, a memoir about an unhappy childhood spent with an abusive, fame-seeking mother. McCurdy recalls being shunted from audition to audition, until she landed the dream, a role on a Nickelodeon show. If you watch clips of this show, or of her as a bubbly teenager on the red carpet, the dissonance between her public image and her private life at the time is near-unbearable. We know how it ends. We’ve seen it. We see it every week.
I think, although I’m open to having my mind changed, that women are more susceptible to this longing than men. We are used to questing – if I could fix my teeth, change my nose, have this opportunity. We are used to being chosen. We know how to pose; we know how to self-promote. In footage from the Factory featured in Todd Haynes’s, a young woman is seen engaged in conversation. As soon as the camera turns on her she begins performing.
The real question is would Warhol like the world as it is now, the world he is so often credited with creating? I think he’d appreciate the repetition: the same restaurant meals, the selfies, the sunsets. As a prodigious shopper, he’d get a kick out of kitschy unboxing videos. But something that never changes across all of Warhol’s biographies is that he was born in Pittsburgh and he came from almost nothing.