Another shout-out for the little free libraries of Burbank, CA!
This book is a roller coaster, if your idea of a roller coaster starts out as insanely boring with bits of really interesting insight and a few chuckles along the way that leaves you with more questions than answers. I realize that is not a resounding endorsement, but I’m giving this book 3 stars because in spite of many flaws I found it rather inspiring. I’m going to be kind of hard on it though, so buckle up.
First off, I’ve been a fan of Eddie Izzard since I saw his Dress to Kill comedy special twenty years ago. Nothing pleases me more than to serve cake to guests with the query, “Cake or death?” and receive a “Cake, please!” in return. I can’t hear “The Twelve Days of Christmas” without wanting to run in from another room to shout, “FIVE GO-OLD RINGS!” When I’m walking through the neighborhood with my husband and we see a squirrel, one of us invariably says, “Did I leave the gas on? No, I’m a fucking squirrel!”
Damn, I wish I were reviewing Dress to Kill.
Eddie Izzard spends the first third of his book talking about his childhood. His mother died when he was six years old, which is a pretty sad way to start out in life. When his father tells Eddie and his brother Mark that their mother has passed, his father suggests that they have a cry. “So we do,” Izzard writes. “Me, Mark, and Daddy just cry for between half an hour and a lifetime.” I like that turn of phrase and had high hopes for this book from there. Unfortunately, Izzard’s writing is uneven to say the least. For the first third, he writes much like he delivers his comedy, which is to say rambling. As much as I enjoy his comedy style, it doesn’t make for a satisfying read. At one point, he shares the story of how he liked a girl and decided to tease her in the pool in hopes of getting her to chase him. “But this is where I had no finesse. The speed of my swimming away was ridiculously fast. I swam as if a shark was after me.” Now, I guarantee that every Eddie Izzard fan, which means at least 90% of the people who are going to read this book, recognize that story as a bit from Dress to Kill:
I was so elated that splashy-splashy was working that I swam like a boy chased by sharky-sharky. . . . I was in Egypt when they caught up to me.
My point is, that story is way funnier in his stand up, and I was baffled why he would include an inferior re-telling in his memoir. At other points he tells stories that by his own acknowledgment are not particularly interesting. He goes off on a tangent about wasps that begins, “This is not a terribly exciting story,” and by God he is right! Again, what makes for an interesting aside in a comedy routine doesn’t necessarily work on the printed page. Maybe it works better in the audio version? Regardless, my opinion stands.
Izzard becomes much more interesting when he discusses his sexuality, except that he raised more questions for me than provided answers. He talks about identifying as transgender, which he says they used to refer to as transvestite. But wait, isn’t transvestism, or cross-dressing, still a thing? They aren’t interchangeable terms. Perhaps he means he incorrectly identified himself as a transvestite when he’s actually transgender? For someone who is open to learning about this topic, I was disappointed he wasn’t more explicit. He sort of assumes everybody understands what transgender means and how he specifically identifies with it, which is a lost opportunity in my opinion. From what I can tell, Izzard is non-binary, meaning he doesn’t feel exclusively masculine or feminine, but I don’t think he ever uses that term in the book or explains exactly what it means for him.
Perhaps this is intentional. At one point, he talks about how sexuality shouldn’t matter. “I am transgender, and I exist. But that is just my sexuality. More important than that is that I perform comedy, I perform drama, I run marathons, and I’m an activist in politics. These are the things I do. How you self-identify with your sexuality matters not one wit. What you do in life–what you do to add to the human existence–that is what matters. ” Fair enough, Eddie, and I agree with your sentiment 100%. Still, this is a memoir, and with such a strong following he could have done a better job educating those who are willing to learn.
What I find most inspiring about Izzard is his approach to his career. As a student in physics class, Izzard learned about something called the Nuffield syllabus, which essentially asked students what they wanted to learn and then how they might go about getting there. This type of experimental thinking was asking a lot of young students, but as an adult Izzard embraced the philosophy and applied it to his career. He knew he wanted to be a performer, so he repeatedly found ways to do things that he had never done before and had never been taught. As an accounting student at Sheffield University, he had hopes of tagging along with the theater group when they went to play the Edinburgh Fringe Festival so he could learn how it was done, only to find out that nobody from Sheffield planned to attend. With no experience, training, or money, he developed and produced a show so that he could go. His show was a flop, but the education he gained served him in the ongoing stages of his career. His experience as a performer was one of repeatedly hitting walls and then finding ways over or around them, so that when his career finally did take off it seemed to happen very quickly. In reality, his career was built on a foundation of repeatedly trying, learning, and often failing at new things. He did sketch comedy and street performance with limited success before discovering that he could do stand-up. Each step of the way, Izzard would push and push to get to the next level. “In my early career, as soon as I become a decent street performer, I wanted to become a stand-up; as soon as I became a good stand-up, I wanted to play theaters all around the UK. As soon as I played theaters all around the UK, I wanted to play London’s West End. Then I wanted to do gigs in New York. And then tour America. And then tour the world. It seems I keep moving the bar higher. To be honest, I feel quite content most of the time, but if I wish to do something, I am quite happy to go back again and again and attack the brick wall of ‘no’ and find a way to push through to the other side.”
That, my friends is grit, or as Izzard calls it, stamina. In the end, that’s what won me over about this book, in spite of my other complaints.
And since he never actually mentions jazz chickens, I’m going to end with a link to that bit.