Over the holidays, I read five female celebrity memoirs and watched both Beyonce’s “Life Is But a Dream” and Jennifer Lopez’s “Dance Again” (essentially, memoirs in video form). I can’t explain the appeal of these works, but another book I am currently reading, “Bad Feminist” by Roxane Gay (strongly, strongly, strongly recommend this collection of essays — it will challenge you, make you laugh, and — most importantly — make you think, especially about how we see and define ourselves collectively as women through pop culture and our potential complicity in building inaccurate and often damaging constructions of what it means to be a woman), has made me think critically about this and I’m not sure what this attraction says of me.
I think there is something else at play here, though, for me. After earning my M.A. in literature, I developed a strange and strangled relationship with books. I found them taxing. I found reading plagued by a series of unwanted interruptions typically involving the lit student in me pointing out the fact that I had an unreliable narrator on my hands, or making an annoying reference to an article I’d read by Gayatri Spivak, or to the concept of “The Other.” I couldn’t quiet this voice. The joy of reading waned. Reading felt like a chore — or maybe not a chore, but an intellectual exercise in which “lit student” me was constantly showing off to “civilian reader” me.
So, I largely stopped reading for the past several years. I’m embarrassed to say this, because for a long time, a huge part of my identity had centered upon a version of myself as a sharp, hard-working, cerebral student. I used the word “epistemology” in the title of my master’s thesis; I told friends I was specializing in “high modernist poetry and poetics”; I could make intelligent observations on some of the toughest works out there, including Samuel Beckett, who is pretty much illegible as I now see it. All of this is true and earned, but there was an admitted posturing to it — a showing-off, a desire to feel highly literate, cultured, and above all, smart. So when I began to shy away from reading, there was a deep shift in the way I’d always seen myself and wanted to be seen.
And that’s why this winter holiday came as such a surprise. It started with the funny and entertaining “Yes Please” by Amy Poehler, and it turned into a three-week long reading binge that has not yet ended. I cannot read enough. But my book selections are largely gravitating toward non-fiction, and, more specifically, the genre of the memoir. Perhaps this is unfair, but non-fiction seems safer for me; it seems less prone to the sort of exegesis I cannot help myself from indulging in with fiction. It feels realer, less artful — and yet. I am beginning to realize that memoirs are perhaps the ultimate kind of fiction, the ultimate re-imagining and repositioning, requiring an ability to bend the chain of events that happened into a meaningful narrative arc. There are a lot of creative liberties in memoirs, a lot of re-shaping and re-ordering, and the language used is reflective of authorial mood and belief in a way that deepens the entire reading experience. “Why did she choose to include this memory here? Why describe it in this way? Why withhold this information until now?” It’s an elaborate set of decisions, a slow and careful revelation of the self to the reader. And even poorly written memoirs are worth reading, in my opinion. Brooke Shields’ “There Was a Little Girl” is horribly written, calling out for an editor. (I noted, with a smirk, that she thanked her editor in the epilogue…woah.) She repeats herself far too much, often contradicts herself in the space of a paragraph, and even falls prey to misspellings. And yet. The memoir, in its hazy and confused and contradictory mass of seemingly unrelated stories, reveals Shields’ deep pain and confusion and ambiguity about her relationship with her mother. She can’t even complete a sentence without trying to offer an excuse for her mother’s behavior — and at the same time, occasionally comes off as unnecessarily harsh toward her mother, in a posturing of “I know that I’m showing co-dependence here.” It’s a sad and intriguing reflection of a truly tormented celebrity.
And so. All of this prologue to get me to the fluffier topic at hand: blues and whites and how much I love them in the home. When I was thinking about a title for this post, I instantly thought of Blue Ivy because I’d just watched the Beyonce movie, and it was top of mind. So, without further adieu, le bleu et le blanc:
Goh-geous. Items in this color palette I’d like for myself: ginger jar ($250); Louis XVI chair ($330); Loeffler Randall heels ($295); Mirabelle rug ($140+, depending on size); set of Juliska plates ($98 for 4); chinoiserie chest ($1,299); Jonathan Adler trinket tray ($24); dip-dyed effect pillows ($60 each); Biscuit Home sheet set ($250); pair of lamps ($375); bikini (Zimmermann, $260); foo dog ($13); blue garland bowl ($14); monogrammed cocktail napkins ($44 for 4); Fae gown (Tory Burch, $1,495); and spongewear pitcher ($98 — great wedding gift).
Leave A Reply