Just Like Us, Geri Halliwell Thought A Little Life Could Have Used an Editor

By Jia Tolentino  |  May 16, 2016 | 2:25pm
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Geri Horner, née Halliwell, has given a delightfully scattered interview to the Guardian, in which an attempt to promote a new line of Barbies becomes more in the hands of Sophie Heawood, who opens her piece:

Confusion abounds from the moment I meet Geri Horner, the artist formerly known as Geri Halliwell, or Ginger Spice, or the one who invented Girl Power and pinched Prince Charles’s bum. We are introduced, and she says my name is lovely, “like Sophie’s Choice!”. I laugh and mutter about it not being all that lovely really, the film where Sophie’s choice is which of her two children will be gassed at Auschwitz. “Mmmm, but Robert de Niro,” says Horner cheerily, while having her lip gloss applied by a makeup artist, even though De Niro isn’t in it. Thus we enter an interesting conversation about two entirely different films.

Heawood presses both Geri and the Mattel rep lurking on the phone about the new “diverse” line of Barbies they are promoting. (“Children live in a much more multicultural environment,” the rep says. “Who knew that immigration and thighs were such recent inventions?” asks Heawood.) Then, when Geri talks about how she worries about young women and “the peer pressure of airbrush,” Heawood asks if that type of conventionally hot image isn’t exactly what made the Spice Girls famous:

Don’t all pop stars sell a dream? She repeatedly says she “doesn’t understand” what I mean, finally declaring: “My experience is that we live in a material world. Also, it’s inside and out, it’s the polarity of both, aesthetics is the shop window, ultimately, if there’s nothing in that shop, it has no longevity, do you know what I mean?”

I do know, Geri! Always the polarity of both. Definitely can’t have a shop with nothing in it, no matter how aesthetics the shop window is.

There’s delightful shade in refusing to clean up the transcript of an interview, which hits its apex here when the two of them start talking about, of all things, A Little Life:

“Oh my God, it is the most – I picked this book up by accident. I’m old-school, I like going into Waterstones and browsing, what’s the No 1 bestseller, what’s been picked up for the Man Booker prize, tell me. I love being recommended all sorts. Anyway this book – I was actually on the way to the grand prix in Bahrain. I was accompanying my husband … I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s reeeeally dark, and the description of some things are so unsettling that I had to skim-read. Awful. I think she could have done with more of an editor on some of it, actually. It’s about 700 pages!…. I’d be reading it at dinner, my husband would say: ‘Would you just put that DOWN,’ and I just couldn’t. If he suddenly had to take a phone call, I’d pick the book up again, just to get another page in.”

Ginger Spice at the grand prix in Bahrain with A Little Life in her handbag going, “Babes, this is reaaaaallly dark!” is a great image, actually. I have bolded the part of the above quote that I would like to be used on the book jacket in future editions. Read more about Ginger here.

Image via AP/Doubleday

 
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