Scamming the Scanners

yes, but here is the thing, and I have to confess to loving Didion, particularly Play It As It Lays and Slouching Toward Bethlehem, if you are publsihing in the venues C. F. is I’m going to expect you to push a little harder and not fall back on chicks dig Didion because she is one, but menfolk can see her flaws because they are reading with their d1cks.   Since peeps outside academia who consider themselves intellectuals get their view of feminism from people like Flannigan in places like The Atlantic, The New Yorker etc I get a little peeved at the fall back to gender essentialism.  The work always seems to me like a promising paper by a grad stu who lacked the follow through for the initially clever insights.    Now if Flannigan wants to ruminate on a blog in this style, well then I’m fine with it. However, if she is going to be one of the official faces of feminism, then I’d prefer more thorough, cogent analysis.

I am finally starting to understand that moment in my book club when I ruthlessly tore apart “Year of Magical Thinking” and all the older women in the room looked at me like I was nuts. They loved it.

And I left our discussion thinking that maybe it was the 20 years in age difference between us, or that they had lost a loved one, and I had yet to experience that.

Either way, we determined (at least among our small group) that those who loved Didion did so because she describes their experience. It seemed to be the divide was ALL about “This isn’t my experience.”

The divide for me, however, was not along gender lines, but along generational lines.  And secondarily, perhaps, along class lines since the privileged life she describes was almost a distraction for me from the story itself.

I find myself very frustrated by Flanagan. She’s a good writer and she has some very good insights. But damn if she can’t get past her own self. She is not only a gender essentialist, but a class essentialist. As a hetero married mother, my life is much closer to Flanagan’s than yours, TR, but I can’t identify with much of what she writes about. Nannies? Resorts? These are hardly concerns of the average working mother in the US. 

God, it must be tiresome after a while to see everything through one filter. 

I’m sorry to get personal rather than address your interesting comment but:  are you the Richard Grayson that wrote Indian Summer in Park Slope?  Because I *loved* that book.

“The Price of Paradise” helped me, an observer to dreary social
phenomena like hetero- or homonormative child rearing, understand a
little better how it is that people spend years, or even decades, doing
things they don’t want to do in the name of family.”

Raising children is a “dreary social phenomena”? Wow, I did not know that and not only is it dreary for male-female parents it is true for gay/lesbian parents as well. I don’t know if that is a position of critical feminist thinkers (is the “critical” even needed, sounds redundant) but sounds oh so world weary. I thought raising children is why we are put on this earth, well, I guess we are on earth to first make the little critters and then raise them. Is that “essentialist” on a global scale? And I really need to bone up on my theory buzzwords, so now heteronormative is not the only oppressing ideology keeping people down,  now the gay community is oppressing itself, how the hell does “homonormativity” factor into the equation?  How much does the raising of children by their parents have to be politicized or ideologically pondered upon through the multi-syllabic jargon of critical studies? Makes me love the natural sciences even more.

“One of these people told me that Quintana’s final illness was not caused
by flying to high altitude in an airplane (as Didion asserts), but by
something intoxicating she ingested on the plane.”

I was quite friendly with Quintana and her husband Gerry Michael, and I feel compelled to clarify that the proximate cause of the final disability that had her wheelchair-bound until her death was falling down in the airport, striking her head on the ground, and suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. I don’t know why Didion would have been less-than-forthcoming about this.

She was such a lovely person.

Thank you for clarifying: in both books Quintana goes from being fine to being mysteriously dead as Didion processes misleading information from puzzled physicians.  One thing that has occurred to me is that Didion is replicating the “feelings” of having one’s world/family collapse, which would jive with Flanagan’s take on her as a writer.  And yet, she writes about Quintana in such intimate ways:  you would think a mother would decide to do that, and tell the truth (perhaps not in its most personal details, but the truth) or not write the book.  And in Blue Nights Didion seems to deliberately mislead.

It would not surprise me if she found it difficult to concentrate on what she was being told about Quintana’s medical situation, in part as a defense mechanism, and in part because she is clearly an extremely inward-directed person. Combine this with a natural desire to minimize her own contribution to Quintana’s fate, and it is not surprising that she would arrive at a narrative in which it was mysterious and out-of-the-blue.

So I guess I overstated both the fact that she was intentionally less-than-forthcoming, and my ignorance of why she would have constructed the narrative as she did.

Well, I think I do know what they mean and thought I was using the terms correctly. I did not look them up but from what I recall heteronormative is a label for the idea that male-female bonding/parenting practices and gender roles are by default the “normal” (not my idea) and preferable set of social practices. And homonormativity (I am sorry I hate these jargon words but I just do)  as applied to parenting is the concept that gay and lesbian parents internalize  “straight” parenting practices and therefore strengthen the heteronormative dominance. Or at least something like that so don’t get too nit picky. So tell me where I mis-use the terms. By saying that the gay community oppresses itself through homonormativity sounds completely spot on to me if the concept has the negative connotation it seems to have. So, I refute your critique and it makes me want to ask you the same question. So you tell me why I am wrong and then I will be happy to do the same! That’s equality we can live with.

Didion’s great strength is her ability to write about her emotions with precision and control. (I found the book about her daughter disappointing, the one about her husband something that no one else could have pulled off.) Her affinities with the New Journalism are clear, but on the “domestic” side, I’d compare her to another Californian, M.F.K. Fisher (and if I had to expand this sentence into an article, I’d throw in Julia Child).

Agree! As a single (not by choice) mother I’m even further away. I also felt like the Atlantic article was TMI to be honest, but I also felt just terrible for that poor kid growing up feeling like she’s a nuisance. A really smart parent finds out ways to take the kids AND have a good time. Esp if you live in NYC!!