That was way harsh, Tai

So, as you either know about by now or absolutely won't care about once I tell you, Brittany Murphy died at the age of 32 this week. It's hard to say why I'm as upset about this as I am--celebrity deaths rarely affect me, and it's not as though I was a HUGE Brittany Murphy fan so that this just brings my world tumbling down.

Part of it is that she was in two of my most favorite movies of all time, and two that were pretty formative for me. The first of those, Clueless, was her breakout role and one of her best-known. She's fabulous in it.

The second is Drop Dead Gorgeous, where she plays Lisa Swenson, a misfit not totally unlike Tai, her character from Clueless. Sort of awkward, very sweet, always hilarious.

Both Clueless and Drop Dead Gorgeous were huge movies for me. They shaped my sense of humor, my sense of style, maybe even my sense of self the way that movies only can before you graduate from high school. And in both cases I related way more to the Brittany Murphy character than the pretty blonde protagonist (Alicia Silverstone and Kirsten Dunst, respectively). They're silly high school movies, but at the same time they're subversively funny and with great heart. One of them is almost always my go-to when I'm having a bad day and want to watch something fun.

As has been well documented across the internet, after those movies she got very blonde and very very thin and started playing more ingénue types. People speculated that she was doing a lot of drugs or developed anorexia. People have, of course, speculated that one or both of these things caused her death.

It just makes me sad that, whatever happened, the world lost such a great comic actress and such a part of my teenage life. It also breaks my heart and turns my stomach how the entertainment shows and magazines and blogs all assume it was drugs or disordered eating and, frankly, we don't know. We don't know her life or her husband or her medical history. Why can't we just remember fondly her bizarre, hilarious, snorting kind of giggle? Or at least keep our damn mouths shut until we actually KNOW something--anything?

Anyway, as Kevin Smith apparently tweeted, Brittany, I hope you're rolling with the homies somewhere nice. I'll miss you.