Early this year, I got a nasty cold and spent a couple of days on the couch in a NyQuil haze. This seemed like a good time to my severely addled brainEarly this year, I got a nasty cold and spent a couple of days on the couch in a NyQuil haze. This seemed like a good time to my severely addled brain to watch "Elvis" and "Priscilla" back-to-back. Both are incredible, albeit wildly different works of art. The first is bombastic, loud, glittery, and borderline hallucinogenic (or maybe that was the cold medicine) and the second is quiet, subdued and elegant. I don’t have a favorite, in case you are wondering: I never thought of those movies as competing to tell the same story, that’s really not what’s going on here. But "Priscilla" made me very curious about the book it was based on, Priscilla Beaulieu Prestley’s memoirs of meeting, falling in love with and living with Elvis. I wanted to see what Sofia Coppola had not put on the screen.
I want to clarify that while I really enjoy a lot of his music, I am a very moderate Elvis fan. His musical legacy is massive, but it’s also complicated, so I enjoy his work, but I never really idolized him.
While I read this book, I kept thinking: "poor, sweet little Cilla…"
The term ‘grooming’ is kind of weird, isn’t it? English is not my first language, and the first time I heard it, I thought of the lovely lady who used to trim my long-haired cat’s fur into a lion cut every summer. That’s not what it means, of course: it means to subtly (or overtly, in some cases) manipulate a generally young and inexperienced person into an idealized partner, the implication being that they don’t know any better, which puts them in a position where they are almost always being taken advantage of, if not simply abused. I thought about that term a lot while reading this, because dang! What Elvis did here is kind of textbook…
Priscilla was 14 years old when she first met Elvis. I tried to remember what I was like at 14, and I admit that’s far enough to be quite fuzzy now. I know I would have loved the attention, especially if it came from the biggest heartthrob of my generation. But even at that age, a ten-year difference would have felt like a lot… And while she insists, repeatedly, that Elvis was always nothing but a gentleman to her, that nothing he ever did was weird or perverted and that they didn’t have penetrative sex until they were married… she also often says that he taught her how to dress, how to do her hair and make up, how to keep house, and shared his drugs with her very liberally. I believe her when she says that he would never have hurt her or let anything bad happen to her, but at the same time, what he did was still manipulative and controlling. He didn’t like it when she talked back, when she behaved (in his words) like a man, by being strong and fighting back, he didn’t want her to go to college or get a job. Poor Cilla basically had to divorce him to have the space and the freedom to discover who she was, and I can’t help but find that tragic.
The book is strangely paced: they only get married in the second half of the book, and while they weren’t married very long, it still feels uneven. Priscilla loved Elvis with her whole heart (and probably still does) and she clearly wants to keep all her memories of him good, and that’s the way she spins – consciously or not. I don’t not get it; it must be difficult to think of such a major part of your life having been abusive. But from an outsider’s perspective, there is something off about what she thinks of as a great love story.
That said, her writing is sweet, if not terribly sophisticated, and while I often felt sad for how isolated she was during her years in Graceland, I also enjoyed learning what it was like living at the heart of this almost legendary place. It’s a shame that Elvis kept her so sheltered, because I think he might have been impressed with the woman she became....more
This book caught my eye at the bookstore: with a title and cover art like that, I was intrigued. Obviously, the yogi in me was curious; I also think tThis book caught my eye at the bookstore: with a title and cover art like that, I was intrigued. Obviously, the yogi in me was curious; I also think that it’s really important to demystify and destigmatize sex work, and I was very interested to know what this woman’s journey had been like, so I picked it up.
Short review: this is a lot more about stripping and doing drugs than it is about yoga, and as such, I think the title is a bit mis-leading. Renaud really becomes involved in practicing and teaching yoga late in the second half of this book, and I was a bit disappointed that she didn’t discuss its impact on her life and work in greater depth – which is what I had been hoping for.
What we get instead is the story of woman who has always had an affinity for drugs, who discovered early in life that despite not feeling secure about her appearance, she also had very few inhibitions and could make a fun and profitable living as a stripper. That part of her story is fascinating and very informative: she describes how she got started in that line of work through an agency that would send her to clubs in the more rural regions of Quebec where she could practice her trade until she had reached the caliber expected in the Montreal clubs. She goes through a few romantic relationships and their challenges, her struggle with disordered eating, her drug use and how it eventually got out of control.
One thing that is very interesting is that Renaud is very lucid and unapologetic about her choices and her behaviors, but that is not to say she is defensive: she simply doesn’t think she should apologize for living her life on her own terms, she is well aware that not all her decisions and actions were smart, but she is also not going to feel bad or beat herself up about the past. She owns her actions and their consequences, and I have great respect for that. That is not to say I agree with her 100% of the time, but I get it. Constantly feeling like you should explain or justify your lifestyle is an exhausting waste of time; I would not have done the same thing if I had been in her shows but if she finds joy in her work and figured out how to enjoy getting baked without it becoming a problem in her life, who am I to judge?
As mentioned before, I wish she had dug a little deeper on the effects that yoga had in her life. I found the passages about starting a teacher-training program and shedding some of her own prejudices in the process really great, and her stories about the “guru” who kept all of his students under his thumbs a horrible and all too-common tale. But that was as far as we really went into her yoga journey. I was curious to know how it changed her relationship with her work and her body and her substances consumption, and those aspects felt a little glossed over.
I also felt like the prose was a tad uneven, and could have used a slightly more rigorous editor, just to make it flow more smoothly.
But don’t let that stop you from checking out this book. It is a very interesting story, told in a real down-to-earth way. Flawed but definitely notable....more
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