Judy Garland, Protagonist

It’s Judy Garland’s one-hundred second birthday today. This great artist has been extensively written about, speculated about, pitied, celebrated and misjudged for decades, both when she was alive and in the nearly sixty years that have passed since her death. She even starred in her own mystery novel in 1945, but that’s another topic for another time (And believe me, we will talk about it, because hardly anyone talks about this bit of movie history and I’d like to fix that.).

Anyway, today we’re looking into Dottie Fray’s new historical fiction novel, The Constricting Corset, which came out today and is currently being sold exclusively in Kindle and paperback form on Amazon, with a hardback edition to come later. It follows Judy from her time in Lancaster, California through her career at MGM, and Dottie sent me a review copy. Woo hoo!

I very much enjoyed The Constricting Corset. It moves really fast, it’s got some bite, and it does a good job at laying out Judy’s private life with her family and her various paramours. Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons would have been agog at all the dirt to be found here, because there’s no shortage of salacious details, although they’re presented pretty discreetly at all times.

One of the nicest parts of the book is that it delves into Judy’s friendship with Mickey Rooney. Fray shows Judy as confused and pining for Mickey while he’s eyeing Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, but it evolves into Judy seeking Mickey out for help when things go bad for her in her marriages and Mickey trying his best to be that help. This is probably pretty close to what happened, but I’m just guessing.

And to be honest, I think it’s hard to really know how one-sided or not their relationship was in terms of Judy’s attraction to Mickey or vice-versa, but what has always been clear is that they loved each other very much and were best friends from the time they met, even when Judy was beyond reach, and that comes out in Dottie’s book, too.

I liked that the book shows Judy being friends with Lana Turner, because most of the time we get the idea that Judy was jealous of Lana at least on some level. Not so in The Constricting Corset, at least until Artie Shaw elopes with Lana and Lana throws Mickey over.

We also get a sense of how insecure Judy really was. On one hand she loved performing for an audience, but on the other she often felt as if she was only wanted for her voice and the money it brought in. And she was insecure about her appearance, often comparing herself to her contemporaries.

As is natural for any book about Judy Garland, the book paints a pretty effective picture of Judy’s relationship with her mother, which was undeniably toxic. She’s a stage mother and she thinks nothing of pushing pills on her daughter as if it’s no big deal, which, at that time, it wasn’t. Her relationship with Judy deteriorated in real life and the book shows that.

The Constricting Corset is fairly balanced in its ideas of the lighthearted and not-so-lighthearted parts of Judy’s life, but on the minus side, Judy’s wit is a little bit diluted. She was a famously brilliant raconteur, at least to people who knew her, and as Liza said about her in an interview in the 1980s, Judy had a way of embellishing her memories so that they become epic jokes, and a lot of people believe what she told even though it wasn’t true.

To be fair, Judy’s wit would be very tough to reproduce because Judy was so in the moment. I don’t think Nora Ephron or Dorothy Parker could have done it, even. They would still come out of it sounding like themselves. Judy had a unique voice, and to be honest, had her life taken a different direction she could have been a wonderful novelist.

Overall, The Constricting Corset is a fun book, and I found it got even better on subsequent readings. Judy fans will definitely want to take it in and get inside the head of our Ms. Garland, albeit in a fictionalized way. Heck, maybe the real Ms. Garland would read the book with a bit of longing if she could see it, rest her soul.

A new “Cooking With the French Chef” is coming out tomorrow. Thanks for reading, everyone, and thanks again to Dottie for the advance copy of your new novel. Congrats! Have a good one, all…

The Constricting Corset is available to own from Amazon (Kindle edition and paperback).

~Purchases made via Amazon Affiliate links found on this site help support Taking Up Room at no extra cost to you.~

If you’re enjoying what you see on Taking Up Room, please subscribe to my Substack page, where you’ll find both free and paid subscriber-only reviews of mostly new and newish movies, documentaries, and shows. I publish every Wednesday and Saturday.