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MAGICAL THINKING by Augusten Burroughs

Finally someone with some success in the field of the personal essay! I enjoyed this one. Burroughs is a prolific memoirist. Wikipedia tells me that:

Burroughs’ writing focuses on subjects such as advertising, psychiatrists, religious families, and home shopping networks

This is totally humourless but also pretty accurate. He’s an alcoholic and an advertising executive who is struggling to date in New York. He has some serious #firstworldproblems, as below, but so do we all

Last weekend, I spent Sunday in a Starbucks writing Amtrak TV spots. I was drinking double espressos and really trying to be positive instead of enraged and spoiled. One of my problems is that I have completely disconnected those blue envelopes my paycheck arrives in with doing any actual work.

I particularly enjoyed his problematic love life

He’s blown me off and is hoping that I’ll just get the message and go away. It’s the modern, passive, gay way to be direct. I know this behaviour because it’s something I would do. This is how compatible we are.

And:

I’m starting to go a little crazy, needing desperately to be in control of the situation and feeling terrified he won’t fall in love with me and knowing that I can’t even know what my own feelings are until I know that he’s safely in love with me so then I can decide.

And:

He knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I’m writing about is me. I tseems wiser to let him think I’m an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other sixteen.

I do always wonder about this. These writers who produce a lot of content about their own lives, how do they do it? Physicists I guess think a lot about physics. Memoirists think about memories. I’m torn. Are they having deeper lives because they are thinking about them more deeply? Or is it just all rather creepy and they ought to get out more?

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.

I WAS TOLD THERE’D BE CAKE by Sloane Crosley

This collection of comic essays show you how hard it is to write comic essays. It was an easy read, but let’s just say David Sedaris’ crown is secure.

It’s my second book in under a week by a young woman living in New York, after MY MISSPENT YOUTH , so perhaps it is just I am a bit tired of the pitfalls of trying to make it in publishing.

It’s kind of dated, having been written ten years ago. You can tell because she explains vegetarianism like we are going to find it really freaky. Also the reviews! I see that some male reviewer at the Guardian comments that he has a ‘tendency to be disappointed by the most well-rewarded female columnists. . . ” As if female columnists are both exceedingly rare and all very similar.

Some of it however was pretty funny. Let’s end with her father’s obsession with fire:

For major holiday dinners, there is no such thing as a ‘fire in the background.’ The flaming abcess in the living room is always in the foreground, dominating the attention and the conversation.“It’s a good fire, Denis,” says my mother, standing yards away from it.
My father contemplates this, having conducted a staring match with the fire for almost an hour. It’s hard to say who’s winning.

To be honest I’ve already largely forgotten this book. So: nothing further.

HOW COULD SHE by Lauren Mechling

This is a depressing novel about the implosion of the publishing industry. It’s like reading a book written about the social life of weavers just as the loom has been invented.

It’s not marketed as such. In fact it is marketed as jolly chick lit, which it sort of tries to be, but chick lit in the context of the collapse of the chicks’ careers. The author is a magazine writer, so I guess she is writing what she knows.

It’s about the friendship of three women after that friendship has died. One of them moves to New York to try and find a job in publishing after a brutal breakup, and the other two variously pity and avoid her. Here she is, at her first cocktail party.

“Hey,” she said, a desperate edge to her voice. “Are you going to the drinks thing?”“Where is it?”Something lifted within her. “I don’t know—I can ask Sunny?” “Nah.” Gus shook his head and looked down. “I’m supposed to meet someone in the city, actually.” He didn’t need to say any more. Another woman was written all over his face. Geraldine’s heart snapped. ….. She was humiliated, but also slightly relieved that he was leaving so she wouldn’t have to spend the drinks portion of the evening being rejected.

Ouch. But where the book really shines is in the workplace:

All the staffers had gone to Ivy League schools and had the social skills of staplers. They stared at her from their workstations and waited for her to talk, and she had to fill the air with references to her quirky travels and friends and obsessions. There was something profoundly sad about these once-brilliant people who clung to their perches in corporate media as if there were a chance in hell the industry would take care of them. Get out while you still can, Sunny wanted to tell them all, but she had to pretend to be operating under the same misapprehension as the rest of them.

Overall it didn’t quite work out for me as a book – I couldn’t get up a head of steam to care about the characters, and their relationship. But I enjoyed the world. Makes me feel like while I may not have made the perfect career choices, it could have been worse.

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.