troisoiseaux

Finished Famesick by Lena Dunham, which I really.... enjoyed does not feel like the right word, because it is basically a memoir of getting chewed up and spit out by the fame machine at the same time as she was suffering from chronic health issues and struggling with substance abuse and she apparently just has godawful taste in and/or luck with men, but it is an engaging and - despite the heavy content - frequently funny read. Prominently features various celebrities who I'd say I was abstractly aware of as famous people who exist, but I found that this didn't necessarily change my opinion of, say, Jack Antonoff or Adam Driver— like, not in the sense that I don't credit Dunham's narrative, it's just that my brain did not really connect my indignation over Dunham's increasingly selfish/useless boyfriend to that guy from that band, or the coworker who sounds like a walking red flag (but, even in her own memoir a decade later, she seems more enamored with than put off by??) with that guy from that movie, etc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (Mostly, I think, because I didn't really have preexisting opinions about any of said famous people; I enjoy the music of both fun. and Bleachers, but 100% could not pick Antonoff out of a lineup of white guys in hipster glasses.)

Read Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper, technically a 1950 fictionalization of WWII's Operation Mincemeat— a deception operation to convince the Nazis that the Allies planned to invade Sardinia, not Sicily, by way of "secret" plans planted via dead British officer washing ashore in Spain; in recent years, the subject of a book, a movie, and a musical— although only the last ~20 pages (of 155) have anything to do with/map onto the story of Operation Mincemeat (which was still classified in 1950, although Cooper apparently learned of it from Churchill as dinner gossip and Ewen Montagu published his own account only a few years later). Instead, it is mostly the pretty bleak life story of one Captain William "Willie" Maryngton (barely filing the serial numbers off of Mincemeat's faked Major William Martin here), a born and bred soldier with the misfortune of being too young for WWI and too old to be shipped to the front in WWII, who finally achieves his life's goal of seeing "action" only after he dies of pneumonia and is used in a deception operation to convince the Nazis that etc. etc. Can't really put my finger on the tone, beyond bleak— the dialogue frequently has the gung-ho feel of a propaganda film, but I feel like there's kind of a cynical edge, overall? The most interesting character in this is actually Willie's foster brother Horatio "Horry" Osborne, the son of a military family who pursues his dream of becoming an actor instead, but— after a lifetime of insisting that the Army wasn't "going to get [him] in their clutches"— immediately joins up when WWII breaks out, motivated by his "profound hatred of injustice and cruelty," and is almost as quickly killed in battle. (RIP Horry.)

It's interesting to compare what we know now about the IRL Operation Mincemeat to Cooper's fictional Operation Heartbreak: in the novel, Maryngton's death provides the operation with a ready-made cover story, vs. the real-life work that went into carefully constructing an identity, down to the pocket litter. (Although someone does still write a love letter to send off with him: in this case, the secretary who does so is the aforementioned Horry Osborne's younger sister! Who Willie has been in love with for years! And had in fact recently turned down his proposal!) Also interestingly, the afterword on the IRL Operation Mincemeat, written circa 2004, dismisses Glyndwr Michael— the "real" Major Martin, an unhoused man from Wales who died (whether intentionally or accidentally) from poison— as a possible identity for the body used, positing that "a postmortem might have discovered [his real cause of death] and the risk would have been too great." Happy to pass this along to anyone who'd like to read it, btw, otherwise it's going to local little free library.