1990s Nostalgia: Seduced by Fame & Bewitched by Isla Fisher


Okay.

Here is a confession. Back in the mid-1990s, when I was in my early teens and spending my weekends buying Dolly magazines, reading Sweet Valley High novels, staring longingly at the clothes in Miss Shop and hanging out at the local skating rink with my best friend Hayley, I was also hiding a dark and sinister secret that I didn't dare reveal to anyone. A secret so dark that it stayed firmly in my closet until one day ...

I was old enough to laugh about it.

My secret was this. I was a closet fan of Isla Fisher, the red haired star of Australian soap opera Home and Away. And when it was revealed in TV Week that nineteen year old actress was also an author, I just had to read her book. Eagerly, I devoured the sample chapters that appeared in Dolly the following month and begged my mother to buy me a copy for Christmas. (Mum obliged and also bought me a copy of Isla's second novel, Bewitched.)

Eagerly, I read Seduced by Fame from cover to cover. This was the story of a young woman who, like Isla, was plucked from obscurity to appear on her favourite soap opera. Wow, I thought. It must have been so realistic, because Isla was an actress, and Jade Silver, the heroine is an actress too. And she must be pretty damn smart, to be able to work on a television show and write books.

Afterward, I eagerly opened the cover on Bewitched. And pretty soon, I realised something.

I had been tricked. Two people were credited as authors on the inside cover and on the copyright page. Confused, I turned back to my copy of Seduced by Fame. Sure enough two people were credited on the copyright page as well. Isla had not written either book all by herself at all, despite her name and her photograph being on the covers. In fact, the writing style of Bewitched was slightly different. (Suggesting that the young actress had more help with her second novel than her first.) But this was explained in a letter from Isla at the back. Apparently, she was so busy with Home and Away that she had to get her mum to research Bewitched and then to help her write it. And they were working on another book together, titled Ebony and Amber which was to be able identical twins who are separated at birth but meet each other when they grow up and swap places. 

Isla Fisher wasn't the first celebrity and she wouldn't be the last to co-author a book and get a larger share of the credit. (And the whole thing was still a damn sight more honest than hiring a ghostwriter, which is still how the majority of celebrity autobiographies find themselves published.) For me, it was an awakening, a realisation that sometimes the people that marketed products could leave out important details that might make their products less interesting to the lucrative teen girl market. The books must have sold reasonably well in their day though, neither of my copies (which I still own, and are now highly collectable,) are first editions. (At least the numbering system at the front would suggest they are not true first editions.) 

And what of Ebony and Amber? A comprehensive search on the internet has failed to produce any evidence of the book ever making it to print, though an amazon search proves that it did have an ISBN and was meant to have been released in June 1996. It also appears that an ISBN was registered for a fourth book titled Too Beautiful though, obviously, that never came to be. (Read more here and here.) Isla's mother, Elspeth Reid went on to write another children's book with a different Australian publisher, titled The Secret Pony and according to wikipedia now lives in Greece. Isla Fisher is now, of course, a reasonably well established Hollywood actress who has appeared in comic roles in films such as Wedding Crashers and Confessions of a Shopaholic (as well as a few smaller and serious roles in films such as The Lookout,) and will be appearing as Myrtle Wilson in an upcoming version of The Great Gatsby.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more