Latkes in literature

Just read and really liked Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs. Goodreads people were less enthusiastic about it. I'll make the case:

Spoilers below, so click on the post title for the rest...

Fiction is better, the nanny edition

Let's say that you're a nanny for a rich family, and an actual nanny - not one on a slightly-too-chipper Netflix show. You're a creative type, but creativity has never once succeeded in paying an actual bill. Because jobs as one of Gwyneth's kids' white-collar-compensated tutor/nanny/yachting-instructor are scarce, you end up in a position of the very sort people totally end up in after a masters program, and that would really be worth remembering exist when people are all, how can it be that so many more women are getting grad degrees these days, yet the wage gap persists? You try your best, kind of, but the family you're working for is unfair, kind of. The hours are erratic, but you've shown up late a couple times. Maybe you're thinking, this would make a great personal essay! It would make great fiction. The essay format - the default these days, it seems, even for fiction writers like Laurel Lathrop, author of the essay in question (which, for the record, I enjoyed) - seems not to lend itself to the most helpful readings of situations along these lines. Which is to say, ambiguous ones, where the narrator doesn't come across as infallible.

The sentiment of feeling overqualified for a job isn't necessarily matched by a reality of overqualification. And it's possible to be exploited by a job and to be somewhat entitled and inept as an employee. These are all widely if not universally-shared life experiences. It wouldn't be especially hard for most anyone who's, say, been 22 to identify with that sort of sentiment, without necessarily endorsing it. Fiction allows for that ambiguity - for characters you can sympathize with, without applauding their life choices. Fiction permits readers other than tsk-tsking at mistakes that I-for-one would never make, or, conversely, earnest advice intended to help the author not repeat the same mistakes. It allows the reader to relate to someone who maybe got herself into that mess and maybe knows it and maybe hasn't emerged having Learned Her Lesson.

But the personal-essay format puts the reader in the position of someone who knows better and is almost ethically obliged to intervene. It demands this of the reader. (If that's the same Caryatis in those comments, hi!) A short story about this situation would lead to a totally different set of readings. Ones that, granted, wouldn't leave the author with specific, individually-tailored life advice, but possibly more useful ones all the same.

Feelings journalism

Joyce Wadler says here exactly what I was trying to get at here, only better. The difference between sophisticated, sex-positive (Dan Savage-approved) entertainment and mainstream may be overstated. More on this later, perhaps elsewhere.

Katie Johnson, meanwhile, offers supporting evidence for the phenomenon Amanda Hess discussed, wherein the "50 Shades of Grey" franchise relies on the hate-fandom of people whose hate-enjoyment comes from setting themselves apart from the "constructed Other of the ‘vanilla’ housewife," as some "50 Shades" scholarship (cue the CCOA outrage that such a thing exists) brilliantly if jargonishly puts it.

Johnson's review of the new movie is feelings journalism taken to the extreme. Based on the fact that her fellow movie-goers were wearing sequined clothing and various observations (or stereotyped assumptions, it's unclear) about the town where she saw the film, she projects all kinds of attitudes onto the audience:

If you’re going to spend two plus hours watching one dimensional characters act out the not so nuanced fetishes of handcuffs and ass slapping, you might as well go somewhere where you can enjoy the show around you. 

In our case, that show consisted primarily of women. Most had come in groups, presumably to dilute their feelings of guilt and embarrassment, while others had their submissives – er, boyfriends – in tow.

 Emphasis mine. It continues:

We opted out of the Valentine’s Day weekend screenings because we weren’t interested in seeing conservative couples taking note on how to spice up their holy sanctioned marriages. Instead we showed up on a Thursday night, opening night, because we wanted to see the die hards; the fans who felt obliged to see their unspoken favorite series brought to the big screen, the ones who left the kids at home and told their husbands they were at book club.

These details - the spicing of marriages, the book-club evasions, are things Johnson has, by all accounts, made up. Not "made up" in the Scandal In Journalism sense, but made up in the unhelpful-speculation one. It's one thing to say something like this to set the scene (and if an author wishes to situate herself as hipper-than-thou, I mean, it can work, but it's dicey, given the YPIS accusations it invites), and another to spend an entire piece attributing views to a group of people you haven't interviewed, based on what they seemed as if they might be thinking. It makes me think of the thing in - allow me a mass-market moment here - Gone Girl, where Nick and his sister - both back home in Missouri after stints in NY - decide to call their bar The Bar, ironically, thinking their cleverness will go over the heads of the rustic locals. It does not.

But back to Johnson's review. There's more along these lines - e.g., "I spent the majority of a sex scene involving whips watching the 60-year- old man behind me stare open eyed and open mouthed as his wife held his hand" - but this was the clincher:

[J]udging by the enrapt faces of the audience members, something told me they could have cared less about the emotional complexities of Anastasia and Christian’s relationship. I looked around the room during the the film’s raciest moments and registered looks of secret acknowledgment and endearing shock. They were completely absorbed by acts that are never discussed in casual conversation, or not in Mesa anyway.

Now, one might point out that Wadler's piece, which I thought was fabulous, is also the product of the author's imagination. Both pieces are examples of fiction in journalism. But... we're not meant to actually believe Wadler had an encounter with "a young woman on an ice floe." Whereas Johnson's presenting her speculation as fact.

Fiction is better, Installment #748,923

Jessica Valenti has located "the worst man in America." Scott Lemieux has a similar reaction to the dude in question. As does much of the rest of my Twitter feed. These all being writers I like, I had to see what the hubbub was about. And it's about William Giraldi's personal essay about a misspent paternity leave. Specifically, this passage:

My son was born in March, and my sabbatical went from early May to mid-January, which, in a tidy coincidence, is nearly nine months. But since his care was taken care of by his mother—whose apparent willingness and capacity to do almost everything for him flooded me with awe—I spent those nine months trying not to be bored while not writing a novel that was coming due.

And so ensues a gently self-deprecating tale of macho drink-consumption and sloth. What, with a different tone, might have read as a Very Serious confession of alcoholism, or a meditation on the dangers of having too much free time, comes across as "[c]lueless male privilege." Passages like this one don't help:

Okay, the university made me sign a document that swore I’d be incurring more than 50 percent of parental duties. But let’s be honest: even in self-consciously progressive households, it’s a rare new father who does as much baby work as a new mother.

The idea behind paternity leave is, one might imagine, that the other parent - typically the mother, and typically the person who just gave birth - can return to work. It's hard to see past the dismissal of paternity leave and get much out of the various musings the essay kind of feels like it wants to be about. And so begins the first feminist 'Gate of 2015.

Giraldi, meanwhile, is apparently a great fiction writer. Perhaps a better one than he is a personal essayist. And what struck me - of course, and thus the post title - was how much better this story would have worked as fiction. A man who takes paternity leave and finds himself with too much free time, and experiences a brush with substance abuse could be a flawed but compelling character. That the author here is the character does no one any favors.

When the first-person person is a man

Nicholas Troester has (tongue-in-cheek) nominated a commenter to this very blog as "Commenter of the year," and with good reason. The commenter, who's chosen the discreet pseudonym of Anonymous so as not to be blacklisted by an op-ed-writing cabal, wrote the following, in response to my last post, on the women pressured into confessional writing:

Yes, but where is the demand coming from? This is a strictly by-for situation, but Hadley doesn't seem too keen to explore that angle (and neither do you, for that matter). The result is that demand for the "confessional" is put down to some non-specified blob of a demographic, even though we all know who is reading all this stuff. I'd also say that sociobiology/evopsych could explain this apparently perplexing phenomenon in about five minutes, but the op-eding class doesn't go in for biodeternism, so they'll continue to wonder why one half of society needs a visceral, emotional connection to the subject at hand. We really do live in an amusing world.

Between the lines, I think what Anonymous is saying is that women are the ones driving the demand for confessional writing, and that biological determinism explains why that's the case. And that if you don't agree, it's because you are part of, or have been silenced by, The Feminists.

Anyway, I was going to respond by pointing out that supply here is key: It's cheap (often free) to publish personal essays, and easy to get this content, because everyone can produce these, whereas not everyone can, say, analyze the subtleties of Cambodian politics. And you don't exactly need to factor in reporting costs - let alone international-bureau-type ones - if you're getting a 22-year-old's musings on the hook-up culture at her college. So even if the demand from men and women alike is greater for other topics, these are so much cheaper to produce that that's what fills the marketplace.

But then I realized I'd had enough Gender Angle for the moment, and will instead turn to two instances of personal-hook fails, where the authors are of the dude persuasion.

Here goes: Dude A wrote a piece about the downsides to prolonging life, Dude B, one advising parents not to leave money to their kids. Both reasonable topics, both pieces backed up with evidence.

But that's not enough in today's journalistic marketplace. We have to hear from Ezekiel Emanuel that he wants to die at 75, and from Ron Lieber that he doesn't want money from his parents. Why? Are we meant to believe that these authors are particularly representative of humanity, or that they, for personal reasons (as vs. professional expertise) truly get the issues at stake? What does it add to frame these topics in the first person? Is Kant's categorical imperative somehow involved? Is the idea that they're hypocrites until proven otherwise, and asserting that they'd do the thing they're advocating preemptively absolves them? Thanks to the personal twist, both articles end up reading smug-and-self-righteous in a totally avoidable way. The issue stops being inheritance or quality-of-life in old age, and starts being what sort of person we think Rahm's brother and this Lieber fellow might be.

And I'm not - as the way I begin this sentence suggests - an anti-first-person absolutist. What I object to is the first-person requirement. Or to this odd hybrid genre, where it's never enough that the writer feels whichever way (too subjective!), so you instead get a piece that results from how the writer feels, plus various evidence that supports whichever preexisting assumption.

The late-1990s Livejournal I never had

The great thing about getting older, all those it's-great-to-get-older protest-too-much articles always claim, is that you reach a certain age and no longer care how others see you. In my experience, this is largely true, if more for those of us for whom ancientness correlates with romantic settled-down-ness. (If you're single and dating, you're bound to care a bit more how attractive people you have yet to meet will find you.) I can remember, in early adolescence, having thoughts about, say, how my thighs looked when I was sitting vs. standing. I no longer ponder my appearance in this micro way, nor even in an especially macro one. I use a mirror when necessary, i.e. to not put eyeliner on random parts of my face, but I don't gaze into it in search of any more holistic information.

It's possible to go along feeling like one's vanity is done, only to have it return, if momentarily, just to remind you that it can. That you're not above such concerns after all. I was feeling maybe a tiny bit old attending a friend's 27th birthday party, but the real issue was that the bar it was at was otherwise populated by people who hovered around the legal drinking age. It was also karaoke night, and the songs it occurred to me to request were popular... before the millennium. I was drinking beer from a pitcher, out of a plastic cup, which somehow made it that much more salient that I'm no longer 21. We were all old. Not quite the-old-people-at-the-bar old (there were some definitively elderly people filling that role), but still.

That, and the book I'd suggested for the book club I'd suggested, "Lucky Jim," has a great many... comparative descriptions of two women, one (Christine) effortlessly gorgeous, the other (Margaret) always somewhat off. Jim at one point wishes Margaret were just a bit prettier. He dreads seeing her in one particular unflattering outfit. She's not horrible-looking, but sort of borderline - with the right sort of effort, or if she just happens to be dressed and made-up in a way that pleases Jim, she's attractive, but she's incapable of inspiring the sort of nervous, must-run-in-opposite-direction response that Christine summons just by existing.

While reading, I did think how probably all women have been in both roles to different people, on different occasions. Or the sensible part of me thought this. The less-sensible one thought, oh my God, I'm Margaret. (A follow-up title for Judy Blume?) Every time I dress up, it probably looks like a costume. There's probably lipstick on my teeth - or I should be better about checking this on the rare occasions I wear dark lipstick. I probably have some outfit that's the paisley dress and velvet shoes. Gah!

I suppose what it is is, it's just such a convincing-seeming description of the ways men see women. While a more enlightened approach would be to just identify with the protagonist - after all, women, too, divide men into Christine and Margaret categories, which is just as unfair, if not more so given how little control men have over their self-presentation - I both identified with Jim and took the relatively literal approach of identifying with the recipients of the male gaze. That the "male" in question, to whom I imagined possibly coming up short, is a fictional protagonist from 1950s England mattered less than it might have, because this is a very good novel and thus, alas, sort of timeless.

All of which is my longwinded way of explaining why I so appreciated Rachel Hills's positive spin on a certain French aristocratic model's previously-mentioned high self-esteem. Specifically, Rachel suggests we adapt said model's self-description as a template, putting in our own physical traits: "See, I’ve had this great chance in life of being born with good genes. I was born ________, with a pretty face (not to everyone’s taste, I concede), and ________." Rachel fills out one of her own, and I see that I'd be capable of doing so as well. After all, weren't we all born with a pretty face that not everyone finds pretty? And we can probably all come up with two more traits such that to mention them would be to boast.

Is fiction better?

As readers of the 'fiction is better' tag here know well, I see fiction as kind of magical. OK, not magical, but the place where the personal writing it can be tempting to do about yourself or your loved ones - tempting, that is, both because of the market for confessional writing, and because it takes less creativity - can be channeled. I tend to think it's impossible to ruin someone's reputation with fiction, because of the giant umbrella over it saying it's made up. You can certainly offend your relatives with fiction - either because they think they see themselves in it, or even just because, horrors, they now know that you know about whichever seedy situations, or it's humiliating to be in any way associated with someone whose mind came up with that.

There's sometimes some iffiness when the "fiction" is very amateur, and where it's not clear the person writing it has a sophisticated enough conception of genre to even intend for the document to be fictional - the obvious example being when a high school student's creative-writing assignments are all about shooting everyone in the class, and the teacher alerts authorities. But in general, at least with published work, we at least try to believe fiction is not fact.

Well! There's now a burgeoning movement to declare Woody Allen guilty (which, to repeat myself, I suspect he is, in part for the reasons Ann Friedman does) on the basis of his movies and writing. This kind of relates to the other movement - to announce that you never liked his work anyway - insofar as that's about making it clear that you are in no way tainted by any of this. (As if, if you liked "Annie Hall," it's because the movie contained subliminal pro-molestation messages you approved of, and not because it's an excellent romantic comedy about adults.) And it also subverts the whole you-can-like-the-art-but-not-the-artist conversation - is there any ethical way to like art depicting something horrible, created by someone very plausibly accused of the horribleness in question?

And... what to do with this? Some of what's 'revealed' is that, if we're blurring fiction and fact, Allen finds 18-year-old women attractive. It's my understanding that most men do - not to the exclusion of somewhat older women, and not as exclusively as some would have us believe (as the attention most women well over 18 get attests). But yes, if a really good-looking late-teens, post-pubescent woman walks by, many men appear aware of this. Such men are not pedophiles. What stops most middle-aged men from getting involved with them is a mix of their lack of interest in men their age who aren't rich and famous; the great likelihood that any 18-year-olds a man actually interacts with would be taboo for some other reason (students, children's friends, etc.); and the fact that they'd have nothing in common.

But other writing dug up (via) does seem to point to an interest in... things far closer to Dylan Farrow's accusation. What do we do with this? A strict 'fiction doesn't count' approach is highly sophisticated, but somewhat devoid of common sense. And yet you don't want a witch-hunt situation, where anyone who's written about something skeevy or illegal can then credibly be accused of the act in question, because it came up in their art. But then the idea that if someone's self-expression is Art, they get a pass, has its own messy implications - those who qualify as Artists (generally rich/old/white/male etc.) can discuss whatever, through their Art, whereas everyone else is held to a different standard. Point being, I have many questions here, but no answers.

New frontiers in overshare

Jay Neugeboren cared for his mentally-ill adult brother for decades. This fact alone means that the default response to his essay about the topic is going to be that the author is a wonderful person, a wonderful brother, helping shed the stigma on mental illness. That's how it goes with such things - readers are so caught up with a story about a person being sensitive that they respond to the sensitivity that's been depicted, and not to the insensitivity inherent in sharing confidential information without someone else's consent. Why can't we separate these things out? We might congratulate Neugeboren for dealing with a difficult situation (albeit one we the general public shouldn't know he's dealing with), while also questioning the ethics of telling the story itself.

For what I'd one day like to be the last time, another person's medical history is that person's story far more than it's the story of any caregiver. That goes even for medical conditions in need of destigmatization. (Who's more stigmatized - the person with mental illness, or the one suffering indirectly?) There's no Very Important Story caveat.

Neugeboren's piece isn't so much about his brother as about the process of deciding to write on the topic, which he already did, publishing that book in 1997. His initial impulse, twelve years before writing it, had been correct:

"To publish the essay [a non-fiction piece he'd written earlier about his brother; not this essay in the Times], I quickly came to believe, would be to exploit the misery of his life in order to advance my life as a writer. I abandoned the project and decided to stick with fiction."

Correct! What changed?

"A dozen years later when I was talking with my literary agent about Robert, my agent asked if I’d ever considered writing a nonfiction book about my brother’s life."

Ah. Neugeboren now felt "it was time to tell the story," which surely has nothing to do with his having learned that this was a book that would sell.

Although this is not, strictly speaking, a case of parental overshare, it has many of the hallmarks of the genre. Neugeboren's brother depended on him. Neugeboren had access to incredibly private details of his sibling's life, beyond the usual. His brother wasn't so incapacitated as to not know what it means to be written about, but still ended up in the situation of a parental-oversharer's kid:

I hoped Robert would not be angry or upset and that he’d collaborate with me, but with or without his cooperation and approval, I was determined to find a way to tell the story of his life because I was beginning to understand that it was central to the story of my life.

I'm not even sure what to say about this. We're supposed to be happy that, after the fact, Robert approved? I mean, yes, that's lucky, but it doesn't change the initial violation. While a child can never give consent to being written about, a mentally-ill adult potentially can, but is also at risk of being written about regardless.

But here's where I get stuck: Neugeboren is a fiction writer. He's capable of writing fiction and getting it published, which is more than can be said for most composers of family overshare. Why was non-fiction so necessary, even without the consent of the very real person he was writing about? Am I a terrible person for assuming the reason is that confessional non-fiction sells? Or is that acceptable, so long as one views this in terms of raising awareness to the greatest number of people, and nothing so crude as selling books.

Concealing, "shrinking"

Man, I wish I were still guest-blogging over at Autumn's, because I think this may be more for her audience than mine, but here goes:

There's this thing in beauty writing where the woman recommending whichever product or approach must not have the 'problem' being 'corrected.' See: Gwyneth Paltrow's diet advice. See also: a woman without under-eye circles learns how to conceal under-eye circles. And also: a wrinkle-cream recommendation from a young woman who "[hasn't] started to think about that yet."

Somehow I relate this to "Japanese" hair-straightening. There's this sense in which the women in the market for advice on how to fix whichever perceived flaw will be drawn to images of women who don't have it, or who barely do, or who wouldn't be thought to. I suppose that's just how advertising works, period. But if there was ever a moment to get all Naomi Wolf about the beauty industry, it would be when advice on whichever miracle product, presented as ostensibly editorial, can only be given via the images of a woman on whom nothing changes. Like, if the thing worked, it would be demonstrated on a woman who didn't so visibly not need it.

(Oh, and Fourtinefork, thanks to a big-enough drugstore.com coupon, I got the Nars concealer. It's OK, not miraculous.)

*****

This Upworthy video has been making the viral rounds. It's a young woman's slam poem (just ignore the background snapping and groaning) about men, women, and body image. And I'm having trouble deciding what to make of it. On the one hand, if I were the sort who snapped and groaned to express agreement with the sentiment, I'd be snapping and groaning with the best of 'em to what Lily Myers has to say. (Instead, I've long since misplaced the black turtleneck I think I once owned.)

On the other, if the poem is indeed strictly autobiographical - which, maybe it's not, but every reference seems to be about it being "about her family" - it's some fine reverse-parental-overshare. While the ethics of spilling about one's parents and grandparents are different from those of spilling about one's kids, it seemed a very personal glimpse of mom at home, one she might not want shared with the positive-thinking masses. And, she called her male relatives fat. While Myers makes a good point about the difference between male and female body-image concerns (while at the same time making a much bigger point about gender and assertiveness - thus the strength of the poem), it's not as if men don't have any. I can't imagine any man I know being pleased to hear himself called rotund in a viral video.

But is this her family? Or is it a poem, and therefore fiction? College-student slam poetry, where my literary-analysis tools fail me.

Mindy Kaling is onto something

-I will no doubt be weighing in on this. For now, the placeholder.

-Is it really all that empowering to end an article arguing against people/women having facelifts by advising, as an alternative, "a good deal of skin care"? Yes, Luisa Dillner also advises "good sleep" and "good diet," but isn't "skin care" itself problematic for many of the same reasons as cosmetic surgery? As in, it involves spending far too much money on that which likely won't do anything positive for one's appearance, but might nevertheless have some unforeseen medical and/or cosmetic consequences? (At least if you're poisoning yourself with lipstick - and you are - your lips actually become - temporarily - whichever color you've painted them.)

If "skin care" means sun protection, not scratching at mosquito bites (or not getting so bitten to begin with - thanks very much, faulty window screens), and, if at all possible, seeing a dermatologist if there's an actual, identifiable problem, then yes, wise. But I'm not sure where, on the "love the face you have" spectrum, the thousand-dollar creams fall, relative to surgery, injections, peels (this is a thing, yes? not just something Patsy does on AbFab?), etc.

-I've been watching a lot of "I Love Lucy" at the gym, while folding laundry, and beats me why, but there it is. And I noticed something I'd never thought about when watching the show originally, as a toddler or thereabouts: Ricky Ricardo is, like, attractive. (Possibly relevant: my husband's been away for a while, as have all human beings, so I'm comparing black-and-white sitcom stars to, I don't know, squirrels, or the more strapping of the deer. And, I suppose, Fred Mertz.) Desi Arnaz must have used a really expensive moisturizer or something, because damn.

Well! Apparently (credit goes to a relative, but a different one than identified the crawfish) Mindy Kaling agrees. She calls him "matinee-idol good-looking," which about covers it. Glad to know I haven't lost my mind/taste, as presumably Kaling is comparing Ricky to a broader cast of characters.

"Lean into an unpaid internship"

Fiction is better, the article. By yours truly. I need to be better about the whole social-media self-promotion thing, i.e. it's not enough to just link to the article without making it clear that I, you know, wrote it. I need to... "lean in." I mean, I'm getting there. I have the beginnings of a functional website.

OK, so I've finished Lean In, and will provide my much-anticipated verdict. (I must phrase it like this, despite not actually thinking my verdict is especially anticipated, because Sandberg promotes faking it until you make it.) Which is not entirely unenthusiastic, if somewhat less positive than Flavia's.

As a reader, I'm not the biggest fan of books that are collaborative efforts between famous people and people actually capable of writing. It's not the principle of the thing - as long as the "with" is acknowledged, it's fine - but the writing style that ensues. There are these little quasi-humorous asides, where you may find yourself wondering, is this Sandberg? Her "with"? The moments that are meant to feel natural just don't. I found the style incredibly distracting, even though I could tell it was designed for easy reading.

Style aside, it's a mix of sensible advice applicable to all women; sensible advice applicable to the three or four women in Sandberg's boat (the second-after-Sartre problem); artificial-feeling nods in the direction of stay-at-home moms doing really important work, too (although I might file that, too, under "style" - it feels very much included to preempt that accusation, but cuts against the book's main message); and painful attempts to make Sandberg's career trajectory relatable. There are also platitudes - be confident, but not obnoxious. Fair enough, but how? Isn't the problem there that the line is only ever visible to others?

First, the sensible-and-applicable. The bit about how you should do what you would do if you weren't afraid, it's self-help-ish, but not wrong. And the advice about the long haul - that just because your work hardly/doesn't pay for childcare doesn't mean you should quit - seems right. There's value in staying in the workforce in some capacity. And the big-picture argument - that there ought to be more women at the top of every field - was true when Anne-Marie Slaughter said it and remains true. Fewer women opting out means a broader pool from which Slaughters and Sandbergs might emerge, and means a lot of good-but-not-spectacular careers for women who don't quite reach the top. (Most men won't, either.) And the biggest, overarching point - that the person who steps back in a straight couple shouldn't by-default be the woman - is entirely true and important. And relevant to everyone, not just executives.

Next, the not-as-applicable. The stuff about the two-body problem was... not so helpful. First, a 27-year-old woman is faulted for not wanting to move abroad for a year for some very important job because she has a boyfriend. Fair enough - if you're not going to go abroad for your work then, when? (I did, and have the grungy Paris-dorm flip-flops to tell about it.) Then Sandberg insists that women should be open about their personal lives as this relates to geography, and proudly recalls telling her mentor, Larry Summers, that she'd rather not move abroad because she wants to meet a man (they're only found domestically?), and also would rather not live in D.C. because it's where her ex-husband lives. What normal person could do this, given that there are enough problems for many people trying to tell higher-ups that they want to live near the person they're actually involved with? What message does this convey, other than that it's good to be at a place in life where Larry Summers has your back? (As someone I discussed this with said, this sounds more like leaning out.)

We then reach the point where Sandberg is happily married to her second husband, but they live in different cities. The cost (or, one suspects, comfort) of travel isn't an issue, but they have a kid now, which complicates matters. Her husband - 50-50 partner that he is - graciously decides to move to her city. Has he opted out? Not exactly - he's become CEO of another company and moved that company to her city. And how delightful that must have been for all the employees of said company, who must now move away from their families. This isn't how it goes for white women, or for white women with college degrees. This is how it goes for like three people in the world, and she and her husband are among them. Between this and the enthusiasm for "Porn For Women," that book about how, ha ha, women's biggest 'turn-on' is for their husbands to clean the house, Sandberg would lose me from time to time.

The main problem with the book is that it's trying to be two things - a guide for all the women, and one for the second-after-Sartres of the world. It's not exactly that it's offensive to women who are less ambitious. It's very every-box-checked, with privilege acknowledged, the full deal. It's just... maybe not so useful if you're never orchestrating the merger of two companies or some such. If your goal is ruling the world, then yes, it's incredibly important to pick a spouse who'll embrace this. Yet few men - and, drumroll please, few women - are interested in signing up for that life, and if you want a happy relationship, and don't want to be CEO of an especially large corporation, this may not be a wise strategy. This one woman is discussed and praised for having played mind games with boyfriends, canceling on them for fake work events, to see how they'd react, and asking them to travel with her (was she paying?) at a moment's notice. It's not worse for a woman to do this, but it's kind of weak behavior on anyone's part.

And then there's the Lean In empire, which is its own thing, and which just feels like internet-age positivity without much direction. A 20-something unpaid intern tells her Lean In story (dream the big dreams!), as do Sarah Ferguson (!) and Tyra Banks (!!!), who evidently leaned into her position as a supermodel. You can also intern for zilch at the Lean In organization. For all that Lean In has to say about the need, as a woman, to deftly negotiate, there sure is a lot of space left open for celebrating women who work-for-no-pay outside the home.

Fiction is better, Part V

A 21-year-old woman in the UK, Tamara Roper, recently arrived home from college, wrote a letter to her parents, explaining that she's a grown-up. Wrote it for the Guardian, though, and the newspaper opened this up for comments.

And... I'm glad that the summer I spent back home after graduating from college and before getting a job-and-apartment is not one I'd captured for all eternity. It's a stressful time for everybody. For parents, because they're used to their kid being out of the house, and what if their kid never gets a job? For the kid too, though, because they've gotten used to living as an adult, and then must face the harsh reality that without the means to pay rent and living expenses (the massively self-sufficient, who not only worked during school but fully supported themselves, may well not move back home), it was all kind of a fake adulthood, after all.

Everyone reverts to the old ways - the parents to the parents of an eight-year-old, and the 20-something "child" to the 13-year-old who resents being treated like an eight-year-old. Adult children in this situation - and if I felt this in 2-3 months, I'd imagine it only gets more pronounced - know they're a burden, and that they should be all serenity, gratitude, and helpfulness. But there's something about that situation that brings out the inner entitled adolescent.

And then comes the thud of a realization (at least if you live in NYC and move in certain circles) that many of the 'independent self-sufficient adults' to whom you're comparing yourself are just people whose parents are paying their rent. (Insert "Girls" reference here.) But then you're the brat for having moved back home after graduation, and not directly into an apartment of your own. Gah! Did I mention that all of this is about 2-3 months, several years ago?

Anyway, if you begin with the reactions to this other young woman's letter, you'd think the letter consisted of diva-like demands that the fridge be stocked with her favorites, the house cleared when she wishes to entertain. You'd think it was a letter to her parents requesting they raise her allowance so she can buy the Louboutins she's had her eye on.

Instead, it's an intended-as-humorous description of the experiences she's had as a student that have made her a different person (well, brought her to a different life stage) than she was when she last lived at home. She expresses her own intent not to be a petulant sulking brat, and asks that in exchange, they not preemptively treat her as one.

Between the lines, it's clear she's embarrassed about her situation. She doesn't spell out the financial details (or really much in the way of biographical details - this isn't quite overshare), only that she wishes she could contribute "more" (suggesting she is contributing some), and that she'll do her best not to run up utility bills. "I hate having to ask you for lifts," she writes, which might sound entitled, and might be just that, depending the level of chauffeuring we're talking. But it sounds like it's an area without much public transportation, and asking for lifts is plenty less entitled than asking for a car.

Does Roper come across as young? Yes. There's the old adage about how protesting that one is a grown-up is the quickest way to seem childish. And it does seem kind of adolescent to not want to tell your parents, or anyone you may be living with, the bare-bones details about your evening plans. And the bit about it being culture shock to return to "suburbia," sure, it does seem a bit like, what, should her parents have moved to a hipper area so she'd feel more at ease? It's not, in other words, that the letter can't be read as immature and entitled. It's just that the overall impression it gives is of a young adult with a certain (dark) sense of humor about what's bound do be an awkward situation.

But oh, the commenters. They have never seen such entitlement. Roper should be on her hands and knees thanking her parents for their hospitality. She should be grateful her parents remain married to each other. That they care about her enough to ask where she's going at night. Some people don't have loving, caring parents who even could welcome them back home. How about that!

And, I don't know. A line here and there about gratitude might have helped placate the commenters, but  it would have detracted from the precise experience the letter conveys. An adult who returns home after X years of real independence will get that this is their parents' - or parent's - place. But if you're a student who's just graduated, you only know this place as home, and you've never known anything else as such. If you're 14, it doesn't occur to you to be grateful for the roof over your head, except in some abstract way that one may be grateful not to be homeless. You feel entitled to being housed by your parents because you are entitled to this. I remember it taking a moment to sink in, at 21, that I was in someone else's home, and not my own. Which is, again, why I'm glad I never thought to write up my feelings in that moment for a mass audience.

Fiction is better, Part IV

Motherlode, the NYT's not-so-gender-neutrally-named parenting blog (but hey, it's honest), posted an essay by a woman whose approach to substance-use-and-abuse and parenting much resembled that of a different author's approach to birth control. As in, this poor woman seems to be doing, and have done, virtually everything wrong. Ah, but "wrong" is so judgmental. What's a better term - ill-advisedly?

The mother reacted to her son's pot use in eighth grade by drug-testing him on a regular basis. (Parental overshare? Kind of - we have her real name - but the son's now technically of age.) She believed - against all evidence, including her own son spelling this out - that her son's high school friends consumed no substances whatsoever. Except she must not have believed this, what with the drug testing. Nothing quite adds up.

Her approach - and an ex-husband's cocaine addiction (the boy's father?) could well enter into this - is rather black-and-white. Either a child is 'good' and squeaky-clean, or 'bad' and strung out on absolutely everything. Which is... I've heard of this sort of attitude, but it's foreign to my own experience. I went to high school with lots of immigrants/children of immigrants, and there was no sense that being an A student and good kid was incompatible with, at the very least, consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Underage, sure, but try explaining this to someone who just arrived from Belarus.

Anyway, the mother here agrees to let her son - now 18 - host a party in their house. To say that she doesn't entirely trust him might be an understatement:

The Facebook invitations stated in capital letters, “No drugs, no alcohol.” I hired security guards to search bags and patrol the grounds. I posted “no smoking” signs and photos comparing pink, healthy lungs with blackened, petrified lungs. I placed a few car-crash pictures on tables to highlight the fallacy of invincibility.

She... what? I can understand (and would support) not allowing smoking inside a house, but with a bunch of teenagers who aren't even your children, eh, it's kind of up to them what they do when not in your house. But more to the point, this just sounds more haunted-house/after-school special than party decor. Morbid, inappropriate, and just weird.

As the essay's title had already revealed, all these measures did nothing whatsoever to prevent this from turning into a rager - the sort of rager that kind of does require a house with "grounds." The lesson this mother says she learns - that one should not host a party for teenagers - suggests she's perhaps missed the point.

As one might imagine, the comments are soon bursting with what was this woman doing? reactions. Also following the script, the mother responds - in the comments, alas:

I wrote this essay hoping (again naively?) that other parents would learn from my mistakes. I expected, and deserved, harsh judgment about the party, but I did not expect to be personally attacked on the subject of my parenting. The commenters make sweeping judgments based on a thin 800 word image of me and my son.

On the one hand, how on earth wasn't she expecting this outcome? On the other, it does sting when people say nasty things about you on the internet, even if you did kind of open yourself up to it. Might it have stung less if the author had at least chosen a pseudonym? Might it have been less about the honor of her family at stake? Could be.

Things that are not underwear

-Conor and Elizabeth just did a Bloggingheads where they talk about my fiction-is-better hypothesis. Conor suggests a move towards a new genre somewhere between fiction and non-fiction, using the techniques of non-fiction but without the overshare-about-real-people element. This I'd certainly support, although I'm not sure it - or different versions of it - doesn't exist. There are articles where pseudonyms are used. And one does notice that in the blog comments at Motherlode and such, people are happy to take stories seriously even if the author is identified only as Alice in Omaha (say). And then there are works of fiction that play with the idea of being non-fiction - Philip Roth using the protagonist "Philip Roth," for example. But maybe there should be some genre in its own right that somehow full-on captures the public appetite for non-fiction - 'reality' - while at the same time sparing identifying information? More on this later, most likely.

-Friends, Facebook friends, currently in Paris: I "like" your posts, but I also envy. Tremendously. Dessert would be nice. But the best bet in the area - the only one, really - is an ice cream place. Ice cream would do, but it's pouring. If such a thing existed, I would call the waaambulence and have it take me to the nearest decent-pastry-having establishment.

-A department list email with info about a six-month internship that would prefer "graduate students and recent graduates." I feel as though I've blogged about this posting before - I guess they advertise this position a lot, considering the rather limited market for an unpaid job for which you need to be quite that old/educated/fluent in French/having of prior work experience. Seemingly legal, but also seemingly the sort of thing that ought to pay. The annoying thing is that other than the thing where it doesn't pay, it sounds like a great job.

Fiction is better, Part III

Kate Fridkis describes a situation at the crux of all kinds of hot-button issues: she's an upper-middle-class writer, a woman who lives in Brooklyn ("Girls" yoga organic parenting CSAs beards flannel coffee artisanal! Brooklyn!), and she married at 24 and got pregnant intentionally at 26. In other words, she dared violate the laws of the window of opportunity by not waiting until her set entered into full-on panic about marriage-and-kids, and did things according to a timeline that worked for her. Is hers a story about the latest updates from Turkey? No. But she has an interesting perspective, conveys it well, and doesn't pretend to be talking about a larger pool of people than she is. She writes about herself without dragging anyone else down in the process. A personal-essay triumph!

The commenters, though, did not see it this way. It's a veritable festival of YPIS getting hurled at the author. Fridkis, the commenters believe, thinks she's all that because she did this utterly normal thing: married and had a kid. (Did they not notice how the piece was about how this utterly normal thing has become, in her world, outrageous?) She is, the commenters will helpfully point out, privileged, and needs to get out of her bubble. Meanwhile, the point of the essay was very much self-awareness about said bubble, but why should that stop anyone?

Some commenters - and there are over a thousand comments, not all of which (shocking, I realize) I have read or will read - are really miffed that Fridkis didn't get into her husband's stance on all this. When it's like, maybe she's prepared to share about herself, but not other people? Still others fault the author for caring what her friends think. When it's like, we all care what our friends think. Less as we get older, sure, but it's far easier to claim indifference to this than to achieve it, and at any rate, it's kind of a good thing to have people you're close to, whose opinions you respect.

And then there's the contingent annoyed at the New York-centrism of all of this. When... just change the ages of marriage and first pregnancy, and the same hoopla would happen in a different milieu. There's quite often going to be an age that's not really too young to settle down, but it's younger than what your friends are doing, and it's therefore scandalous. That's the window-of-opportunity problem, and the reaction to the piece I wrote about it suggests it's not only an issue in New York. But yes, New York, so tragically overrepresented. I mean, I was slightly bitter - where I live now, there don't appear to be any wine-fueled non-fiction writing circles, waa! - but the broader point holds even for those of us who need to drive to run errands.

The reaction, then, points us back to the whole fiction-is-better issue. The only reason readers reacted as they did was the dynamic created by the author being a real person. The story gets classified as a news article in readers' brains, and readers understandably compare it, at least implicitly, to hard-news, breaking news, things of that nature. Which, alas, even the best-written personal essay about being 26 and having a baby with one's spouse is never going to be. This is not the first time such a thing has happened, to say the least. One commenter calls it a "narcissistic humble brag," which... no. There is a real problem, but it's not a Real Problem. Fiction allows for presentation of real problems that aren't Real Problems, whereas the personal essay, it seems, does not.

Anyway: to be clear, I don't think fiction is better than non-fiction. I think fiction is better at doing certain things than non-fiction is - better at telling a certain kind of human-nature story. I think we've started looking to non-fiction for the things we should be getting from fiction, while at the same time criticizing certain non-fiction for dealing with exactly the small-scale, relatively-petty concerns that we do find interesting, thus why we were reading the thing in the first place.

Why fiction is better, Part II UPDATED

If you're going to end a confessional essay with the question, "Am I totally insane?," you probably do relinquish your right to object that you have indeed been called "insane."

That aside, it is an interesting question, why people do stupid things. (I would say, why smart people do stupid things - the author refers to herself as "a smart, progressive feminist woman" - but eh.) While we may not all do things quite that stupid, let alone do them and write about it, we do all do things that rationally we understand are unwise. In this self-censored self-presentation age, where everyone is constantly checking their public persona for anything that could ever be a liability, a function of hyper-confessional writing can be to shed some light on the less-photogenic aspects of our lives.

But then the question is, if the author of such a piece doesn't want her choices validated, doesn't want to serve as an example, but also doesn't want to be "shamed," well, what does she want? Or rather: what is the purpose of this sort of writing?

The purpose, I'd think, is to examine human nature in all its ambiguities. A purpose to which fiction is better-suited than the personal essay. An exploration of why a woman not looking to get pregnant is sexually active with men, without using birth control, would be interesting in a fictional character, where we could be shown-not-told the various reasons she may have come to that behavior. Readers could judge more and sympathize more if this were a fictional character's fictional uterus at stake.

UPDATE

I now see, via the Facebook page of the person who had linked to this initially (and who, incidentally, works for the same publication, and who makes a good case for the piece) that the author of this essay-and-retort has been subject to all manner of hate online. That, I want to make clear, is never excusable. Criticizing the article - and yes, that can include, as MSI says, the "prose" - is fair game. Sending obscenity-filled emails to the author about her life choices, no.

Why fiction is better

Sung J. Woo, a novelist, wrote the most recent "Modern Love," and it's one of the better ones. It's about his Korean mother's insistence that he continue to eat her food, even while in his own home. With his wife. Who's also cooking. It's a new spin on a great many old subjects: food as love or control, the immigrant experience, the conflict of modern and traditional ways of life, in-law tensions. It's a sweet story, and while there's the awkwardness that makes for good humor writing, no one's dirty laundry, by the standards of this genre, is exposed.

It does leave one big question open - why doesn't his wife just join him in eating his mother's delicacies? - but you can read between the lines. The wife doesn't love her mother-in-law's cooking. Either she doesn't like Korean food, or she doesn't like this Korean food, or the fact that she herself "has been a food writer and restaurant critic" means that she has specific enough ideas about food that she knows what she likes, or wants to try many different things, or at any rate doesn't want to commit to however many decades of this particular woman's cooking. Or it's a symbolic thing, and however delicious the leftovers, the wife doesn't like the idea of her husband's childhood extending into his own middle age. Whatever the reason, it's out of manners, presumably, that he's not overtly spelling this out.

I will admit that my first thought, as I was reading the essay, was that if this guy, who lives not that far away in NJ, has some succulent Korean leftovers he can't finish, particularly if there are dumplings involved, I could help out with that. But that was clearly not the big-picture point of the essay. 

Clear to me, at least. Not to other readers, at least not to the subset of readers who feel compelled to comment on the essay itself. They read the thing not as a story, but as a man offering up his life to be judged. And judgment - "Modern Love" allows comments! - is forthcoming:

Why doesn't he have more respect for his elderly mother? Why isn't he just grateful that his mother is alive? Why doesn't he adopt a rescue dog that will help him with the leftovers? (I don't believe any dog, however procured, should be fed kimchi, or spicy and/or cabbage dishes from any cuisine.) Why doesn't he donate the food, as if there's some obvious place one brings homemade leftovers. Why doesn't he give the leftovers to his co-workers? (Maybe because he's a novelist?) Why does the wife insist on cooking, when someone else would happily do so for her, for free? Why doesn't the wife learn how to make Korean dishes from her mother-in-law? How dare she squander this opportunity? (Does no one else notice that the elephant in the room is, the wife doesn't like her mother-in-law's cooking?) And so many more. 

Readers react, in other words, as if Woo had written a letter to an advice columnist, and is asking for the appropriate course of action. And you can't really blame them, because Woo has, in this case, offered up not his psyche channeled into fiction, but a story that purports to be the utmost truth about his own life and his own motivations. Readers of "Modern Love" can't be expected to - aren't being asked to - take some sophisticated literary-analysis approach, in which they realize that even in 'autobiography,' there's on the one hand the writer the person, on the other, the character created by the writer, a character that shares his name and biographical details, but that is at best a huge distortion of the real-life individual, impacted by various biases - that of the author, who (not Woo especially - just all of us humans) wants to be liked, that of the author who's trying to tell a compelling story, and more. No, the essay is to be read as an email from a friend about a situation he's dealing with. Your job isn't to assess the prose of the email, the narrative, but rather to tell your friend to get a grip.

Fiction, meanwhile, gets around this. Not only does it not purport to tell about real people. It's also intentionally ambiguous. There is no answer to how we should advise a character to behave. We are supposed to sympathize with flawed characters. We are often meant to sympathize primarily with one character, and not to be losing sleep over whether that character offended the mother-character by not eating her leftovers.

All of that said, I am interested in these leftovers.