The 14 short stories that make up Marni Jackson’s Don’t I Know You? follow protagonist Rose, a writer with a seemingly miraculous knack for having celebrity encounters. While the premise of the books is fun and appealing, Jackson doesn’t always pull it off. Some of the stories are strong, but at several points I found myself slipping out of the narrative and saying, “Yeah, right.”
These celebrity encounters begin innocently enough—such as a chaste love affair with a young John Updike—but they become stranger and more involved as the book progresses and Rose ages, culminating with Rose, now well into her sixties, on a canoe trip with Leonard Cohen, Karl Ove Knausgård and Taylor Swift.
While the stories follow Rose chronologically—we watch her grow up, fall in and out of relationships and work in different capacities as a writer—the book has a disjointed quality that makes it feel more like a mash-up held together with the idea of celebrity than a fully realized collection of short stories. Much of the book is written from Rose’s perspective, but some of the stories only include Rose as a peripheral character.
The book jacket promises to delight fans of Miranda July, but the stories in Don’t I Know You? don’t have the vibrancy and characters that allow July to pull off similarly outlandish premises in her work. When Jackson is at her best, some of her stories, especially the first in this collection—a coming of age story set in southern Ontario—reminded me of Alice Munro’s fiction that is also steeped in that landscape.
Don’t I Know You? is at its best when it is at its lightest: “Yes, I’m an old whore at kissing,” Rose says to an impressed John Updike. But things fall flat when Jackson uses dialogue to force-feed the reader plot points. Like this passage, in which Keith Richards (somehow Rose’s surgeon) explains the quid pro quo arrangement that led him to the operating table: “I taught him some chords. He wasn’t bad actually, decent sense of time, and then he let me watch him operate.”
While the celebrity encounters toward the beginning of the book—a chance encounter with Joni Mitchell among hippies in Greece, running into Neil Young and his father as a reporter writing a story for Rolling Stone, serving Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray at a diner and being invited out for a drink—seem plausible, they get more bizarre and hard to believe.
By the fifth story, Rose, her partner Eric and his son Ryan arrive at the cottage they are renting to find Bob Dylan floating in the lake on their air mattress. They invite him up for a drink, and he ends up staying for most of the summer, tubing and playing Monopoly with Ryan, eating their groceries without chipping in and eventually sleeping with Rose out on the porch during a quarter moon.
After Bob Dylan leaves without a word, he sends a note with the chords to the song he was teaching Ryan. But the note gets lost in the move back to the city. Here Rose echoes some of the skepticism that her readers feel: “So our time with him became a family secret—something that might or might not have taken place, like the mirage of summer itself.”
This isn’t the only time Jackson encourages doubt. After a picture surfaces of a man who looks like Jimi Hendrix, Rose convinces her editors to send her to New Mexico to follow up. She finds Jimi living with Canadian artist Agnes Martin. While out in the desert watching Agnes work, Rose is skeptical about the reality of the situation: “For a moment she wondered if she were still asleep on the plane and dreaming.”
These moments of doubt from the protagonist call into question the nature of the celebrity encounters. Are they real within the confines of the narrative? Is Keith Richards really the surgeon who removes a tumor from Rose’s liver? Does Gwyneth Paltrow really give Rose a facial? Or maybe it doesn’t even matter. While Gwyneth extracts blackheads from Rose’s nose, Rose begins telling her about the dissolution of her marriage. When she invites Gwyneth to talk about her own “conscious uncoupling,” Gwyneth says, “It involves some names.” Rose replies, “Feel free to change them […] It’s all the same story.”
While some of the stories in Don’t I Know You? are interesting and entertaining, the book itself is not without problems. The book’s wide cast of celebrity characters are underdeveloped. For the most part, we see these celebrities through Rose’s gaze and don’t get a good sense of what is behind their actions. Apart from her habit of running into celebrities, Rose lives an unremarkable life as a struggling writer, yet celebrities keep taking interest in her. Charlotte Rampling follows her around at Cannes, and after she meets Meryl Streep at a spa, Streep befriends her to prepare for a role as a failed writer.
At the beginning of the book, in the author’s note, Jackson writes, “But whenever artists share their creative gifts with us, when we are consoled or inspired by their words, lyrics, or performances, we come to feel we know them. Their presence in these stories is meant to represent the powerful and intimate roles that famous people sometimes play in our ordinary lives.”
So did Rose actually paddle alongside Leonard Cohen, Taylor Swift and Karl Ove Knausgård, or was their presence on the canoe trip felt through their songs and stories? Rather than feeling delighted by this question, I felt frustrated. When I finished the last page, I didn’t do so with fresh insights into these celebrities, or celebrity in general. Instead, I finished it unsatisfied.
‘Don’t I Know You?’ by Marni Jackson
Book Reviews
The 14 short stories that make up Marni Jackson’s Don’t I Know You? follow protagonist Rose, a writer with a seemingly miraculous knack for having celebrity encounters. While the premise of the books is fun and appealing, Jackson doesn’t always pull it off. Some of the stories are strong, but at several points I found myself slipping out of the narrative and saying, “Yeah, right.”
These celebrity encounters begin innocently enough—such as a chaste love affair with a young John Updike—but they become stranger and more involved as the book progresses and Rose ages, culminating with Rose, now well into her sixties, on a canoe trip with Leonard Cohen, Karl Ove Knausgård and Taylor Swift.
While the stories follow Rose chronologically—we watch her grow up, fall in and out of relationships and work in different capacities as a writer—the book has a disjointed quality that makes it feel more like a mash-up held together with the idea of celebrity than a fully realized collection of short stories. Much of the book is written from Rose’s perspective, but some of the stories only include Rose as a peripheral character.
The book jacket promises to delight fans of Miranda July, but the stories in Don’t I Know You? don’t have the vibrancy and characters that allow July to pull off similarly outlandish premises in her work. When Jackson is at her best, some of her stories, especially the first in this collection—a coming of age story set in southern Ontario—reminded me of Alice Munro’s fiction that is also steeped in that landscape.
Don’t I Know You? is at its best when it is at its lightest: “Yes, I’m an old whore at kissing,” Rose says to an impressed John Updike. But things fall flat when Jackson uses dialogue to force-feed the reader plot points. Like this passage, in which Keith Richards (somehow Rose’s surgeon) explains the quid pro quo arrangement that led him to the operating table: “I taught him some chords. He wasn’t bad actually, decent sense of time, and then he let me watch him operate.”
While the celebrity encounters toward the beginning of the book—a chance encounter with Joni Mitchell among hippies in Greece, running into Neil Young and his father as a reporter writing a story for Rolling Stone, serving Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray at a diner and being invited out for a drink—seem plausible, they get more bizarre and hard to believe.
By the fifth story, Rose, her partner Eric and his son Ryan arrive at the cottage they are renting to find Bob Dylan floating in the lake on their air mattress. They invite him up for a drink, and he ends up staying for most of the summer, tubing and playing Monopoly with Ryan, eating their groceries without chipping in and eventually sleeping with Rose out on the porch during a quarter moon.
After Bob Dylan leaves without a word, he sends a note with the chords to the song he was teaching Ryan. But the note gets lost in the move back to the city. Here Rose echoes some of the skepticism that her readers feel: “So our time with him became a family secret—something that might or might not have taken place, like the mirage of summer itself.”
This isn’t the only time Jackson encourages doubt. After a picture surfaces of a man who looks like Jimi Hendrix, Rose convinces her editors to send her to New Mexico to follow up. She finds Jimi living with Canadian artist Agnes Martin. While out in the desert watching Agnes work, Rose is skeptical about the reality of the situation: “For a moment she wondered if she were still asleep on the plane and dreaming.”
These moments of doubt from the protagonist call into question the nature of the celebrity encounters. Are they real within the confines of the narrative? Is Keith Richards really the surgeon who removes a tumor from Rose’s liver? Does Gwyneth Paltrow really give Rose a facial? Or maybe it doesn’t even matter. While Gwyneth extracts blackheads from Rose’s nose, Rose begins telling her about the dissolution of her marriage. When she invites Gwyneth to talk about her own “conscious uncoupling,” Gwyneth says, “It involves some names.” Rose replies, “Feel free to change them […] It’s all the same story.”
While some of the stories in Don’t I Know You? are interesting and entertaining, the book itself is not without problems. The book’s wide cast of celebrity characters are underdeveloped. For the most part, we see these celebrities through Rose’s gaze and don’t get a good sense of what is behind their actions. Apart from her habit of running into celebrities, Rose lives an unremarkable life as a struggling writer, yet celebrities keep taking interest in her. Charlotte Rampling follows her around at Cannes, and after she meets Meryl Streep at a spa, Streep befriends her to prepare for a role as a failed writer.
At the beginning of the book, in the author’s note, Jackson writes, “But whenever artists share their creative gifts with us, when we are consoled or inspired by their words, lyrics, or performances, we come to feel we know them. Their presence in these stories is meant to represent the powerful and intimate roles that famous people sometimes play in our ordinary lives.”
So did Rose actually paddle alongside Leonard Cohen, Taylor Swift and Karl Ove Knausgård, or was their presence on the canoe trip felt through their songs and stories? Rather than feeling delighted by this question, I felt frustrated. When I finished the last page, I didn’t do so with fresh insights into these celebrities, or celebrity in general. Instead, I finished it unsatisfied.
Flatiron Books | 256 pages | $32.99 | cloth | ISBN# 978-1250089793