Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know: A Review of A Good Bad Boy

Guest Post

Vallie Lynn Watson and I have bonded over many things: “One Tree Hill,” living in Wilmington, fondue, bamboo plants. But one of our strongest connections has been over our mutual love for the late Luke Perry. We’ve dined together on Perry’s birthday, exchanged mournful messages on the anniversary of his death, and made more Dylan references than I can count. Lynn even named her dog “McKay” after Perry’s “Beverly Hills, 90210” character.

So when I contemplated having someone read A Good Bad Boy: Luke Perry and How a Generation Grew Up and write about it for TeenDramaWhore, Lynn was the obvious choice. After all, she’s an author herself and teaches creative writing for a living. Below, Lynn expertly distills where A Good Bad Boy excels — and where author Margaret Wappler’s narrative choices fall short.

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Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know: A Review of A Good Bad Boy: Luke Perry and How a Generation Grew Up by Margaret Wappler

By Vallie Lynn Watson

I will start with what I hope is the highest of compliments: I wish I had written A Good Bad Boy: Luke Perry and How a Generation Grew Up. The title suggests a fantastic and somewhat timely, post-MeToo premise, and one close to my heart and psyche: the character of Dylan McKay, and how that “Beverly Hills, 90210” character set, or at least strongly reinforced, my early personal predilection for the sensitive, troubled type. 

Author Margaret Wappler gives us more than a simple biography or deep dive into Luke Perry’s life, which was cut short by a stroke in 2019 when he was only 52. The narrative is an ambitious juxtaposition of Wappler’s own memoir against sections about Perry and the characters he played. These two perspectives trade out in every other chapter, a constant rotation. Wappler seemingly aims to connect to Perry in that her personal recountings — framed as being about a character named Margaret — are tangentially about growing up in a world of gender power imbalance. Perry’s characters sometimes experienced this imbalance, and Perry himself seemed to recognize the real-life imbalance between the sexes and served as an ally for women.

Sound confusing? It isn’t, exactly, but the split narratives also never fully connected for me. If the personal memoir sections had offered a first-person point of view, it might have helped a bit. Wappler instead presenting herself as a character named Margaret installs an immediate sense of removal, as though her own story is a fictional one. Alternatively, presenting it as pure fiction might have also worked, because if those sections had been fiction, the author could have taken more liberties to creatively parallel what was happening in the Perry sections of the book.

The lack of cohesion between the stories is a disappointment and a missed opportunity; they’re both interesting, but Wappler’s own story is never fully realized. She skims over what we’re supposed to assume from the book’s title are her own “good bad boy” relationships. She delves into family conflict, sporadically, with zero discernible connection to anything to do with Perry. I found myself wanting Wappler to unpack each section in light of what she’d learned about herself via Perry and his characters, but the only flicker is offered in the epilogue, in which “Margaret” discusses the process of writing about Perry. Still, the only real explanation about why the book was written this way was that it was meant “to attempt some sort of art in duality.” I suppose that, by lumping this juxtaposition under the broad subtitle “How a Generation Grew Up,” Wappler’s attempt at artistic duality can’t be considered fully unsuccessful.

Perhaps having to share the pages across Perry’s story and her own necessitated extreme concision, which resulted in a sacrifice of development and, even more importantly, personal investigation. Consequently, the two sections mostly read as two different pieces of writing, not necessarily even by the same author, that someone thoughtlessly cut-and-pasted into rotating sections of the same document. I would have liked to read a version of this book that wasn’t from a big publishing house like Simon & Schuster, as I wonder if they were too focused on editing this book as a Hollywood tell-all of sorts. An academic or small press may have allowed Wappler more room for psychological and sociological exploration, and may have championed her voice more strongly.

It may be surprising then that despite these critiques, I still recommend the book to any Perry fan. Those sections aren’t groundbreaking, but they’re comforting and accessible. I learned a few new things (the Leslie Jordan bits are particularly charming), and I smiled at the things I already knew (those pot-bellied pigs Perry kept as pets!). And I cried, more than once, particularly at the recounting of Perry’s visit to Jason Priestley’s hospital bedside after Priestley’s near-fatal car crash in 2002, when he managed to speak his first word post-accident: “Coy,” Perry’s rarely used first name. This anecdote was one of many that made clear Perry touched the lives of everyone he came into contact with. 

All of this presents its own duality for my experience as a reader. I didn’t not enjoy what feels like a modular rough draft of Wappler’s own personal memoir, and I am impressed with her intention. I just want so much more! (And, wish I’d had the idea first!)

Vallie Lynn Watson is the author of the novel A River So Long (Luminis Books); her Pushcart-nominated short stories appear widely in literary journals such as Hobart, PANK, and Bending Genres. Watson teaches fiction in the MFA program at McNeese State University, where she edits the magazine Boudin. She hunts for sea glass in her spare time.