Meet Aléna Muir: Your Next Favorite Essayist
Aléna Muir is a South African essayist and self-proclaimed pop cultural critic. The objects of her obsession (which manifest as both essays and fiery monologues in any given social setting) include pop culture, memory, her home country, a good old-fashioned scandal, friendship, identity, memory, and grief. In writing and life, all of these are consistently and profoundly in conversation with each other. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.
“If there are indeed only two types of people in the world—ones who entertain, and ones who observe (Britney deserves an honorary Doctorate in Philosophy for her mind)—then my pursuit of a writer’s life must be the manifestation of the audacity to want to be both.”
-Aléna Muir on writing
Confessions of A Very Lucky Celebrity
(an excerpt)
by Aléna Muir
When I’m asked why I’d participated in an online dating show, I usually respond, “To officially claim the title of Family Disappointment—someone’s gotta do it!” or “To fulfill my lifelong dream of becoming a D-list South African celebrity.” The truth is that I owed it to a former version of myself. It was an old itch that demanded to be scratched: to see my face on television. In hindsight, I am grateful it only lasted eleven episodes.
When I was a preschooler, my mother had me convinced that she was tight with Julie Andrews. I was watching the Oscar-snubbed masterpiece The Princess Diaries (2001) in our living room when she waltzed past with a laundry basket and paused for a quick check-in. “Is that Julie Andrews?” I was surprised. My mom has never been a big watcher of films. She’s more of a CSI or Law and Order SVU kinda gal. “Yes, Mamma, do you know her?” “Of course,” my mom replied with a puffed up smile, “we went to school together.” In my defense, I was skeptical at first. “No way—she’s too old!” “Ya, but she wasn’t the sharpest. She got held back a couple of years.” My South African mother was born in 1967, the British Dame Julie in 1935.
She left the conversation and went about her day; I left the conversation and spent the next few weeks telling everyone from friends to kindergarten caretakers to grocery store cashiers that my mom knew Julie Andrews—even helped her with her homework sometimes—back when they were in high school together. It was the moon landing of my five-year-old life.
I eventually became aware that my mother’s Julie Andrews story was pure hoodwinkery and, more importantly, that those around me did not care as much as I did for the people on the covers of magazines. My hometown, the placid hamlet of Stilbaai, is a small coastal Afrikaner town about three-and-a-half hours from Cape Town. Afrikaners tend to get excited about rugby, hunting, and church bazaars. I was never quite embedded in our agricultural roots. I enjoy a farmer’s market on a weekend morning and a nice farm-to-table restaurant and that’s that. Stilbaai had no cinema, no theater, and the annual concert by the infamously nationalist and racist Afrikaans singer Steve Hofmeyr might as well have been the second coming of Christ. In fact, the main fandom that existed in the milieu of my youth was the one dedicated to Jesus. The local grocery store likely stocked one copy of each Britney Spears album on the sole CD rack just for me. Few of my days on this earth were as sweet as the one when I finally lifted Greatest Hits: My Prerogative and paid for it with the twenty rand notes I’d saved up from my Tooth Mouse visits. (It’s a mouse, not a fairy, where I’m from. I will not be elaborating further.)
In February 2004, fellow Afrikaner Charlize Theron—or, as I like to call her, Charlize from Benoni (we like to keep local celebrities humble, and nothing is more humbling than being from Benoni)—won Best Actress for Monster (2003) at the Academy Awards. We were all nailed to our box TVs for the 6 P.M. Afrikaans news to watch Charlize from Benoni’s acceptance speech. My mom was convinced she would say something in Afrikaans, and was pissed off when she didn’t. I simply gawked at how beautiful she looked; I couldn’t believe that she was like me when she was a kid, and now she was a movie star, and didn’t sound Afrikaans at all. It didn’t make any sense.
As soon as I started my school career, I had to formally learn English, but I already knew as much of the language as Dr. Phil and Judge Judy (or whoever else the South African Broadcasting Community could afford at the time) could teach me. It only took one acknowledgment from Miss Elmarie that I was a bit ahead of the rest of the class for me to Dunning-Kruger effect my way through first-grade English. A standard in any South African language class is an oral report each term. For the compulsory First Additional Language level, topics are kept painless—“My Family,” “My Holiday,” or, most famously, “My Hero.” I seized the latter topic as an opportunity to educate my peers; while the majority limited themselves to Nelson Mandela, South African Paralympic swimmer Natalie Du Toit, Mother Teresa, and their own boring dads, I reported on the heroism of Hilary Duff. I would just note, as a testament to the fact that I have always had amazing taste, that Mother Teresa has since been soft-canceled while Hilary has never done a single thing wrong.
One person who did indulge me—even inspired me—was my maternal grandmother. OumaHetta made the other girlies’ grandmas look like bores. She had cherry red hair, lit up a room as effortlessly as she did her Craven A menthol slims, and loved Christina Aguilera and Britney. In the local sphere, we were hardcore Patricia Lewis fans. Patricia—who made English and Afrikaans pop music, had bum-length hair the color of a full moon, wore sparkly taffeta corset tops with bootleg jeans, and had dated David motherfucking Hasselhoff—was the touchstone of South African excellence. In September of 2004, during my Ouma Hetta’s final visit to me, she brought over the People magazine with Britney’s wedding on the cover. We were both deeply concerned because, hello?? Britney could do so muchbetter than K-Fed! After OumaHetta passed away five days before Christmas, my mom found only one gift in her apartment, beautifully wrapped and addressed to me. It was a Patricia Lewis Barbie doll.
