Today I got a library card so now I can rent free DVD's at the corner, and they actually have quite a good collection. How's that for community media?

The first DVD I borrowed was Lady Sings the Blues - The Billie Holiday Story. Which I watched with Simon this evening.

Okay first things first, if you read the review at the bottom of the IMDB page, it's basically true. Diane Ross sings her versions of Billies classics, and the plot is so manufactured it turns a story of solitude and strength into one of dependency and victimhood. Which, is actually kind of par for the course where troubled creative woman biographies are concerned especially if the woman in question isn't normative.

As a kid, I listened to Billie Holidays greatest hits CD over and over again, during a particularly difficult period following my parents divorce. I had decided to move out pretty early and was dealing with the unexpected complications of actually getting all the freedom I had asked for.

Billies music and her voice, expressed a lot of the excitement I was living through, but also the loneliness I often felt. Even though I was the one who had decided to move out, I was still frantically lonely, without any of the normal family stuff no matter how toxic it had been, to place me in a world I knew. I listened to Billy because she helped me understand why in that first year living by myself I dated everyone I could see, went out all the time and got as close to socially bankrupt as I ever hope to come.

In her songs she would take her loneliness and her craving for company and turn it into either romance, or bravado. An act I repetitively followed by becoming the life of parties, descending into hopeless crushes and then just as quickly talking myself out of them as soon as the next candidate came around.

So that's Me and Billie.

Simon and Billie, came at each other as perfect strangers, so he watched the movie with a lot less interest and was less captivated by Billies character, or seemed to be. I can't blame him, Diana Ross singing Billie Holiday is not the same as spending a lonely Sunday afternoon in your room singing along to "Crazy They Call me" over and over while you work on a painting. One is appreciation, the other is watching a movie.

So yeah, the movie was kinda disappointing and Simon was put off by the whole idea that Billie was victimized by her addictions to the point that she could not succeed. Which led me to think hard about perceptions of ambition and drive and addiction and self-destruction especially as it pertains to woman artists and creators.

These are not thoughts that are in any sense academic for me, I watched my mother negotiate a relationship to those words and the activities they imply and it hurt me to watch and not just empathetically, I am hurt by watching her, I have these self-destructive tendencies and negotiate them often through expressive acts. So thinking about how Billies character gets mis-represented in this film, isn't just about whether the facts were right or not. It's about whether, the essence of a persons flawed coping strategy can be simplified into a word like sad. Or depressing.

The only excuse Billie will initially bear in the movie, for trying smack is if she gets hit by a truck. She says it as a joke, "Well if I ever get hit by a truck, I'll come looking for a shot." That's bravado, living with a sense of self that doesn't even require a truck to feel like it's been knocked on it's ass every day, and shrugging off your first shot with a joke. Bravado is not a terribly viable strategy, and it's not going to keep Billie off smack, because she knows behind her jokes is the part of her that makes the bravado necessary, and that part really wants an antidote to the constant work of getting knocked down and having to stand back up. But a failed and failing strategy is not victimhood - it's a kind of survival.

It's not simple for people to live with damaged selves and it bores me to see characters like Billie Holiday reduced to cut-outs, it seems that no-one wants to imagine, much less portray extremely intelligent, extremely talented people who maintain dignity, and negotiate success and also failure, while behaving and treating themselves terribly. I watched my mother go through it, and the nuances and the fragility of her position really only became apparent to me after I had grieved her death. It isn't enough to look at people with addictions as "sad" or as victims, it does no credit to their achievements, one of which includes surviving and negotiating dependencies.

Okay last tear-jerker thing and then I'll stop. One really important thing I remember about my mom (all the time in fact), is this one afternoon when I was getting seriously on her case about her depression, and her drinking and the fact that she would stop taking her anti-depressants because they interfered with her ability to drink as much as she wanted. I kept yammering on about her quality of life and how she had to learn to be happy, and she finally shut me up by looking at me and saying - "Don't you think I am happy in my way?"

I have written about this incident a billion times, I'll probably have to get it tattoo-ed on my back at some point that phrase, to remind me of a couple of things. #1/ Addiction is absolutely not simple. #2/Personal happiness, satisfaction and quality of life are inherently private concerns and I have no right to judge anyone's but my own.

Not everyone wants the same happy ending, is I guess an easier way to phrase it.

What I really wanted to ask: if anyone knows of a movie that portrays a woman, an artist or historical figure of some stripe who struggled with addictions and poor self -image that doesn't end up making them look like a twigged out crazy please can you tell me about it so I can watch it with Simon and we can continue this debate?

Thanks a bundle.