Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls, and Everything in Between(13)

Carrie Fisher is one of my favorite actors and writers. I’ve enjoyed her films, seen her on Broadway, and read everything she’s written. When I was writing my novel Someday, Someday, Maybe, I kept her Postcards from the Edge on my desk the whole time, and when I got stuck I’d pick it up and reread sections I’d already read a dozen times. Our books are very different, but the fact that she is an actress who wrote a novel—one that was loosely based on her own life—and became a successful screenwriter was a big inspiration to me.

Recently Carrie Fisher responded to a New York Post article that quoted her mentioning the pressure she’d felt to lose weight for the most recent Star Wars film. The writer commented that if she didn’t like being judged on her looks, she should “quit acting.” He went on to say, regarding her work as a writer, “No one would know the name Carrie Fisher if it weren’t for her ability to leverage her looks.”



Carrie Fisher is a bestselling author and screenwriter, giant movie star, and all-around attractive person. And there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of really beautiful people in New York and Los Angeles who’ve come to those places in an attempt to become actors. If getting work as an actor was simply about leveraging your looks—if that was the sole currency of success in our field—then everyone on Vanderpump Rules would be winning Oscars one day and I would be the center pullout thing in next month’s Maxim. I’m not saying either thing can’t happen, but it hasn’t yet, perhaps because there’s at least a subtle difference between acting on a reality show and modeling, on one hand, and being a talent like Carrie Fisher, on the other. “Leveraging one’s looks” is just one component. Also, I’m not even sure Maxim has a center pullout thing.

One day I might not feel like “leveraging my looks” anymore, and I’m okay with that. I’d like to age gracefully, although I’m not yet entirely sure what that will mean. I just know there are certain things I don’t want to have to do to look younger. I don’t have problems with plastic surgery in theory. Wait—that’s not true. I do sort of have problems with it. I’m just trying to sound blasé about something that’s currently fashionable but also troubling to me. See also: high-waisted jeans.

For starters, as a viewer, I just can’t stand it when it’s all I can see. Suddenly I go from watching a scene with two actors I like to being more focused on a conversation between Upper Lip Filler and Botox, and it’s too distracting. If I could be guaranteed that no one, including myself, would notice something I did to my face to look younger or somehow better, maybe I’d do it, but I feel like I have one of those faces that shows that sort of stuff too easily, and I don’t want to be worried that you’ll start mistaking my forehead for a skating rink.



Also, while there’s nothing wrong with doing things to make you feel better, I just wish the choices were limited to simpler things many of us have access to, like drinking more water or jogging or finding a more flattering shade of lipstick. It’s a bummer that it’s even an option to appear more youthful by chopping off your ears and reattaching them in order to hoist up your neck flaps (this may not be the precise surgical term). It’s confusing to me that my aversion to doing that has any sort of bearing on my work as an actor. “You mean you aren’t willing to chop off and reattatch your ears in order to hoist up your neck flaps, Lauren? Don’t you care about us? Where’s your commitment to your craft?” mean people on the Internet yell. I wish this possibility simply didn’t exist, so that we all had somewhat of a fair playing field. But this is as futile a concept as my belief that everyone who’s born should automatically be allowed to live until age eighty-five. The people who treat themselves the most healthfully would get extra credit, more time to live longer; the partiers and couch potatoes would get docked points, living less long. This system is much more fair than the random “sometimes smokers live into their nineties, while marathon runners occasionally drop dead at forty-five” thing we’ve got going now. But alas.

Another remarkable thing about Betty White is that she went from being twenty-and thirtysomething Betty to eightysomething Betty while maintaining the same wonderful quality she always had of just plain being Betty White. No matter what character she plays, Betty White is always funny, always smart, and always at least a little sexy. She didn’t set herself up early on as hot temptress Betty White, and therefore she didn’t have to desperately try to cling to her hot temptress persona, pretending with each passing year that nothing had changed. She didn’t have to face headlines like “Betty White: Hot Temptress! Back and Better than Ever!” or “Betty White: Still Hot Temptress?” or “Sad Betty White Seen Clubbing at Limelight! Desperate to Reign as Hot Temptress Once More!” Also, that Limelight (which closed in the 1990s, I think) is literally the only club name I could think of should tell you a great deal about my clubbing habits.



In The First Wives Club, Goldie Hawn’s actress character says there are only three ages for women in Hollywood: “babe, district attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.” This suggests that acting careers follow a three-act structure, which makes sense. For the people who are willing to do the ear-staple-neck-flap surgery, perhaps the second act lasts longer. I haven’t gotten to my last act yet (Ole Granny Sack Pants? Cranky Irish Potato Maven?), but so far for me career-wise, I’d call my first two acts Gal About Town and The Mom.