BARRY’S IMAGINARY GIRLFRIEND

[Geee]

Powerline:

There has been a lot of hilarity today over the revelation that the “New York girlfriend” who plays a significant role in Barack Obama’s autobiography Dreams From My Father did not, strictly speaking, exist. Rather, she was a composite or “compression” of several girlfriends that Obama now says he had after he graduated from college. To be fair, Obama wrote in the introduction to his book that “some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known,” so the reader was forewarned. Whether a typical reader would have imagined that the “New York girlfriend” was such a composite, and that various incidents attributed to Obama’s relationship with her never happened, I don’t know.

The revelation comes from a forthcoming biography of Obama by David Maraniss that is excerpted in next month’s Vanity Fair. Like most Vanity Fair articles it is just about interminable, and I haven’t yet had time to read it all. But already, several interesting points emerge.

There actually was a New York girlfriend. Her name is Genevieve Cook, and Maraniss interviewed her for his book. Not only that, she kept a journal that included the time when she dated Obama, from which Maraniss quotes. She is by no means hostile to Obama, but her account of their relationship diverges from his, in Dreams From My Father, in a number of ways.

For example, in his book Obama says that he broke up with the New York girlfriend. Not so, replies Ms. Cook: actually, she chose to end the relationship as a result of what she saw as Obama’s remoteness. But the one who writes the autobiography gets to tell it his way.

In his book, Obama tells a story about taking his New York girlfriend to a play. The story is important because in Obama’s telling, it led to the end of the relationship. The play, as you might imagine, dealt with race:

One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very funny. Typical black American humor. The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in church. After the play was over, my friend started talking about why black people were so angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.

Only Genevieve Cook says it never happened. No such play, no such dialogue. Maraniss charitably supposes that the event involved a different, later girlfriend in Chicago who was part of the “composite” girlfriend character. But Obama places the play in New York, not Chicago. My guess is that the incident never happened at all: one nice thing about fictionalizing an autobiography and including fake characters is that it gives you license to include events that didn’t happen but, from an artistic standpoint, should have.

[Casino67]

Twitter is having a lot of fun with #Julia posts.

 

"Barbara Arnold ‏ @BarbaraArnold74

At 40 #Julia marries Rachel Madcow because Madcow was the closest she'd ever met to a "real man".

[Casino67]

David Burge ‏ @iowahawkblog

At 33, #Julia gets a job designing an Obama campaign website. At 33 + 5 hours, she is fired after it's mocked to death on Twitter.

[Casino67]

[Valin]

"If you took all the girls I knew

When I was single

And brought them all together

for one night

I know they'd never match

my sweet imagination

Everything looks worse

in black and white"