The Rainbow Comes and Goes

“We're all prophets when we have the benefit of looking backwards.” This is a quote I heard in an audio drama podcast (called 1865) a few weeks ago, and it's just stuck with me since. It's kind of a rephrasing of the title of this book “The rainbow comes and goes.” There are bright days and there are dark days, and sometimes we just have to accept that in order to keep going.

I didn't know much about Anderson Cooper (other than he's a hot silver fox on the news) or his mother Gloria Vanderbilt before reading this. It's structure is based off of emails the two shared over the course of year in order to understand each other more. Throughout the book Anderson Cooper asks questions, Gloria Vanderbilt responds, and if necessary Cooper provides context for the response before following up or asking a new question. It's a structure that I think could get stale if I read it from cover-to-cover in a few days, but this was a book I read over an extended period of time. Whenever I needed a break from schoolwork, I'd read through a couple Q&A sections before picking my work back up.

Overall, I think the insights and experiences shared were interesting, but I do wish that Cooper and Vanderbilt would have acknowledged the extent to which their familial social capital and privilege allowed them to do what they each did with their lives. They lead abnormal lives, not everybody goes out to dinner parties with the who's who of Elite Society on the regular. Obviously, if you're reading an autobiography/memoir of two celebrities, I guess that's sort of an implicit element of the story but I would have appreciated the explicit nod to the extraordinary elements of their lives.