“Don’t call yourself a whore,” Jill Soloway’s mother pleaded when she read the manuscript of her daughter’s new book. “Call yourself a . . . sex enjoyer!” Soloway’s memoir, Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants (Free Press), could give any mother palpitations, but Jill’s mom is used to it. In the book Soloway tells the tale of losing her virginity at the age of 17 to a George Hamilton clone she met at the East Bank Club and details her teenage career as a stalker of every celebrity who passed through Chicago, from Ric Ocasek and David Lee Roth to a not-yet-famous Tom Cruise. He gave her his phone number, but she threw it away because she thought he was too short.
In Hollywood she worked her way up the food chain writing for sitcoms. It was the frustration of working on a particularly horrid one that made her sit down and write her first short story, “Courteney Cox’s Asshole”–told from the perspective of Cox’s fictional personal assistant, whose duties include fielding press calls about a rumor that Cox bleaches her anus. It was published in the literary journal Zyzzyva, featured on Andrei Codrescu’s Web site Exquisite Corpse, and developed a cult following on the Internet. It got to the point, she says, where high-powered agents were supposedly telling their clients, “You need to write a CCA.” The short story also caught the attention of Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, who hired her to join the writing staff for the show’s second season.
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Jill Soloway: I keep having these experiences where we all look at each other and say, “We will never have this again.” In Chicago I felt that way about The Real Live Brady Bunch and The Miss Vagina Pageant. But it really did happen again with Six Feet Under. For four years it was like being with my best friends doing amazing writing and acting and filmmaking.
DM: Did you start writing when you were a kid growing up in the city?
DM: In one chapter of the book you add up all the times you’ve mentioned the word “Jew.” Why is being Jewish so important to you?
I think the kind of people who love George Bush love the idea of a father, a person who has all the answers, someone who can say, “This is why we’re doing this.” I’m much more interested in the questions.
