Fame

July 23, 2018
Producer and actress Bateman delivers a blisteringly honest analysis of fame and her years in and out of the spotlight. Perhaps best known for her performance as Mallory in the 1980s sitcom Family Ties, Bateman uses that period as a springboard to describe the darker sides of fame—stalkers ( a man once followed her from L.A. to Berkeley where she was performing in a play, calling out her name from a car), duplicitous reporters, and, later, being trolled on the internet. She bemoans the ways reality TV and social media have changed what it means to be famous. “Prior to the 1990s,” she writes, “there was no frenzy to be famous... but around 2006, then everybody could join in and have a semblance of fame.” She also shares her own experiences of fame, both at the height of her popularity and after it faded. “Your obituary... will still list that pinnacle of ‘accomplishment,’ ” she writes, “to the exclusion of almost everything else you have done in your life.” For Bateman, her personal achievements include becoming a writer and producer, getting a pilot’s license, and entering UCLA as a computer science major in 2016. Bateman’s impassioned narrative points out to those who relentlessly seek fame that rather than a blessing, it can be a curse. Agent: Anthony Arnove, Roam Agency.

August 1, 2018
Now in her early 50s, the actress best known as a teenager on Family Ties lashes back at the distortions and toxicity of celebrity-obsessed culture.Bateman insists from the outset that she has no interest in writing a memoir, though the narrative draws from her experiences and particularly from the emotions that those experiences elicited. Neither is it the book she originally intended to write, one that would have had more distance between the author and her subject and relied more on theory and research concerning the topic. There is still some of that here, reflecting the college education she pursued in her mid-40s, but "instead of the academic version I had already half-completed, [this is] rather a cut-to-the-bone, emotional-river-of-Fame book." Bateman has no filter, whether she's describing how it felt to be introduced to male fans who had masturbated to her photos or fending off the fathers who asked for autographs for their daughters while simultaneously trying to hit on her. The author shows how things changed with reality TV ("the cancer of America") and with the internet that made fame available to anyone and made the famous targets for armies of anonymous trolls. "You cut and gut and make them bleed," she writes about those who slam her online. "Type, type, peck." And then they type, and she bleeds all over these pages, as if the passage of time and the maturity of decades can't heal the hurt that she experienced when she went from very famous to not-so-famous and from young and thin to older and heavier. In almost stream-of-consciousness fashion, she takes readers along for a ride that few are prepared to experience: "You're 16, 17, 18, 19, 20; you don't know shit. It's all happening too fast, too fast to do anything about. You're doing school, the show, then this Fame. Much too fast. Unmanageable. Can only lie down in the canoe and let the rapids pull you downstream."Instead of crashing and burning, Bateman has found a life outside the maelstrom, ably described in this sharp, take-no-prisoners book.

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September 15, 2018
In this collection of razor-sharp essays, prolific actor and producer Bateman meditates on the fear, trauma, and access of fame. Bateman became a household name at a young age and has seen how fame's acquisition and disappearance can impact the psyche. She is candid about how terrifying it can be to be recognized at any private moment as well as about the discomfort of feeling forgotten. Although the spotlight made Bateman feel like her body was not her own, when the spotlight shone elsewhere, the loss she experienced was something akin to a death in the family. As Bateman explains, aside from a few fame unicorns (Travolta, Clooney, etc.), an icon seldom maintains his or her height of celebrity. Bateman also dissects the digital hatred flung at the screen stars, and she explains how infrequently celebs received such vitriol when anti-fans had to send snail mail. Rarely has anyone written so honestly about the experience of being famous. In the interest of better understanding the figures we claim to know and love, Bateman's book is a must-read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)