The last couple of weeks, which ideally I should have spent working on academic writing, I have instead been reading books that have nothing to do with anything. I read Eula Biss’ Having and Being Had (sorry to my friend whose book I stole) and then Rachel Cusk’s Outline and Annie Ernaux’ s Exteriors, and oh! Famesick by Lena Dunham and Strangers by Belle Burden. All books written memoir essay style, by rich white women I presumably have nothing in common with. Yet I read these books, honest tirades of their lives, a retelling of their narratives, a deep dive into the female psyche with rapt attention. 

Eula Biss, a critic of class, lives in a palatial house in Chicago, and the book centres on a collection of essays on work, owning property, and capitalism. And what it means to be in a certain class– what it means to own things when you move up the ladder. These markers of ‘American success,’ according to her, are things that she holds in relation to how she views her relationships, the world, and herself. How her dissociation from her own life was predicated on the accumulation of material goods. This materiality she roots back through Marx, Frederici, and David Graeber to try to explain her own alienation, as a person participating in the labor market but not as someone who is a ‘laborer’ in that she is an intellectual producing work in a university setting. Biss spends much of the book weaving her narrative through these Marxist texts, her own self being created in the space where she explains events, but not as an active participant, but as a viewer and analyst of her own actions. A memoir where everything has an explanation. Biss masterfully gives you a glimpse of her world without really letting us in. There are nods to how she lives her life, what she does, but there is no way to access her; instead, what we see is the aftermath of her sanitized attempt at preserving and presenting to us an intellectualized version of her life. I am sure her therapist would be upset with this. 

Biss is, however, in the long list of writers, zealously trying to show how many books she has read instead of what she really feels about things. Authorial intent is obfuscated under the garb of a lazy literature review– maybe that was the intention all along? But I would be remiss to fault Biss for this, after all, she is writing non-fiction essays, and those things tend to have a New Yorker structure to them– a new paragraph but begin with a throwaway reference to another text lest we start to believe the writer has their unique point of view. 

Cusk moves away from this essayist style, but retains a detached tone in her entanglements with the people she is writing about. Outline is premised on a set of conversations Cusk has with people she meets on a quaint Greek island where she is teaching a writing workshop. These conversations are told through her version of what happened; although they happen sequentially in the timeline of when she met these people, the conversations themselves are analyzed and then reported instead of being given to us as conversations. I guess that would make it a play and not a novel. Outline is a stunning book.  Cusk is contemplative and cares about listening, or maybe selectively picking on things that she thinks are important. Although I don’t know if I would have enjoyed a book entirely premised on small talk, perhaps that can be Cusk’s next foray. But of course, the conversations are then layered with her own sense of morality and positioning of the world. The report is then premised on how she analyzed the specific moment she is talking about, how she read the mood, and that is what we are getting. Yet immersiveness is something that Cusk keeps at arm's length. You can see yourself as a viewer watching in, but never experience the writing in the same way you experience life? Someone will say that that is an odd requirement. I don’t mean to assert that that is something you need to do to produce great writing, but it does seem like that is the thing that keeps repeating itself in this genre of writing about the self. The more you dig deeper into yourself, the more you become a passive recipient of the experiences of your own life. Do what you will with that information. 

I recommended The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector to my friend recently. He finished the book on a train ride, and when he texted me to say that he had read it, all I could really say was, doesn’t the book feel so claustrophobic? It was a claustrophobic book; it is a book that I tried very hard to write about, but couldn’t. But I felt nauseous when I finished it, as if I was there with the protagonist, the absurd abstractness of her existence felt more real to me than my own life. I wonder what the detached first person has done to this form of storytelling? And I wonder if the need to know yourself has become so deeply individualized that we forget that a lot of life we live is not really inside our head, but as a projection of how we live outside of it. And that interiority is not necessarily the devil here, but the analytical frame of this project– where the world is what you make of it, and now how you experience it. 

And you would wonder what this question has to do with Dunham and Burden? After all, weren’t those books meant to be a tell-all of their lives, of the strange underbelly of indie Hollywood, and of the repercussions of giving up independence for love.  I read both Famesick and Strangers in one sitting– they flow easily, and my need for gossip is more than that for high-quality literature. Dunham and Burden certainly draw you into their world, it is just a world that is so far removed that the realistic quality of their lived lives pushes me to scoff at the issues that seem to plague their lives. I am sympathetic towards both; they WERE wronged, and they were women who fought for what was theirs. And I don’t mean to be the kind of reader who, if the character isn’t me, I don’t like the book. I don’t think relatability is a strength; in fact, the least relatable books have been the ones that I have enjoyed the most. I mean that the narrative storytelling in these memoirs is so consuming from just the one person telling it that I wonder if it quenches the thirst for more.

Dunham is characteristically honest, even if she wants to be given a pat on the back for recognizing that her behaviour might have been the problem in certain parts of her life. Burden designs her husband almost like a cartoon villain, which I am sure he contributed to, but I could not really see him outside of the version that Burden sketches. Obviously, you could raise a host of ethical questions. Is it fair to do this to the person? Was Jack Antonoff the devil’s spawn in hanging out with Lorde as his partner suffered through life-threatening surgeries? Was Burden’s James really a swindling, two-bit, cheating scum and deadbeat dad who just flipped one evening and left his life? I don’t know if those are questions worth asking. The New Yorker did a deep dive on Burden’s divorce settlement and her finances and poked factual holes in her account. They found many. I don’t know if I really care about the facts of the situation, 8 million, 10 million, they really are all the same to me. The question they really should have been asking is how Burden has created the world that she lives in. The nostalgic glow of her childhood and the relationship with James are all so wonderfully constructed that it seems like a fairytale broke one fine day. That construction reminds me more of a Wattpad fanfiction story than it does of life. That is the honesty that is missing in Burden's memoir, oh, and also an editor. 

Then again, what really is honesty? Has the genre of the memoir moved our world inwards and muddled perceptions? Have we really stopped looking at how we are perceived instead of how we perceive things? Have you stopped feeling at all, and instead just think and think and think through every thought uttered and created? Perhaps this is the question I will live with this summer.