is this gonna be weird?
it’s been a minute. last i posted i mentioned i was finishing madame bovary, and i think i’ll still write about it sooner or later, but when i thought about writing it two things came to mind:
- this is the kind of book about a woman that only a dude could write (probably a dude that never hung out with a woman before), or else a woman could write it, but a woman who wasn’t a good writer.
- i’ve been fairly negative on this here site so far this year, so let me put off writing about james wood’s dreamgirl until i can say something positive.
so i moved immediately on to a book by a woman who is a good writer, and that book was the two kinds of decay and the good writer who wrote it was sarah manguso, who i’ve written about before. manguso might be the only writer in the world who could get me to read an illness memoir (in hardcover no less), and i don’t regret having done it one bit, though it seems like it would be perverse to say i enjoyed it.
(stick around and see if i say it anyway?)
i’ve read enough memoirs. that is, enough memoirs to know that i don’t like them categorically. let me see if i can explain concisely why that is.
okay here:
- if somebody came up to me and punched me in the jaw and it was a good punch and it hurt and maybe knocked me down, i would think that that person punched well and was capable of hurting me and that that person had some degree of toughness to him or her.
- if a person came up to me and said, “i’m going to punch you in the jaw,” i might be nervous depending on who said it, scared even, but i would also be like, “why you want to forecast what you’re going to do?” and also “you probably don’t really want to punch me.” in other words, this person has introduced irony into the situation.
- but if a person came up to me and said, “i am tough,” well, what am i supposed to do then? fucking ridiculous, no? that person is not tough.
so what am i supposed to make of the phrase (or implicit suggestion that) “this is real”? this is what i make of it: it’s tantamount to saying “this is not real.” this might sound like sophistry, but i think it points to the fundamental, and to me completely mindblowing, credulity of contemporary readers.
that's right.
let’s take that well-worn punching bag james frey. i’m sorry for being obvious here. i never even read one of his true stories. the reason i never did, was because i read the reviews, i.e., plot summaries, and said to myself “this is bullshit.” this guy wants me to believe that he can sit on an airplane all bloody with a hole in his face and nobody says anything while kevin smith gets kicked off for being silent bob? and then i read the profiles where i learn that he has a tattoo with an acronym for fuck the bullshit it’s time to throw down? but also he has a tender heart underneath that gruff (it actually seemed more mewling to me) exterior? the soul of a poet? and he wants to confess to you.
you are a sucker if you ever believed that shit happened or that man existed.
but i don’t care if it ever happened or not. it just sounded fucking corny to me. and that’s the thing — fiction editors turned a million little pieces down. when it was fake, it set off their bullshit detectors.
but here’s the rub:
i would suggest that the audience who bought into it (and continues to buy into all manner of memoirs and true stories that are equally untrue, if more factual) is only mostly responsible. fiction writers are also responsible, because they’ve spent the past few decades offering up boring (lower middle class domestic life written by upper middle class professors) (google “dirty realism”) or flattering (upper middle class domestic/social/political life written by adjunct professors and publishing entrepreneurs) (google “hysterical realism”) (see, i don’t hate you, james) (wood, not frey) depictions of and/or prescriptions (though they will always deny being prescriptive) for the world. in other words, the audience got bored of being bored and/or flattered and swung to the opposite extreme, choosing to believe the patently unbelievable rather than the more subtle and insidious unbelievable of most contemporary fiction.
in this sense, manguso’s illness memoir, the two kinds of decay, brutal as it is, is a palliative. firstly, she doesn’t seem to be concerned with proving or demonstrating that it’s real (the word “memoir” doesn’t appear on the front cover or in the jacket copy, though it is on the barcode) (i wonder if this cost the book any sales?), nor is there any throat clearing in the book itself. she just jumps in with a section titled “The Beginning.”
The disease has been in remission seven years. Now I can try to remember what happened. Not understand. Just remember.
she then spends the next 181 pages remembering. fortunately for all of us, her remembering is wiser than your understanding.
basically what happens is between “The Beginning” and “The End” she comes down with a rare strain of guillain-barre syndrome and then eventually recovers.
but the brilliance of the book lies, not in manguso’s having experienced it (this is obviously part of the difference between me and her) (but also, of course, between you and her, unless you are a sufferer from the same illness), but in the fact that it frequently hurts to read.
i could probably have learned about the medical processes involved in treating the disease (shit is real) from wikipedia (user generated content) (sampling) (mash-ups) (REALITY), but it’s the prose that gives me a sense (which is not to say the direct experience, which i frankly don’t want) of what it feels like to have room-temperature plasma pumped into body-temperature blood vessels.
I need to describe that feeling, make a reader stop for a moment and think, Now I understand how cold it felt.
But I’m just going to say it felt like liquid, thirty degrees colder than my body, being infused directly into my heart, for four hours.
see, the smart move is, she doesn’t “describe” it; she just says it. but she does describe it, perfectly, with the commas (between body and being and heart and four). understatement darting toward deadpan.
the book isn’t organized chronologically. instead it’s broken into short, prose-poetic (i’m sorry) (it’s true, though) segments. as usual, manguso explains it better when she writes “…I remember things in the order they make sense…” so we get sections about paralysis and blood infusions and hospital staff as well as reminiscences about past acquaintances, some of whom are current hospital staff (as in the particularly affecting section “The Cheerleader”).
throughout, we get a truly unsentimental view of both illness and life (as opposed to the sentimental view that is usually called unsentimental in reference to both fiction and poetry) (fuck the bullshit it’s time to throw down), combined with a daring tendency toward classical aphorism.
an example of the former:
…there were times that i cherished my rare disease for its irrefutable proof of my specialness.
of the latter:
The world, with its infinite variables, is the wrong place to attempt implementing the scientific method.
i do have two issues with the book, though:
- manguso is a writer, and there are mentions of a developing writing career throughout. of course, that isn’t the focus of the book, but, in the way it’s presented, it makes developing a writing career look a bit easy. which ties in with my second issue.
- there are attempts in the book to address class issues. manguso attended harvard (which, throughout most of the book, is just referred to as a school located in cambridge — this itself rung a little mannered to me). this is not a problem. but in a memoir about illness (a very expensive illness) where the author never runs the risk of homelessness; never, it seems, has to worry about material comforts beyond her own body; where the author can take leaves of absence from school without, it seems, worrying about losing scholarships; can commute to cambridge from new york city while finishing her undergraduate degree and then go on to graduate school when she feels ready, etc.; i think it would probably have been best to leave the whole i-showed-those-rich-kids-by-forcing-my-way-into-the-hasty-pudding-society theme out. or at least she could have developed it to where anybody who never went to a debutante ball could feel her pain. metaphorically, i mean.
still, though. i read an illness memoir. and i did enjoy it. it was visceral and moving and also funny, and i think manguso is one of our best writers.
our? who the hell is we?
at least james frey’s been redeemed.
