Colors Insulting to Nature

Colors Insulting to Nature
Cintra Wilson

A hilarious and original debut novel that skewers our craze for celebrity.Liza Normal, like a million teenagers before her, wants desperately to be famous. If she can't be famous, she'll settle for infamy. But no Pop Idol contest on earth will ever crown someone like Liza, with her spookily vulgar 'vocal stylings' and her stripper's wardrobe. Her wits addled by celebrity culture, the ashes of failed stardom in her mouth, she decides to turn her back on her tinsel dreams and embrace her outsider status with a ferocious purity.Colors Insulting to Nature is a brazenly hilarious odyssey through teen humiliation: the crushes who spurn her, the revenges gone wrong, and the dawning realization that life doesn't come with a soundtrack that tells you when to laugh and cry or an audience to applaud at the end. Cintra Wilson is a pyrotechnic wit – the natural heir to Douglas Coupland and the challenger to Dave Eggers. This novel will have readers howling with laughter and writhing with retrospective embarrassment. She is a staggering talent.

COLORS INSULTING

TO NATURE

A Novel CINTRA WILSON

For Kent, who is like Abe Lincoln.

And for all the child-stars in my family:

Meghan, Grant, and Adam Dickerson, Abigail and

Roscoe Bernard, and Ava and Una Ankrum.

Especially Adam, a great actor and a righteous American.

Just don’t read this until you’re 17, unless accompanied by an adult.

Contents

Cover (#u07539ab5-19e7-5ec3-aa98-5478fe8fe25a)

Title Page (#u042c9726-8508-5ea2-9867-e52eb7fca331)

PART I ARE YOU THERE, GOD? IT’S ME, LIZA (#ub5237386-1d8d-5b47-88ef-67a105bb7767)

PART II I, THE CHEESE (#uafa94ed2-082d-56f2-b602-3b50c80ec52c)

PART III PUPPY SQUEEZIN’S (#u672ffcbd-2911-5029-b6a5-9d30545cd021)

PART IV PYGMALIENATED (#litres_trial_promo)

PART V EXILE ON PHANTASY ISLAND (#litres_trial_promo)

PART VI THE HORROR (#litres_trial_promo)

PART VII WHY, IT WAS ALWAYS IN MY OWN BACKYARD, OR, JUST WHEN YOU STOP WANTING IT (#litres_trial_promo)

EPILOGUE THE ROLAND STONE OF MRS. SPRING OR YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT (#litres_trial_promo)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

P.S. Ideas, interviews & features… (#litres_trial_promo)

About the author (#litres_trial_promo)

Q & A with Cintra Wilson (#litres_trial_promo)

M. E. Russell Interviews Cintra Wilson (#litres_trial_promo)

About the book (#litres_trial_promo)

Why I Wrote Colors Insulting to Nature

Read on (#litres_trial_promo)

A Writer Who Influenced Me: John Fante (#litres_trial_promo)

By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)

FIN (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

PART I (#ulink_0684421b-8ca5-5765-aa96-b51663cd6aad)

ARE YOU THERE, GOD? IT’S ME, LIZA (#ulink_0684421b-8ca5-5765-aa96-b51663cd6aad)

(A Heartwarming, Young-Adult, Coming-of-Age Tale)

July 23, 1981, Novato, CA

THE FACES OF THE JUDGES revealed, although they were trying to hide it, deep distaste for the fact that the thirteen-year-old girl in front of them had plucked eyebrows and false eyelashes. Something about her well-worn miniature stiletto heels and her backless black evening dress—side slit up to the fishnet hip, with rhinestone spaghetti straps—was unsavory to them. The girl looked way too comfortable. Equally unsettling was her performance.

“… and now, I’d like to perform a little something by someone who has been a huge influence on my work. This lady has the most incredible pipes in the business. I’m speaking, of course, of Ms. Barbra Streisand. Vincent?” she asked, addressing the horrified pianist, who was busying himself with the mosaic of colorful buttons on his Yamaha DX-7 that promised such sounds as “oboe” and “tympani.”

“Could you give me ‘Clear Day’ in F. sugar? You’re too good to me.”

The child took the microphone and Cher-ishly flipped back a long strand of zigzag crimped hair with fuchsia fingernails as the pianist rolled into the opening bars. Her vibrato, though untrained (learned, most likely, by imitating ecstatic car commercials) was as tight, small, and regular as the teeth on pinking shears.

“On a Cleee-yah Daaaaaaaaaaayy

T’ Wheel Asssssh-TOUND Yewum… thank you,” she spoke, as if the judges had just broken into spontaneous applause.

The mother, visible mouthing the lyrics from the wings in an exaggerated fashion, was clearly responsible for this travesty, this premature piano-bar veteran of a youngster.

“Yew can sheeeee Fah-REVAH, ond EVAH.”

The moderately talented girl was emoting with her hands, seemingly tweezing the adult male heart out of its sexual prison with her kitten claws, all too professionally. The judges squirmed in their seats, intensely disliking the thought of their own daughters or nieces belting out a song in this seamy, overwrought fashion—parroting the stage acts of overripe chanteuses, moist with the rot of numerous alcoholic disappointments in both Love and Life. The mother would probably be devastated if her child didn’t land the gig… she might, in fact, lock herself in an all-peach-colored bedroom and wash down handfuls of muscle relaxants with cheap Polish vodka from a plastic handle—jug; her unfortunate daughter would be left for days without milk and forced to eat lipstick. It was this thought that brought large grimaces of feigned appreciation to the faces of the judges as the girl collapsed into the bow as if she’d just wrung every drop of hot life out of herself and was now utterly spent. She blew a few kisses toward the judges and urged them to “give themselves a hand.”

The mother, whose diaphanous, mango-colored pantsuit was trumped in visual loudness only by the Louis IV—style stack of conical curls on her strawberry-blonde wig, came forward and shook the girl playfully.