Starf*cker: a Meme-oir Read Online Free

aloud as “mem-wahhhr”). These stories in this book are another form of my list obsession, with as many celebrities name-checked as possible. In the same way we relate to celebrities, maybe you’ll see a bit of yourself in here or will laugh at what might have been had your renouncing of whichever idols you had (Bobby Sherman? The DeFranco Family? NKOTB? Don’t you dare say One Direction unless you have parental approval to read this book…) not taken.
    It might even inspire you to return to fandom. It’s good to be a starfucker, even if it’s bad to be a blind follower. A starfucker in the way I use it is someone who sees the ridiculousness of flying across the country strictly to meet Joe Manganiello at a cystic fibrosis event and who can coldly assess everything positive and negative about most stars from a space of undying, irrational affection.
    A starfucker sees and is awed by how lucky it is for someone to become a star in the first place. That doesn’t mean stars’ lives are perfect or even better, but to ascend to the ranks of stardom among our own species is something only human beings can experience. My lists were an attempt to round up all that luck and make sense of it.
    So is this book.

I’m lucky. (Isn’t that how a Jackie Collins novel begins?)
    I live in New York City, in Hell’s Kitchen, right on 42nd Street—which is about as believable as an episode of Friends . I’m close to a firehouse, a police station, an emergency clinic, a post office, a Dunkin Donuts with a TV, a strip club, and a gay hotel, which means I can watch first-run episodes of The Good Wife with well-heeled bums while munching on antique Old-Fashioned donuts (the newfangled name for “plain,” which somehow are advertised as having more calories than custard-filled ones), set fire to a cop and rest assured she will be extinguished in time to avoid death (you thought it would be a man, sexist), or simply stay in, fire up my Grindr, and watch it explode with horny men of every variety (especially the obnoxious variety) who are all eight inches away and only want white guys—just not this one .
    But in spite of my good fortune, things haven’t always been so easy.
    At pre-school story hour in Flint, Michigan, where I lived for a lukewarm minute after birth and before elementary school, I remember being haunted after a story from the teacher about a prince and princess getting married. Another post-toddler innocently suggested the prince marry another prince and was shut down by a little girl notorious for making you watch her pee. She exclaimed, with all the charm of the monster baby from the early-‘70s film It’s Alive! , “Boys can’t marry boys!” It would be a cold day in hell before I’d ever again accompany her into the junior pissoir and help her lower her green tights for flow and tell.
    Even then, hearing that boys couldn’t marry boys triggered something not so deep inside me to feel as policed as when my mom would ask, “Who drank all the Coke?” in reference to the eight-pack of soda she’d bought twenty-four hours earlier. I was a bottomless pit when it came to anything I shouldn’t have.
    Another time, when my knock-out of a bored housewife mom picked me up from the same pre-school, she returned to her car to discover the spare tire had been brazenly stolen in broad daylight. We soon left Flint, along with most other white people. This was before political correctness—P.C. B.C.—a time when unfair, fair-skinned people openly blamed every act of criminality on “them.”
    “They stole your tire?” people asked.
    …and they weren’t talking about the Irish.
    I don’t believe my parents thought this way, my dad teaching at a heavily black high school and my mom such a rebel she’d posed like a “hood” in ‘50s family photos, but I know they were eager to trade up from the shoebox home in which we lived, and nearby Flushing was the most logical step. We said good-bye to the little house