I have read her in Salon.com and admired her writing, but it wasn’t until I read A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Culture Re-Examined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease that I fully appreciated the glory that is Cintra Wilson’s mind. She has the beautiful person’s intolerance of vanity and the brilliant person’s intolerance of stupidity, but there is also a profound streak of empathy running through her work.
Here she is getting warmed up on the subject of young gymnasts:
“Those poor young women must be set free. Who are the idiots that told them that winning a gold medal at the Olympics would be worth sacrificing their height, their self-image, their entire childhood, and their bodily comfort forever. Sure, they can jump and twist and handspring like superballs, but Christ, forty-five seconds off the mat they look as shrunken and needy eyed as suicidal orphans in indentured servitude to the Peking Opera. …”
Here is Cintra Wilson functioning at the height of her powers on the subject of young gymnasts:
“The heartwrenching biographical montages set to overwrought piano music were another travesty: ‘Little Natalia was ripped from her mother’s womb with a set of ice tongs by Communists and given to Dmitry, the man who would be her trainer for life. Natalia developed her upper-body strength dragging corpses up the harsh terrain of the steppes to the local incinerator, near the ice cave she called home. Dmitri would tell Natalia hourly that if she stopped moving she’d be clubbed by wood trolls. Sleeping covered only with a used aluminum foil near a tray of radioactive beef as a means of warmth, Natalia dreamed of the day she would be able to fly. And fly she does. Winning is all she knows, this tot-faced little angel, and if she doesn’t bring home gold for her country, her little body may be sold and converted to shark chum.’”
–From A Massive Swelling, 2000.
Cintra Wilson’s new book, Colors Insulting the Nature: A Novel, will be out in August.