Tag: essays

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LOVE by Dolly Alderton

Here is a book to make you really feel like an immigrant.  You live in London for a majority of your adult life, you think you fit in, then you read a book by an actual Londoner and you realize you’re still and always a visitor. 

It’s not so much the extremely specific London references she makes, but the confidence with which she makes them: as if she is sure that many people share the same experience as she does. I can only ever aspire to feel that way.  (That said, I did laugh at those references I did understand. When her friend gets married she fears she will end up having to go out with the husband’s “friends and their wives at barbeques in bloody Balham.”  But this is not funny to you if you don’t know London, which is my point)

The book is a series of essays about various relationships that the author had in her twenties.  As befits any even half-feminist writer, these are not all romantic.  Despite the book’s title, they are not even mostly romantic.  Much of the book is about the various female friends she lived with in houseshares across North (of course) London. 

I always find something creepily hetero-normative about people who only have friends of their own gender.  But I still found this part of the book quite touching.  It reflects what is true, is that unfortunately Prince Charming may come late, and even when he does, he can only do what he can do.

She has an intense and lengthy online relationship with a man, who she meets for one remarkable late night date, and then never hears from again.  She is upset, but as she puts it: .. like a child mourning the loss of an invisble friend. None of it was real. . . We played intensity chicken with each other, sluts for overblown, artificial sentiment and a desperate need to feel something deep in the dark, damp basement of ourselves

This I thought was interesting, as was this:

To be an empirically attractive young man, you just have to have a nice smile, an average body type (give or take a stone) a bit of hair and be wearing an all-right jumper. To be a desirable woman – the sky’s the limit. Have every surface of your body waxed. Have manicures every week. Wear heels every day. Look like a Victoria’s Secret Angel even though you work in an office. It’s not enough to be an average-sized woman with a bit of hair and an all-right jumper.

I don’t think this is true anymore.  These days, younger men face just the same body fascism as women do, and possibly more I think.  They have to find a way to fit in those skinny jeans. I feel sorry for them but also like hahahahahahhaa welcome.

HALF EMPTY by David Rakoff

Here is another example of how hard it is to write the personal essay.  Truly, it is a formidable form. 

I did enjoy this part, where he lays into the musical Rent for avoiding the inalienable fact that one of the hardest parts of being an artist is in fact paying rent.  He doesn’t like any suggestion that art is glamorous:

. . . the only thing that makes you an artist is making art.  And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out. 

. . . . . . most folks would opt for the old fantasy of the carnal chaos of drop clothes, easels, turpentine, ratafia-wrapped Chianti bottles  . . . forgetting momentarily the lack of financial security and the necessary hours and hours of solitude spent fucking up over and over again.

These essays may not be so wonderful, but he at least suffered over them.  Also this I  found this interesting.  Not many people will admit that children can be unattractive, and certainly not themselves as children:

Tight as a watch spring, skittish as a Chihuahua, when I wasn’t bursting into tears, I covered my over-arching trepidation with a  loud-mouthed bravura.  I was highly unpleasant.  I am not fishing here.  It dawned on me recently that even though I have published books and lived through a bout of cancer, barely a handful of people from my childhood have ever attempted to contact me, and I don’t blame them one bit. 

I did have to give up after a while though.  Try this sentence:

The House of the Future was simultaneously sleek and voluptuous; imagine a gigantic furturistic cold-water faucet: a lovely white plus sign of a building with the  mid-cetnry grace of Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal, gently inflated like a water wing. 

Indeed, art is hard.

MY MISSEPENT YOUTH by Meghan Daum

Apparently 2001 was really a long time ago.  Enjoy this extract from one of the essays in this book:

I am not what most people would call a “computer person.”  I have utterly no interest in chat rooms, news groups, or most Web sites.

Imagine a world where you get to not be a “computer person.”  Imagine a world where there is a concept called “computer person.”  Today that is just a person.  

 These essays are about Daum’s experience of being in her late twenties and her life not having worked out as she planned.  (Whose life has worked out as planned?  Only the most extreme sociopaths, and maybe Taylor Swift, I would say). 

The extract is from the first essay, which is about the time she had an online romance, and is probably the best in the book.  This is not so much for thoughts on these “Web sites,” about which she indeed has not much idea, but about what it is that makes romance so painful:

Of all the troubling details of this story, the one that bothers me most is the way I slurped up his attention like some kind of dying animal.  My addiction to PFSlider’s messages indicated a monstrous narcissism.  But it also revealed a subtler desire that I didn’t fully understand at the time. My need to experience an old-fashioned kind of courtship was stronger than I had ever imagined.  For the first time in my life, I was not involved in a protracted ‘hang-out’ that would lead to a quasi-romance. 

The other good essay was about her $70,000 debt.  This is largely from her choice to get a graduate education in that most remunerative of fields, creative writing

And even though I was having a great time and becoming a better writer, the truth was that the year I entered graduate school was the year I stopped making decisions that were appropriate for my situation and began making a rich person’s decisions. 

She blames this on knowing too many rich people.  I can vouch that this is a problem.

. . . my years at Vassar did more than expand my intellect.  They expanded my sense of entitlement so much that, by the end, I had no ability to separate myself from the many extremely wealthy people I encountered there.  . . . Self-entitlement is a quality that has gotten a  bad name for itself and yet, in my opinion, it’s one of the best things a student can get out of an education.  Much of my success and happiness is a direct result of it.  But self-entitlement has also contributed to my downfall, mostly because of my inability to recognize where ambition and chutzpah end and cold, hard cash begins. 

The rest of the essays I didn’t find particularly interesting or insightful, but I admire the ambition.  Thinking that in just writing about you own ordinary life you can come up with interesting insights is a bold move. That it paid off twice in ten essays is not terrible odds.