Five or six years ago, on some grey Sunday afternoon in London, a friend and I went to see The Wizard of Oz at the National Film Theatre. I'm not sure why we went. I don't like Judy Garland much and the Munchkins actually frighten me.


Judy Garland as Dorothy asleep in the poppy field in The Wizard of Oz.

About 20 minutes in, just as the little Munchkins had begun to pursue Judy, chanting "follow the yellow brick road" over and over in a menacing fashion, I leant over and said to my friend: "Creepy, isn't it?"

I must have spoken louder than I realised. Suddenly, people all over the auditorium whipped around, faces taut with disapproval. One lady had tears in her furious eyes; a man in the row in front of me hissed: "Why don't you just leave?" I felt hurt and confused - it was just a film!

Well, I'm sorry. Sorry Judy, sorry Susie Boyt. I didn't know then what I know now: that The Wizard of Oz is not just a film, it's a religious service, a meeting place for believers in Judy.

My Judy Garland Life - Boyt's account of her life-long crush on Judy - has explained the mystery and cleared up any lingering resentment. I was an unknowing heretic among the faithful as they worshipped at her ruby slippers.

Judy Garland fans are experts in devotion, and won't tolerate any criticism of their idol. They have an unspoken pact never to mention anything negative about her life - no talk of suicide attempts or swearing, collapse or diva tantrums.

"Some crazy-good fans believe that speaking about Judy Garland's difficulties in any way can still do her harm," writes Boyt, and it's not clear she disagrees.

Boyt herself has made the pilgrimage to Judy's grave in the Ferncliff cemetery outside Manhattan, to weep, leave custard-coloured roses and packets of Judy's favourite menthol B&H

Boyt's devotion to Judy began when she was about six. She was a fat, plain child, the one square in a family of cool eccentrics (her father is the painter Lucian Freud), easily overwhelmed by emotion.

"As a young child it seemed to me that all anyone said to me was, 'You must learn to toughen up. You mustn't take everything to heart so.'" Then she met Judy on the big screen, as Dorothy, and there was an instant "tessellation of spirit, accompanied by thick bolts of not just fellow feeling, but of fellow being".

"When I first saw quite how strong Judy's feelings were, I felt both enormous respect and a sort of wonderful validation," Boyt says.

"I love the notion I get from her that people with very strong feelings are the world's best citizens and that very painful feelings and very jubilant ones are absolutely as good as each other. These ideas made sense of life to me when nothing very much else did."

It's not just Judy that Boyt fixates on; her obsessions pop up all through the book.

My favourite passage is one in which she explains the appeal of a particular biscuit: "The lure of cooked sugar, its scent and its promise, then the moist chewy texture beneath the crisp first bites, the potentially harsh note of ginger reprimanding, mellowing then vying with consummate sophistication for supremacy over the plentiful drops of chocolate that studded the biscuit's face." Honestly, the woman's a fruit loop.

Boyt also has a very Judy-ish tendency to offer up all the most personal and potentially humiliating details of her life - perhaps in the hope that a reader might feel a little better about theirs.

One particularly embarrassing moment comes when she arranges to meet her favourite teacher again as an adult. "I had planned that our meeting might be excruciating for I have felt excruciation many, many times and there are far worse feelings. I really loved you with all my heart, I would say. Your kindness during a difficult time for me made the difference between - and no exaggeration here - sinking and swimming."

Please don't say that, Susie, please don't. Susie doesn't care.

A lesser woman might have held back from exposing the really frightening depths of her love for Judy, but Boyt bares all. Here she is just before her meeting with Judy's daughter, Liza Minnelli: "It struck me forcibly, the bald blank truth, and I gasped at the realisation. There was literally nothing that Liza Minnelli could ask me to do to which I would say no. I would give her anything and drop everything. I would follow her anywhere, like the passage about Ruth in the Bible that her mother so admired."

Is Susie Boyt joking? Yes and no. She's not so far over the rainbow that she can't see the comic side of her passion, but even so it's a relief to think that My Judy Garland Life might be a sort of exorcism.

She ends with a theatrical farewell to Judy: "Goodnight Judy. Goodnight."

I hope she means it.


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