Katy French Hysteria

What happened to Katy French was tragic and i wouldn't wish it upon anyone but lets not overhype her death. Day in day out people day in Ireland of drugs but as soon as a rich, blonde woman dies suddenly we have a national drug problem. Below is Mongrel.ie brilliant article on the matter.

Every so often you come across a newspaper article so joyously unhinged that, like the diner in the famous scene from When Harry Met Sally, you’re tempted to grab a passing waiter, point at the journalist responsible and say “I’ll have whatever he’s having”. John Waters’ eulogy for Katy French in today’s Irish Times is one such article. The link to the full article is here. But, since the Irish Times site is subscription only, I’ve reprinted selected highlights after the jump.

After a brief introduction, in which he explains that he once said hello to Katy French backstage at the Late Late Show, Waters gets down to business:

"She had a beauty that suggested itself as emanating from an infinity within. She seemed to believe anything was possible and her smile convinced you, for an instant, that she was right. I wanted her dreams to come true. She was a child. She was my daughter and Eoghan’s daughter and Eamon’s daughter and Pat’s daughter and Bertie’s daughter. She was your daughter, your little sister. She was a child of Ireland in the time of its rebirth."

Incidentally, I once ran into Katy French at the mart in Ballymote and that’s exactly what I thought too.

"Katy French was a personification of our fantasies, of our sense of what we were becoming, of how we might unfold ourselves. She was not the only one, but in the immediate past was perhaps the most spectacular light on the skyline, a meteorite of desire plummeting through the Irish zeitgeist… Katy had found a way of being that promised her it could slake all her human cravings. She had manoeuvred herself into a position where everything humanly desirable seemed to be within reach, and was careering forward on the path opening up in front of her. She did not, other than literally, die of whatever it will say on her death certificate. She died of desire, of being utterly human."

Now, obviously, no article on Katy French’s (genuinely) sad demise is complete without at least one reference to the Pope’s most recent encyclical.

"As Pope Benedict reminds us in his new encyclical, we have no idea what we would really like. “We do not know this reality at all; even in those moments when we think we can reach out and touch it, it eludes us.” All we know is that it is not what we have. God is a concept by which we measure our longings. I’ll say it again. God is a concept by which we measure our longings. As Katy did not comprehend the limits of her human capacity to pursue her angelic yearnings, neither, anymore, do the rest of us… And so, dear friends, we’ll just have to think it up all over again. The dream is over. Our daughter Katy is dead… The dream is over."

Holy shit. Makes ‘Sorry for your troubles’ seem kinda stingy by comparison.