Margaux Eliot takes on manipulation and the art of reinvention with Honeymoon Stage
If assumption serves me right, I came of age during the same era as Margaux Eliot. A time where being a teen girl meant looking at tabloid magazines talking about 96 pound women as if it was a prize, watching shows like The Simple Life and Newlyweds and realizing that smart women never got attention, at least not the kind you were told you wanted, and that happiness was lounging around in hundred dollar sweatsuits proclaiming that we were quite Juicy. It was a time. A time that thankfully is over, although replaced with new frightening images and ideas. Margaux Eliot knows a thing about being someone different for the public eye. Her debut novel is penned under a pseudonym. The real woman behind the pages, or maybe a different version of her, is Chicago author Julia Fine.
Eliot’s Honeymoon Stage is set in southern California during the onset of reality TV. Cassidy, a young PA, is trying to make a name for herself and get through the drudgery that is early career coffee runs and always being on call. She accepts the job on the show Honeymoon Stage after her aunt got her an-in with one of the stars, an old childhood friend turned pop starlet. The show itself follows the first year of marriage between baseball hunk and popstar songstress, strong jock paired with dumb blonde, two caricatures destined for happily ever after in our eyes. But the honeymoon comes to end after a startling death on set. Cassidy uncovers damning footage, which makes her question it all, placing blame where the camera seems to lead it, all the while trying to have her own, possibly too good to be true, love affair. In the end, Honeymoon Stage lets us in on the lies they have all been keeping, the manipulations of media, the self-preservation techniques void of shame, and if there is still an ounce of hope for being true to oneself, whichever self that may be.
About seventy-five percent of the book reads like a murder mystery. A fast-paced read with new information and false leads chapter by chapter. You think you know someone, their motives, their place in the story, who is bad or good, and then the lighting changes and what we were meant to believe is wrong. We become just as obsessive as Cassidy to get to the truth, to continue on the misleading journey no matter what may come. But as we approach the end, and I mean in the last twenty pages or so, we realize that the ride was of our making. We were just as disillusioned to think the worst of people, to shame the woman, to pity the man, to not read between the pages and facades. Honeymoon Stage itself is a study on what creation of drama brings to the tale. The gimmick of lights, of editing, and how it can pull an audience so deep into the depths of characterization that we too lose track of the fact that only some of us are actually capable of murder and mayhem, the rest is just for ratings and intrigue. It’s all showbiz baby, call the make-up girl, it’s time for a new shade of pink.
In the end, Eliot shows us the true questions of the book, navigating the very thing that influenced the narrative in the beginning. Cassidy is allowed to let go of what she should be, what she should do for love and prestige, and chooses her own path. Although, she does leave quite the show in her wake. Eliot, or Fine, Julia, or Margaux, captured the power of the art of reinvention. That at any given moment we can choose who we are, reshape it, put it in a different package. There is a manipulation when it comes to restructuring a human. What was once known, a shy, dark humored nerd, finally takes off the glasses, slowly swabs on sparkling lip gloss, her hair flows differently, and poof, she’s now hot. Ready to party. She’s fun and witty and giggles easily. In the media, what sells is hot new thing, flighty and fun, a life of excess and extravagance. No one ever wanted The Simple Life. We wanted to see how two girls could fall on their face over and over just attempting our own humdrum lives. Julia Fine knows this, she has studied what makes an audience tick, she has watched our obsessions, seen the demise of it. That knowledge created Margaux Eliot. And Margaux Eliot has taken off the glasses.
I look forward to what Margaux Eliot and Julia Fine do next. Two sides of a coin as most of us women are. Told we can have it all, yet told to stay in our place. Fine found a way out of her lane, paved a new path as Eliot, creating new audiences without the preconceived judgements on being able to switch gears from haunting to something poppy and fun. Julia Fine is just as interested in her own slices of self as she is of others. Here’s to Fine and Eliot always telling the tale of the multitudes of being women, our inner and outer lives, our dualities of self either forced or chosen, in their own provocative ways.
