On Alana Massey’s ‘All the Lives I Want’

Massey’s essays speak loudly about who she is, and what our consumption-driven, body-obsessed culture has become.
Alana Massey
Essay Collection
256 Pages
5.8” x 8.6”
Hardcover
Available in All eBook Formats
Review Format: eARC
ISBN: 978–1455565887
First Edition
Grand Central Publishing
New York City, New York
Available HERE
$26.00

Our society loves to devour. We are gluttonous, and our drink of choice is celebrity news and gossip. We binge on our hatred for their perfect bodies and on our judgments of flaws paparazzi find in rare, un-Photoshopped moments on beaches or city streets. What we’re actually doing, though, is devouring the lives, and the bodies, of young women who are often forced into the spotlight too soon. At least that’s what Alana Massey argues in her essay collection, All the Lives I Want: Essays about My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers.
Approaching everyone from Sylvia Plath, to Britney Spears, and even Princess Diana with brutal honesty is what sets Massey’s collection apart. Not only does she see pieces of herself filtered through the images of how society treats famous women, but she sees how society treats women as a whole. In her essay, “Public Figures: Britney’s Body is Everybody’s,” Massey opens with:
When people ask me how much I weigh, they are often looking for a measure of distance more than a measure of weight [. … There] is a desire to know the difference between their bodies and mine.
She uses examples of articles like “The Best and Worst Bikini Bodies of the Summer!” not only to demonstrate how society’s views of women have impacted her own mental health, but to speak to a larger issue at hand. It’s not that we’re obsessed with these women because they’re people, but because we see them as objects that must be perfect and exist for our consumption.
Beyond consumption, Massey argues that these women exist as standard-setters, especially to the men in her life. In “Being Winona: Freeing Gwyneth: On the Limitations of Our Celebrity ‘Type,’” Massey discusses a conversation she has with her friend and (at the time) boyfriend. In it, he admits to having a soft spot for Gwyneth Paltrow. This begins an essay comparing Winona Rider and Gwyneth Paltrow, on how the image of perfection is encompassed by the blond, thin, Academy Award-winning actress. Meanwhile, Winona is the epitome of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl who was Goth-chic, had a troubled past, and a long slew of public lovers.
I’ve instead come to the whole experience as my moment on a surveillance camera in Saks Fifth Avenue. It was the episode in which the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was revealed to be the Depressive Witch Nightmare Woman that she was all along. It brought to life my sadness and desperation outside the vacuum where being mentally ill was a fascinating quirk that had no potential to create real consequences.
Outside this vacuum was the fact that Winona’s career never recovered after her shoplifting. No one wants to see the darker side of mental illness — especially at the hands of a woman.
It’s these truths, and more, that Massey brings to light in this collection. These truths that not only speak loudly about who Massey is, and what our consumption-driven culture has become, but also forces the reader to sit up and take notice of their own thoughts and actions, and whether they’re making this world better or worse.

