Cathy Alter - CRUSH: Writers Reflect on Love, Longing, and the Lasting Power of Their First Celebrity Crush

F irst crushes are enduring. It doesnt matter how old you are now, theres still an indelible imagethe boy who sat behind you in math class, the girl who lived next door, every junior counselor at your summer campetched into your memory.

Throw a celebrity into the mix and theres a whole new level of potency. Maybe it was David Cassidy making you feel like you didnt just think you loved himyou knew. Perhaps you stared at Farrah Fawcett and her red-swimsuit poster on your wall until you were convinced she was the only girl for you.

Both painfully real and wholly implausible, your first celebrity crush is a hormonal alchemy capable of producingas evidenced on the pages to followpoignant and funny stories that say much more about the admirer than the admired.

Celebrity crushes change and mold us into the people we will become, shaping our ideals, fueling our fantasies, aiding and abetting our conquests, and leading us to (or away from) the people we meet and fall in love with decades later.

Celebrities are our ideals in love, our best friends, our parental proxies, and more. They give us hopethat we are lovable, popular, and gorgeous enough (as, ahem, one of us here once believed) for Sting to definitely spot us in the nosebleed section of Madison Square Garden.

They offered us safe placeson the pages of Teen Beat magazine, in a darkened movie theater, or in front of the TV, nestled in a family of Partridgeswhere we could try on and try out feelings. Removed from the anxiety of actually having to talk to these gods and goddesses, we could instead dream up conversations while staring at their images plastered to our bedroom walls.

As one of our brilliant contributors writes: What else is a crush but a repository for our own passions and unfulfilled real-life relationships?

And that is the role that celebrities play. They are both knowable yet distant; familiar and remote. It is this dichotomy that produces intense desire, but also, because our passions are never returned, we must eventually deal with crushing disappointment. And so we move on.

Whether we feel the pull eight-year-old Stephen King felt seeing screen siren Kim Novak for the first time or empathize with Jodi Picoults crush on Donny Osmond, we understand their longing. Our parents may have called our first celebrity crushes puppy love, but for us these crushes were our earliest approximation of love and demanded to be taken seriously.

Sometimes our first celebrity crushes are the people we want to become. Ballet legend Mikhail Baryshnikov led Kimberly Dawn Neumann to dance, and cartoon character Speed Racer turned Jamie Brisick into a champion surfer. James Franco saw in River Phoenix both the young man and the actor he wanted to become.

This book started with the two of us talking about our celebrity crushes, Donny Osmond and David Cassidy. The more we explored the origins of our crushes, the more we realized how much these celebrities had influenced us and how our stories were deeper than just fleeting fancy. Which led us to wonder who influenced some of our own literary crushes. How did their crushes affect them and what did they think about them long after the initial crush subsided?

To find our contributors we turned to the eternal question that Bo Diddley put to music: Who do you love? Thirty-eight of our favorites have shared with us their most profound first crushes. They bring together emotional heft, brilliant wordplay, and deep insights into what it means to love someone with such one-sided fervor. Some contributors, like James Franco and Andrew McCarthy, have been the object of crushes and, in writing their essays, have turned the tables on themselves.

For us, the variety of voices and the depth of their prose achieve remarkable sweep and power. By including writers of various ages, ethnicities, orientations, and experiences, the essays examine how crushee and crusher reflect the era in which they were born.

The stories, while sometimes subtle, still manage to illuminate the social conventions and consciousness of the times. While its true that millions universally adored pop culture icons from Marilyn Monroe to Brad Pitt, the stories of our crushes are unique to each storyteller.

Even if you werent in love with Jared Leto like former Gawker-ette Emily Gould, the ability to relate, to share, to commiserate, to understand, is affirming. Weve all been there, whether your there was a superhero or, in the case of Andrew McCarthy, his worship of (and sexual awakening to) a super body.

If, as the late anthropologist Clifford Geertz suggested, culture can be summed up as an ensemble of stories we tell about ourselves, these crushes, like prehistoric insects trapped in amber, remind us of who we were, in all our brace-faced, unencumbered glory, when anything and everything was both possible and futile.