Janice Dickinson’s No Lifeguard on Duty: A Review

Before we begin, let me confirm that yes I do mean that Janice Dickinson, yes she does have a book, and yes I have read it. And I think that you should read it too.

Lest you think that No Lifeguard On Duty is nothing more than gossipy trash (which, okay, it mostly is), let me get a little lit-crit for a moment. Dickinson is not one for messy syntax or flowery metaphors; she knows what she wants to say, and she says it. The men in this book wear jeans “so tight you could read Braille through them” or “so tight you could tell their religion”.

If some of No Lifeguard on Duty‘s sentences were in a trendy magazine with your favourite indie author’s name attached, I think that you would admire the simplicity and honesty of the prose. Some examples:

That was the summer I met Pam Adams, who possessed all the security I lacked. I think she was related to John Quincy Adams. She had milky white skin and freckles and gorgeous hazel eyes, and I found her irresistibly beautiful. So did most of the guys at Nova Junior High. And she knew it; she’d slept with plenty of them. She did everything I wouldn’t do. “I wish you had a cock, Janice,” she told me once.

Daniela took me and a group of friends to Tuscany for the weekend, and we drank our way through several vineyards. One of her friends was an Italian film director. He kept accosting me — in dark hallways, in corridors, by the ruins of a once-magnificent castle — to tell me he wanted me, that he couldn’t get me out of his mind. He did it with such passion I felt like I was in the middle of an Italian movie — a bad one, maybe even one of his.

So you’re excited and half-naked and hot and nervous and surrounded by the most beautiful people in the world, and suddenly you find yourself horsing around with a perfect-looking man who wants you — and what do you do? You find a closet and you lift up your skirt and you fuck him. And you fuck faster because the show’s about to start and then you come and he explodes inside you and you barely have time to catch your breath and, boom! — you’re disengaged and heading for the runway.

And Calvin [Klein] is screaming, “Where the fuck have you been? I’ve been looking everywhere!” And the dressers are hovering around you, their hands flapping like nervous birds, trying to undo the mess you’ve made. And then you feel the come dripping down your leg, and you smile at Calvin and say, “I was fucking Tony Spinelli, and it was great, thank you very much,” and then you’re on the runway, trying to keep your knees from buckling.

Most of all, Dickinson is open and honest about sex. She wants it, she likes it, and she’ll have it with whomever she likes:

I’ve been in Europe for seven months and Guy was the only man I’d slept with (okay, I let one other guy go down on me, and maybe there was some fellatio one night when I was blindsided by some excellent cocaine, but what’s a girl to do?)

In pop-cultureland women are still virgins or whores, and Dickinson’s honesty is refreshing. She’s not trying to be shocking, as recent oh-look-women-do-fuck books like Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands and Melissa P’s One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed. She’s just being honest, and it doesn’t seem to occur to her that people might dislike her for this; if they did, she’d just pretend she didn’t care anyway — she’s “Janice fucking Dickinson, motherfucker”, as she reminds us at least once per chapter.

The danger of this book is that you may read it simply looking to find out some gossip, rather than for the lucid and well-paced prose. To help you with this, I will now share all the sexual details Dickinson reveals: Mick Jagger is fantastic but a womaniser, Jack Nicholson is okay but clingy, Warren Beatty is great but wakes at dawn to stare at himself in the mirror, Bruce Willis is a nice guy but a bad actor, Liam Neeson is “hung like a donkey” but still in love with Julia Roberts, and Sylvester Stallone is short, wears cowboy boots with three-inch heels, offered Dickinson a million dollars to abort his potential baby, refers to sex as “bam ham slam”, and calls his penis a “dead rat”. Incidentally, that last tidbit made me feel gayer than ever before.

Am I the only fake-intellectual who really reads celebrity trash? Share your favourite celebreality book! I have many lunchbreaks to fill.