[David]

Originally Posted by michelej1

Well, she says she kept audio journals that helped her refresh her memory.

I think she's a liar. I don't think she used old tapes as refreshers. I think she used old newspaper clippings & Mick's book as refreshers.

As far as the dramatic language goes, the only thing I'd give her leeway on is that Stevie and Lindsey do talk in crazy extremes sometimes. So, I believe they would say some pretty unnatural, overblown sounding things.

Carol wrote a Victorian melodrama, & Lindsey is the wicked villain with devilish looks, a Jack the Ripper mustache, one eyebrow arched, an evil red glow across part of his face (the other part is always in shadow).

Open any page at random. "Malevolent glances" are always being cast at this person or that person; "storm clouds" are always hanging over everything (inside people's homes!); angry lovers don't talk -- they "snarl," etc. etc.

She keeps making fun of the "soap opera" that the band's lives have become, but nothing in Fleetwood Mac history is as soapy as this book.

Now, what do you think about the shooting of the Rolling Stone bed cover? To me, that's not only odd because no one else describes it taking place that way and in that place (Carol's home), not even Annie, who would be an objective source. But I think it's a calculated lie, in that it seems designed to undermine what Lindsey and Stevie have said more recently about holding each other (Stevie says for a couple of hours) during that shoot. Carol seems to have written in a way deliberately designed to undermine that story.

I'm with you. But it's surprisingly brief & surprisingly free of high drama. I agree that it's very odd that Carol makes absolutely no mention of ex-lovers hanging out together after everyone else leaves the room or goes home or whatever they did.

My notion is that Carol is seriously ill, but not in the way she might think. Either she's lying to a pathological degree or she's emotionally crippled to a pathological degree. Somebody is always scratching her arms, scratching her face, strangling her, punching her in the face, punching her in the back, pulling her hair, dragging her, or slapping her. She portrays herself as a pincushion. Worse, she appears to be getting off on this sadomasochistic portrait. No matter who is physically or verbally abusing her, she stands there, weeping like a sob sister, unable to speak or to move (how many people, when their arm is being twisted, don't use their free arm to push or elbow?). She is frozen in place, time after time, wondering what did I ever do to make them so angry with me? I love them and I know they love me because they said so, and . . .
Does anyone believe this dreck?

"I twisted myself out of his grasp & stumbled backward, speechless with shock" (speechless, mind you, even if it's the twenty-fifth time her romantic lover has smacked her). She is concocting a weirdly idealized "Carol Harris" in her febrile brain, a character who is as guileless and wide-eyed as Cinderella. She even says numerous times, "My life had become a fairy tale." My bull**** meter hit the red back around page 36.

There are descriptions of things here -- we've talked about this already -- that wouldn't be here at all if they hadn't already been described, in virtually identical ways, in Mick's book. Examples: the New Zealand business on the Tusk tour, the show at the Munich Olympic Horse Riding Stadium, the various rehearsals, the photo shoots, the album sessions, the radio broadcast of "Tusk" before release, etc.

Virtually every other page, we read something like, "I could see the rage in his eyes and I knew that I was helpless." This is a romance novel, for chrissake -- a bodice-ripper. It's cheap, it's corrupt, it's hypocritical, & it's fake. The only Polaroids in the whole book that aren't mysteriously blurry are those of Carol herself, professionally taken as part of her modeling. What the great Mary McCarthy once said about Lillian Hellman is true here: Every word in this book is a lie -- even "a" and "the."