BooksBarbecue
Back Thin Skin Save as PDF
Chapters (55)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Cast of Characters
  7. Part One
  8. One
  9. Two
  10. Three
  11. Four
  12. Five
  13. Six
  14. Seven
  15. Eight
  16. Nine
  17. Ten
  18. Eleven
  19. Twelve
  20. Thirteen
  21. Fourteen
  22. Fifteen
  23. Sixteen
  24. Seventeen
  25. Eighteen
  26. Nineteen
  27. Part Two
  28. Twenty
  29. Twenty-one
  30. Twenty-two
  31. Twenty-three
  32. Twenty-four
  33. Twenty-five
  34. Twenty-six
  35. Twenty-seven
  36. Twenty-eight
  37. Twenty-nine
  38. Thirty
  39. Thirty-one
  40. Thirty-two
  41. Thirty-three
  42. Thirty-four
  43. Thirty-five
  44. Thirty-six
  45. Thirty-seven
  46. Thirty-eight
  47. Thirty-nine
  48. Forty
  49. Forty-one
  50. Forty-two
  51. Forty-three
  52. Forty-four
  53. Forty-five
  54. Forty-six
  55. A note on the Author

“I like your hair extensions,” I said, because I didn’t want to answer the question. I knew I was the girl in the Claude Chabrol film. But no one else did. Because in the film, the one in the multiplex, not the one in my head, I was still just the daughter. And it took so much time to be the daughter. I was in makeup for three hours every morning so I could look appropriately wholesome. They gave me a tear stick the day we shot my “father’s” death scene. Nothing happened. They held it closer to my eye. Still nothing. The director stormed off the set. I tried to explain it wasn’t my fault. “Hey, I’m crying twenty-three hours of the day and you just caught me on my hour off.”

But by then the studio head had been screaming at him for ten minutes and he was almost in tears. So I just held the tear stick right onto my lid and I cried him and his boss a river. Then I went to hospital for the rest of the afternoon.

The boss thought I did a great job. The director, whose name the boss and I both forget, thought I did a great job. And evidently the Goths, twitching under purple eyeliner and fishnet stockings, thought I did a great job.

Six

image
Nap Time

I had been at the Chelsea a week when my agent handed me a film the Goths could really sink their fangs into, a film that three of CAA’s other young, female clients had already turned down. It was too low-budget and too sexually charged. They would have had to take pay cuts and show their tits. Since directors usually have to request that I put my tits away, they knew it wouldn’t be a problem for me.

“Well, I suppose I might as well go meet the director.” I sighed, feigning disinterest, for fear they would take the offer back if they realized how good the screenplay was. Although it did have nudity, briefly, in a scene beneath a desk, it was the subject matter that was really contentious. The film was called Mean People Suck. The director, Sean, was a young man who had done well in off-Broadway theater, a Mormon from Utah. Sean had spent two years trying to get financing for his romance set during a school shooting.