"Let Me Tell You What I Mean" by Joan Didion

Awhile back I started Didion’s much-lauded memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, about the horrific year following her husband’s death and her daughter’s severe illness. I abandoned the book early, though I wanted to like it more. Given Didion’s fame as an essayist—and having now read Let Me Tell You What I Mean— I think I should have started with her preferred art form.

Didion’s newest book is a collection of essays, most from early in her career (the late ‘60s), with the most recent from over twenty years ago. The essays are presented without theme or introductions (even the year published is saved for the end of each essay)—the point seems simply to be, “Didion is great. Here are some things she wrote.” Fortunately it's an apt assessment.

Organizationally, the lack of any preface to the pieces works both for and against the book. Some pieces, like “Why I Write” (the only included essay I’d read previously), are certainly timeless. Another, “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice,” about the feverish competition for college admittance, works effectively without context primarily because of the shock of learning it was published in 1968. The same piece could be published today; fifty plus years later, the process is only worse. In the book's final piece, about the power of Martha Stewart as a brand (“Everywoman.com”), Didion references an IPO concerned with what would happen if "Martha Stewart's public image or reputation were to be tarnished" (130). The piece receives some unintended dramatic irony by being published only a few years before her arrest.

Other pieces feel untethered without context. The first, “Alicia and the Underground Press,” criticizing newspapers, might have been improved with information about the political reality to which Didion was responding. A later essay, “The Long-Distance Runner,” appears to be an introduction to a book by a late director (whom I’d never heard of). Background on him and his work would have benefitted me as a reader.

Nonetheless, organization aside, I discovered how much I enjoyed Didion’s writing. She’s a master of the personal essay, able to weave personal observation and experience into broader meditations. Several of the pieces are about writing—the aforementioned “Why I Write,” another about Didion’s challenge with short stories (“Telling Stories”), and a third criticizing decisions to publish Hemingway’s unfinished work posthumously (“Last Words”). The essays suggest Didion as a person consumed by the author's relationship to the written word. Though intensely personal in many ways, the essays don't feel confessional--instead, they seem to reveal greater truths about art. 

Perhaps because it was last, or longest, the Martha Stewart essay stands out most in my mind. She challenges the notion that Stewart's brand reinforces traditional female domesticity. Instead, Didion argues that Stewart's enormous success as a businesswoman reflects a way of female style succeeding in a man's world--not getting ahead by emulating masculine traits, but by embracing femininity and power.

Perhaps that's true of Didion too. She came to success at an early stage of noted female essayists, not by replicating the work of men who had come before, but by embracing her own style and focus.

"Consent" by Vanessa Springora

Consent is a French memoir by Vanessa Springora, recounting the sexual relationship she had with G.M., a famous French writer much her senior, beginning when Springora was fourteen. Springora recounts the grooming process by which G.M. lured her into a relationship and the methods he used to prey on a young girl desperate for a man's affection. Even though G.M. was a known pedophile and had written at length about his relationships with minors, no one in Springora's life--including her mother--took steps to prevent or end the relationship. Though Springora was eventually able to sever the relationship herself, she was stalked and haunted by G.M. for years, particularly because he continued to write about her in "fiction" form for decades.

According to the press I read, the memoir caused a sensation in France, where it finally resulted in G.M.'s (Gabriel Matzneff) long-due fall from grace. The obvious question: what the hell took so long?

That central question guides Springora's approach to the memoir. She begins by explaining some of the context that made relationships with minors "acceptable" by the time she was a teenager in the 1980s. The sexual revolution worked (appropriately) to de-stigmatize sex, but that free spirit soon extended to de-stigmatizing all sex, ignoring the way unbalanced power structures can apply to consent.* G.M.'s celebrity allowed him to continue his behavior for years. Springora recounts a now-famous TV roundtable where one guest--a Canadian woman--called G.M. out for his pedophilia. No one came to her support. Instead, the assumption was that there was something "special" about being chosen by G.M. He was famous and smart. He coerced through promises of love and manipulation of teenage insecurities, not through threats and violence.

All of this backstory forms the occasion around which Springora sat down to write her book. So what does she do? Bring him down as forcefully, as powerfully, as convincingly as she can. Wrote the New York Times review that made me pick up the book: "'Consent' is a Molotov cocktail, flung at the face of the French establishment, a work of dazzling, highly controlled fury."

The memoir is not concerned much with Springora as an individual. In fact, as a reader, I wanted more of her--who was she when alone, or in school, or with friends? What else was happening in her life? But recalling her life in whole is not Springora's rhetorical purpose. Instead, the memoir is tightly and completely focused on her relationship with G.M. and the predatory ways he hunted her and continued to destroy her life. 

Unfortunately, at this point, we've heard many stories of rape and sexual abuse. It can feel salacious to read a book that covers the visceral details of sex between a 14-year-old girl and a 50-year-old man. Yet, after reading the book, I can understand and admire Springora for writing the book that she did. And it worked.

*I'm reading a collection of essays by Joan Didion, and in one she recounts a famous director inviting her to summer in France; she's unable to, but her 14-year-old daughter consents, and Didion joyfully recounts finding her daughter weeks later, topless on the beach and being courted by several Italian men. This adventure might have been an entirely positive experience for her daughter, but it reminded me of an attitude that led to tragedies like Springora's.

"Intimations" by Zadie Smith

I remember the first time I heard about the pandemic in fiction. I was listening to the New Yorker Writer's Voice podcast, and the story was set during the pandemic, though the crisis wasn't the primary focus of the piece. It felt strangely dissonant--to hear about my bizarre reality in a fictional world. It still feels that literature should exist without masks, without constant hand-washing, without literal isolation.

Zadie's Smith's Intimations is a series of nonfiction essays, written early in the pandemic. Because they're nonfiction, they shouldn't feel as surreal as fiction. After all, I've read (too) many essays in newspapers and magazines about the pandemic. Nonetheless, assembling reflective and philosophical essays about the crisis in book form still feels odd. As if it's sacrilegious to talk about something so finitely (in a bound book!) while we're still living through it.  

Yet while part of me screams "it's too soon!", because her essays were written and assembled so early in the pandemic, it's also easy to feel how "spring 2020" many of her musings are. So much has changed in the past year they already feel cute or dated.

All of this is to convey the odd experience I felt reading Intimations, not to lodge a criticism again Smith. We're just in a weird place now. The spring of 2020 feels so long ago, and yet we're still living through (hopefully the end of) the pandemic. We're not as scared as we were in those early days, but we're more jaded.

One of the dominant themes in Smith's book is the way the pandemic has made issues of privilege even more explicit--and uneasy. In the essay "Suffering Like Mel Gibson," Smith talks about how quickly Zoom conversations required the "expected, decent and accurate claim that you are fine and privileged, lucky compared to so may others, inconvenienced, yes, melancholy often, but not suffering" (36).  Of course, Smith's readers are largely of this group--aware that their sufferings are not so great, yet still sidelined by moments "as puny as they may be in the wider scheme of things" that bring us down. 

She reinforces the unsettling questions of privilege  in a later essay, "A Man With Strong Hands," where she contrasts herself with Ben, her masseuse. Pre-Covid, their primary topic of conversation was the inconvenience of school shutdowns during snow, but even then Smith was aware of the vast gulf in inconvenience--an annoyance for her, a loss of work for Ben.

Probably the most compelling essay is her last, "Contempt as a Virus," in which she discusses American racism through the metaphor of a virus. The comparison could seem too pat, given the confluence of George Floyd's murder and the spring lockdown last year, yet Smith is able to use our conflicted feelings about and understanding of the virus to mirror back our long history of racism. For all that's been written in the aftermath of Floyd's death, the approach still offers insight--how difficult it is to reach "herd immunity" in Covid or in ending racism.

It might be interesting to reread the collection in a few years, once the pandemic is more of a memory, to see how many of her perspectives have held or shifted.

"A Swim in a Pond in the Rain" by George Saunders

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is an unusual book, and I’m honestly surprised there are not more like it (or maybe there are and I’m unaware). Essentially it’s a book form of a class Saunders teaches in the MFA program at Syracuse—an exploration of short story craftsmanship via the great Russian short story writers. It’s not so much literary analysis—though there is that—as a probing look at what makes good short stories “work.” As Saunders acknowledges, for many people, there’s something almost gut-level right when literature works: difficult to articulate but moving nonetheless. It’s why it’s easy to write a critical review and so challenging to write about books I love. For that reason, there’s pleasure in witnessing an expert break down the reader's subconscious response and consider how other writers might adopt similar strategies.

Nonetheless, if I wasn’t such a fan of Saunders’ Tenth of December, I certainly wouldn’t have read this book. But now I’ve read six classic Russian short stories, and I can pretend I attended a graduate MFA class (without the work)!

Though the book could have been dry and technical, Saunders keeps the wit and warmth that make his other books engaging. He doesn’t lecture, but rather questions and attempts to answer—sometimes even back tracking on his earlier thoughts. Though some of the "writing advice" in the beginning can feel simplistic—keep escalating, emphasize cause and effect—it’s clear to see how apparently “obvious” truths can be easily forgotten in the immersion in a draft.

In the second half of the book, I found Saunders' advice somewhat more nebulous, the tone a little more didactic. He spends a lot of time on the “skaz” narrative style of Gogol’s surrealist “The Nose,” but I wasn’t sure what to do with that information. Similarly, he enthusiastically explores the potential ambiguity in Tolstoy’s “Alyosha the Pot,” but I didn’t glean much beyond “great writers are great often without even meaning to be so.” A valid point but one perhaps disheartening to emerging writers. Even worse, by the end of his effusive praise of Tolstoy, I got that feeling far too many students get: that their English teacher is making up complicated elements of meaning to justify their ill-chosen career.

Nevertheless, the novel is not a how-to or self-help book, nor is it traditional literary analysis, so inevitably my expectations of either would fall short. Saunders ultimately claims that some writers are great. You might be great too, but if you are, it’ll be because of you, not because you adapted something from the other greats--or even learned from Saunders himself.

So far I’ve neglected the stories themselves, which Saunders includes in their entirety. With the exception of “The Nose,” all are fairly traditional short stories: detailed characters in a detailed world; an escalation; a surprise resolve (of some sort) at the end. My favorite was the longest in the book, Tolstoy’s “Master and Man.” Perhaps because of its length, Tolstoy's able to achieve significant character development, increasing tension, and real "stakes" to the doomed sleigh ride of land owner Vasili and his peasant servant Nikita. Like the Alyosha of a later Tolstoy story (the final entry in the book, "Alyosha the Pot"), Nikita is a quietly-suffering peasant, but his development is more well-rounded than in the latter story, so he avoids being one-dimensional.

Reading A Swim in a Pond in the Rain reminds me how much I miss being in school, or even engaging in a vigorous book club (mine has been on pause since March 2020). I read a lot but have few opportunities to discuss what I'm reading, outside the personal reflections I record in this unread blog. Reading Saunders felt like a conversation with someone else smart and book-y (okay, smarter and book-ier). In that way, it was a joy.

"A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself" by Peter Ho Davies

A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself is an abortion book, but Davies is aware it's not a typical story. First, it's told from the father's perspective, an approach the narrator immediately feels is problematic. Secondly, the abortion is the end to a desired pregnancy of a married couple, chosen only because of tests indicating a strong possibility of severe abnormalities in the fetus. It's a "virtuous abortion," as one woman calls it in the novel. So how to write about abortion from a man's perspective? How to write about a rare type of abortion--an abortion most likely to be sympathized with but that still retains the shame our culture places on abortions more broadly? How to remain pro-choice while also feeling guilty about the decision to end the pregnancy?

Davies navigates all these questions through his unnamed father narrator, as the couple chooses to end the pregnancy and later have a second child. The abortion frames the opening of the novel, but much of it is spent in the childhood of the second child.

For parents there's many moments of recognition, but where other books might go more comedic ("Cheerios everywhere?!"), A Lie remains aware that the dominant feeling of parenthood is fear--perhaps even abject terror. Those fears change and adjust as our children do, but never go away. Davies recognizes too the toll parenthood takes on an individual and a marriage, without sugarcoating such truth under an unhelpful "they're only young once!" platitude.

At times, particularly toward the later half, the book does feel heavy-handed. It's understandable that the father would choose to volunteer at a clinic that provides abortions as an attempt at resolution, but when every moment--even years after the act--recalls the mixed feelings on the abortion, I wondered if some nuance was missing. Nevertheless, there's so much to Davies that's intimately relatable to any parent that I immediately recommended it to my husband. 

I called it an "abortion book" in my opening sentence, but that's an unfair characterization. It's a book about parenthood, about the many choices we make, and the many failures that follow. It's about the all-consuming nature of parenthood, the way our children's lives and likes and abilities and failures become our lives (and likes and abilities and failures).

"The Lying Life of Adults" by Elena Ferrante

The Lying Life of Adults, the English translation of Ferrante's Italian novel, is a compelling look at the lies we tell others and, more importantly, ourselves. Through her teenage protagonist Giovanna, Ferrante suggests an essential element of growing up is becoming aware of these lies. First, we feel outrage as we realize those we admire--typically our parents--lie. Only later to we recognize that we shape our own identity through lies as well.

The novel begins with Giovanna learning about her estranged Aunt Vittoria and beginning a relationship with her, despite her father's misgivings. Though it seems the book will be about her father's family secrets, Vittoria is only a jumping off point. Her father's hatred for Vittoria challenges Giovanna's warm feelings about her father, and the later revelation that her father has been having a long-term affair with the mother of Giovanna's best friends only increases her distance from him. She doesn't know how to deal with her father's lies. She still seeks affirmation from him yet begins to see him more objectively: as someone who struts his intelligence; as someone too absorbed in his work to care for those around him.

But, again, whereas you might expect the novel to focus on the straining of the father-daughter relationship, instead it shifts again as Giovanna, as a maturing teenager, moves her focus on her father to her own burgeoning interest in men, particularly Roberto, the charismatic boyfriend of a friend. She is mesmerized by Roberto's confidence, by the way his attention can make her feel worthy in a way she rarely feels. Her admiration for him is total and all-consuming until she impulsively travels to his apartment and realizes he will sleep with her. 

Though the book focuses on lying in all forms, much of the novel is really about men and women, about the separate spheres in which their attentions and devotion operate. There's Vittoria, still attached decades later to a now-deceased married man with whom she had an affair. There's Giovanna's mother, who remains defensive of her ex-husband, even after he leaves her. Or even the principal of Giovanna's school, easily charmed by Giovanna's father's minor flattery. And there's Giovanna herself, so easily hurt by her father's words and so easily obsessed with Roberto and his small attentions in a world where she feels unrecognized.

The novel suggests many of the relationships between men and women are built on lies. "My behavior is acceptable because I am respected and great." "He deserves my love because he is great." "I respect her." "He respects me." These lies about intentions and beliefs perpetuate a patriarchal system that gives the men power, but excuses behavior on all fronts. Roberto can bask in the respect he receives from others and convince himself he is a devoted boyfriend and a caring friend, even though he has no compunction about sleeping with Giovanna. Giovanna can believe Roberto respects her and values her opinion, even though his attentions are fleeting and infrequent and he'll immediately cheat on his girlfriend with her without preamble. These lies are necessary: to justify Roberto's identity as a bright scholar; to justify Giovanna's slavish crush.

But these are just some of the lies in the novel. Giovanna's parents lie to her, and she lies to them. The adults lie to each other, to the children; the children lie to each other, and to the adults. The lies take various forms--explicit and implicit; dangerous and petty. Still, there's so little opportunity for truth-telling that the final scene--in which Giovanna chooses to lose her virginity to a boy she barely likes--is shocking. In the decidedly unromantic--yet, importantly, also un-traumatic--scene, she tells Rosario exactly how she wants to have sex. There are no lies of polite speech or enticement. It's a liberating moment amid a novel of obfuscation.