You're thinking, "Duh, right? I would be too with That Mother." Yes, I've said that before. I pity the chick. I would expect her to be snarky and bitter. That said, reading this gave me some...pause.
"Rarely are there guests; after Alexis’s spat with He’s Just Not That Into You
author Greg Behrendt—she hassled him for avoiding eye contact—the
Sirius talent department stopped sending people. (“I didn’t know he had
a lazy eye!” Alexis swears.)
Explains Jennifer, “Some people were initially like, ‘Oh, crap!’
because Alexis talked about her sex life”—shtupping a limo driver in
Las Vegas, for instance—“and I would talk about pooping.”
“My media training was when I was 22 and some C-U-N-T named Candace
Bushnell came to interview me about my mother,” Alexis says. “I learned
very quickly.” Hilary Schupf, a Sirius publicist who’s been sitting in,
grins helplessly. Bushnell, who later says she’s “completely mystified”
by Alexis’s comment, happens to have her own Sirius show. “I don’t
think we need to talk about other hosts,” Schupf suggests gently.
During a commercial break, Stewart begins complaining about a newish
NPR program. “ ‘The Takeaway’ is going to kill me,” she seethes of the
jokey current-events show that airs weekday mornings on WNYC. I mention
that “The Takeaway” is co-hosted by John Hockenberry, a
wheelchair-bound paraplegic. Stewart’s eyes light up. “Oh, who knew?”
she says with relish. “Now I hate him more. He gets that convenient
parking spot.” Jennifer covers her face with her hands: “You know she’s
joking, right?” Alexis is not quite finished. “And all the bathrooms in
my new apartment have to be big so he can do a 360 in there. Like I’m
ever inviting him in.”
(OY.)
"JENNIFER: Does she like little children?
ALEXIS: She didn’t like me. But then again not many people do like me.
And then later …
ALEXIS: People like to say that Martha didn’t pay attention to me, and that’s just not true. [Beat.] Maybe not the right kind of attention.
JENNIFER: Well, that’s your flair for dramatics …
ALEXIS: Oh, you think so, hmmm? That’s not what my therapists say. And that is plural. Therapists. Plural.
Two years ago, Alexis went on an on-air tirade about how much she
dislikes Jennifer’s friends. “I hate all her friends, and if I don’t do
exactly what they’re expecting me to, they’ll freak out because I’m a
bitch,” she tells me. “I don’t tap-dance.” But Jennifer gets along with
Alexis’s friends. “Because I have nice friends,” Alexis stage-whispers.
“I have nice friends, too,” Jennifer says, a little wounded. “Your
Jappy Long I sland friends?” asks Alexis.
Her parents sent her to a shrink in her adolescence who told her she
was chronically depressed, and she still takes antidepressants. “That’s
not public information! Where did you get that?” she demands, after
I’ve asked if she’s still on 25 milligrams of Zoloft twice a day. When
I produce the page from the Frequently Asked Questions page of
whateverradio.com (the specific question being, “What medications is
Alexis currently taking?”), she calms down. “Now it’s one [50
milligram] pill once a day,” she says for the record. “And that’s
almost nothing.” She says she used to take a much higher dose of
Effexor, a regimen that made her feel increasingly complacent and numb.
“I kept trying to suggest to my doctor I get off of it and then
something horrible would happen, like my mother would go to prison, and
it would be like, ‘Not now.’ ”
“She drives me crazy,” Alexis says of Ray. “She’s annoying, and she eats shit out of a can.”
I have to wonder if perhaps it’s true what some say around the office,
that what comes out of Alexis’s mouth dwells unspoken in Martha’s head,
that Alexis is Martha’s id, free at last."