(Picture from Amazon)
I’ve been burning through books this week. Two books and half the fiction section of a lit journal in three days so far, and I’m about to start another book. After the next book or two, I think I’ll have the reading-urge out of my system so that I can seriously write again.
My latest completion was Don’t Kiss Them Goodbye by Allison Dubois. Ms. Dubois, of course, is the psychic on whom Medium, the best TV show ever, is based, and the “dead people” joke above was hers, not mine. The book is very rough–it was kind of like reading a tell-all by the latest celebrity-of-the-week–but it shed some interesting light on the inspiration behind the best show ever. Like Patricia Arquette’s character, the real Allison Dubois has three daughters named Ariel, Bridget, and Marie, she has a husband named Joe who is an aerospace engineer, and they live in Arizona. While Dubois does forensic work on missing persons for a police department, she only handles two cases a year, and she doesn’t get paid for it. And while most of the TV character’s visions come from dreams, the real life Allison Dubois rarely has dreams. Instead, she reads people much the same way John Edward does on Crossing Over–she just talks to a person and “reads” them, or she touches objects and tells the future or past through her feelings.
Throughout the book, Ms. Dubois argues that psychics are real. She says that there are plenty of them around, but many do not share their gifts openly. She talks about kids, and how we need to encourage kid psychics to use, rather than hide, their gifts. She talks at length about being misunderstood. This misunderstanding and feeling of not fitting in, of course, was one of the main themes during the first few seasons of Medium.
I’m not a hard skeptic, but I’m skeptical. She writes a bit about how Osama Bin Laden is bad, but if all these psychics really could talk to the dead, why haven’t any of those thousands of Bin Laden’s dead victims stepped forward to tell the many existing psychics where he is? She also praises a Professor Gary Schwartz, who later betrays her trust after the publication of her book–why didn’t she see this coming?
A point that she makes is that all people are human and make mistakes, and maybe the missing Bin Laden and the broken relationship with Schwartz just happen to be among these mistakes. I love the show, and I won’t judge. Anyway, what do you all think? Are psychics real?
Overall, the book was interesting, and I recommend it. It was great reading about the inspiration behind the TV show. Clearly there was an amazing story behind the show, and I’m glad she shared it, even if I am somewhat skeptical.
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