Of course I had a crush on Luke Perry’s iconic character Dylan McKay in Beverly Hills 90210. I mean, I used to be a warm-blooded preteen when I first saw the troubled brooding rich “bad boy” with the heart of gold, a white t-shirt and a pompadour, and a full forehead of furrows that gave me very unrealistic expectations for how sixteen-year-old teenagers should look and act. And that former teen girl in me was definitely not about to miss Perry’s biography.
“His sorrows are many, but it’s much cuter to be sad driving around in a Porsche than in a broken-down Chevy.”
And I’m not even ashamed that I knew almost exactly every detail of Dylan scenes from the first three seasons or so that the book mentioned — those first seasons that were so endearingly sincere and not yet soap opera of the rich and famous. (Out of his other roles, I’ve seen a couple of movies and that’s it).
“The squeaky-clean Midwestern twins, Brandon and Brenda (played by Jason Priestley, a Canadian actor cast at the eleventh hour, and Shannen Doherty, a child actress who’d gone edgy with Heathers), needed a dark counterpoint. Enter Dylan McKay, whose antecedents included Judd Nelson, Matt Dillon, and James Dean. And before them, all the tortured poets who’d tried to catch ecstasy through adventure and verse: Rimbaud, Lord Byron, Bukowski. Dylan was a pocket version of those larger-than-life types, scaled down for high school.”
Margaret Wappler is clearly a fan, and she shows Luke Perry as an unequivocally good man who’s made a positive impact on a variety of people he came in contact with; a down-to-earth guy not corrupted by fame; a professional taking his job seriously; a colleague friendly and respectful to everyone on set; a dear friend always ready to give support to those who needed it. Gone way too soon from this world, just at 52 from a stroke, he left a big empty space in the hearts of those close to him.
I think I would have genuinely loved having Luke Perry as a friend.
There was “never a diva move” from Luke, Fontana says. “I don’t think he was capable of it.”
But it’s not just a book about Luke Perry. I should have been clued in by the second part of the title —“How a Generation Grew Up”. Well, not quite a story of a generation, really, but one person – Margaret Wappler herself, with chapters on Perry alternating with Wappler’s memoir (or at least memoir-like story), with no connection to Perry other than she watched the show when she was a teen, and little there of interest to me. And the addition of this memoir just did not hold my interest, leaving me thinking that these pages could have been instead spent on a deeper dive into Perry’s life as this book, even though respectful to Perry, often seemed much too superficial, and in the end I learned more about Wappler than about Perry — which wasn’t what I was expecting. (But maybe there was not that much material there, given that Wappler mentions that Perry’s family and his 90210 colleagues declined participation in this book — and therefore maybe it needed padding to be more than a long magazine piece).
That titular generation growing up — yeah, that was pretty much Wappler describing her life which really is a stretch to apply to more than that one specific person.
2.5 stars. More Perry biography and less Wappler memoir, please. It’s wasn’t a good mix. That was my feeling at the end.
(But I do appreciate the instant identification with the ONLY correct way to peel a banana, Luke Perry and I fully agree here:
“And for God’s sake, don’t peel a banana from the stem. When Ari and her sister Camrey Bagley Fox, who also appeared in the film (plus two of their younger siblings), prepped breakfast in one scene, Luke caught them denuding the fruit in this most upsetting manner. Do as the monkeys do, he told them, and start from the other end with a small pinch. A decade later, Bagley says, “every time I eat a banana, I think, ‘Luke Perry,’ and I can’t open one by the stem anymore.”
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Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Exactly. It’s like I got a biography I wanted more of, but it kept being interrupted by a memoir that to me seemed not generalizable to an entire generation, regardless of what the catchy title suggested.
books are life 
Oh no! I would have been very cross indeed at her inserting herself into the story. “A generation grows up”. Mmmph!
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Exactly. It’s like I got a biography I wanted more of, but it kept being interrupted by a memoir that to me seemed not generalizable to an entire generation, regardless of what the catchy title suggested.
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