Annals of Narcissism: On Daphne Merkin
"Recently I arrived at what I consider to be a dramatic new understanding of the concept of change." The quote-unironic!-is the first sentence of a 1989 Times article by Daphne Merkin, the writer whose chosen form is the personal history (her one novel, Enchantment, is about as fictional as Primary Colors, and she is the author of a memoir already). But little has changed, in tone or content, in the twenty years that have intervened between that "dramatic new understanding" and "A Journey Through Darkness," the 8000-word account of her depression that was the cover article of yesterday's New York Times magazine.
In memoirs, as with so much else, it comes down to: celebrities and the rest of us. There will be incredible nuggets in, say, Rue McClanahan's autobiography-it's just a fact. But the rest of us need to try a lot harder and write a lot better if we're going to make people care about those years we spent high or the time Dad raped us. The best non-McClanahan personal histories telescope outward, starting with the writer's experience, but somehow along the way picking up implications, consequences, interest!
Daphne Merkin's pieces, on the other hand, always start with an intriguing subject-family, or class, or sexuality, or motherhood-and inexorably wind up being All About Her.
This narcissism fails even her own criteria for self-revelation, defined in 2006, when she told an interviewer: "I have very strong feelings about self-revelation. It is an art. Tina Brown once said to me, 'The art of self-exposure is not simply catharsis.' When I write personally, I truly try and think: 'If I were reading about me, would I want to know this much? Have I gone on too much here?'"
So this piece about Merkin's depression, as it goes on too much, fails even to harrow-the very least any good illness memoir can do. And it's because not much happens. The piece refers to the writer's lifelong ("I do know that by the age of 5 or 6…I had begun to be apprehensive about what lay in wait for me") battle with the disease, and comes into focus around her 2008 hospitalization. The main drama, picked up for a paragraph or two, is whether or not she will opt for the scary but newly fashionable electro-convulsive therapy that may give her relief. Will she?! Won't she?! (She doesn't.)
In fact, she thinks (or projects) that her Freudian analyst is perhaps pushing ECT because of Merkin's fame:
Perhaps I had frightened him with my insistent talk of wanting to cut out for good; perhaps he didn't want to be held responsible for the death of a patient who compulsively wrote about herself and would undoubtedly leave evidence that would tie him to her.
Among other ways that this does not make sense, it might have occurred to her that suicides are incapable of writing confessional essays from beyond the grave.
It's been fully eight years since Salon declared "Depression mania!" and asked, "Why has a cultural cottage industry sprung up around the most isolating of illnesses?" William Styron's Darkness Visible, the touchstone of literary writing about depression, came out in 1990. Andrew Solomon's Noonday Demon, the pharmaceutical heir's account of both our cultural and his own depression, won the 2001 National Book Award.
Pretending, as Merkin does, that depression remains a little-known, broadly ignored condition is disingenuous. (Though not nearly as disingenuous as her dubious "disclaimer," in a March 21 blame-the-victims Times op-ed piece about Bernie Madoff, that she had "a sibling who did business with him," by which she meant her brother Ezra–who is being sued by, among others, Mort Zuckerman, the New York Law School, and New York University for, in some cases, running a negligent "feeder fund" for Madoff's Ponzi schemes.
So, if there's no real story here with Merkin, we can at least expect a good story. Or, not. Merkin's prose is flat and unevocative; the best she can muster to describe herself is as "lost in the Gothic kingdom of depression." (This writing style may itself be a sign of depression.)
She remains as self-congratulatory as she was in 1989, when she declared herself "daringly open to the untried and untrodden on an intellectual level." As usual, while discussing processes much larger than any individual, she claims center stage: "You could say that the history of depression medication and my personal history came of age together, with me in the starring role of a lab rat." After the Madoff disclaimer became a debacle, Merkin defended her piece by saying that she "had something of sufficient interest to say that had not been previously aired." Similarly, her reason for pulling through her latest bout with depression is focused on her indispensable voice: "I had things I wanted to say."
Zachary Woolfe grew up on the South Shore of Long Island, tutors Upper East Side high-schoolers by afternoon/early evening, and enjoys opera and himself. He also writes about the U.S. Open for The New York Observer.
This post was untried and untrodden on an intellectual level, because I didn't read it.
I believe Merkin is one of those rare persons whose outward appearances are in perfect aligment with their inner selves.
http://bit.ly/CqGJW
Thanks. At least as presented, her life is no different from that of anyone of the tens of millions of people who suffer from depression today (but with much more human compassion around and access to advanced pharmaceuticals), but yet she thinks it is. Depression as a unique condition was much more interesting in the time when there were no other solutions than permanent hospitalization, primitive electro-shock that caused your hair to fall out, and debilitating addictive drugs that caused at the least permanent tardive dyskinesia. My mom could write that story if she weren't dead.
Mr. Woolfe, your complaint is more properly directed to the New York Times Magazine –they had a choice about what they would publish. It is also known the NYT Mag has a love of stories in which navel lint is explicated. In their defense, they gave fair warning of what the piece was and I fairly ignored it.
When I read this:
"I had begun to be apprehensive about what lay in wait for me"
I couldn't help but think of a caveman's five- or six-year-old kids, who may have been apprehensive.
Then thought: maybe terror banishes depression.
Stages of life (normative):
"Who am I?"
"I am what I am."
"Is this it?"
"Oh well."
Stages of life (subset):
"Who am I?"
"Hey, look at me!"
"Hey, look at me!"
"Why did you stop looking? At me?"
Stages of life (sub-subset):
“Who am I?â€
"Follow my blog!"
“Follow me on Tumblr!â€
“Follow me on Twitter!â€
“I'm quitting the Internet; want to know why?â€
Didn't Kierkegaard write a "Stages on Life's Way"?
S.K. will cure depression. For sure.
The presentation of that article was weird, as though it were something new and different and maybe even a bit edgy; I guess the art director, knowing it was a retread, overcompensated.
Anyone who could have written at least as compelling an essay as Ms. Mopey Merkin, shake your fist at the screen in impotent rage.
Thinking about how much better this silly thing might've been is depressing.
Having a mother and sister much like Ms. Merkin, I felt like I've already lived her story and didn't really need to read about it.
You feel sorry for the depressed person, you do your best to help them, hold their hand, show up in the middle of the night to rescue them, but ultimately, you resent that your life is held hostage by their disease.
And then you feel guilty about thinking such a thing.
So my best wishes to her daughter….and my admiration to her sister.
I thought the NYT article succeeded as high concept: nothing happens story-wise, the prose lacks emotional tone, the themes are all of self-involvement to the point of autism, and yet–it is easy to lose oneself in its repetitive drone. Seems a pretty good simulation of depression, no? I certainly doubt the editors were implying this was something groundbreaking.
Being a doped-up manic-depressive (though with age the mania has pretty much stopped) I have to say that Merkin's piece did a pretty good job, perhaps unintentionally, of conveying one essential truth about depression: it's just not very interesting, for either the depressed or his/her family & friends. And it does suck that you don't look like anything is wrong with you, so your less enlightened family assume that's actually the case. However, mania is much more interesting, both to experience and to read about. Try Kay Redfield Jamison's autobiography. It blows anything Merkin's written out of the water.
This post and the comments that follow are disturbing. You all – particularly you, hockey mom and Bohan – are apparently experts on depression. I have a feeling, however, that many less-learned folks found this first hand-account of the disease enlightening.
Also, narcissism? The author herself accepts this trait, and abhors it.