Marshall Sella has a fascinating profile of Cameron Diaz in this month's issue of GQ. To counter the pathological nature of celebrity journalism, Diaz insisted that the story allow her to respond midstream:
The reason Cameron Diaz is here at all is that (she says) she will never again sit for a standard profile-interview. Near enough, this is it. And she has a few salient points to make about celebrity journalism. So the idea (her idea) is as follows: We'll spend some time together, and I'll write it up. Then she'll elbow me off the page and respond -- busting me if I've misquoted her, addressing the strangeness of having the media create an omnipresent "Cameron Diaz" persona, and in general conveying what it's like to have your life turned into a weekly, wildly overpublicized sem-fictional soap opera. After that, bringing a knife to a gunfight, I'll respond to her response. And so on, back and forth.
And it works -- Sella's article helps us understand Diaz in a way that is impossible in the traditional semi-fictionalized format of glossy magazine profiles. Politicians and political journalists, take heed!
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