What is Meredith Brooks’ actual age?
Wikipedia says she’s 65 and was born in 1958, but a 1997 Los Angeles Times profile says she was 31 that year. The article notes the author and the singer met for breakfast near Brooks’ mid-Wilshire home. I’m not too familiar with LA diners, but I like to imagine that maybe it’s that one from Pulp Fiction.
If she was pretending to be eight years younger than she actually was (contractually, perhaps, she was not allowed to be older than 31 years old), then maybe she ordered a stack of blueberry pancakes and drank six cups of coffee from a ceramic mug. That’s a breakfast order the stomach of a nearly 40-year-old could not accommodate, despite what Gilmore Girls would put forward a mere three years later.
Brooks’ hit song Bitch is an anthem about a woman being unapologetically herself, so why was Meredith lying about her age? This information sent me into a bout of nostalgia poisoning that tumbled me aggressively down the rabbit hole, each tab in my browser multiplying like bubbles of useless trivia in an episode of Pop Up Video.
In my findings, I also picked up the tidbit that many people (who weren’t raised by VH1, I guess) thought the song Bitch was by Alanis Morrisette.
And isn’t it…ironic? This is all very much like that America Ferreira monologue at the tail end of Barbie (to paraphrase: women are criticized for being too young and too old, too driven, too domestic, etc). It is not the most nuanced take on feminism, I know. They could have just overdubbed that part with the COOL GIRL monologue from Gone Girl, methinks.
Meredith Brooks, who are you? Where are you? Were you feeling some kind of way because Alanis is 16 years your junior? Jagged Little Pill has sold 33 million copies worldwide, after all, and has become the soundtrack to its very own jukebox musical. I don’t know any other songs by Meredith Brooks. I do know I keep confusing her with Meredith Marks, Real Housewife of Salt Lake City, who has a son named Brooks. Is this synchronicity or the side effect of residing at the intersection of too many pop culture roads?
I saw a TikTok from a user who had never heard of Lilith Fair. It made me wonder if the creator of the video was also lying about her age, a ritual remaining timeless no matter how far society “progresses.” Did you know that Emma Stone, age 16, sang a rendition of Meredith Brooks’ Bitch on a 2004 VH1 reality competition called In Search of the Partridge Family? She probably wanted to seem older.
I know when I was 16 I was aching to be at least five years older, occasionally enveloping the metal of my braces with the smoke of a cigarette inhaled sneakily on the roof of my parents’ home. My parents certainly didn’t know I was smoking, and they didn’t know I was on the roof, but I wanted more secrets than those two clandestine acts could provide. It was 2005, and I thought being an autonomous woman meant carrying an air of mystique and a Marc Jacobs Stam bag. Almost 20 years have passed and I have never had either.
Coming of age never really changes and it never stops coming. I could be 16 pretending to be 21 or 39 pretending to be 31 and both would be a mechanism of coping or defense while navigating the polarities of girlhood. Nothing in between.
“…I've been numb, I'm revived
Can't say I'm not alive
You know I wouldn't want it any other way”