Jancee Dunn's parents never beat her with hot coat-hangers. Her adventures with drugs and alcohol were largely uneventful: No jail time or rehab for her. The men in her life were only mildly dysfunctional, her capacity for overwrought self-absorption modest at best. And yet Dunn has written a memoir anyway! But Enough About Me, her wry and breezy tale of coming of age in 1980s New Jersey and then embarking on a successful career as a staff writer for Rolling Stone, where she specialized in celebrity profiles, won't induce any teary power-hugs from Oprah, but it is a fun, engaging book, and a pleasant reminder that in the hands of a gifted writer, a stable, fairly ordinary life can be just as interesting as a more chaotic one.
Of course, as a marketing hook, at least, it's nice to have a trove of A-list celebrity anecdotes at your disposal, too. And, thus, in But Enough About Me, Dunn actually does stick to her title's promise: Only every other chapter is about her primarily.
In the rest, she documents the rules of engagement one must adhere to, and the devious charms it helps to employ, when profiling luminaries like Brad Pitt, Dolly Parton, and Ben Affleck. A sample, synopsized tactic of hers to get sullen rock stars talking: "Pay attention only to the drummer."
In addition to such helpful instruction, these chapters offer some evocative glimpses into the weird, offhand lives of the fabulous. Rolling Stone guitarist Ron Wood washes out his socks in his hotel sink and keeps a keg of Guinness in the tub; the Olsen twins commandeer matching Range Rovers while shopping together in Los Angeles.
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But as Dunn explains, the exposure journalists get to stars these days is brief and tightly choreographed, and thus hardly ideal for in-depth portraiture, either in magazines or books. Thus, the richest, funniest parts of But Enough About Me are the stories she tells about her parents and sisters. Describing her father's patriotic allegiance to his employer, J.C. Penney, or the nighttime visits the whole family used to make to a cemetery where her father had bought a double-plot for their eventual use, Dunn engagingly sketches that rarest thing in contemporary American memoirdom, a close-knit, happy family.
Even in these instances, however, Dunn writes with the economy of someone used to encapsulating entire lives into 2,000 words or less; one wishes she would linger just a little bit from time to time. She also never quite gets comfortable with the idea that she is, finally, the star of this particular show, and remains something of a cipher.
For example, when she finally decides to be more "judicious in [her] choice of interview subjects," it's no big surprise, given the arch, skeptical attitude she has maintained toward her vocation all along. What remains a mystery, however, is why she kept at it as long as she did. Did she ever ask her editors at Rolling Stone for a chance to apply her obvious literary gifts to weightier subjects than the latest nu-metal heartthrob? How badly did she hope to attain a measure of celebrity of sorts for herself? (As her career evolved, Dunn took on-air infotainment-correspondent gigs at MTV2 and Good Morning America.)
Dunn pretty much sidesteps such questions, and throughout But Enough About Me, she engages in roughly the same amount of tortured introspection that James Frey exhausts on a grocery list. In theory, that's a good thing. In practice, one wishes Dunn were a little less reluctant to go on about herself.
But Enough About Me: A Jersey Girl's Unlikely Adventures Among the Absurdly Famous
Jancee Dunn
HarperCollins, $24.95