Susie Boyt and her best Judy-friend, Marc, are at Judy Garland’s tomb in Ferncliff Cemetery, New York. Boyt is wearing a pencil skirt and high gold peep-toe shoes. Her hair is curled, Judy-style. They have with them a bowler hat, a bunch of roses, a grapefruit, a bottle of vodka, Judy’s gold necklace (Marc collects memorabilia), and some Benson and Hedges menthol cigarettes, Judy’s favourite smokes. The bottle smashes on the steps of the mausoleum; they use the remains of the vodka to clean the engraving of her name. “The first time I came I did it with my tears”, Marc says, and the tears are running down Susie Boyt’s cheeks as well. They place the grapefruit, roses and cigarettes by the stone and agree not to sing. Then she sees it, on the other side of Judy’s grave: an “oblong of smooth grey marble with no lettering at all”.

“Oh my God, look!” . . . Marc looks at me wisely. “The first time I came here, I saw the plot empty and although I don’t like enclosed spaces and I definitely don’t want to be cremated, no question, I thought about it and . . . before I knew it I was tearing round, calling for the attendant, and I said, ‘Excuse me! Excuse me Miss . . . the grave next to Judy! Is it free?’”

In a memoir packed with more fantastical interludes than a Broadway musical, this scene takes some beating. Over the rainbow in Judy-land, bathos and pathos melt like lemon drops and the sublime and the ridiculous blend together into one great strawberry milkshake. “Please Miss Garland”, so a fan implores, “never ever forget the rainbow.” “Madam”, Judy replies, “I am hardly likely to. I have rainbows coming out of my ass.” Boyt, a novelist, finds the tragicomic everywhere; even Toto, she notes, cocks his head when he listens to Dorothy sing in The Wizard of Oz. “It is the closest I have seen a dog come to tears.”

That “gotcha moment”, as her fans call it, when Judy gets you for life, got Boyt when she was three years old. Since then, Judy has supplied the soundtrack to Boyt’s experiences, providing the melodies for her darker moments and the lyrics for her nameless dreads. “I have a voice that hurts people”, Garland said, “where they think they want to be hurt.” Garland’s story has imprinted its shape on Boyt’s own. Born in the same year as Boyt’s father, Lucian Freud, Judy died five months after Boyt was born, in 1969. On the twentieth anniversary of Garland’s death from an unintentional overdose, Boyt’s boyfriend was killed in a horrific climbing accident.

My Judy Garland Life is the literary equivalent of one of those Tudor multi-roasts in which a goose is stuffed with a duck, a guinea fowl, a partridge and a quail. This is a memoir inside a biography inside a novel inside a play inside a meditation on hero worship, loss and excess. The result is a veritable feast, but we might savour most what Judy has taught us about loss: “its memory and its anticipation lie at the heart of human experience”, and one’s sense of it can be reduced by total immersion. Hero worship is a way of living with loss and also of containing excess. “I knew I was the kind of person who in life would be prone to over-love”, Boyt writes; “the type to kill a plant by over-watering.” Excess is also Garland’s appeal. You make people nervous, the songwriter John Meyer explained to Judy, because “No one knows whether you’re going to sing ‘Over the Rainbow’ or open your veins”. “Sometimes I do both”, she replied.

To help explore the roots of Judy-love, Boyt brings in the poems of John Berryman and Thomas Carlyle’s “On Heroes and Hero-Worship”, but the book that beckons on every page is Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Beautiful objects, says Burke, are small and smooth. The sublime, on the other hand, “always dwells on great objects” and is an experience of domination. “The ideas of the sublime and the beautiful stand on foundations so different, that it is hard, I had almost said impossible, to think of reconciling them in the same subject.” But they are reconciled in Judy Garland, whose diminutive height (four foot eleven) was always contrasted with her enormous voice. “I’ve never known another story or type of human being where their talent was too big for their person”, said her daughter, Lorna Luft. Judy was also smooth: one fan, in response to a questionnaire sent to him by Susie Boyt, explained that “I feel smoother when I’m watching Judy”.

The Amazon website will tell you that readers interested in My Judy Garland Life might also like Emma Brockes’s What Would Barbra Do?: How musicals changed my life (2007), on how the genre transforms what is otherwise dreary into “material for epic, noble suffering”, and Antonia Quirke’s Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers (reviewed in the TLS, May 18, 2007), on how epic, noble suffering in films has made her life seem dreary. Boyt’s approach to the business of the self forged from celluloid is more serious and searching than those of Brockes or Quirke, and in her focus on one figure she has produced a study of obsession quite unlike anything else. At the end of My Judy Garland Life, Susie Boyt is in the lounge of a London hotel, singing her heart out in a duet with Mickey Rooney: “Here we are”, they croon, “two very bewildered people”. Those of us who are not Judy fans are less bewildered now.

Susie Boyt
MY JUDY GARLAND LIFE
For anyone who’s ever held a candle to a star
286pp. Virago. £15.99.
978 1 84408 411 1

Frances Wilson's book The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth was published earlier this year.

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