“The Friend Zone sounds like a place with lots of hot dogs and trampolines! LET’S GO!”
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Francine Prose and Leslie Jamison discuss the ethics of mining real relationships for literary content:
A recent surge of media interest has involved the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose multivolume memoir-novel “My Struggle” has been criticized for revealing too much about his close relatives. In a Paris Review interview, Knausgaard says the question of whether a writer ought to use his family as material is akin to asking the question: Would you save the cat or the Rembrandt from the burning house? He says we must save the cat, choose life over art — a somewhat surprising answer from a writer who portrays his own family in such intimate detail.
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Chanel and Jane Marie’s latest “Oh, You Pretty Things!” column over at Rookie!
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This essay in The Paris Review by Ruth Curry hits a lot of the what-thinking-about-your-high-school-friends-does-to-you buttons today:
Tracy was my Rayanne. She had long, frizzy-curly hair like Rayanne, and, like Rayanne, she was a little weird and crazy. Tracy was a dancer, with a dancer’s compact build and a dancer’s peculiar walk, like her feet weren’t quite part of the rest of her body. She wore the same plaid button-down shirt almost every day over a rotating collection of baby T-shirts and smoked Marlboro Lights. The popular/athletic kids at our horrible, tiny public high school ignored Tracy because they thought she was dumb, but she wasn’t. She just was spacey in a way she didn’t particularly bother to hide, and not good at science. My parents didn’t like her either, in part because Tracy actually knew who Rayanne Graff was, which implied Tracy watched TV—cable TV, even!—which further implied a familiarity with sex, drugs, Michael Jackson, and the Delia’s catalog, all of which were forbidden in my house. This, of course, made me like her more.
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Jesus in everyday situations:
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As I type this, my power has been out for 14 hours. Perhaps I will update this from my own, power-having home, tomorrow morning! Perhaps! Perhaps! Perhaps!
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I would not usually link to a Buzzfeed list of “60 Pictures That Perfectly Capture the 2000s,” BUTTTTTTTT:
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Bodega cats: in their own words
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Shopping and class and moms:
On the steps of Marni, a place which I had long fantasized about, I broke. “I can’t go in,” I told them. “OK,” they said, looking bewildered as they walked inside without me. I lingered outside on the sidewalk, looking in at the security guard looking back at me through the glass. I assumed that his job was working-class and that his lifestyle was similar to the one in which I was raised, and in that moment, he felt like “my people” more than my friends did. I realize now this was (slightly unfair) projection on my part, but I still felt my class issues more viscerally than ever before. And it unmoored me.
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
That friendship piece is beautiful. There’s an intensity in female friendships, especially when you’re outcasts, and then when you get to a place youa ren;t an outcast you often – so often – realise that what kept you together was your oddness, and there’s nothing really in common as you grow and change. And it’s sad to grow apart, but also necessary.
Bahaha love that friendzone cartoon. Now I wish it WAS a place!
It is excellent, in a T-Rex-branded kind of awesome way.
But of course, we should also not forget the Sinfest take: http://sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=4371
Nicole, I’m concerned about your refrigerator. (I can’t help it! I’m a worrier.)
JOLIE, we are now on hour 36. Be happy! Since everything must now be thrown out anyway, I am going to use your NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING BOOK advice to clean my fridge and my freezer and my still-hanging-on-w-bags-of-ice chest freezer.
Ahhhh. Okay! I will stop worrying. Have you cleared it out already? Put down towels to catch any water overflow?
I’m … not doing such a great job on the “stop worrying” front, am I?
I’ve bagged almost everything and tossed it in the chest freezer w bags of ice so it won’t become disgusting before next garbage day, I will take your towel advice!
I also read LITERALLY 725 pages of Under the Dome by flashlight last night, and now I feel much better about my own situation.
I had no hot water in my apartment from when I got home at 5:30 to when I went to bed at midnight, and had no water, period, for a good chunk of that as well. Obviously this is not as terrible as going without power but Nicole, I feel your non-functional-living-space pain. (And like Jolie and Tim Gunn, I have Concerns about your refrigerator.)
I dunno, I think I’d take no power over no water.
We have a well that only runs through an electric pump, so our water only works if our power is on. *sob*
I grew up in a house like that! I’ll never forget moving “to town” and learning that most people don’t have to keep jugged water on hand to flush the toilet during outages. Luxury!
We have no hot water right now, as I speak. Solidarity!
Stay strong! I had to do a sponge bath with water heated up in the microwave last night, just like in Ye Olden Days.
That’s dedication! Our gas has been off for two days due to a gas leak in the basement (exactly what I want to hear, living 1/2 mile from where that building blew up in Harlem and all). Our hot water has still been working, but this morning it was sluggish and I got pretty excited when I thought I might be forced to skip showering for the 2nd day in a row. Sadly, the hot water kicked in. I’m revolting.
That is exactly what I will be doing in a few minutes. Oh joy.
Aaah, I have to rant. We applied for a visa for my partner like 2 weeks ago. And yesterday a package containing my partner’s passport was delivered to his Dad’s work!!! (His address is more stable than ours at the moment). And the most-annoying-man-in-the-world didn’t look in the passport or take the package home or find any information or anything! We have to wait until tonight to find out what it is, and IT’S KILLING ME! We don’t know whether the visa was approved (if so, really fucking fast!) or denied, or they want more information, or what. Aaaaargh!
Any tips to help me get through the next few hours without pulling my hair out?
Oh nooooooo. Hmm. Eat things with melted cheese on them, it’s soothing.
Mmmm, melted cheese.
Can’t the Dad send communication outwards from his office? By telephone, by email, during the lunch hour?
Visas are weird, though, and the amount of time they take corresponds to nothing rational or predictable. Maybe you just got a visa in record time!
YOU WOULD THINK HE COULD, RIGHT?
No, apparently he cannot ring during morning tea, lunch, or afternoon tea. He cannot read it (granted, he only knows some English, but still, it would be enough!) and email us. He cannot take a picture at work, and also cannot scan anything.
Though to be fair, it’s also my dumb annoying no-good partner’s fault, who is apparently perfectly happy to wait until tonight to hear! I would throttle him, but that sort-of defeats the purpose of having a visa… Fingers crossed that we did get a really quick visa, but I don’t count the chickens until I’ve poked them to make sure they’re alive.
If it makes you feel AT ALL better, Mr. September’s brother had all kinds of bewildering paperwork foibles when he was applying for his permanent NZ residency, and then all of a sudden they approved it way sooner than he was expecting – so it isn’t unprecedented!
Enjoy your soothing melted cheese, at any rate 🙂 Hope it’s all good news!
We’re applying for a NZ visa as well, your story does actually make me feel better! Thanks =)
I thought I remembered you saying you guys were trying to move to NZ! Good luck!
Cheers
Those 2000’s pictures have revived my morning.
Does anyone else want to go back to bootcut/flared jeans with me? They’re just so much more flattering than skinnies. I miss them.
I’m still rocking the bootcuts and nobody can stop me.
I always wear bootvuts. I have wide hips and chunky thighs and a big bum, and tiny little calves, so skinny jeans or straight-legs make me look like an ambulatory parsnip.
An Ambulatory Parsnip is the BEST DESCRIPTOR EVER for my lower half. I love this. You win the vegetable/people-shape descriptions.
I saved my flared red plaid pants from high school. I don’t want to be 16 again but man I loved those pants (with a studded belt, rubber bracelets up to my elbow, a thirft store baby tee and converse? oh yes)
Do you remember the super low-cut flared blue plaid pants Christina Aguilera wore in the “Come on Over (All I Want Is You)” video? I wanted those pants sooooo bad. They would look awful on me, but whatever!
ETA: Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RQDIJ2CvbA&f… Pants first appear briefly at 0:22 and then at 0:27 and various points after.
No, and you can pry my skinny jeans and leggings from my cold, dead hands.
(love you though)
I still wear flares – call me an iconoclast.My daughter calls my closet the “place where time stood still”
NEVER. I have wide hips and carry most of my weight in my thighs and butt . I also have short legs and all of that together makes me look like a sad shetland pony in bootcut jeans. Narrow leg jeans (hate the term ‘skinny’ jeans) lengthen me out and make me look like a happy shetland pony who believes he is a prize winning thoroughbred.
what with your happy shetland pony and C.B.Blanchard’s ambulatory parsnip, I’m pretty sure that this comment thread Wins At… Something. idk what, but I am delighted.
Do you remember watching TRL every day? I remember watching TRL every day.
“Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez leaving Blockbuster together after a long bout of video shopping in clear platform shoes.” Oh yep, that’s the essence of the early 2000s right there.
“Justin Timberlake and Carson Daly exchange numbers on their typing machines.”
Yesssssss. Remember when the sidekick was the coolest phone to have? IT FLIPPED AROUND!
SO much Sidekick hype in that photoset.
It just reminds me how I never had a Sidekick! I really missed out with my stupid Razr. 🙁
Didn’t they product place it on the Gilmore Girls in a few episodes? I feel like I remember Rory being all “Let me put your number in my sidekick.” And I was painfully jealous, clutching my ancient Nokia (without a texting plan)
Let us all take a moment of silence for the glorious days of the Nokia brick. Amen.
I miss Xtina
Tantina though.
I liked Diirrrrrty Xtina, myself. The chaps! The hair!
THE HAIR
It just looked like if you touched it, it’d all break off
Those 2000s pictures are so great. I spent a good 15-20 minutes just basking in the nostalgia last night when I found the post. There’s no way I could pick a favorite.
That piece on friendship in the Paris Review is beautiful. We all probably have that person who used to be our best, best friend, the ONE PERSON we would tell everything and do everything with, who we just don’t even talk to anymore, except maybe the occasional “happy birthday” on Facebook or something. It’s always dangerous for me to start reminiscing too much, because I just get sad that we drifted. Even if the drift was natural. Ah, life.
Doing the silently-laughing-at-one’s-desk thing with those Jesuses in everyday situations. A+, would recommend.
Seconded. I want to post it to facebook so badly but I know so many of my friends would be majorly offended…
Same. I settled for emailing it to a few friends who’ll appreciate it.
Found a humanist group in my area and FB posted it there. Much appreciation, loved it, A+. 🙂
Christian here, still loved it, didn’t lose my sense of humor when I converted…
the maracas
JESUS IN A PILLOW FIGHT.
Can we collectively swoon at the photo from this lesbian triad wedding? http://offbeathome.com/2014/04/lesbian-triad-preg…
HOW CUTE ARE THEIR FAMILIES??
The ‘shocked’ photo is THE BEST
They are the absolute cutest.
(I love offbeatbride and offbeathome. I even had an account on the wedding planning forum they have over there, becuase it was the least stressful place to do it.)
So do I! It’s been very helpful.
Oh, awesome! I love them over there, I got so many good ideas – and the best thing was a place where people just accepted the weirder things we wanted to do rather than constantly pick at or challenge them.
Also, Ariel Meadow Stallings is an awesome, hilarious, super-friendly person in real life!
This is impossible, and I need you all to swear at it with me http://flappy2048.com/
you’re welcome
I got up to SIX WHOLE POINTS
WHO DID THIS AND WHY
The comments on the Jesus pictures are priceless
re: Buzzfeed list:
Brittany Murphy 🙁
Re: Knausgaard’s “My Struggle”: Has anyone read it? Is it worth the undoubtedly substantial time it will take to read a 6-volume memoir?
I read the excerpt they ran in the New Yorker a few weeks ago. It was pretty good, but I couldn’t read a whole book of it, let alone 6.
The only review I read was in the last issue of Private Eye, and the short answer from that is No.
My mom read the first volume and said that the writing was really good, but from what she told me about it, it sounds a little hard to follow, and also she has more patience for ridiculous male narrators than I do. Apparently some of his prose is really great, though. *shrug* Report back if you do read it?
The article at Rookie is great. I didn’t grow up poor but for what I guess were geographic and cultural reasons, up until recently I rarely interacted with the kind of people that buy designer clothes (or go to fancy colleges, or take international vacations, or whatever). Now I live in a big coastal city and work in a creative field and I run into these people all the time, and it makes me feel uncomfortable in a way I can’t put my finger on.
I grew up in a similar economic situation to the author’s, but my parents were always very frank with me and my brother about it. My dad would never lie and say he was working an 80 hour work week “for fun” – it was “because we need the money.” And if there was something at the mall I wanted, my mom would say “we can’t afford that.”
When I moved to New York, I was still uncomfortable around People With Money and in fancy stores/restaurants, but to a much lesser degree. I’m wondering if it’s because of how open my parents were with me. Like, I know there’s certain cultural capital I don’t have that People With Money do, and being able to name the problem helps?
I have so much fondness for Shailene Woodley. I love – legitimately, non-ironically love – that she’s out there talking about sunning her vagina like it’s totally normal for starlets to casually discuss their vaginas in interviews (which it ought to be if they want to do so!). She won me over forever when she basically shut down members of the media who tried to incite a rivalry between her and Jennifer Lawrence, calling them out for their sexism and emphasizing her appreciation for Lawrence. Also she was great in Divergent.
I really want to eat some clay now. Okay, I wouldn’t actually eat clay, or drink diatomaceous earth or do a Liver Cleanse or any of that stuff, but there’s something about that whole ‘Ingest a weird substance>> egest a different weird substance’ earthy Crunchy AltHealth vibe that seriously presses every single one of my happy buttons. I could* gleefully and vicariously read about that stuff for HOURS on end.
* I know I could, because I HAVE.
I mean, I think writing about your life is fine. But if you’re like say, Hannah Horvath, who tries to make “writable moments” happen inorganically, then that’s when it gets gross.
Oh wow that “using real people in books” article is timely. A family close to my family is going through some rough times because another family friend borrowed a little too heavily from them for her book that came out this month. She told them she wanted to write a character with a mental illness and hey, one of the daughters of that family has the same mental illness! So she did interviews with all of them, and the daughter let the author read her journals. It turns out the book is basically a thinly-fictionalized account of the daugher’s symptoms and diagnoses, her subsequent drug addiction, the family’s resultant implosion, etc. to the point where parts were taken basically word for word from the interviews and journal entries. It’s been pretty hard of them having that all aired so publically.
So, at the moment, I’m coming down on the side of “don’t use real people in your books”.
Or at least “don’t use real people in your books without their complete, enthusiastic, and ongoing consent.”
If nothing else, it shows a lack of imagination (and empathy). I’m off the ‘take little bits from a variety of sources and my own personal experiences and mash them together’ school, but using someone elses life and pain and experience to make yourself a success is awful.
This happened in my husband’s extended family, with pretty disastrous results. Author is an in-law who lightly fictionalized basically 80 years of family history, and now everybody is mad. People who are more or less accurately portrayed are furious about perceived exposure. People who are changed/conflated/omitted are pissed about the inaccuracies, and everybody feels like their legacies were sort of appropriated by a relative interloper. Plus, the book is kind of doing well, which sticks in everyone’s craw. Totally and completely agree that widespread sign-off and very open communications pre-publication is a prerequisite for this kind of thing to not suck.
How would you feel about the situation you describe if the author used a pseudonym? And went every extra mile to make identifying the family impossible? Change names, pets, number/gender of children, locale, time period, etc. I have no axe to grind. I am genuinely curious and have not given this much thought before. Would love to hear Toasty Thoughts.
I dunno about you guys but I would still wear Paris Hilton’s orange dress.
I’m pretty sure they still sell versions of it in the cheap clothes shops in my city.
I have suddenly, horrifically, realized my style has not changed in 15 years. I can’t even use “I took to the sea” as an excuse.
I’m starting to notice trends from the 90s are making a comeback (ie Docs with dresses). My stubborn clinging to 90s style is finally paying off. Cool once again…or, at least not as mockable for awhile.
I never stopped wearing docs with dresses, Never.
I love Jesus in everyday situations. I can’t wait for my husband to come home so we can safely giggle at the Lord in the privacy of our own home.
We have a well that only runs through an electric pump, so our water only works if our power is on. *sob*
JESUS IN A PILLOW FIGHT.
Christian here, still loved it, didn't lose my sense of humor when I converted…
Wow, I did not think it was possible to feel nostalgic for the 2000s.
I never stopped wearing docs with dresses, Never.