Hello, and Happy New Year!
I’ve had an extremely peaceful start to 2023. I logged out of all my social media and now my screen time is down to an hour a day (this is when I play the NYT daily spelling bee and text my friends all the things I would normally post about), I’ve read quite a bit, watched three great films (Some Like it Hot, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Meet Me In St. Louis) and written quite a substantial amount. There is a lesson in this, one I will learn absolutely nothing from.
What I’ve been reading and what I think about it
On Sunday, I did something I haven’t done in a while, which is start and finish a book in a day. Unfortunately it was an extremely terrible book, perhaps one of the worst I’ve ever read. Anne Berest’s Sagan, Paris 1954, translated by Heather Lloyd, claims to be a book that tracks the year that Francoise Sagan became a literary star on the publication of her debut and best known novel Bonjour Tristesse, but really it is a thinly veiled account of Berest’s divorce. Knowing that Berest is better known for being an actress would have helped me suss out earlier what the hell was going on when she writes things like:
For ten days I have not been living in my own flat at all.
My daughter is away on holiday and a friend who has gone abroad to work has leant me her little doll’s house of a place in the Paris suburbs. The walls resonate with the sounds of the neighbours going about their lives if we shared the same space, which I find pleasant and reassuring.
Leaving aside the phantom neighbours that I live with, I am beholden to no one, or virtually no one.
I am there only for Francoise.
It reads more like a diary that someone has kept alongside the writing of another book; Berest is constantly saying what she wants the book to be, without ever fully doing it, and also how much she loves books, and is excited to be writing a book, and then somehow shoehorning Sagan into these wild tangents that have nothing to do with Paris in 1954. (Fear not, however, as she did visit a clairvoyant who told her that Sagan approved of the project.)
I feel like I got good idea of what kind of Sagan’s life was like, so there is that, but I can’t say I know any specifics because Berest frequently admits to making things up. Perhaps if she concentrated on getting these details right, rather than making us read a three page letter she sent to someone she had a one night stand with after he said he did not want to join her in the south of France (I am not joking), this would have been a bit more of a success.
After I read something bad, I have to follow it up with a writer I love, so I read Joan Didion’s The White Album (1979). Even Didion’s worst book (which I’ve yet to come across) would be a million times better than Berest’s best, but I’m glad to say that The White Album is particularly brilliant. The main thread of the book is a reflection on the 60s from various vantage points, after Didion suffered a nervous breakdown. There are essays about the water irrigation systems of California, Hollywood, shopping malls, Honolulu, orchid greenhouses, her book tour, among many, many other things. Every time I read Didion I’m struck by how interested in the world she is, while being completely impatient with the normal run of things. Learning that she took a course on how to build shopping malls did not surprise me, but neither did her annoyance at how people normally shop in them. Learning that she is obsessed with water plants did not surprise me, and neither did the hilarious sentence, ‘Not many people I know carry their end of their conversation when I want to talk about water deliveries, even when I stress that these deliveries affect their lives, indirectly, every day.’ Her fascination with the random, hidden things that make up the world culminates in the last essay that largely focuses on a worker at an orchid greenhouse called Amado, who moved from Mexico to California and found himself the proud custodian of hundreds of rare orchid varieties. This essay seems to be accidental; Didion only meets Amado because she likes sitting in greenhouses, and he doesn’t bother her while she does it. Instead of seeking out a story, as she does in many of her other essays, the information comes to her naturally while she does something she enjoys. Which, again, is not something usual.
My favourite section was ‘On Women’, which is made up of three essays: one on Doris Lessing, one on Georgia O’Keefe and one on the Women’s Movement. Didion hates Lessing, admires O’Keefe and is ambivalent towards her contemporary feminist movement. What struck me in her feminism essay particularly was how her grievances are still relevant today, which is depressing. The main crux of her argument is that those most vocal about ‘women’s issues’ are middle and upper-class women who invoke straw man arguments that actually have very easy solutions; her answer to being bombarded by advertisements for make up is to turn the television off, for instance. Her issue is that these women do not take agency for themselves, and are not experiencing sexism per say, but disillusionment. She gets the impression that the fantasies that they have thought up for themselves as children are not coming true, which they funnel into a movement that should be focusing on things more grounded in reality. She concludes:
The astral discontent with actual lives, actual men, the denial of the real generative possibilities of adult sexual life, somehow touches beyond words. “It is the right of the oppressed to organise around their oppression as they see and define it,” the movement theorists insist doggedly in an effort to solve the question of these women, to convince themselves that what is going on is still a political process, but the handwriting is already on the wall. These are converts who want not a revolution but a “romance",” who believe not in the oppression of women but in their own chances for a new life in exactly the mold of their own life.
This reminds me of the plethora of wealthy, insufferable women who invoke ‘girl power’ as part of their right to start podcasts or write terrible books, which do very little in the quest for women’s emancipation while overusing the language of feminist theory. I don’t mean anyone in particular, but a few probably spring to mind.
Books on my radar
I’m going to do it, I’m going to read Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde (1999).
I’ve started reading Helen O’Hara’s Women vs. Hollywood (2021), which is good so far. Will report back next week!