to shock, to shake things up. Erica Jong (of the infamous Zipless Fuck), was an idol and a teacher and a role model. I had experiences in my younger years, that today I am not necessarily ashamed of, but there are some that I would not want to write about for publication, or shout from the rooftops. I left writing to shock behind with some of those experiences, grateful that I moved to the present intact and happy.

I do write about my past in this very blog, sometimes entertaining you, sometimes boring you to tears like an old lady endlessly turning the pages of her scrapbooks and albums of faded photos. Don't judge too harshly young ones, it will happen to you too. Writing about brief encounters with celebrity, no matter how ordinary the life of the author, pique the interest of the reader.

I guess what's bothering me is the writing of this book. I understand Mimi Alford's need to heal and put this behind her after hiding it for fifty years. But I don't understand the why of the book. I know she did it for herself, and that she protected her family and the man's family for fifty years. Maybe she could have written it as fiction, or worked it out in therapy and family counseling, or kept an unpublished manuscript in a box to be opened upon her death.

Then there is the matter of the train wreck fascination and side show media coverage of all things celebrity to deal with. Does Mimi Alford actually like going on TV to talk about this to promote her book? Is this her entitled Karmic payback, and perhaps paycheck in the form of a best seller attached to the inevitable Lifetime movie deal, the fair recompense for the secret she kept? She says she was young and adventurous, and a had mainly a good time during her eighteen months of fucking with fame. She suffered the pain all young girls have at the hands of powerful men who use them. I don't buy the blanket statement often tossed about when the tawdry hits the television of telling the story to save others.

I don't begrudge Mimi Alford from saving herself, but somehow I wish she had done it without telling all of us about it. She wanted to set the record straight because another author added her as a footnote to his version of history, but really the outing she talks about is two or three sentences that states that the man had an affair with an intern. What record is there to set straight?

What is amazing is how in fifty years the press and media has changed, and how protected celebrities were in the old days. Which world do you think is better? I prefer not knowing about the most intimate private details of the lives of the famous. What do you think about this? I promise to get back to the pretty world Chinoiserie tomorrow.

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