A life of idle chatter
No, that’s OK, leave it on: Take Your Shirt Off and Cry isn’t attractive enough to warrant a second look.
Nancy Balbirer would be a great cocktail-party guest. One can assume the actor-turned-author would confidently stride into the shindig with a flirtatious smile, tell Hollywood-insider stories about the time she worked with Jerry Seinfeld or was made to audition for a bikini-clad role on MTV’s “Remote Control,” and would thus conquer all in attendance with her articulate wit and magnetic personality.
But Balbirer is the type of character fitting for distance-interaction only: Don’t get too close, or the self-assured façade will melt away to reveal just another insecure actor able to drop a few big names. True, she recalls an intriguing life of bit roles and cameos in Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences, but Balbirer falls flat in her delivery, unable to translate her oral talent (or what she repeatedly insists is oral talent) into a written product. The result is a poorly penned memoir of little interest to anyone outside the desperately seeking fame crowd.
Take Your Shirt Off and Cry has all the makings of the David Sedaris/Augusten Burroughs/Jen Lancaster-type memoir: Crazy circumstance plus larger-than-life personas equals a comic romp with a heartfelt twist. A struggling actress trying to find herself (and a job) in the midst of the shallow entertainment industry, Balbirer has fleeting encounters with fame via “Saturday Night Live” and Off-Broadway roles but lingering issues with self-doubt.
However, Take Your Shirt Off and Cry never reaches the realm of the poignant comedic memoir. It’s perplexing that the author of the critically acclaimed one-woman show I Slept With Jack Kerouac would fail so miserably at creating a longer text (I was ready to march into Barnes & Noble to demand my money back at Page 7). But Balbirer consistently manages to bore the reader, from droning on about drama-school lessons (like the most annoying of theater majors) to crying over the men (and women) she’s loved and lost. Riding on the emotional roller coaster that is Balbirer’s self-esteem is as frustrating as watching an episode of “My Super Sweet 16.” (For example: All of my acting teachers said I had potential. They really did! Wait, do you think I’m pretty?)
Indeed, one major problem arises in that none of the supporting cast is given enough page space to create a multidimensional portrait of the heroine. Those who need to be present aren’t fully realized, often given pseudonyms or incomplete portraits, and those who could be written out or turned into a composite character serve as distracting names detached from intangible figures (Ex: Oh, yeah, my friend what’s-her-name was at the party, too. Boy did she tell a funny joke that night!).
The bigger problem lies with Balbirer’s writing style — namely, she has none. Brilliant memoirists bring their pasts to life in their retellings, never neglecting detail to transcend into a universal plane of shared meaning and self-discovery. Balbirer is unable to rise anywhere near such heights, repeatedly breaking the first rule taught in writing school: Show, don’t tell. The reader is presented with so much he said/she said narration that powerful scenes are never fully created.
Ultimately, Take Your Shirt Off and Cry fails in almost every sense of the word, proving once and for all that a few good stories does not a memoir make. Though the plot has potential, the writing itself simply isn’t polished enough to craft Balbirer’s personal tale into something more substantial than idle cocktail-party chatter.
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