Tori Spelling’s Mommywood: More of MY STori

Those of you who tune in regularly here, probably read about my long, occasionally, stormy relationship with Tori Spelling last week.  So, you know that while I feel like Tori and I are solid right now, I also know that we could turn on each other that any moment.  Like what happened with the third season of Tori and Dean – I just walked away.  I have no idea what happened during Stella’s first year of life.  Not a clue.  Tori and I were totally not speaking.

Fortunately, Tori wrote a book about it!  I like to think of it as the journal she kept during our estrangement.  It’s a living record of the time I spent ignoring her and she has published it as a gift to me.  And also to make yet more money off the franchise of Being Tori Spelling that she has created to sustain her.

Mommywood is…I don’t know what it is.  It’s sort of a memoir of being an attention whore a c-list celebrity grasping for continued recognition a famous mom. But I’m not entirely sure what she thought people were going to take away from it besides the fact that she make a conscious decision to raise her children in the most public way possible while at the same time continuing to claim discomfort about being a public figure.  Correction: a figure who forces her way into public.

This book chronicles all her attempts to have a normal, suburban life for her family, which is admirable but rings TOTALLY FALSE because if she wanted a normal suburban life, she’d be living anonymously in the suburbs, having pulled the plug on her reality show instead of taking every opportunity she finds to fling herself in front of cameras.

Tori, make no mistake, is selling her ass.  She sells it in the form of jewelry on HSN.  She sells it in the form of books about being Tori Spelling  She sells it on Oxygen every week.  She sells it to the tabloids by filming her marital issues for Oxygen. And by extension, she’s selling her kids asses before they’re old enough to spell ass.

Do you think I’m judging Tori for parading her life around on reality tv and sharing the details of her exploits at block parties and neighborhood parades in Mommywood? Good, because I have my judgin’ shoes on and I am stompin’ my judgement all over the damn house.

(I have no idea where that metaphor came from.  I don’t think it even makes any sense.  But I like it anyway so it’s staying)

Here’s the deal.  Tori’s first book was all “My life was so fucking weird that I’m now totally maladjusted and can’t breathe unless someone is pointing a lens at my fake boobs.” Tragic.  Really.  And it’s true, at least about the parts of her life that happened before she asked her dad to put her on tv.  Then she became culpable in her own exploitation. She is no coma victim waking up, years after the murder of her mother, to find herself stalked by her mother’s murderer in case the coma didn’t render her amnesiac like in Awake To Danger.

Her second book is all about how she’s trying to make a good life for her kids by working on fifty million projects that keep her as visible as she can possibly get. Including, and primarily, their family reality show. She makes no apologies for putting her kids on film, making them household names, and allowing all of America to watch their earliest years. And maybe there’s nothing wrong with it. Or maybe there wouldn’t be anything wrong with it if the world wasn’t rife with people who will write hideous things about her kids.  Tori herself talks about how upsetting it was when people called her names in the press. So, why would she basically hand people the same pen that wounded her with words and give them permission to use it on her children?

She defends it all by saying that being an actress/media whore is all she knows how to be.  Fair point  And where could a moderately wealthy person in a major metropolitan area go to learn a new trade, after all?  Oh wait.  UCLA. Or USC if you don’t like powder blue. Tori doesn’t have to do this.  She’s chosen it. And the choice is irrevocable for her children now.  They are Out There.

See? Her kids look way cuter this way. You know. Anonymous.

I’m sure Tori is, as she so desperately tries to assure us in Mommywood, a good mother, if an offbeat one who spend a lot more time in a make-up chair than the rest of us do. But I can’t get behind her choice to put her kids on tv.  I feel the same way about the Duggars, the Gosselins, and Kendra Wilkinson. Moms have a duty to protect their kids.  Simple as that. You want to know who’s doing that?  Dean McDermott’s ex-wife.  According to Mommywood, Dean’s son from his first marriage lives with Tori and Dean part of the time but you never see him on the reality show  I assume that’s because his mother said no. And brava to her for saying it.

So Tori, I’m sure you’re gonna be mad at e for saying all of this stuff.  You’ve made it abundantly clear that you don’t like being judged.  But, um, you kind of ask for it. Maybe you should turn off the cameras for a few years and focus on giving your kids a life that doesn’t have a film crew in it.

But I’m totally reading your next book.