The Weight of Failure (When Failure Costs Nothing)

Just because the price of failure is low doesn’t mean someone cannot feel the weight of it. While reading Lola Kirke’s memoir Wild West Village it became clear to me that Kirke feels every gram of failure as it lands on her.

I watched Mistress America and Mozart in the Jungle and liked them. She was good in both though felt typecast as an uptight person while she saw herself as a barely domesticated wolf. But that’s why it’s acting and not documentary. Then she vanished. You think someone has finished with acting, only to discover that acting has finished with them first. The phone stops ringing, the agent steps away and projects vaporise as the entertainment industry contracts. Fame is predatory and leaves devoured and exhausted victims behind it. Having become one of these statistics she feels this failure, even though the price of the failure is low. Kirke is exactly the type of person who should go into the unforgiving world of the arts. She’s wealthy.

Mother was a designer, father a rockstar and grandfather a UK real estate flipper who built a fortune to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds. Money wasn’t a problem, there seems to be houses tucked away across the US and the UK, but it enabled problems. Drug addiction appears early in the book and drug abuse carries on to the end. There’s serial infidelity running right way through the family. Buried under all of this is a gnawing sense of whatever level of success is achieved it never hits the target. Success has flowed from the deceased family patriarch, their grandfather, in comparison to his achievements the rest of them are just playing.

At 14 Lola seems to have been expected to behave like a 24-year-old and she starts living that way. This wounds her in ways she understands but may not have changed. Her older sisters become personalities in music and TV, Lola with a gap of six years between her closest sibling feels like she must catch up. She wants to be adored more than being seen as annoying. Lola may have been envious of her sisters fast-paced lives, but they may have been jealous of her place in their parents’ affections.

Cool, monied and famous people enter and leave the cool, monied and slightly famous Kirke family orbit. Some names are dropped; others are obscured in the prose depending on their sins. When a co-star invited her to dinner, Lola (already in a relationship) declined. He took her indie musician sister instead. Lola discovered this only when her sister gushed about their magical evening together. In the Kirke family, passing around current and potential boyfriends isn’t scandal. It’s sport.

Lola pivots to country music with the expectation it may treat her better than acting has. That strikes me as moving from one piranha tank to an even smaller piranha tank with an equal number of piranhas. One day she may decide to have her own children, she won’t raise them the way she was raised. She describes her own family as a pack of artistic wolves, not cannibalistic, but always probing for weakness. Her move to country music and writing also carries a low cost of failure, but the weight of it is artistic fuel for both of those professions. There’s nothing like life kicking the shit out of you to inspire a good country music song.

There were parts of her journey, and how she explained it, that I did not enjoy while reading this book. She has luxury beliefs in the most cliché ways. For example, while in the UK visiting a former nanny she evaluates the woman’s level of racism when the woman points out an improbable entry area for illegal migrants. While the woman is incorrect (Migrants jumping from cargo planes as they have just landed and exiting the runway at the spot she pointed out) it may have less to do with racism and more to do with the fact she’s a minimum wage factory worker who pays a wedge of tax while also competing for state services in a rapidly growing country whose native population have been having fewer children. But when you have never needed to think about things in that way you reach for the progressive orthodoxy that it just has to be racism.

Beyond the lingering sense that she’d try and sell women of a certain economic status wellness products like jade eggs, if only she had the following, I’m glad I read this book.