This is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed. Copyright © 2012 by Katie Roiphe All rights reserved. Published in the United States by The Dial Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. DIAL PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.: Excerpt from “Mayakovsky” from Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara, copyright © 1957 by Frank O’Hara. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.: Excerpt from “Needle Biopsy” from Endpoint and Other Poems by John Updike, copyright © 2009 by The Estate of John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Previous publication information for the essays that appear in this work are located within the author’s Acknowledgments, which begin on this page. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA In praise of messy lives: essays / Katie Roiphe. Roiphe, Katie. p. cm. eISBN: 978-0-67964402-6 I. Title. PS3618.O53I5 2012 814′.6—dc23 2012013549 www.dialpress.com Cover design: Anna Bauer v3.1 v3.1 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Introduction PART I Life and Times The Great Escape The Alchemy of Quiet Malice Unquiet Americans Beautiful Boy, Warm Night PART II Books The Naked and the Conflicted Writing Women The Bratty Bystander Reclaiming the Shrew Making the Incest Scene Joan Didion Susan Sontag The Ambiguities of Austen Rabbit at Rest Do Childish People Write Better Children’s Books? PART III The Way We Live Now The Perverse Allure of Messy Lives The Fantasy Life of the American Working Woman Is Maureen Dowd Necessary? Profiles Encouraged Elect Sister Frigidaire “Love Child” The Perfect Parent Whose School Is It, Anyway? The Feminine Mystique on Facebook The Child Is King PART IV The Internet, Etc. One Day at a Time Twitter War The Language of Fakebook The Angry Commenter Gawker Is Big Immature Baby Whiplash Girlchild in the Dark Acknowledgments Other Books by This Author About the Author Introduction Here is something I remember from school: in French class we quickly learned that no matter what we were reading—Camus, Sartre, Ionesco, Voltaire—the correct answer to any question was always “L’hypocrisie de la bourgeoisie.” We were good students, all girls, navy blue uniforms, and we would raise our hands and duly deliver that answer, and Madame Camille, our pretty French teacher, would smile encouragingly. I fear that same commitment to theme is a little bit on display here. One day an editor asked me to write a piece analyzing the enormous popularity of Mad Men, and it was in distilling my response that I began to think about messy lives. After watching the show for a few days straight, an experience I don’t necessarily recommend to anyone, it seemed to me that our conservative culture was fascinated by the spectacle of people who drank too much, smoked too much, and fell into bed with people they weren’t married to, the mixed glamour of it, the stylish retrograde thrill. I began in that piece to think of messiness as a value, a good thing, a lost and interesting way of life. I had long felt discouraged by what seemed to be a certain lack of imagination in the way most of the people I knew were living, a kind of narrowness and provincialism in liberal, progressive New York circles, a cultural preoccupation with healthiness above all else, a veiled judgment toward anyone who tried to live differently; and now that discouragement felt suddenly useful and productive. While getting my doctorate in literature, I was trained to do close readings of poems, and what I am trying to do in these essays is close readings of the outside world. I want to take apart the language we use and expose the subterranean fantasies and mythologies and assumptions at work. On disparate subjects, whether I am writing an etymology of the phrase “love child” or an analysis of the sexual preoccupations of American male novelists, I am attempting close readings of the culture. Though I have tried for the sake of neatness and clarity to divide them into sections, the line between the cultural pieces and book pieces and personal pieces is largely imaginary; they all blend and blur and spill into each other. One review of one of my books used the colorful phrase “Roiphe- haters,” and though I was a tiny bit taken aback, I am aware that there are an unusual number of people who “hate” my writing, and that I have done something to attract, if not court, that hatred. I once read someone describe me as “an uncomfortablist,” which may be as accurate a characterization as any. For some probably perverse reason, I am drawn to subjects or ways of looking at things that make people, and sometimes even me, uncomfortable. In life I will go very far out of my way to avoid any possible conflict or argument, so it is a little surprising that in my essays I often seem to pick fights, and to offend or otherwise enrage people. It’s hard to explain how this works, and I admit that it’s fairly implausible or untenable as a way of life, but that seems to be how I go about my days: peaceably in person, fiercely on paper. One day one of my students was doing a radio project on writers and their ideal writing conditions. He was very serious and very smart, and I would have liked to give him smart and serious answers. But I don’t think I have ever had or even thought about “ideal writing conditions.” I had to confess to him that my ideal writing conditions are that I have a deadline and the Con Ed bill is due. As Virginia Woolf wrote about novels, essays and articles are not “spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.” And looking back, I can read the conditions behind some of these essays: a baby’s fever, a month of not sleeping, a marriage falling apart. I am afraid the messy life is not just a theme of the essays, it’s in the sentences. In putting this collection together, it was a little surprising to me, looking at these pieces written over time, casual or serious, book pieces or culture pieces, pieces on Jane Austen or divorce, to see a pattern emerging, themes obsessively being worked through, a worldview, sometimes actively or perversely courting the extreme, and definitely not all that hugely far away from “L’hypocrisie de la bourgeoisie.” Madame Camille, wherever she is, should be pleased. My own life at the time of writing is a little messy. I have two children, with two different fathers, neither of whom I am living with. It did take me a little while to achieve quite this level of messiness, but I did it in the end. I once wrote to someone: “I am kind of a failed conventional person. Or maybe my failures liberated me toward ever more colorful and flamboyant failures.” And this seems as accurate a description as any of my relation to conventional life, this book being, among other things, a defense and celebration and interrogation of precisely those failures. After my essay “The Naked and the Conflicted” appeared in The New York Times Book Review, the paper ran the following response in the letters column: To the Editor: Not only are you contributing to the total annihilation of the literary culture, but also to the destruction of our civilization. Think about it. John Rendeiro Union, NJ I keep this pinned up on my office wall, for inspiration on a slow day. PART I Life and Times