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This is an astounding piece of writing. Astounding. I don't even know how to talk about, where to place it on the true/real/false/fake Venn diagram or why exactly after reading it, I can't tell you the one relevant thing I have to say about it, even though I've told you that story before.

http://www.esquire.com/features/heath-ledger-last-days

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Wow. That was fucking amazing.

My attention was grabbed and let loose a couple of times, but ultimate salvation came with the short paragraph that contains "-- but for the living I left, is to leave it alone."

Amen.

Very well done.

If it had been about a fictional person, I would have really loved it.

Given its actual subject, I find it creepy, morbid, and uncomfortable.

This is so true to the New Journalism of the late 60s that everyone's forgotten about now. Wow.

She is more interested in drawing up the story she will tell later than she is in living in this moment with me.

Yes.

Yeah. The Nicholson voice was amazing, but what sold me was the whole thing with the chick and the ski mask and our societal dedication to narrative when everyone's bad at it.

Want to have stories to tell, but not wanting to tell stories.
Except for a perverse obstinate few, I suppose.

I love it when she forwards my links.

Come to think of it, I should have forwarded it to you directly! Silly me. I read this in Esquire (which I totally love for their writing in general) a few months ago, I think? Then I ran across the link today on digg and I was like, Holy forward batman!!

That made me cry, like big high ceiling white rooms with uncurtained windows.

Thanks. I've spent years trying to understand the appeal of RPF, and this has finally finally explained it to me.

If we are going to make Icons of people, then we have to deal with those people iconicly. We just have to remember that only the private flesh and blood people are canon.

Exactly. But I couldn't even understand the attraction of playing with the icons, because, frankly, it's usually written about people whose caricatures I don't know well enough to care about (including in this case), and either it's utterly unrealistic or utterly uninteresting.

This was a meta meditation on it while being it at the same time, done interestingly enough that I cared. As someone who has never seen one of his movies (wait, maybe one... I dimly remember seeing Knight's Tale) and didn't know what he looked like until the ghoulish media blitz, during which I studiously avoided learning any rumor that wasn't actually held in front of my nose, I cared about the character this author created who was loosely based on this person I'd barely heard of.

There's a great deal of published RPF out there, and as long as the RP is 50 years dead or so, no one seems to care. Or it's in the tabloids, where no one realizes it's F, and that's why I strenuously avoid such things.

Sorry, I think I'm starting to babble, but I've reread and can't see what to cut out. It boils down to "I've done a lot of thinking about what fanfic can and can't fulfill, but never put that thought into RPF, and doing so is now blowing my mind."

I don't think that you've babbled here.
Or, if you have, then I am already quite damned to whatever circle of Hell to which the habitual babblers go.

Hmmm, I find that really strange. Like, fannish RPF writers seem to try to make an effort to capture the subject's voice, insofar as that's possibly based on things like interviews.

But I just can't imagine Heath Ledger sounding like a metanalyst journalist. So it's just strange.

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