tellall

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/martyrdom-tell-memoir/"></div>Sure, you could say that the process is rewarding — but it’s equal parts excruciating. You divulge your insecurities, every character flaw and body part you’d rather will away. You exhibit your fears in high-definition. You’re held to a standard nothing short of judicial: the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Then you field questions from some schmuck who knows nothing about you, except for all of your childhood traumas.
But it’s not therapy. Far from it.
T Kira Madden has just returned from a 24-city book tour. She traveled the country to promote her debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of the Fatherless Girls. Now we’re sprawled on her living room rug, and although we just met 45 minutes ago, from her book I could tell you: the story of her first kiss, the story of her first assault, the torments of her grade school bullies, the torments of her teenage crush. Her mother’s struggle with crack. Her father’s struggle with crack. The date of her father’s death.
Which is perhaps why it takes me almost an hour in her home, spewing questions on grief and exes, to realize that she’s tired. Not just tired, but emotionally sore.
“It’s been like therapy ad infinitum,” Madden says, of the responses to her tell-all book. “I have to talk about my mother’s overdose constantly, my sexuality constantly, my father’s absence and neglect.” It doesn’t feel entirely healthy. “I’ve had to create this removal of sorts, almost like disassociating from my body as a means of self preservation.” Every question that Madden’s asked, she rips off the Band-Aids; she pours on the iodine of exposure and analysis until she can no longer feel the sting.
Reading Madden’s coming-of-age memoir feels like pillow talk. Like you’re in bed and she, chin propped in her hand, asks you: Want to hear a secret? Yes, in fact, you do. You hear the electric pulse of her first queer relationship, the prickly pain of a parent swallowed up by addiction. You find your own stories, too — in the lifesaving force of female friendships, in the tender reach of siblings who grow distant, and then close, and then closer still to make up for lost time. It’s sort of the way that I imagine the pubescent boys in my Jewish high school felt discussing Philip Roth. It’s no small thing, as a reader, to feel seen.
In a word, it’s catharsis. It’s every scar you wanted to re-trace, every bruise that you needed to press down on so you could feel that hot, slow ache. Whatever you call the opposite of being numb.
Between Madden’s book and works like Roxane Gay’s Hunger or Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering, you could say we’re in a golden age of memoir. But given our cultural tendency toward over-exposure, it can be easy to take this raw honesty for granted. We’re all tweeting our every thoughts, handing Facebook heaps of our data, barely shrugging when celebrities leak their nudes — why shouldn’t authors be expected to get naked on the page? Then we can deconstruct their lives the way we close-read William Faulkner or Richard Yates: Who is the main character’s foil? What’s the meaning of the rape?
What we don’t talk about, though, is the wounds inflicted when we write about our wounds. Or really, when we publish that sort of work. For Madden, writing itself is restorative. The magic of memoir comes in the moment when a memory moves beyond the plane of practical experience; she sees it through the filter of prose and it becomes ethereal, abstract, almost shimmery in the light. But the dialogue around her writing, that’s something else.
“To talk about everything literally, as if it’s the people in my life nailed to the page, breaks the spell,” says Madden. “The risk of nonfiction is that people are like ‘I know everything about you,’ and I’m like no, you just know this fun house mirrored projection of the people in my life through one lens, which is mine.”
Leslie Jamison tells me that when she first began writing deeply personal nonfiction, she felt the need to answer every interview question asked about the experiences behind her work because she had this nagging sense that she’d started it all — that ugly-beautiful process of self-revelation.
“There’s a fantasy of access that can reduce the art,” Jamison says. “I’ve had to develop muscles around making it clear that what I write about in my work is only a very small fraction of the truth of my life. I like to talk about the partiality and sculptedness of experience becoming art.”
I ask Roxane Gay, who has modeled for so many what trauma writing can be, how she narrates her past without opening herself to fresh pain, or over-exposure. “If you don’t have firm boundaries, you’re going to sacrifice some part of yourself that you’re not willing to sacrifice,” Gay says. “The system is designed to encourage writers, and especially marginalized writers, to ignore their boundaries. I tell my students you don’t need to cannibalize yourself.”
Ultimately, though, even the parts of yourself that you guard often end up for grabs.
Growing up, I wanted to write nonfiction but I was terrified of what I could lose packaging my emotional life into sentences. I figured that writing about your pain means you relinquish some ownership over its meaning; your fears and failures fall into the public domain. When I tried to write about my parents’ divorce — which was totally lacking in classic drama, like screaming matches and shattered glass — I bumped up against the charged line between the simple facts of my experience and the more complicated facts of my emotional response. I began to think all memoir involves some degree of self-sacrifice.
“It’s a political act,” says Michele Filgate, of nonfiction writing. She argues that the power of the personal essay is so potent it’s almost revolutionary. It gives weight to the lived experiences of people who have long been told their stories don’t belong in the canon. It means opening yourself to all the analysis of people who think they know you — not because it’s restorative, but because others might find themselves in your words and begin to heal.
That’s why Filgate gets vexed by takedowns of <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/technology/2015/09/the_first_person_industrial_complex_how_the_harrowing_personal_essay_took.html">“the first person industrial complex.”</a> Slapping a label like “trivial” or “navel-gazing” on a personal essay isn’t just an indictment of the form, it’s an indictment of someone’s life story. And really, it’s a power-grab on who gets to decide which truths matter. It’s no coincidence that personal essay critiques exploded just as a new generation of female writers claimed their space, the Jamisons, Gays, Filgates, and Maddens.
Alongside the criticisms, there’s also been new recognition of the need for stories of female trauma. With the #MeToo movement, we’ve seen how the women who come forward and share their experiences can transform systems of power and hold abusers to account. But memoirs like Madden’s and Jamison’s are insisting on space for something different. Not the stories wielded for a specific purpose, but those shared because they’re beautifully told and deserving of our time.
“That an event doesn’t have to be extraordinary to be worth narrativizing is something we tend to accept with fiction, but with memoir there seem to be very different expectations at play,” Jamison says. “I believe any life and set of events holds infinite potential to show us something about what it means to be alive. What makes it valuable doesn’t need to be about extremity.”
Both Jamison’s and Madden’s works insist on translating the ordinary — the stories of regular women, abused women, joyous women, women in love and in lust and in pain — into the power of prose. Even when that translation risks misinterpretation. Even when their readers will break their hearts. They dig through the banalities of life and find all the magic of a fairytale. And it’s all the more extraordinary because it’s tethered to the ordinary.
Madden is actually an amateur magician —  she can pull a playing card out of an orange, or find a penny behind your ear — and her writing reminds us that nothing is ever quite what it seems. Even in her book’s title, she calls herself “fatherless,” but tells me that her dad feels more present now as she mourns his death than in her childhood when he was often absent and high on crack. She says she always tries to “write into contradictions.” Nothing’s a stock character. Her parents, her bullies, her own teenage self have the complexity made possible by emotional truth.
Watching in Madden’s memoir as her heart breaks and then recovers, you almost wonder what you did to deserve her trust. I remember once writing a personal essay about an eating disorder for a nonfiction workshop, and once my classmates had read it I had the sudden urge to take it all back. Somehow I wanted them to earn my confession — but I realized that memoir reading affords the rare privilege of hearing someone’s secrets without any promise that you’ll reserve judgment, or even share something in return.
Facing Madden on her floor, there are a million more questions I want to ask the memoirist who, through her writings, I feel like I already know. But I’m also acutely aware of the minutes we can fill with something more valuable than examination.
“Want to hear my favorite Joanna Newsom song?” she asks, and I nod.
She crawls toward the record player in the corner and pulls out a vinyl. Newsom’s voice — sopranic, almost childlike — crackles over the turntable. The late morning sunlight fills the room with a cinematic glow. Madden begins to sing along: “I will raise my own glass to how you made me fast and expendable, and I will drink to your excellent health and cruelty, will you have one on me?” Her fingers tap the ground while she sings.
All of a sudden I feel that I’m intruding on a moment — but somehow, like her prose, the trust in her voice invites me to stay.
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We Need to Talk About the Aches and Pains of Nonfiction

cambridge

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/claiming-hardest/"></div>“A place belongs forever to whoever…remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image,” Joan Didion writes.
Falling in love with a new city, with a new idea of home, is easy when you know that it has an expiration date. You can call it love knowing full well it’s just a crush. You know that its impracticalities will eventually overwhelm the pull of cobblestones and coffee shops and the hazy stillness of its sun-drunk riverbanks. You know you’ll never claim it, or if you do, that you can’t claim it hardest.
I arrived in Cambridge on the last day of September. It was Indian summer but I was wearing a fleece winter coat that hadn’t fit inside my checked luggage. When the bus drew up by Parker’s Piece — the park, I’d later learn, where modern soccer rules were born — I was mainly thinking about where I could find a shop to turn my dollars into pounds. But I still remember that first glance of lazy punters on the river. I remember wondering whether any part of this place would ever let me remake it, reshape it with my own attachments of scribbled pages and half-remembered conversations. I wasn’t sure what I wanted. A new home? Or maybe just the opposite. Some space far removed from the textures of belonging and laying claim, some space so romantic that it stayed forever in the realm of cold detachment. Or just something in between.
As I moved my bags into the dorms, I told the PhD student next door that I was from New York City but hadn’t actually lived at home for at least four years, so I had nothing in particular to be homesick for. Maybe the bagel stores on Broadway, or the doormen who knew my name on West End. Still, I was ready for some other home, one detached from the many versions of myself that I’d tried on in adolescence.
On the first day in Cambridge, I walked to the main street pharmacy to buy shampoo and tried to imagine what it would feel like to retrace these steps in a few months, when the baristas would know my order. It all felt too unfamiliar. Maybe it was the accents.
That night I reread a William Blake poem a former English professor had emailed me as I had boarded the flight. I listened to Van Morrison’s “Summertime in England” before I fell asleep. It was still early autumn but it was already nippy so I slept in all my layers. The stucco walls were thin and I tried not to think of the impending winter cold.
¤
If California meant sepia-toned sunsets and New York meant the feel of sticky summer subway seats, Cambridge hadn’t meant to me much of anything at all.  Maybe Stephen Hawking or Alan Turing, names I’d read in textbooks so many times that I’d given up on clarifying the exact codes and numbers they were known for.
The city of Cambridge feels almost Disneyfied — remarkably different from the sort of place that might’ve inspired the laws of motion or the Logico-Philosophical Treatise. Yet there, in the Botanic Garden, is the very tree that Newton’s apple fell from. In Trinity College’s Wren Library there’s a shelf with Wittgenstein’s original works. Am I doing it wrong? I asked myself in those first few weeks. It only started to make sense when I found the floor of the archives with A. A. Milne’s original Winnie-the-Pooh. There was a shelf for whimsy, after all.
I’d never lived somewhere that wore its history with such self-assurance, draping it around like a vintage shawl whose owner pulls it out again in April to collect a few last compliments. Oh this old thing? It’s nothing. It’s the barstool where Watson and Crick discovered DNA. It’s the garden that shelters Oliver Cromwell’s decapitated head. New York, I’ve always thought, seems to continually refresh itself with new layers of graffiti. Cambridge doesn’t ask you to leave your mark. You’re told to stay off the grass.
Throughout late October I started to wonder if it was all about power, about men who wanted their words made immortal and boys who thought they just might one day be prime minister. The city is built on a river, but really it’s built for the river. It’s built for the Cam, and for the nimble boys who shake their boats awake at 6:00am, pressing body to blade in a show of anatomical grit. “The boaties,” they were called, with a tone that carried equal parts resentment and respect. Cambridge is a place that prizes muscle — broad shoulders, well-articulated points.
Over glasses of Malbec, we debated Hegel and Marx. We smoked on rooftops and I learned the intricacies of dialectical change. It was an intellectual high. And I was relieved. This was a place I could love, but it was only temporarily. I knew that eventually the temperatures would drop. It would no longer be rooftop season. We’d have to shelve our discussion of Kant.
¤
Somehow, though, there came that moment when I realized that it still wasn’t mine but it also wasn’t just a fling. I found myself walking the streets more confidently. I found myself spending early mornings rowing on the Cam. The barber at the King Street salon knew my name. The shopkeeper at Le Patissier knew that I drank skim milk, not cream. I started to call New York less often.
And I realized that Joan Didion might not have been entirely correct. A place does not always belong to whoever claims it hardest — but one morning, or one purple twilight, you might wake up and realize that the place has laid its claim on you. It has wrenched you from yourself obsessively, remade you in its image. It isn’t yours, but you belong.
Looking back, it’s hard to point to the particular moment when the city laid its claim. It might’ve been the first sunny afternoon in February when we sang Tom Petty and laid out by the river while someone played the guitar. It might’ve been in a garden, which for just that moment I thought that I’d discovered because it was 2:00am and we were barefoot and nursing a bottle of champagne. It might’ve been a musty library corner napping in the late afternoon light. The earnest conversations over McFlurries and fries. The memories all feel hard to pull apart.
Was I attaching myself to the city or the moments? It’s almost too easy to fall in love with a place when life takes on that giddy quality of things coming to an end, of knowing that pretty soon you’ll be on some other train line and in some other time zone, somewhere where you’ll have to trade in currency other than nostalgia.
¤
I moved back to New York in July. I tried, perhaps too hard, to fall in love with lower Manhattan, with a New York entirely different from the one that I’d grown up in. But the magic of place and of home, I learned, is that it isn’t within our control. I’ve lived in New York for a year now, or maybe 23, and it still doesn’t feel like it’s laid its claim. I’m still waiting for that moment of purple twilight.
People ask me if I’m happy to be back home and I explain that I’m still figuring it out. But you’re home, and home is New York. Home is “the city.” Why wouldn’t you be happy? They look at me like I’m missing the point. And maybe I am missing the point, or maybe there was never any point to begin with.
The other day I got out of the subway on West Fourth Street and Washington Square and passed someone by the park entrance playing an off-key rendition of “Summertime.” I caught a stranger’s eye and both of us smiled. Nearby a gangly teenage boy and girl were holding hands, each silently enjoying a cone of chocolate soft serve. It was almost 7:00pm but still light outside and I realized that it actually was close to springtime, that a year had gone by somehow and I hadn’t been remade but I was starting to adjust.
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Claiming It Hardest

cyborg-feminist-full

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/bring-back-feminist-cyborgs/"></div>“Shut up Alexa!”
My nine-year-old babysitting charge directed this order toward his family’s Amazon device. I almost rebuked him, but then held back. I reasoned he was barking at an inanimate object. Better to shield the other members of his household and direct his angst toward their cyborg-in-residence — right?
Or not. In 2018, new research emerged about the corrosive effect that AIs like Alexa have on our social norms and etiquette. UK-based research agency Childwise <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/amazon-alexa-reward-polite-children-manners-voice-commands-ai-america-a8325721.html">published a report</a> indicating that use of the gadgets is making young people more demanding. Children quickly grow accustomed to bossing around their digital assistants without couching their requests in a “please” or “thank you.”
Amazon was quick to respond to these charges: in May, the company began rolling out a new “magic word” feature that rewards polite interactions with positive reinforcement. But the problem is that social etiquette isn’t the only norm at stake in our interactions with digital assistants — gender norms are just as much in play.
It sends a disconcerting signal to young children when they’re taught to shout orders at a female voice trained to dutifully serve. “Alexa, turn on the lights.” “Alexa, play Cold Play!” “Alexa, pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees.” It comes as no surprise that the predominantly male engineers who prototyped AIs like Alexa and Siri decided that people would prefer to hear their assistants serve them in a feminine tone. Dennis Mortensen, CEO and co-founder of the company x.ai, said he named his company’s digital assistant Amy after a secretary he’d had in a previous job. He, and other male coders, build into their algorithms the gendered expectations they see embedded in the world around them.
Adam Cheyer, the engineer who programmed Siri, says he had an almost father–daughter relationship with the gadget. “If I were to anthropomorphize Siri, I would imagine that it would think of me somewhat like a father,” Cheyer said. “Someone who wants the best for them, who teaches them, who is occasionally demanding, annoying, or embarrassing but who loves them and is proud when they do well.”
Cheyer’s words capture the Siri Effect — the digitization of old-school gendered power dynamics. It’s the patronizing relationship between patriarch and offspring, or masculine executive and female assistant, but rendered all the more ubiquitous as it is encoded into the devices that structure our careers, our homes, and our daily routines.
The tech sector’s sexism is patriarchy at its most viral — it embeds in our algorithms, then it replicates. That’s biology 101.
The Siri Effect was never an inevitability. In fact, in the earliest days of the tech industry, people dreamed of feminist, rabble-rousing cyborgs. For the 1990s cyberfeminist movement, Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” was a seminal text. Haraway saw the potential for technological gadgets that challenged the norms of patriarchy. She believed that cyborgs would evolve to undo the very concept of gender; their existence would push for a world beyond binaries, where we don’t separate human from machine; science from culture; mind from body; man from woman. “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world,” she wrote.
Haraway wasn’t naïve; she recognized these creatures as the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” — but still, she added, “illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.”
Just 35 years later, her prophecies seem to ring hollow. The decidedly gendered nature of today’s cyborgs presents a cautionary tale. When novel technologies are created, they provide an invitation to rethink our existing systems, routines, and social structures. But with the development of our contemporary AIs, especially digital voice assistants, we’ve simply reinforced our status quo and made it more efficient.
Now what of the new generation of technologies, those just now in development? There are critical opportunities to learn from the failings of the past, intervening in early-stage industries and designing products that resist rather than reify gender norms.
Take blockchain, as an example. An industry still in its infant phase, it retains the potential for disruption. We can critically examine representation in the sector. We can train female developers who champion the interests of female users and create products that subvert, instead of enforce, masculine biases. The Collective Future is just one example of an initiative pushing for feminist disruption on the blockchain. It’s a blockchain diversity advocacy group, launched in February 2018, that pushes crypto companies to train and hire underrepresented minority groups. Its founders point out that the sector’s cultural norms are nascent and still in flux, so the opportunity for greater commitment to gender parity hasn’t yet dissipated.
The Collective Future is changing gender representation in the industry, but its work is also bigger than that. After all, the people hired to design and program our technologies are ultimately able to program our social norms and interactions. Just ask Adam Cheyer and his “daughter figure” Siri.
Decades ago, Haraway dreamed of cyberfeminist revolution. She dreamed of transgressive technologies — but her manifesto can’t be dreamt into reality, it needs to be fought for and embedded into technological products and processes. Sometimes illegitimate offspring take some time to come into their own. The cyborg feminists could yet be revived.
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Bring Back the Feminist Cyborgs

Emma Goldberg is a writer whose work has been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Economist, Glamour, and Salon, among other places. She lives in Brooklyn.&nbsp;