susan cheever on ayelet waldman:
Waldman’s wit and honesty seems directed at making mothers feel better about being, well, mothers. “I feel like a bad mother,” she admits, “even when by all reasonable analysis I’m a perfectly fine mother.” As she writes with typical deadpan humor: “A good mother remembers to serve fruit at breakfast, is always cheerful and never yells, manages not to project her own neuroses and inadequacies onto her children, is an active and beloved community volunteer. She remembers to make playdates, her children’s clothes fit, she does art projects with them and enjoys all their games. And she is never too tired for sex.” But Waldman’s book is actually a tragedy wrapped in a comedy.
i might point out that cheever's standards for both wit and honesty seem a trifle...low. i'd say that, in oprah-world, even extremely obvious repetitions of what women have been saying for half a century pass for courageous self-examination, brutal honesty, and uproarious hilarity. it's all about making mothers feel better about being mothers, or any woman feel better about being whatever it is she might be: it's all part of the self-esteem industry, an atmosphere that comports poorly with rigorous self-reflection. i'd say also that it's easy to say of a memoir that it's courageously honest, but it's impossible to assess this from the text itself.
ayelet waldman's fame seems to derive from her declaration to the nytimes that she loves her husband (the novelist michael chabon) more than her children: the reaction to this is the struggle through which waldman has had to fight, like a refugee woman in the darfur region, clawing her way through a sandstorm with her starving family as the janjaweed sets up a crossfire. both the declaration and the outrage are, if you ask me, just puzzling: like, who, really, ever felt like this was a dilemma or a choice you face? and, you know, ok if you feel that way, i guess, whatever. it's really not my business, but rather a task for your family and therapist. maybe it's really fucked up, but maybe it's ok. like: are you basically nice to your children?
at any rate, the woman's memoir of self-esteem is a rather complicated genre. first, the woman must be fucked up: fat, addicted (cf susan cheever), idiotic enough to marry john edwards, sterile, indiscriminately promiscuous, bipolar, a bad mommy, bulimic, or perhaps all at once. and she must find redemption in the form of self-esteem: she overcomes her terrible problems at the moment she comes to face and accept them or learns to love herself. one cannot dismiss this as an unimportant or completely disingenuous exercise, though it is formulaic, and the redemption seems exaggerated, as the next memoir by the same author is liable to show clearly. but the effect on other women depends first of all on very vivid degradation: the reader is meant to feel that she's not as fucked-up as the author, and so not alone or without hope. the memoir depends - like the spiritual autobiography (augustine or malcolm x) - on the vividness of the degradation, the clarity of the redemption, and the strength of the identification. the way you overcome your apparent degradation is to realize that you were never degraded at all (which is definitely not the approach of augustine or malcolm): that you can fix anything by believing of yourself that you are a good and valuable person. i think that there is something to that, but also that in many situations it is potentially just delusional and actually not an enduring solution to a real problem. on the other hand, there are some problems which might yield to positive thinking.
indeed, the contrast of the self-esteem memoir to the conversion narrative is instructive. for augustine or malcolm, the sin - though it is not portrayed as being without its attractions, of course - is real. they really did things that they really, on reflection, believe to be wrong, and that show that they were actually bad people, because they were the people who did those things. the self-loathing is conceived to be necessary. they believe of themselves that they are persons capable of actual evil, because they are persons who have actually done evil. this requires of them a radical transformation, which in turn requires the intervention of a god or a miracle. the efficacy of this miracle depends on holding fast to their sense that they were, truly, and are still always potentially depraved. it is a real moral drama within the self. the self-esteem narrative is comparatively superficial: here's my confession. but i was always a good person. and when i saw that i realized i didn't have to keep (snorting coke/fucking everyone/eating ice cream). or: i finally saw that i have a disease, and i was redeemed by medication. the bad things are unreal, unconnected to the self, and to say that the redemption is superficial is an understatement.
the courageous honesty of these memoirs - and that is the blurbological form prescribed for their assessment (cheever's review of waldman deploys it like twenty times) - is measured by the depiction of degradation. but putting it mildly, though that kind of self-portrait is difficult to write, it is not the only dimension of honesty, and the form presents various temptations to disingenuousness. indeed, because the formula prescribes redemption through self-acceptance, a real withering self-scrutiny that involves clear personal responsibility is kind of prohibited: the moral problems have to melt in the sun of mere self-acceptance. the defects in one's character have to be both extremely vivid and, finally, unreal. "i feel like a bad mother when i'm really a fine mother": that's not exactly as deep as self-reflection might go, is it? and to identify it as wit is just some kind of confusion: a good argument for not reading susan cheever's books, which are courageously honest examinations of her alcoholism, weight problems, sex addiction, and so on.
it's worth asking, as many a feminist or oprah post-feminist has asked, why girls come out of girlhood thinking so negatively about themselves. i don't want my daughters' personalities to be cesspools of self-loathing. but it's also worth asking why, for the grown girls themselves, this is almost the only model of what could ever go wrong, the key to every problem, the total environment. this sort of understanding kind of constructs the female self as an infinite trap, facing mirrors with infinite embedded reflections. there's a woman's magazine called self; why is there none called other? it could even be...about something.
i guess what i wonder is whether all these writers and readers' experience really does comport with the formula, or whether it's usually forced into it. i wonder whether there could be less formulaic arcs that would be truer to people's real experience. i wonder if there is a way of reading or a dimension of being moved - especially for female readers - that is more than just "I relate!" and "i feel better about myself!" or in other words i might just say that it is a problematic but legitimate form, but that there's too much of it, and that even women could possibly think as well as feel, or assess literary quality or honesty on bases other than effect on their own self-image. i wonder whether even an american girl, growing up in the suburbs, might actually more or less freely decide to do something wrong. not because she was suffering from an illness or because she had low self-esteem, but because her real, actual personality was one that was capable of making such a decision. then i wonder whether she might use her responsibility for such a thing as an occasion for real self-scrutiny and the basis for a self-tranformation that wasn't just some kind of chanting of affirmations.
i wonder, in other words, whether there could be a woman who grew up in connecticut, whose dad was a lawyer, who turned out to be a pillpopping anorexic ho or whatever, and who actually worked to engage in self-criticism and to work toward self-esteem by working to deserve the self-esteem she lacked, rather than by seeing that she never actually did anything wrong, that it wasn't her really, because her real self is good and beautiful whatever she might actually do.
one might point out, on the other side of the coin, that though this sort of memoir fetches up in self-esteem, it markets degradation: there is an exhibitionist streak: i'm *so* bad, which is ok, because i'll stop at the end. you want to read about how carolyn knapp overcame her terrible drinking problem. but you also want to read about the crazy shit she did when she was drunk. susan cheever's desire: where sex meets addiction might be about how she came to realize that she is a precious person, but it's going to get you there through wallowing in random, wild sex, which is going to be the heart of the "i relate!" response or: geez, if she's a valuable person and did all that, i must not be as bad as i thought i was. plus i just got to read some pretty cool porn; that is, the degradation is overcome, but it is romanticized. sin is fun or at least...stimulating, but then it might suck, but then redemption is a matter merely of affirming your own goodness.
the theme of exhibitionism is sticky, because one thing you might notice about, say cosmo or whatever, is that self-esteem and exhibitionism are related, so that if you can get yourself looking really good by dieting or whatever it may be, then you can feel "sexy," which is a central element of woman's self-esteem under this sort of representation of women's subjectivity, and that in turn will allow you to flaunt what you've got etc. and of course the mere fact that you are retelling your sexual badness can be a treatment for your self-esteem problem in a variety of ways, even though it is also supposed to be...a symptom of your self-esteem problem etc. oy. sometimes it's hard to be a woman.
self or oprah mag is caught in a similar deal: it's telling you that you are good enough just the way you are, and it's marketing products to you that will make you more attractive and happy. we might point out that the american economy (including the publishing industry) rests on both wallowing in or manufacturing self-loathing or moral degradation and marketing self-esteem redemption.
the solution has to be superficial or temporary, because the next product has to be sold, the next memoir written, the next show put on the air, the next plastic surgery performed, etc. in a worst-case scenario, susan cheever's continued success might depend on a relapse, or a whole new addiction. for such reasons, and even though you're going to feel better for ten minutes, i don't think that you're going to find a long-term cure for your self-esteem issue in oprah or susan cheever.
