The Thrills — and Heartache — of Being a Fan
Loving our idols from afar can be a very intense relationship
Last year I woke one morning to a solemn message from my best friend: Sorry for your loss, my dear.
My eyes blinked in bleary confusion. Loss? Not again.
My sibling had died from cancer years earlier and, while I understood they had left the world much sooner than most, I didn’t feel ready to be dragged through the meandering and foggy roads of grief once more.
But as I read on, I saw that my friend — who was holidaying in Europe and on a different time zone — had learned the news that the rest of my country was only waking up to: journalist and author, Elizabeth Wurtzel, had passed away.
Like a lot of my favourite things, Elizabeth Wurtzel entered my life rather late.
As a teenager, I’d read a dismissive and critical interview with her where the journalist had made no effort to hide their distaste and disapproval of a writer whose memoir, Prozac Nation, had shattered and reshaped the mental illness narrative.
But I lived in a place where books were sparse, unaffordable and the library never seemed to house anything I actually wanted to read.
I wonder, sometimes, if we encounter the art and artists that shape us most only when we are ready? I do think I would have benefited so much more from reading her as an adolescent who felt too awkward to exist in such a razor-sharp world.
There are so many writers I love and admire, but Elizabeth Wurtzel was the only real-life writer, memoirist and journalist who seemed to understand exactly the way I lived — live.
It felt like with every new article she published our bond grew closer, despite the fact we had never met or communicated and I felt too nervous to even follow her Instagram account, knowing she likely wouldn’t follow me back.
And now she was gone.
I divided the rest of the day into thinking of something erudite to write on social media, and wondering whether I’d feel any less alone knowing I’d no longer have her work to guide and comfort me.
And in all that thinking, I kept coming back to the message sent by my friend and what that meant.
In a way, my identity had become synonymous with my fandom. A large part of me was the people I idolised.
That’s not a bad thing; it’s certainly not something I’m ashamed of. I figure it’s better to feel something strongly than not at all.
But how much should we love our idols?
In high school, I sent my first fan letter to a writer whose books had made me adore reading.
For six long months after sending it, I agonised over every word I had typed: had there been a mistake? Had I written something stupid or offensive? And when an envelope addressed to me in unfamiliar writing arrived in my letterbox, I felt my heart burst with joy knowing that there, on the page, were words meant for me.
After reading the one-page letter so many times I could recite it, I did something different: I wrote back, sent a second missive although there had been no invitation to do so.
Even as a 13-year-old I knew I was breaking a social code in doing this, that I risked sounding like a stalker, an opportunist, that my personality would likely be reduced to a single word: obsessive. But this realisation alone was not enough to stop me.
Around this time, I befriended Melissa*, a girl who took the same bus to high school as me.
Melissa was a few years older and — like many girls in the nineties — worshipped Courtney Love.
I’d never heard her band, Hole’s music, but already I understood why Melissa could feel so drawn to the rockstar.
Both of us lived in a country town, close to nowhere and home to nothing. On the excruciating bus rides to school each morning we depended upon books or our walkmans not so much for entertainment as escape, survival.
“I really hope you meet her,” Melissa said when I told her how I’d received a reply from the author.
There was a faith in her voice, faith that I kept when Melissa travelled to the city to see Hole in concert, fought her way to the front row and braved a brutal moshpit — no mean feat for a teenage girl in an environment that was all too often a cesspit of toxic masculinity.
“I got to touch her,” she told me after. “I was out of it with happiness.”
This didn’t surprise me; I almost knew it would happen because that is how life usually goes for the devoted few whose breath burns with passion and conviction.
Over a decade later, I myself stood at a Courtney Love concert and witnessed her jump from the stage and into the audience, letting us hold her hand.
Love, who once famously sung: “You want a part of me? Well I’m not selling cheap” wasn’t doing that by any means.
For all her contradictions and questionable behaviour that I can’t defend, I do think she understood just how much this gesture could mean to those like me and Melissa. Touching someone’s flesh for a second made them real, made us real.
There are a lot of dead people on my mood board: Truman Capote, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Richey Edwards.
At times I think I should replace the images with countries I have visited or plan to; castles and glaciers are so much more reliable than people.
Instead, I make a compromise: only those who are no longer alive get to go here.
I think often about Melissa and her intense desire to meet her idol; the same urge that saw me travel through icy Manchester in winter to find the childhood home of Morrissey and grip a pen in my ice block of a hand so I could scrawl the lyrics: I know you would like me, if only you could see me on the nearby Smiths bridge.
Whatever happened to that fan? The one who wrote letters and would brave the elements for those who fascinated him so much. I don’t believe age is a barrier to admiration — in fact, the opposite.
It’s just that, somehow, somewhere I realised I don’t need to speak to any idol so long as their work still talks to me. And for me, that is now enough.
*Name has been changed.
