Michael Malice is a very successful celebrity ghostwriter, co-authoring books with D.L. Hughley and Bret Michaels, and then there was this one time Harvey Pekar wrote a book about him. For his seventh book, he’s doing something crazy. Also, he’s never going back to North Korea.
“I would never go back there,” Malice tells ANIMAL. “People go to the gulag if they have a newspaper with his pic on the floor. I would be tortured and killed, or maybe just killed.”
Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il — sounded “too weird” for any editor, so naturally, Malice turned to Kickstarter.
Unlike with his other celebrity co-authors, Malice has never met the dictator, but he did go to North Korea and bring back a suitcase of books upon books upon books and books written about and by Kim John Il, books no one in the US has ever read or ever will. But it’s full of very insightful things.
“Some are his life story, and some are the story of Korea,” Malice explains. “Kim Jong Il was born just as Korea was being freed from Japan, so he’s kind of like their Forrest Gump, being at every event of historical importance. Except life is like a box of torture. It was not at all a given that Kim Jong Il would take over for his father, Kim Il Sung. Dynasties are the antithesis of communism — and they had to change their dictionaries to reflect that! So his magical birth stories were to feed the idea that he was ‘destined’ to take over, that he was the ‘Spirit of Mt. Paektu,’ a sacred mountain of the Korean people. It is literally in many ways a copy/paste of the Jesus myth. They not only invented the location of his birth — like myself, he was born in the Soviet Union — but they literally put up a fake log cabin that’s supposed to be Dad’s ‘secret hideout’ where Kim Jong Il was born.”
But how did he die?
“Like any good romantic hero, Kim Jong Il dies of a broken heart,” Malice says. “His father, Kim Il Sung, died of overwork (supposedly) signing a document regarding reunification during his last moment. A giant granite slab bearing that last signature is on display in Panmunjom.”
This sounds like a controversial book. This sounds like it might upset people.
“I don’t care if people are offended,” Malice told the Observer. “I care about the fact that they are a nation in crisis and no one knows what to do–and therefore, no one wants to talk about it. The first solution, war, is crazy. So if people have to get upset, good. It’s one of the most upsetting places on earth, and if we don’t understand their perspective we can’t possibly change it.”
Speaking of gulags, how about an autobiography of Putin next?
“I’M HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO,” Malice tells us. “David Bowie, CALL ME!”
