November 5, 2000
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Book Review: Model Patient by Karen Duffy
I just finished reading Model Patient: My Life As an Incurable Wise-Ass, by Karen Duffy. I picked it up at Barnes and Noble the other day, because I always thought Duff had a lot of spunk, and I thought a book by her wouldn’t be the usual celebrity cliche-memoir. Usually, this reading strategy results in me slogging through pages of drivel, but occasionaly I find something that makes all that drivel worthwhile.
Model Patient deals with Duff’s struggle against sarcoidosis of the central nervous system. The subtitle of the book desribes it best: “Embracing the Chaos of a Life-Threatening Illness with Style.” To tell her story, Duff talks about her entire life, so she’s not just talking about fighting a disease in a impersonal context. We learn all about how she started modelling at age 27, how she got her job as an MTV VJ (and how she came to hate it), how she met her husband, etc.
Most of all, we learn about how Duff looks at the world. Maybe it’s her ghostwriter, but I laughed out loud when Duff found a way to inject humor into prose describing some terrible stuff. Some examples:
“The pain was so bad that I couldn’t help crying, harder than I’d cried since I watched Old Yeller and Sounder and the other puppy snuff films aimed at kids.”
“I still have to spend a lot of time in bed when I have drug side effects or the pain flares up. But even on my worst days, I can still cheer myself in little ways, like whipping out my panties out from under the blankets when a friend comes to visit and demanding, “Just whose are these?”
It’s this unbelievable attitude that has made Revlon keep Duff on as a model alongside Cindy Crawford, despite having to work around Duff’s medical problems, and her body-changes from the illness.
I also love Duff’s embrace of the absurd as a strategy to survive life.
Comments (1)
I’d thought about checking this book out, and this was the push I needed. Thanks!