http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/07/10/071011-arts-books-latoya-1-4/
Ms. Jackson’s not sorry
A second memoir from La Toya is unapologetic — and
unintentionally hilarious
BY RICH JUZWIAK SUNDAY, JULY 10, 2011
Not since Huckleberry Finn has literature seen an unreliable narrator as unwitting as La Toya Jackson. Her second memoir, “Starting Over,” picks up where her first, 1991’s “La Toya,” left off, and spends several pages revising the earlier book. “La Toya,” she claims, was written under the influence of Jack Gordon, the abusive man to whom she was married at the time of its release. Allegations she made about her brother Michael’s child molestation and her father Joseph’s child abuse (including the implication that he sexually abused her older sister, Rebbie) are explained away as resulting from Gordon’s coercion, which was part of a bigger plan to destroy her career. Why, outside of sadism, he’d be moved to do such a thing is never really explained, nor does it make much sense, given his persistent profiting off her. But maybe now is not the time to be asking questions — we’ve entered La Toya Land, a place where ignorance isn’t so much bliss as it is de rigueur.
That ignorance, which comes from being sheltered, is one element of consistency between the two books. Another is a shared storyline regarding controlling men who must be escaped. Except that the previous controlling man, her father Joseph, has now been accepted back into her life, and negative things said about him hurt her “deeply.” Whether they’re based on what she previously wrote or divulged via her “Jackson Family Secrets” 900 number is never accounted for.
Gordon is blamed for Jackson’s string of abysmal career decisions that followed his signing on as her manager in 1987, including two “Playboy” shoots. To hear Jackson tell it, she spent this time in a fog, oblivious, for example, to his smuggling diamonds and drugs via her inherited ability to breeze through airports. If you watch any of her TV appearances from these years, though, you see a confident woman who’s as open about her opportunism as she is with her body.
But then again, there are pictures of her with black eyes, and Gordon was a known criminal. It’s useless to take a battered woman to task.
And anyway, Jackson’s book would not be worth reading if it were not so contradictory and goofy. The cluelessness that was apparently present throughout her life is key to this pop cultural runt’s adorability, and “Starting Over” runs on unintentional hilarity. Jackson speaks of her “passion for crests,” her former belief that “marijuana smells like popcorn” and her “lifelong love” of spicy food that resulted in a hemorrhoid operation. She backs herself into hilarious redundancies like, “Michael said it best in his song ‘They Don’t Care About Us’ when he sang, ‘All I wanna say is that, they don’t really care about us.’” At one point, Michael relays that both he and Diana Ross liked her first “Playboy” shots, and the imagery of the two superstars ogling a nude Jackson is howlingly absurd. “Starting Over” only helps cement Jackson’s reputation as a camp icon. Read it in that frame of mind and it is entirely enjoyable.
Like most camp, it’s a mess. Formally, it exists in the same state of flux as Jackson’s overall concept of the truth — it’s part revisionist history, part self-help narrative (emphasis on the self) and part whodunit about her one-woman inquest into the death of her brother Michael. Regarding the latter, she brings up some good points (why wasn’t Michael named a producer on his posthumously released documentary “This Is It”?),
but her conspiracy theorizing that those closest to Michael killed him is based on conjecture and Michael’s own (possibly drug-induced) paranoia.
At the end of “Starting Over,” Jackson pledges “I’m not done with my investigation for the truth yet.” She’s talking about Michael’s story, but she might as well be discussing her own. We’ll see whether, in another 20 years time, she can turn that threat into a promise.