This is probably more movie-related than book-related, but I read it over at The New York Times Books page, so that’s close enough.

On March 6, 2008, Tim Arango, in an article titled “Esquire Publishes a Diary That Isn’t”, reported upon a diary account written by Lisa Taddeo for the April Esquire. The article, “The Last Days of Heath Ledger”, is told in the first-person as if penned Sunset Bldv.-style¹ by the recently-deceased star of the modern cinema classics 10 Things I Hate About You and A Knight’s Tale,² who sadly dispatched himself ‘pon the dull blade edge of a prescription drug overdose in January.

As Arango says, this all has the whiff of a gimmick about it, and Taddeo is, apparently, somewhat of a repeat offender in the area of what Arango terms “journalistic stunts”. Amongst other flights of journalistic fancy, she has done a faux article by the real-life baseball player Derek Jeter (“an extended meditation on sports, celebrity and mortality”); a totally fabricated cover story on an invented Hollywood “it” girl provided with the hoax-tastic appellation “Allegra Coleman”; and some fallacious profiling of R.E.M. front man and generally queer sort of duck Michael Stipe, about whom most people would, I’d venture, believe near anything.

David Granger, editor-in-chief of Esquire Magazine, is quick to deflect any charges that the piece on Ledger is exploitative, but rather says that the notion to do it was born out of curiosity about a man who, despite not being a big celebrity, nevertheless found himself on the receiving end of a weird outpouring of public grief over his mysterious and accidental death.

In any event, you can read all about it by following the link that I provided for you above. Mostly, I brought up the topic in order to quote this passage from Arango’s article:

Her article, published in the April issue, which will be on newstands next week, finds Mr. Ledger eating Moroccan food with Jack Nicholson in London, returning to New York and partying at the downtown nightspot Beatrice Inn, eating steak and eggs at a cafe in Little Italy and wolfing down a banana-nut muffin as his last morsel of food.

None of this is exactly true. “The Last Days of Heath Ledger,” written in the first person as if it were Mr. Ledger’s own diary, is a fictionalized account of his last days in London and New York and ponders the indignities of celebrity.

All things considered, there are worse epitaphs. As is probably normal when confronted by somebody else’s mortality—especially somebody roughly your own age and almost, but not quite, as handsome as you are—one necessarily reflects in some measure upon his own, and I simply can’t help but wonder what the diary of my last days would read like.

Just substitute “ate Moroccan food with Jack Nicholson in London” with “stopped at Wendy’s for the $1.19 small chili—was surprised and a little bit sad that it was no longer $0.99—and ate it alone in front of CNN”, and “returned to New York City and partied at Beatrice Inn” with “returned to my Fayetteville apartment and watched Transformers on DVD followed by the special features on disc two—regretted that I didn’t have time to watch Michael Bay’s director’s commentary before I had to return the discs to the library”, and there you have it.³

Okay, well it isn’t the stuff of Esquire Magazine, but it ain’t bad.