If you’ve seen “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” you know Amber Tamblyn as the rebellious Tibby. You also may have seen her at the Women’s March with her famous friends Blake Lively and America Ferrera. Or perhaps you may know her as one of the founders of the #TimesUp movement.
But what you may not know is she is a talented poet.
"Dark Sparkler" is Amber’s third collection of poetry, along with "Free Stallion" and "Bang Ditto." I was so glad I found this book after scrolling through Blake Lively’s Instagram. The book features poems dedicated to twenty-five actresses who tragically died before their time. Each story is more tragic than the next.
Amber’s writing is genius. She captures the anguish of each story so well. All of them died in different, yet horrible ways. For starters, there’s Peg Entwistle: a British actress who jumped 45 feet to her death from the Hollywood sign in 1932. She was a sadly disturbed actress. She felt like a failure among her equally beautiful fellow actresses.
Her big role in David O. Selznick’s 1932 “Thirteen Women” was cut, so she never made it in Tinseltown. That night, full of alcohol and desperation, she wrote a suicide note and plunged down the old sign. What is even more tragic was the note itself.
Peg writes, “I am afraid. I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain. P.E.”
One of the most haunting lines in Amber’s ode to this actress is, “she wanted to know what it’d be like to get seen in the dark.To make the first move.”
This is especially true because she was so desperate to be seen when she was practically invisible to Hollywood. Sadly, the only way she was seen was after death. What is even more horrifying is Entwistle is said to haunt this landmark. Both Park Rangers and hikers claim they see a striking blond woman in 1930s clothing suddenly vanish, as the smell of gardenias permeates the air.
Another tragic story is that of Brittany Murphy’s, who died of pneumonia in December 2009. Murphy is known for her roles in “Clueless” as the zany Tai Fraiser, “Uptown Girls” as the daughter of a deceased rock star, and alongside Eminem in “8 Mile” as his love interest.
Even though Murphy’s death is still a mystery, it has been said her cause of death was anemia and pneumonia. The pneumonia killed her husband Simon Monjack five months later, but Murphy’s anemia, in addition to the multiple drugs in her system, were a recipe for disaster.
Among these were anti-depressants, anti-seizure medication she started taking after filming "8 Mile" and antibiotics for the flu. I am a big Brittany Murphy fan, so to picture Amber’s description of the late actress’s body being “lifted from the red carpet [and] put in a black bag” is difficult.
That is why this book works so well. It’s not easy to read, but it gives just a short glimpse of the perils of Hollywood.
One of the most haunting poems of all is one that doesn’t have any words, but just a single title: Lindsay Lohan. My take on this is that Amber is challenging Lindsay to write her own story. It’s as if she is showing the troubled star a likely future at the rate she’s going. If she doesn’t want to become another name in Amber’s poems, she should stop.
Amber portrays her own dark path she was on while writing this book. In the epilogue, she includes a few emails she sent to fellow poet Mindy Nettifee, which illustrate her on the verge of suicide.
She writes, “can I just go the way of Brittany Murphy and say [forget] it, do drugs until I drop and call it a day?”
At the book’s end, she includes seven pages of search terms, mostly are the ages the actresses died and why. The most morbid of them all is “Amber Tamblyn died age _____."
I commend Amber for publicly dealing with her struggles with depression. It is not easy, especially when writing about tragic deaths. I highly recommend reading this book if you enjoy powerful poetry. It is equal parts haunting and fascinating.
**DISCLAIMER**
You may spend a couple hours lying awake while looking up all of these actresses.
