Amber Tamblyn's Dark Sparkler: The Actress Talks Poetry, Lindsay Lohan, and More

AT: Oh, trust me, when she offered I was like, if somebody hits me with a car, I'll be ready to die happy.

And how did you get David Lynch and Marilyn Manson to illustrate some of the stories?

AT: I just kept making this book more and more difficult for myself, it's beyond comical! Originally, Manson was going to do several pieces, and it was going to be a collaboration just between the two of us. When he had another album come out, we thought it may be more interesting to have this sort of schizophrenic work amongst it where not one piece is similar to the other. He ended up making the florescent piece for Sharon Tate, which I originally sent to David Lynch, but he really did not care for that one.

Really! Why?

AT: He didn't understand why that moment [of her death] needed to be revisited. I realized it's probably a generational thing. That experience was so, so terrible for people that were around then. I was able to tell a story without feeling any pain or personal attachment to it, which is the opposite of the first piece I wrote, initially for Pank magazine, about Brittany Murphy.

Were you guys close?

AT: I saw her all the time at auditions because we were the same age. I remember seeing her cover of People after she died—a beautiful picture of her in a beautiful dress. I wrote the poem right after her death.

I think your exact wording in the poem was, "The Country says good things about the body. They print the best photos; the least bones, the most peach."

AT: Right. [The media] didn't glamorize her life per se but sort of immortalized her when in reality she died very tragically, and then her husband died very tragically—it's still surrounded in mystery to this day. It was sort of a love letter to her from me, a girl who was born and raised in Los Angeles.

How did you go about choosing the other actresses to highlight?

AT: We went through, I'm telling you, thousands and thousands of names of actresses from all over the world and who had died close to me in age. The book is very much an exploration of my own growth and experience growing up in the industry.

In a lot of these poems, it seems like the villain is oftentimes the media. What is its overall message?

AT: It's about death but ultimately about rebirth—my rebirth. The entire epilogue is about me going crazy, starting to write poems about these actresses, some of whom aren't even all real. Don't go looking online for Laurel Gene or Elizabeth Pine…But in there, there is a poem that starts, "I took a break from writing about the dead and drinking from writing about the dead to walk around my childhood neighborhood. Everything's for rent. Or for sale, for ten times the amount its worth…My childhood neighborhood is a shrine to my success, and I'm a car with a bomb inside, ready to pull up in front of it and stop pretending." I so wish someone like Brittany could have written something for themselves that tells the truth of their experience.