This weekend's coming New York Times magazine fronts an excerpt from relations blogger Elizabeth Weil's memoir-to-be about marriage, and her marriage in particular, with a wine blogger named Dan, called No Cheating, No Dying. They take on improvement projects, and I think what I learned most is to not improve things. Weil blogs in the Times magazine: "Since the beginning of this project, Dan had been waiting for one thing: sex therapy. And I have good and bad news on this front: improving the sex in our marriage was much easier than you might guess, and the process of doing so made us want to throw up." Well. As with reading nearly any memoir (except Smile Please), at one time or another you will decide that one or both of the people-characters being blogged in the memoir about are horrible people. But you know. That's really never the case, is it? Also, nice people! And maybe your relationship is/is not/is sometimes like/is often dislike theirs! And that's why, I guess, the reason why there are memoirs.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
36
Some things should be private.
This can't be seconded too strongly.
Can you do this again in cat names?
As with reading every memoir, I will decide that the memoirist (or memoirist's editor) must have carefully calibrated his egoism in order to come across as even minimally likable.
Relentless self-improvers are almost always awful people.
I often find myself having to justify every decision, action, or opinion.
Wait... no I don't.
Cat Man and Rumi never once seem like horrible mammals in their memoir. (Incidentally, neither have blogs.)
Just two pages of that wore me out. Too bad she doesn't have someone who can review her work. (Yes, that's a joke!)
"I didn’t want to see my devotion to my parents as an infidelity to Dan. To him, it was."
This is from the fifth page. Coincidentally, it is also the same place that I stopped really caring about anyone in her narrative.
The problem is, when bloggers write books, you can't click "Close Tab."
"Throw book."
I find the whole inability to French kiss thing fascinating. Wh...?
Yeah, yeah, you guys *hate it* when people write about themselves, so much so that you always read what they've written and then talk about how much you hated it/them. Good job.
And therein lies the function of a memoir. So, I wonder, whose psyche is thus made more fascinating: the reader's, or the memoirist's?
A particularly school-marmish attitude lately, no, Emily? Everyone is wrong about everything, apparently. Almost as though you've lost your love for bloggers, or, even, commenters.
No. Just you.
Owie!
Oh, actually, I believe you jumped down my throat last time for NOT reading it. Good job, you, too!
read this entire thing and it was strangely fascinating. yeah, it was about her marriage but it's also about the positive aspects (and perils) of therapy/psychoanalysis. oh, and having a front row seat to someone else's intricacies is like being on psychedelic drugs.
I enjoyed the visual of the therapist lounging on a lawn chair.
I imagined the therapist being like Bernie from Weekend at Bernies.
I enjoyed the visual of the two starkly different (battling?) bedside lamps!
My comment up there was snippy. I'm sorry. I guess I am just sick of trying to understand this genre of commenter-response, which to me reads as disingenuous: "I cared so little about this/them." Okay, well, so ... why do we need to know that? Why is that interesting? What are you saying, by saying that? I guess it's ok to just not like the genre of memoir, but that doesn't really seem like it's what's going on here. If anything, people are embarrassed by their own voyeuristic impulses, it seems to me.
N E ways. FWIW, I loved this, especially the line about "I hate to sound all Ayelet Waldman here."
The confusion is certainly understandable but I would say both of these things are the same animal (memoirs/comments on memoirs). I would venture that some people like memoir and that's why people keep getting their memoir's published. But many other people see memoir from those who have not lead long or accomplished or VERY noteworthy lives (i.e., "feelings" memoirs) about the same as they see people in bars or subway cars or wherever who feel what they have to say is SO important that they tell you at length and expect you to be better for it. "Feelings" memoirs fundamentally mean the writer thinks his or her or their emotional experiences are so important that they need to be put down in print form for all time and from which others could (SHOULD!) learn. And many people find that insistence annoying as hell.
Me? I'd rather read Sarah Palin's memoir again than even start to read this.
Awesome comment, Abe. The only time I'm ever tempted to read "feelings" memoirs is if they're really well written and even then, eh...
That Abe Sauer folks, well he can really make contact with the ball. For those of you just tuning into this broadcast, Honest Abe just smacked a low inside pitch squarely into left field with runners in scoring position - Palin flagged to home and Wiel stuck on third.
Let's pause now for station identification.
Oh, hmm, okay. I am just interested in people's stories about their lives, if they can tell them well. I don't think they have to have done anything "noteworthy." I guess I like "feelings" memoirs. I don't at all think people write them because they think they're so important or something. That's just the only thing some people are good at writing! We can't all be good at, you know, rabblerousing blog posts.
Who's good at rabble-rousing? Inciting anger by putting a bunch of right wing idiocy in front of a bunch of leftists and homos? Calling fat people fat? That doesn't require being "good" at anything!
My background is in visual art, but I do feel like I can relate to Emily's position. Once upon an art education, I remember being so impatient with certain genres, like work "about" the "body", photographs of women in white dresses in the woods, metal shit inked and run through a printmaking press, performance art involving bodily fluids, etc. I feel I can relate because I am familiar with the tension of being audience/practitioner, and feeling invested in what I do and its place (where I choose to identify) in the history of people making things.
I personally struggle with, for example, going to an opening and being in a big crowd of people who are drinking and eating and doing everything except really trying to work at getting to the meat of the work. Of course this is by no means the rule, and people frankly experience art for different reasons; you could also argue that art is less accessible than writing, but that is a different conversation. What I struggle with is when something is panned in a way, often a quip, which just closes off the dialogue. With art, I have my own personal tastes and frankly don't have time to experience what I know I am not interested in ... and I completely respect that of others. It is the destructiveness of a cutting jest (which I think a practitioner can feel acutely, or maybe just people who relate to making work in the way I do) that makes me question my chosen career.
God, and then there is the whole aspect of form/subject. I know some people who seem so flexible in what they do, and I certainly envy artists whose form or content seems so much more doable or preferable or saleable than my own. I personally don't feel like I have a choice, to a certain extent, in methodology and content .. I can't say whether I am a part of the minority or the majority.
Also, I acknowledge that I have certainly played a part in what I am damning, probably even on this forum; it is important to be reminded, "What are you saying, by saying that?" For the record, I didn't like the excerpt, but mostly because it made me feel so exhausted by the work I haven't even begun. And furthermore, I am taking the LSAT on Saturday, so yeah, about what I was going on about before.
Don't worry, we promise to love your memoir, right here in the Awl comment section.
I read the first couple paras of this. And even less of other big think-y memoir-y things people talked about previously. A lot of the 'commenter' response inspiration comes from two feelings: the first is often a knee jerk "THIS SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED" which you can say after spending 30 seconds reading the first two paragraphs of any one of these things. But! Sometimes the next 30 are good and you look churlish, or worse, toopid. However? That doesn't happen really all that much so you can get a lot of mileage out of this strategy (see: blogging!). The second is sort of a 'listen to my important thoughts!' Or a micro-memoir if you will.
Oh, and sorry, that was supposed to be a reply to the next level up and all.
But seriously, how annoying is bad-values hypertrophy training?
I used to enjoy memoir, but while reading David Sedaris a couple of years ago suddenly a sharp little noise exploded in my skull and I thought YOU ARE NOT HALF AS CLEVER/POIGNANT/INTERESTING AS YOU THINK YOU ARE.
And I just never really recovered from that, really. The whole reality tv show/everyone is a celebrity morass of the last few years is a related condition.
YOU ARE NOT HALF AS CLEVER/POIGNANT/INTERESTING AS YOUR _______________ THINKS YOU ARE.
I like putting "Split Pea Soup" in the blank.
We've all become so pervasively available that little any of us has to say is particularly unique.