You’re on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, the title of Parker Posey’s new book, is the first indication this isn’t going to be your run-of-the-mill celebrity memoir. It’s the log line to get you settled into your role. For the 300 pages, the reader is playing the part of a non-famous stranger seated next to Posey on an airplane where she is talking at you, telling her whole life story.
In You’re on an Airplane, which is out today, Posey leans into the kind of controlled intimacy many readers want in celebrity memoirs, while simultaneously emphasizing that she is, above all, an actress. A book isn’t her normal venue, but she’s making it a performance anyway, fully assuming the part of the talkative, self-involved, name-dropping thespian type. Throughout the book are references to the flight — Posey interrupts herself frequently, to accept coffee from the steward, to comment on the altitude, to hear briefly what we may have to say when she brings up Bob Dylan — and the book has a pointedly rambling, conversational style that takes you into the speaker’s buzzing train of thought.
We randomly hear about major celebrities that Posey has had casual run ins or working relationships with. She tells us about her favorite fancy places to get food. She makes us promise not to share gossip she’s telling us. That commitment to realism and character is what allows for an entire chapter about pottery and another dedicated to her dog Gracie’s supposed gripes with the media. (Apparently, she’s still mad that Gawker wrote that she was “a bad dog” and “the devil” in 2008, but Posey dismisses it as “fake news.”)
In the book’s many tender moments, the reader learns about Posey’s roots going back to her grandparents. There are family photos incorporated into collages, shared recipes, a loving ode to her mother. Her family’s, and particularly her father’s, influence on her emerges as the anchor of her story. Like him, performing is a part of who she is, living life as if cameras and a live audience are as present as God. Though Posey talks about her varied interests in You’re on a Plane, it’s focused on acting and performing as a central part of her personality, an open door into the ticking mind of a performer for those of us who can’t relate. Anyone who is a fan of Posey’s work will find this structured look at her world off-screen fascinating, partially because she writes with such a conversational voice. We came to this book to meet Posey the actor and celebrity, after all.
As she writes about repeatedly in You’re on an Airplane, acting allows Posey to disappear into another person, and thus the distance from the reader she establishes allows her to hide when writing about two pivotal characters. One entire chapter entitled “Louie” is about Parker’s relationship with comedian Louis C.K. and working with him on his show Louie in 2012. In 2017, the New York Times reported that five women in the industry claimed he had masturbated in front of them without their consent. Posey never references the accusations nor the rumors about C.K. that had been swirling around him for years before, instead likening him to the mythical minotaur. Posey ends the chapter recounting a conversation she had with actor Ellen Burstyn, who starred in The Exorcist. “I told her I read her memoir and that the chapter about The Exorcist was so scary that it made me believe in monsters — how people can be possessed by dark forces they can’t control,” she writes, not-so-slyly hinting at how she considers C.K.’s actions against his work
A later chapter “Master of Storms” details Posey’s working relationship with director Woody Allen on the movie Irrational Man, filmed the same year Allen’s adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow published an open letter in The New York Times accusing him of molesting her as a child and calling out Hollywood for continuing to support him. Posey refers to those molestation allegations against Allen as “his personal life,” “the accusation scandal” and “the news.” She writes that she had read the articles published at the time and “can relate to all the players in the story.” However, more words are spent on her reverence for him and the experience of working with him on set.
Thanks in part to their emphasis in the book, these chapters cast an unsettling shadow over the entire story. We, as Posey’s captive audience and seatmates, do not interrupt the narrative for a “But what about” interjection that would ruin the mood. And when Allen’s reputation as an alleged abuser does come up, the circumstances of the schtick are a convenient fall back, as the Posey of the memoir advises the reader to buckle up during turbulence.
As the book’s extended title acknowledges, memoirs and autobiographies are an act of mythmaking, creating an official narrative and putting it in the place where before there was only outside noise. For modern celebrities, that often means adding to an already hefty collection of writing and speculation about their lives. The sheen of PR is present no matter how “real” an author claims their book is. In You’re on an Airplane Posey, the author, takes that a step further by placing her memoir in an acknowledged construct. As a whole, the plane scenario implies a built-in insurance policy for Posey, the person, who, even as the book’s effusive star, seems to have a bit of resentment for having to live her life in public.
The book is a refreshing departure from the unnatural, authorial voice some celebrities assume when they get their first tell-all book deal, but it leaves the reader with a self-conscious burden. When it comes to Posey’s confessions about her frustrations with celebrity and show business, and especially when it comes to her glowing accounts of alleged abusers, are these the truths as they are to her — or is this just the facade, what she wants us, a stranger on an airplane, to see? When creating the myth of yourself, are you obliged to include the truths you don’t want to acknowledge? You’re on an Airplane transfers these questions from the author to the reader and in its narrative distance reminds that even a work of “non-fiction” like a memoir is ultimately another kind of front.
