"It was the parents who felt the that the details of her condition and of the sexual assault needed to be in the book," Rick Bragg, author of her authorized biography of Jessica Lynch, explains to Time magazine. The parents calculated that the book would be "incomplete" without it. They were probably right.
Fame may last for only 15 minutes, in Andy Warhol's famous calculation, but it arrives quickly and requires instant attention lest it vanish before it can be fully exploited. The stories of these two women were written quickly, following soon after the two homecomings.
Fame even has its analysts and historians. Leo Braudy writes in "The Frenzy of Renown" that society is "so suffused with images, the tricks and gestures of the surface have become easily detachable from whatever substance they once signified." Rape, as Gertrude Stein would no doubt have told us, is a rape is a rape.
It makes little difference why we're famous. Details that once would have been considered an intrusion on privacy are aggressively made public now so they can be turned into a major motion picture. The gradations of privacy that were once controlled by the moral prescriptions of humility, self-respect and personal peace have been flattened to an all-inclusive bravado. One size fits all.
The television critics reduced the portraits of Jessica and Elizabeth to the "battle of the blondes." Hollywood once airbrushed blemishes and hushed up details, particularly sexual details. Children were especially sheltered from public exposure. Now heroines are presented with warts and all. If the bankable blemishes aren't really there, they'll paint them in. Humiliation is a badge of honor. Suffering isn't real unless everybody knows about it.
This does not inspire pity and fear so much as expose the greed and envy that invariably accompanies fame. The producers of the Jessica Lynch and Elizabeth Smart stories aren't sure of the size of the jackpot, but they're confident that they've hit it.