Personal observations of one's own preciousness don't make for interesting reading
by Donna Raskin
Poor Deborah Copekan Kogan. She's so smart, she's bored in her suburban high school. She's so bored, she doesn't want her own boyfriends and steals them from other women. She's so able to steal other women's men and not give a rat's ass about anyone's feelings that she has to run off to photograph wars with a French photojournalist who's cute, but crazy. She's just so gosh darn special. Don't we all want to be her?
The sad truth is that many of us do. Or did—until we grew up—because, let's face it, the woman did actually go off to war. Kogan has spent nights huddled in caves hidden in the Afghanistan mountains, gotten lost in crowds of Russian revolutionaries, spent days bribing Swiss junkies, and even cried (this part is truly harrowing to read) over Romanian orphans. And she's taken remarkable photographs to boot (the book doesn't show enough of them, but the ones it does have are quite special and affecting).
Unfortunately, Shutterbabe ($24.95/Villard), Kogan's memoir of her  life as a photographic Christianne Ammanpour is ultimately a disappointment. The author (and apparently her editor) is equally fascinated by her poor choice of boyfriends, her subsequent marriage, her obsession with getting pregnant, and her ability to become a network TV producer as she is with her war exploits.
Here's just one of her many descriptions of life before heading off to war. "On my way back to Potomac, I had an affair with a young movie actor on a beach in Hawaii, who later that fall invited me up to New York during a press junket for his new film. I wrote an article about my Japan trip on spec for Seventeen and got it published, which then turned into a gig writing book reviews. I applied early to Harvard and got in. I auditioned for a film and got a small part. I cut all my hair off and fell in love—really in love—with Gabe, a well-read, semi-outcast, punk-rock drummer whose hand I proudly held while walking through the judgmental hallways of our high school."
Kogan is now in her late 30s and she still hasn't figured out that everyone felt this way in high school. In fact, even as she gets older, Kogan seems to consider her neuroses and relationship issues to be more interesting and equally as important as, say, the destruction of the Russian government. She writes as if she considers the civil travesties that she witnessed simply fodder for her own life—an extension of her own ego. The death of others is just another way she could find a new job and meet more cute guys.
Finally, Kogan sums up many of her experiences with an astounding lack of depth. Here, after enumerating the promiscuity she enjoyed, as well as the sexual assaults, armed robberies and other violent episodes she has endured (which she ascribes, not jokingly, to having grown up in the suburbs), she concludes, about men: "They gave me intense pleasure. They caused me profound pain. It was complicated."
Unfortunately, Kogan isn't the only woman who suffers under the "I'm so special" delusion. Take (please) Lipshtick ($13/Harper Collins) by Gwen Macsai. Basically, it's a history of a girl who remembers every single detail about her life and is convinced that somehow you want to hear about them, too—her junior high crush (his name was Greg Alcoke, she still  talks about him all the time), the first time she touched a penis, and even where her father keeps his toenail clippers. Ms. Macsai assumes that all readers are her friends, even though she strikes me as the kind of girl who wasn't all that popular in high school and decided it wasn't because she was obnoxious, but because everyone else was just too stupid to get her jokes.
Here's an example of her special humor: "all the women I know worth their salt are hotheads, like me...A typical exchange between the women in my family may entail a soft opening lob like this: 'Hey girl, how you doing?' 'How am I doing? I hate my goddamned husband. That's how I'm doing. He is such a fucking idiot. I'd like to wring his neck, the asshole.'"
Don't you want her to be your best girlfriend?
If nothing else, these stories really make you respect women who have taken photographs, traveled the world with the Red Cross or Medicin sans Frontiers or who are simply the funny people you're fortunate enough to sit next to at the office or in school. At least they're not busy writing books.
February 15, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 7
© 2001 Metro Pulse
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