I don’t care. Actually quite the opposite. I revel in reality’s fakeness. I celebrate it. Support it. Preach its gospel. I drink it, eat it, let it flow through me. I let it move me and make me laugh. I let it piss me off and make me sad. I let it take me to places I would never go or see or know anything about. I let it entertain me, and educate me, and sometimes—and this is always sort of shocking and sort of lovely and wonderful—it enlightens me. I let it occupy hours and days and weeks of my life. Fake reality. The unreal real world. Some reasonable semblance of the world reengineered to be more reasonable. Abnormal normalcy. It’s the future, this state, this dimension, this way of disseminating. It’s where our world, with virtual reality, with twenty-four news stations broadcasting different versions of the same events depending on their political philosophy, with memoirs full of truth but lacking fact, with newspapers more fictional than novels, with movies based on Hollywood’s version of real life, with presidents and leaders of nations, both past and present, making shit up so they can go to war and pass laws and shape the world to their own vision, it’s where our world is going, or has already gone, or is right now. And I love it. Fucking revel in it. Celebrate it. It allows me, or you, or anyone else on this planet, to believe what we want to believe. To find what speaks to us. To create our own reality. To live in that reality. To be entertained in that reality. And to make that reality real. As real as anything else, and as true as anything else, and as valid as anything else. You cannot escape it. I said it before and I will say it again: You cannot fucking escape it. So sit back and make yourself comfortable and have a sip from a nice cold beverage and maybe a snack or two. It’s your choice. It’s your life. It’s your reality. It’s your story to tell or watch or read or write, to love or hate, to manipulate, embellish, edit or structure in any way you want. It’s your show and your channel. It’s on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five motherfucking days a year. You cannot escape it.
INTRODUCTION
Anna David
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN SOMEWHAT ASHAMED of my lowbrow sensibilities. I was raised in a house where the multiple bookshelves were stacked with everything from Austen to Zola and Beethoven blasted from the speakers. Of the four of us—me, brother, Mom, Dad—two have PhDs and two went to Harvard and I’m in neither group. Growing up, the way I dealt with the inferiority complex all this brought on was to simply to snap off the stereo that was always blasting classical music whenever I passed it and stubbornly tune in to Three’s Company in one room while everyone else reveled in Masterpiece Theatre in the other.
And now? Well, I know I should be reading Dostoyevsky, watching Brideshead Revisited, seeing Hamlet at the Metropolitan Opera, and listening to Symphony No. 9, but instead I’m scanning Gawker, declaring Nelly one of my favorite musicians without a hint of irony, and lamenting the fact that I didn’t manage to see 9 to 5 before it left Broadway. And even though books are, bar none, my favorite form of entertainment, I’m woefully illiterate in many ways. The truth is, I can barely even pronounce Dostoyevsky.
I’m also obsessed with fake reality. I’ve published two novels, and the undercurrent of both is, essentially, that what we project is far different from who we really are. And yet, perhaps ironically, I have a nasty habit of comparing how I feel with how other people look, usually selecting the most successful or joyful-seeming individuals I can find and invariably concluding that my life is terrible because I don’t have their 2.5 children, house, or bestselling book. Reality TV, with its seemingly endless supply of horrible people to feel better than, offers a glorious antidote to this.
The truth is, I didn’t stand a chance against reality television. If I’d worked hard to avoid it—the way I’ve staunchly avoided, say, learning about opera—I think it would have sucked