GARY INDIANA on LAID BARE: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives & the Hollywood Death Trip "I read Laid Bare straight through with stunned fascination. John Gilmore is such a terrific writer, and this book is so surprising. The opening chapter is really a masterpiece all by itself, it recreates an entire era, and brings Joplin to life at a moment when things could have gone any number of ways for her. You're left imagining yourself in the same boat, faced with all the existential choices everyone has to make, which can lead anywhere, not 'inevitably' to fame and/or self-destruction. "Gilmore deals with mythically familiar subjects, but not to turn them inside out. Instead, he boils off the myth and shows you how things really were, and what things felt like to the people living what later became a myth. Most books that try to do this take the later myth as something almost ordained by fate-which is only true ex ponfocio-so that the other parts of a celebrated person's life are simply rendered as obstacles and setbacks to the ultimate goal; the people they knew 'on the way up' become extraneous minor characters, etc. That approach only reinforces the unfortunately widespread belief that celebrities are the only people who have real lives. Gilmore shows what a pile of shit that ultimate goal really is, and that the people who get there are completely warped by the process of getting there and that they don't change into wonderful beings just because ten million people know who they are. They just have a big arena in which to be assholes. "I think, ultimately, Gilmore's work is as much opposed to gossip as it is to mythmaking, because both are different faces of celebrity-worship, an epidemic mental illness in our society. When you find someone who isn't infected with it to one degree or another, you realize, as somebody once said, that sanity is the most profound moral option of our time." Official John Gilmore Site