Previously: My prestigious literary novel.
“This book is absolutely searing.”
“This book is like being baptized in lightning and in blood.”
“If you pick this book up, it will never put you down. You will never be the same. The people who read this book have to change jobs and move to different towns, is how different they get. They become wizards.”
***
I am running, but I do not know what I am running from. The sound of my feet slapslapslapping against the pavement and my heart slapslapslapping against my ribs are my only friends. I have named them Jill and Katie, respectively.
***
[describes fireflies in a Georgia field for three and a half pages, interspersed with flashes from when my grandfather died in my arms after telling me I would never be good enough, that this womanbody, this girlflesh, would always be tender and useless and weak, but he was wrong, I am stronger than the earth’s heart]
***
The word of the body made flesh.
The word of the body made sacred.
The word of the body made profane, and therefore flesh again.
***
My Father Has Set My Eyebrows On Fire And That Is When I Realize I Am Going To Go To College
***
My [sacred/holy/profane] [thighs/cunt/sex] is like going to fuck-church
***
Brutal Intercourse With A Stranger Immediately After My Sister’s Funeral Because The Depths Of The Human Heart Are Unfathomable
***
A Brief Interlude With A Unique Male Lover Who Awoke Me To Myself, Then Serenely Drifted Out Of My Life
***
There is a [gibbering/slavering/monstrous/childlike] [demon/murderer/child/monster] in my blood that must be [exorcised/released/charmed/fed at regular two-hour intervals]
***
A reminder that nursing a child is no different from sex, using the words “fierce” and “primal” no less than three times.
***
“bitchmother”
***
[Agony/rage/fury] is tattooed on my [skin/eyelids/guts/titflesh]
***
“This relationship is like an abortion.” He spat the words out as if he hated them.
“You are not good enough to be my abortion,” I told him, unraveling each word out like a gift from the deepest mines of the earth. “An abortion is at least planned. You are hardly even my miscarriage.”
“How can you be so impossibly cruel,” he asked me, sliding to his knees.
“I have held a dead grandfather in my arms,” I answered him, and all the hosts of invisible murderers who have followed me with their loathly knives since my birth. “I have seen my own eyebrows turn into smoke. The kindness has been burned out of my bones, and all that is left is strength.”
Then we did it for like an hour. It was like going to fuck-church.
Tags: books, like going to fuck-church, memoirs, things mallory does for no reason
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“It was like going to fuck-church.”
I’m dying.
What if one wants to go to the fuck-synagogue instead?
This is a woman’s memoir so…only male opinions needed in the comments please.
Something like, “She did preeeetty good at relaying her own experience, but…”
“As a man, I’m Concerned about Ms. Ortberg.”
“She shows no suitable sympathy to the man-character”
simply named “father” and “unique male lover”…she completely rejects or ignores their individuality and their narratives.
“The problem is that the narrator is moderately unlikeable while also being a woman. Therefore, I can feel no amounts of sympathy but insufficient antipathy to be able to recommend this book. It is clearly a failing of the book.”
“If she had described her tits more, though, I would have liked her.”
“I really couldn’t quite picture myself hatefucking her”
The coat check boy on page 221 was strikingly underdeveloped. A real failure of empathy.
Fortunately, the fuck-church only ordains men.
“did she think enough about the feelings of the men who have to read abut her fuck-church and feel inadequate”
Has she even considered whether her father had a good reason for setting her eyebrows on fire? Maybe he was trying a home remedy for lice? Maybe he was nearsighted and mistook her for tinder? Plus, she wound up going to college because of it, so why complain so much about a happy ending?
#notalldads
Ms. Ortberg’s coruscating prose leaps from the page, seemingly unmediated by a consciousness other than your own. Trauma, travails, transubstantiation: this book is truly the fuck-church of reading.
YEP
sorry only male opinions allowed in the comments. please be respectful of their feelings.
*resolves never to rest until someone uses ‘coruscating prose’ in a review of my writing*
Ahahahahaha “titflesh”
trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash trash
on fire
which is burning
burning forever in an inferno
like Dante’s inferno, set in a New York
cavedwelling in the deep south
With all of your least trustworthy friends
And your father, who hoarded every receipt and all his expenses in a roll of yellowing onionskin,
To transparent to save him from the bank.
I’m going to go out a limb and say that all memoirs are terrible and no one should ever read or write them.
I tend to agree, however, I did enjoy The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls.
Except for Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, which is a thing of beauty and a joy forever!!
Disagree! Memoir has been and continues to be a crucial vehicle for women’s voices and experiences! Tons of what is published right here on The Toast is short-form memoir and I am glad to have it.
Thumbs-upping this wasn’t enough, so you got a Hiddleston gif.
I am now attempting to meditate on why it is that I generally love short-form memoir but have little to no use for a full-length volume of it. I mean, the answer(s) seem fairly straightforward, but I hadn’t realized this contradiction in myself before, and I think it’s interesting.
Agreed! (to your point, not the hiddleston gif….whatever). That being said, I’m very much Not Down with the subgenres of’ “not quiiiite interesting enough to be a novel, so let’s just call it a true story” memoir or the “200 pages of excuses for my shitty actions”
I like food memoirs, but this more due to my interest in food than my interest in memoirs. Otherwise, I agree with you.
People who have actually had interesting lives (whether that means wildly awesome or wildly horrific) tend to write interesting memoirs. For good-interesting memoirs, I actually really liked Patti Smith’s Just Kids. For bad-interesting memoirs, I recommend Life After Death by Damien Echols, who was on Death Row for eighteen years.
No one should write a memoir until they are AT LEAST 80 years old. Until they are on the verge of memory loss. This I firmly believe.
Especially because they’re just gonna make shit up anyway. Might as well go all in.
i mean there are so many different kinds of memoirs and some are very great and some less so
How old do you have to be to retool your failed novel into a memoir and publish it under an assumed name? I’m thinking at least 26.
At 30 I was thinking the thing to do was to retool your failed memoir into a novel… I may prefer your method.
Kenneth Branagh published his memoirs at 28, just after Henry V came out. He said it was “to make money”, which was disarmingly honest.
My fingers would not relinquish Ms. Ortberg’s searing memoir. The doctors think they can save most of my lower arms, but everything below the wrists is char.
The burning smell of my fingerflesh that has been seared by said memoir burns my nostrils
Ok I’m not even done reading this yet and already this
My Father Has Set My Eyebrows On Fire And That Is When I Realize I Am Going To Go To College
makes me desperately wish I knew photoshop and oh holy fuck I actually wrote this story in my first fiction workshop because college:
Brutal Intercourse With A Stranger Immediately After My Sister’s Funeral Because The Depths Of The Human Heart Are Unfathomable
(That not-unknown-to-The-Toast prof totally knew I was gay before I did/admitted it, and was like, you…need to go out and live. Direct quote.)
HAHAHAHA oh my god your professor.
I KNOW. It was the one and only time he ever annoyed me, and it turns out it was because he was right. He* deserves all the internet love that he gets. Possibly more
*Ok originally I had his name in here, bc I wasn’t paying attention, and then I was like AAGH IDENTIFYING DETAILS so I took it out, and now it just looks annoying? So: was partially outed by Junot Diaz in my youth. Poor dude presided over a workshop that was absolutely frothy with budding homosexuality and I think he was pretty amused by the whole thing. In the limited sphere that I knew him, he was indeed a fantastic human.
I love this story so much.
Can you just imagine how much fun he was having, though? Like, “Oh, these children. These sweet little angel babies. They’ve got no idea.”
Hilariously, I was the only one who had no idea. The rest were totally fucking and being closeted and self-loathing and then writing stories about it.
He said it to me with this sly smile, too. In conclusion: he had a great time.
Aw. I miss that class.
You are fascinating. I’d read your searing memoir any day.
Aw! I am mighty jealous of your username, btw, because I frequently feel like hugpunching people, like now. (Wait there isn’t some new meaning for that, right? It’s just a masculine of center awkward gesture of affection? Not…not something on urban dictionary?)
I bet I have a box of those old workshop stories somewhere. I could probably cobble together something appropriately searing just by annotating them with what I really meant.
Do it! Do it! Do it!
This is a great idea and I am on board.
And hugpunch is a band name my friend and I came up with because it’s how we were feeling about certain people/situations, like wanting to hug and punch them simultaneously.
MALLORY, BITCH-QUEEN OF MY HEART.
I need a lengthy description of a still photo, please.
“I was envious of the cat that got run over. At least it had escaped, no matter how brutally”
“Even as its viscera dried to hard-tack on the pavement in front of my father’s house, I wept, not for the cat, but for the futility of my own life.”
CORUSCATING
bless you
Am I a wizard yet?
Why is there so, so much hate-fucking in high-brow literature/memoirs??
It is what passes for drama in high-brow lives?
I have a memory of reading some man’s supposedly high-brow book and he had a character named Saffron (so subtle) who “impaled herself” on the main character’s pole/cock/whatever word he used, and I remember thinking, “So…am I supposed to think that is good writing? Oh god, I just can’t.”
Not a memoir, but I think my favorite piece of highbrow squick was the description of vaginal secretions as “less of a sauce, and more of a glaze.” CHRIST, UPDIKE.
My reaction may have partly been to Updike himself.*
*I make no promises for my memory on this; maybe just [insert old white man here]?
I just threw up in my mouth a little.
I just threw up in my mouth a lot.
And movies.
Because emotional attachments are passe, but sex sells. B
actually I really like that “you are hardly even my miscarriage” bit and am tucking the line away for possible future use.
Mallory should write a searing little book on things to say to men. A small little book that we could carry with us all the time, so we are always prepared. Deluxe edition packaged with a flamethrower in case the reader wants to get into actual searing.
No, no. No flamethrower. After diligent study of Ms. Ortberg’s Searing Little Book on Things to Say to Men, the reader will develop the ability to incinerate any deserving man with just a look.
How To Destroy Men: The Mallory Ortberg Story should be required reading in every school in America. This doesn’t betray her secrets, because in my hypothetical utopia future we don’t teach men to read.
Creating compound nouns with the skill of a german and the raw feeling of an underachieving gifted teenager, Ortberg has reached new heights in her latest memoir (fifth in the series).
Real question: is the compound word thing A Trend in srs literature? If so, I’m glad I don’t read it! 🙂
It works with comedy, less so when everything is in that laconic-but-serious-because-it’s-meaningful tone. And I like jokes, so I thank the Germans for the inspiration as often as I remember.
I am totally going to steal “the raw feeling of an underachieving gifted teenager.” EVOCATIVE AS BALLS
(fifth in the series)
perfect
My memoir would have I think less fuckchurches and more times where I screwed up my liquid eyeliner and ended up wearing WAY more than is necessary for daytime. I said the word fuck whilst doing this, though so…samesies? I’m probably still doing it wrong. *sets eyebrows on fire*
That is your own special form of prayer, and it is as beautiful and true and fierce as you are.
*sets eyebrows on fire*
This is my new Internet reaction. Let’s make this a meme.
I feel this searing pain of eyeliner fuckups. it is a tale that needs to be told, and told harshly and unflinchingly, with coruscating prose.
“My Father Has Set My Eyebrows On Fire And That Is When I Realize I Am Going To Go To College”
There’s probably a scholarship for that type of thing.
Mallory, I’d go to fuckchurch with you anytime.
This electrifying memoir was like a cattleprod to my butthole.
Hi, Mason.
Would somebody please drop a broad hint about what current masterpiece is being parodied here so I can go hateread it?
I think it’s a take-your-pick sort of situation, but that’s because I’m jaded wrt: searing memoirs.
It spoils the hatereading experience for me if I can’t share the joy.
Maybe Chronology of Water?
The title alone is irritating me. Can water have a chronology? It’s like the bit in Stephen King’s On Writing where he talks about poetry and says something like, “You may be a lesbian and angry, but your breasts can’t be these things because they are only breasts.” It’s basically poetic sounding nonsense.
I’m guessing this: http://www.amazon.com/The-Chronology-Water-A-Memo… and “Wild.”
I’m hatereading just that summary. “This is not your mother’s memoir.” Oh, sorry, my mistake.
and she has a kid! Imagine how confused he’ll feel when he goes looking for his mom’s book and reads that summary some day.
“For one thing, if your mother had published her memoir, she probably would have told you about it. This is not a book about the lived experiences of your mother, sorry.”
But the reviews are so gloriously perfect that it comes around again, and now we are all the serpent and its tail:
“I didn’t like this at all. Seems like only women liked it. Her writing was incoherent and it was not an enjoyable read.” – Mark Thompson, 1/5 stars
“I didn’t care for this book. It wasn’t sexy or inviting or light.” – TEESTIEFLY, 2/5 stars
I thought it was, like, a whole genre.
omg I don’t know what to call them, but phrases like “slapslapslapping” drive me CRAZY. You’ve really hit the nail on the head with that one. See also John Green’s “Andbutso” usage in Will Grayson, Will Grayson, and Jenny Schecter saying things like, “The jogger stepped, hovered, poked.”
Using serials to suggest…movement? I don’t know. Like trying to do stream of consciousness, but not really.
brb going back to reread the whole thing in the voice of Jenny Schecter. Fuck-church, vagina wig, tomato, tomahto.
It was like going to fuck-church: mildly tedious and full of well-meaning people with regional accents.
Partly done standing, partly kneeling, partly sitting. Taking a break to have some wine and only speaking in Latin (I go to traditional fuck-church, but only on the high holidays)
I’ve got “I really don’t give a shit” tattooed on my ass, and it’s been difficult for me to make that work in my memoirs. It’s been keeping me up nights, but “Something, something, fuckchurch” ought to do the trick so that I can move on to the more satisfying story of stalking that musician.
If somebody rewrites this memoir in the style of Ayn Rand, then, boom, the world ends.
And here I thought that you didn’t like Updike.
I would totally tithe 10% at fuck-church.
What denomination is fuck-church? Sounds kind of Lutheranish to me.
There goes my bestseller.
“bitchmother”
….come light my bottom? http://abitoffryandlaurie.co.uk/sketches/censored
YES I agree. It was a few years ago that I read it, so I can't remember my specific flashpoints, but I remember finishing it feeling duped and angry and baffled that everyone else seemed to love it.
How did I miss this? Patti Smith cracked me open and freed my inner punk woman. I owe her.
It's wonderful, she's wonderful *sigh*
Mallory da gawd