When Parker Posey sits down to pen her memoir, you can bet it’s not going to be some by-the-numbers snooze. But even diehard fans of the veteran character actor might be surprised by her book’s sustained delivery of curveballs.
Let’s start with the premise: You’re On An Airplane is modelled on a flight during which we find ourselves seated next to Posey – and her emotional support dog, Gracie. Besides allowing for a regular stream of jokes about this shared experience, this device enables Posey to tell a discursive, stream-of-consciousness version of her life story that’s not beholden to chronology.
She skips around freely and dwells on yoga and Ayurveda, even sharing a few favourite recipes and indulging in a semi-instructional chapter about throwing clay. Most striking of all, she illustrates the book herself with mood-lightening, photo-based collages that feel like part scrapbook, part zine.
Of course, Parker Posey is candid and charismatic enough to utterly own those counterintuitive touches. Famously dubbed “queen of the indies” by Time magazine in 1997, she has spent the subsequent two decades cementing her loopy originality and left-field comic timing.
She’s spiced up Hollywood blockbusters and rom coms – from Superman Returns to You’ve Got Mail – as a scene-stealing supporting player while bringing her quipping, self-possessed presence to bigger roles in Christopher Guest’s improvised comedies, Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool trilogy and acclaimed dramas like Personal Velocity.
Now she’s starring as the deceptive Dr. Smith in Netflix’s Lost in Space remake, a creative piece of casting that plays on Posey’s signature unpredictability. Her book is similarly volatile, with the first-time author quipping her way through playful puns and name-dropping while mocking smartphones (“There’s all this swiping going on, all this shoo-fly bullshit”) and gushing about dogs (“When people say, ‘I’m not really a dog person,’ all I hear is, ‘I’m not really a person.’”)
Parker Posey as Dr. Smith in Lost In Space
Born with her twin brother to a 22-year-old mother and a military father, Posey grew up in the South, mostly in Louisiana and Mississippi. After making it through Catholic school (“Jesus was my first crush”), she dropped out of uni and shot Dazed and Confused at age 24 while appearing on the TV soap As The World Turns. She had wanted to be an actress since childhood, and those early few parts quickly led to her breakout starring turn in 1995’s Party Girl.
That heralded a slew of roles in indie flicks like The House of Yes, Clockwatchers, The Daytrippers and Drunks, plus parts in more Hollywood fare like Scream 3 and Josie And The Pussycats. She was especially memorable as a snarky vampire villain in Blade: Trinity, perking up the script with some one-liners of her own devising.
Though it’s great hearing anecdotes about the Guest movies – Best In Show, Waiting For Guffman, A Mighty Wind – Posey doesn’t go into her work with Hal Hartley, aside from living in Berlin while shooting Fay Grim. She also doesn’t mention Noah Baumbach’s cult comedy Kicking And Screaming or Amy Sherman-Palladino’s post-Gilmore Girls misfire The Return Of Jezebel James.
Parker Posey in Drunks
But then, she has such a depth of screen credits that there were always going to be omissions. Less comfortable reading, however, comes with a whole chapter on Louie CK that alludes to some character flaws but doesn’t directly address his downfall. And she only gushes about Woody Allen, calling him “the greatest living film director” after appearing in the back-to-back Irrational Man and Café Society.
Posey comes across as a lifelong student of pop culture, seeing so much of life through the lens of film and television touchstones. As for the book’s subtitle, A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, that applies more to the sections about her family – especially her larger-than-life father.
Yet she casts herself again and again as an eccentric comic force in real life, whether shouting out car windows to ask if people are vegan or having her pants fall down in public. “I’ve slipped on banana peels several times in my life,” she writes, “and not as a joke.” She also has a lot of funny stories about vomiting – usually when she finds herself in LA rather than in her adopted hometown of New York.
Those snappy one-liners and priceless pratfalls only reinforce the book as a winsome extension of Posey’s most consistent on-screen mannerisms. Such individuality hasn’t always gotten her jobs, especially after she passed the age of 40, and she’s very open about her career struggles in recent years.
She calls herself an “impish woman-child” in temperament, and confirms her knack for colouring outside the lines of showbiz with the fact that she has rarely auditioned successfully for a role: “Auditioning feels like my real self has been punished and sent to my room, while my pretend self is forced to make nice…”
Anyone looking for behind-the-scenes gossip will find some of that, too. Posey recounts getting her dog while dating Ryan Adams and seeing the future stardom of Matthew McConaughey right away on Dazed and Confused. She also shares some lovely moments of camaraderie with Nora Ephron, Shirley MacLaine and Emma Stone, and describes bouncing around bars with characteristic spontaneity while living in Vancouver to shoot Lost In Space.
That said, those are fleeting elements in a book that stands out as gleeful counterprogramming to the stock celebrity memoir. Stubbornly quirky, You’re On An Airplane is the off-the-wall, anti-tell-all that only Parker Posey could write.
You’re On An Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir is out now through Hachette.
