Doing Dishes
abrams, racheL
Doing Dishes The unbearable lightness of the naughty literati. by Rachel Abrams For this collection of essays, tantalizingly entitled Bad Girls, the novelist Ellen Sussman has rounded up 26 women...
...There's dangerous territory ahead...
...Enter at your own risk," Ms...
...But as long as they continue to insist upon treating their every runny nose, hot flash, rejection, beating, and orgasm as food for thought, and upon using the written word as so much Kleenex for the drying of their tears, I'll stick with Tolstoy and Eliot—and oh, by the way, the wonderful PD...
...When she stumbles on one at the hotel bar, he turns out to be not one of the "over-medicated professors released from their small-town colleges for a few days of . . . drinking, schmoozing, and airing of professional resentments," but rather a refrigerator repairman who can't believe his luck...
...Making appearances here are an alcoholic or two, a drug addict, a couple of bulimics, an unfaithful wife, several sluts, a liar, and a cheat...
...At least her "A Good Girl Goes Bad" usefully reminds us that she was an 18-year-old virgin who, thanks to bulimia, looked like a prepubescent 12-year-old when the pedophilic 53-year-old Salinger seduced her...
...The ground shifts beneath you...
...Sounds exciting, doesn't it...
...In "I Am Badder than Omarosa," Michelle Richmond, teacher, novelist, and publisher of the online literary quarterly Fiction Attic, writes, For a couple of years in high school, I was an enthusiastic member of an overzealous Southern Baptist youth group...
...Must Joyce Maynard relive in print, yet again, her horrible treatment at the hands of J.D...
...Sussman's own "Consider the Slut," a numeration of the boys who explored her body when she was 14— to her apparently eternal delight— ends with a peroration on "Making Out" that is as breathlessly steamy as a romance novel...
...It was one of those organic San Francisco babies dressed to look like a migrant worker or a lesbian...
...Two, Joyce Maynard and Erica Jong, are as famous for one infamous piece of writing each as for any of the other 20-odd books of poetry and prose they have collectively produced...
...All this suggests a decent gossip-fest to come, at the very least...
...Jong's derision notwithstanding...
...I couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl, which was intentional, I assumed...
...It's off to her room for a night of . . . something— she's so wasted that, next morning, she can't remember what—while her roommate (and now ex-friend) suffers in the next bed...
...Apparently so—and we along with her...
...by Rachel Abrams For this collection of essays, tantalizingly entitled Bad Girls, the novelist Ellen Sussman has rounded up 26 women writers (including herself) to talk about all the ways in which they are now or ever have been Bad...
...For Bad Girls, with all its promise of disclosure and illumination—and naughty diversion—is really a pretty dreary time...
...But why deliver it at all...
...There's certainly plenty of salaciousness...
...He forced himself on me sexually for so many years I am not entirely certain when it began and when it ended...
...some have bestsellers under their belts...
...One author gets her kicks, such as they are, from hearing about the exploits of others...
...What constitutes Badness for these women...
...So did the description by the novelist Kaui Hart Hemmings, in "Author Questionnaire," of a trip to the playground with her daughter: "She went to the sand pit to play with another baby around her age...
...There's the Rachel Abrams is managing editor of Policy Review harsh smell of wildfire, the hiss of a snake, the bubbling cauldron, the wild winds of the mistral...
...I have no illusions...
...My message: Religion can be fun...
...It lurches from cockiness, so to speak—Ms...
...Just about every one of these novelists, poetesses, and essayists is some kind of prizewinner: One has a Pulitzer, one is a recipient of the Prix France Bleu Gironde...
...Sad to say, those two passages are just about the only funny ones in the book...
...It was not beneath me to give a guy a hand job in order to persuade him to attend a Contemporary Christian rock concert...
...In the same flat voice she describes her peculiar forgiveness: I have now lived long enough to understand that the things he did are not so different from the things a lot of other fathers do in a lot of other families [Really?], and I don't—have never—wanted or expected any more sympathy than any other person who has made it forty-four years into the world...
...Merkin's Adventures in Penisland—to complaint—"Now that women supposedly can be heard," gripes Erica Jong in "My Dirty Secret," "we are still constrained by stereotypes of femininity . . . ghettoized in chick lit, romance, or mystery fiction"—to downright bleak misery...
...The New York Times's Daphne Merkin, in "Penises I Have Known," delivers a little homily on the male copulatory organ down through history (and literature) before cataloguing her own felicitous encounters with several of them in the flesh...
...The confidence of these women in the capacity of their self-exposure to fascinate others has been rewarded with favorable notices for this collection in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere...
...The currents carry you away...
...Reading it is like paying a visit to the confessional with members of the New York Times's "Modern Love" club: a tedious plod through territory that has been charted extensively—and stultifyingly—already...
...Sussman warns in her introduction...
...some are professors of creative writing...
...In "Executrix," the short-story writer Pam Houston recounts without inflection the abuse her father visited on her when she was a child: "He broke my femur when I was four years old...
...The poet/novelist Kim Addonizio, stoned on weed and drunk on Scotch and champagne, trolls a writers' conference for a bed partner...
...Salinger, and the vicious reception her memoir of her time with him received...
...Rounding out the group is a penis assessor...
...That bit made me laugh out loud...
...Just a lot of women shooting the breeze about the things women so often discuss when they get together: cruel lovers, rotten husbands, difficult children, crappy bosses, bad parents...
...I'm not asking the daughters of the sexual revolution to conceive characters like Anna Kar-enina or Gwendolyn Harleth or that ur-Bad Girl, Becky Sharp...
...there are a couple of National Book Award finalists...
...It's an ugly story, and one can see why it's delivered in the practiced monotone of the therapized woman who has exorcised her demons...
...My target audience: track-and-field boys...
...James, Ms...
...There are no surprises here, and no mistrals...
...Must every piece of writing by a woman be a form of therapy...
Vol. 13 • October 2007 • No. 5
