Heeeeey, I Think I Love You!

Was there ever a more exquisitely inane piece of sugary pop perfection than "I Think I Love You" by David Cassidy?  To me, it is the pinnacle of fluff music:  there's nothing to touch it in terms of being catchy while simultaneously being innocuous to the point of meaningless.  It is a masterpiece, and it launched the teen idol career of David Cassidy, who cheerfully sang it during episodes of the first season of The Partridge Family.



And now it's the name of a book.  A book about worshipping at the altar of David Cassidy.  A book that as soon as I heard about it, I wished I'd written. 

A book that, somewhere in the course of reading it, reversed my exuberance about the concept.

Some thoughts:

1.  Like The Help, I Think I Love You is a story from multiple narrators.  Like Abraham Lincoln:  Vampire Hunter, it is told partially from the first person and partially from the third.  Using one of these two storytelling tactics can work.  Using them both left me not quite fully engaged with either narrator.

2.  In addition to parallel storylines from more than one character, another trend in modern literature is The Mother Who Thinks Her Daughter Is Unattractive.  I'm just going to make a general motion here on behalf of the emotionally damaged public:  we need to retire these mothers.  They're overdone and they depress the hell out of me.

3.  Why is every adolescent in literature sexually active at an age far earlier than average for the time period in which she lives?

4.  Why is every adult male in literature a wanton man-whore who has slept with more women than he can recall off the top of his head? 

5.  Why do adult women in literature always anonymously hook up with moody man-whore men in public places?

6.  OH MY GOD, I'M SORRY THAT MIDDLE AGE SUCKS.  Seriously.  I really, really am.  Personally, I can't wait to hit forty years old just so I can know how much I have ruined my whole life and wasted away my youth with horrible, cheating men and feel the life drained out of me by my unappreciative, bitchy offspring.  Truly.  I am waiting for this day.  So maybe, in the meantime, we could have fewer books out there that deal with this so the feeling isn't spoiled for me when I come to experience it myself.

7.  This is a pink book.  It's pink!  It's about a happy, girly crush on David frickin' Cassidy!  And everyone in it is sad through the whole goddamn book.  Speaking of which...

8.  ISN'T ANYBODY HAPPY ANYMORE?!

9.  Parts of it were absolutely brilliant.  Parts of it made me realize that the reason I didn't write this book is because I couldn't write this book.  The descriptions of David himself and the passion with which every detail about him was savored and stored away and cherished...I felt it with every ounce of my being, and know that I am not yet skilled enough as a writer to convey that type of emotion with such aching perfection.

10.  I'm also apparently not old enough to be so jaded with life.

Novels written for "adult" audiences frequently leave me grieving on behalf of modern humanity.  Selfish and self-destructive behavior is treated as normal and universal.  And yes, I am fully aware of the irony of me writing that when my own book was about me (it's all about me!) spending my mid-twenties chasing down a movie star, trying to get something from him which I knew, deep down, he didn't have in him to give.

But I would hope that anyone who read my book would come out of it feeling that they had just read about life, and not life-is-awful.  I think that's what was missing from I Think I Love You for me.

It's David Cassidy, for Christ's sake!  How horrible can the rest of it really be?