Literary Clusterfucks 2013

oh ewwwwwwwww

it's a little funnier now that he wrote a whole book about getting cucked

I think it's fair game for writers to write about traumatic experiences they have personally had, up to and including a loved one's suicide. How well they execute that I guess is up to the readers, but I don't think there's anything wrong with him writing the book. It's his life too.

otm. not sure i really get the criticism tbh--once someone dies, you can't write about your own life with them? i can't see how he could have written the book without discussing the affair.

idk it seems to me like they both extremely suck(ed)

molly was a great writer and poet. i read her memoir and she seemed like a pretty good person. unusually talented, unusually fucked up upbringing, but otherwise like, normal or at least far from "extremely sucked." i guess you're saying that because she had an affair? is that really such a big deal? idk

it's a little like revenge porn: the book

yikes

Oh yeah no I'm not sitting in judgement, just Cecily Stronging it: "yeah, and? Was she sleeping with his clone?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf26Q-E2YNY-

all that i am saying is

He found troves of photos of her posing in lingerie and with sex toys, along with videos of her pleasuring herself and saying the names of other men in a baby voice.

the new york post and similar rags are lapping this up like vomit, as is to be expected, and even if butler didn't *intend* to publicly take a dump all over her memory, he seems to have done so regardless, and anyone could have seen that coming, and it's an ugly thing to do

again i'm not saying he shouldn't be allowed to write whatever he wants! just that his choice of publicizing these sorts of details makes me think that he is an ass hat, and probably doing so for money and revenge.

in the law & order episode the twist will be that he killed her after discovering the affairs, and the double twist will be that actually one of her lovers killed her and set him up, and the climactic reveal will be that their chickens orchestrated the whole thing

none of this seems to have much to do with literature tbh

How would you know?

i suppose if i were to write some sort of punishingly honest and direct memoir of my days getting riled up on an increasingly irrelevant webforum i'd have more chance of getting published. wait who am i even zinging any more

Yourself. That's a terrible idea for a book but who knows, knock yourself out.

one cold but fresh december morning, i encountered a familiar username literally retreading the implication of a light-hearted post of mine in a sort of crushingly serious tone, like he had come up with it himself. i briefly worried for his sanity, then realised my coffee mug was empty

settle down, you're both pretty

but how is the butler mess not literary, there's an author & poet & book, what element of literariness is lacking here

no ofc it is, sorry, i am just increasingly tired of the omnipresence of what amounts to diaristic confessionals equating to literature. the whole epistolary novel thing reheated, i'm sure

my inclination is to side against this blake chap purely because he's written a fuckin memoir without having done anything remotely to justify it

'been cheated on by a Kinda Famous who then killed herself' is not justification, it's if anything disgustingly lurid and cheap

no amount of pretending to honour her memory can overcome the fact he's doing this for commercial gain. if you truly wanted to honour her memory there are a thousand ways to tell your story of her without seeking monetary profit for it

*from it. bad writing imago!

maggie nelson's 'the red parts' (a modern memoir that is entirely good, relevant and thought-provoking) this is not. i'm sure there are other exceptions but there's so much of this solipsistic licentious emotional pornography knocking about rn disguised as rel8ability

To be clear, after defending the guy’s right to write the book, I have zero interest in reading it. Might look up some of her poetry tho.

*without having done or experienced i shd have said up there soz

maybe the 5d chess theory is accurate, the fallout from this can only mean her poetry gets more attention

i'm sure there are other exceptions but there's so much of this solipsistic licentious emotional pornography knocking about rn disguised as rel8ability

― imago, Friday, 8 December 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Most of these are written by women. Talking about things that are relating to other women's experience.

I don't think this should be dismissed as emotional porno.

It is hard to write about what it feels like to live today. This is why autofiction is the genre of the moment. Sorry imago

no it isn't

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQs26c1klAU

I always feel like the issue of memoir/autofiction is something that only really affects writers, i.e. it is relevant to the process and I can see how writers would get frustrated at it being the dominant genre. But as a reader it's kind of a red herring - what matters is whether the book comes out poetic or funny or moving, whether the events described in it are real (or as real as one person's perspective can be) doesn't matter and I don't think there's anything inherent to autofiction that would make it more likely for works to fail or succeed.

Obviously outside of that if work is done under ethically murky circumstances that's something to discuss but that's kind of a separate issue.

Butler's memoir of insomnia - Nothing - is really good and his old VICE columns introduced me to a lot of authors/books back in the day. Very very weird seeing him on the Daily Mail, I must say.

Might be nearly as good as Paul Morley's book about his father's suicide of the same title.

"it is relevant to the process and I can see how writers would get frustrated at it being the dominant genre."

The frustrated writer that isn't writing autofiction is also being published. Maybe the bad quality ones find it harder. Which sounds good to me!

I have a lot of thoughts about this— my next book is a mix of poems and essays about medical trauma, gay sex, narrative, and political resistance— but I think that treeship’s point is well-taken. Many of the writers I encounter are working through how to be a human in a world that has been mediated by a constant stream of lies, violence, and despair. Some are more successful than others, but those that are successful write very movingly about their subjects. Part of the complaint, tho, seems to be the subjects, which I totally understand— I am not so interested in young people musing philosophically about their sexual exploits, for example.

But take this essay by Hilary Plum— it is about reading, writing, her partner’s cancer, memory, etc. It is auto-fiction or memoir… but it isn’t some salacious, gossipy piece of candy to be absorbed and forgotten.

https://brooklynrail.org/2018/09/fiction/Narrating-Forgetting

The frustrated writer that isn't writing autofiction is also being published. Maybe the bad quality ones find it harder. Which sounds good to me!

Eh, "who gets published" is always and at every moment influenced by a plethora of factors, "what's fashionable" being a major one amongst them, and I don't think you can make a "they're not getting published = they're not good enough" argument unless you believe in the free market. So I'm always sympathetic to authors who're having a harder time of it because what they do doesn't happen to be the thing that's getting buzz. In a similar vein, it must be very annoying to be in a writing class and have everyone around you opting for the exact same strategy to mediocre effect. This is just based on what I've heard from writers, including at ILB faps!

"I don't think you can make a "they're not getting published = they're not good enough" argument unless you believe in the free market."

While there could be a combination of luck and circumstance involved I'd say if you are white, middle class, live in the West or a combination I feel like the amount of opportunities to be published in the West are pretty good. Just a ton of small presses out there. There are ppl in corners of Romania whose writing got known through twitter, went for it and get published!

Imago attacking writing by women (again) because he feels he can't get a break is an ugly sight and should be called out every time.

yeah sorry not vibing with your grindset attitude here, good ppl go unpublished all the time! and of course it's not just a published/unpublished dichotomy, getting published is step one, whether what you're writing is trendy influences every other single instance of promotion/success.

Also why the fuck would we limit this discussion to white middle class ppl from the West? I don't think hostility towards autofiction cones exclusively from ppl in that category, at least not more than writing autofiction does.

Jesus, does Tao Lin have a whole decade now??

Butler was part of that Muumuu House online world centered on Lin, and he really was an asshole to people online to an extent that, as I said, keeps me surprised at his success. Kind of like knowing a shitty guy in a fraternity who goes on to be a judge.

he ran htmlgiant, right?

xp He's the Sen. John Blutarsky of autofiction

Also why the fuck would we limit this discussion to white middle class ppl from the West? I don't think hostility towards autofiction cones exclusively from ppl in that category, at least not more than writing autofiction does.

― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 8 December 2023 bookmarkflaglink

The West is what I mostly know about, and I've only seen hostility from white middle class men towards autofiction, which is why I address that.

It can be a risky genre.

The first volume of my struggle really is an incredible achievement. White male, whatever, blah blah blah, he writes of his loneliness and confusion in adolescence, and the brutality of the kind of disillusionment literature has liked to call “coming of age.”

Subsequent volumes became looser and, to me, less powerful, but still human and affecting and of course enjoyable. However, he seems to have destroyed not just his marriage with these books, but his wife’s mental health.

People on ilx disagree with me, but Tao Lin is also an uneven writer capable of greatness. His best books are the most recent two. On twitter he is an anti-vax conspiracy theory lunatic; in the books these elements come off as desperate attempts to make sense of a broken life. His writing about his parents is funny and heartbreaking.

However, in 2010 he wrote a book about how he manipulated and abused a 16 year old girl when he was 22. He used her text messages in the book. Obviously this is a person who is — or was —willing to “use” others for his art.

Ben Lerner avoids these traps in his autofiction because the lyricism comes from high theory and the pathos (and comedy!) from his own failures. He doesn’t really rope anyone else into it.

These are the three 2010s autofiction writers I have thought about the most. The ones who really create daring stuff seem to have an abnormal kind of relationship to ethics.

I have tried to write stuff in the Lerner mode — quasi-autobiographical fiction used as a frame to explore philosophical, social, and personal issues with humor. I could not ever write something about the personal failings and private life of someone else — even someone who hurt me. I think most people share this reservation.

Also autofiction has a really long history. Ulysses is basically autofiction, although he splits himself up into two characters. Molly Bloom is his wife and the portrait of her is pretty sexist in my opinion. The worst part of the book.

But in general that book is amazing. Could Joyce have written it if he cared about the feelings of others?

zzz @ autofiction discourse

So much more in the world to write about than cars

is there though

'Fromm mentions sex and the automobile as fundamental outlets of postmodern boredom.'

zzz @ autofiction discourse

otm, not that it will do us any good, the age of memoir is a cash cow

from Keeping up with books

poet molly brodak who died this year tragically at the age of 42, and who wrote an incredible memoir about growing up with a father who was a bank robber.O SHIT Molly Brodak died?! I felt like I knew her, from reading Bandit: A Daughter's Memoir, which was even more about her and her sister and mother than him and how he (maybe) got that way: pellucid and fluid and affecting---I haven't found my way into her poetry per se, but can see how her training and other experience w that came in handy prose-wise. Also some excellent tweets, her photos etc. O shit.
― dow, Saturday, November 28, 2020

In a feature on NPR's All Things Considered, Brodak described the ethical process of Bandit's subject, which detailed her experience as the daughter of a multiple felon bankrobber in Detroit, Michigan: "Every family has darkness and heaviness that people would prefer to not talk about. And when you choose to become the person who's going to bring light to the dark family secrets, you can sometimes be perceived as the betrayer."[5] An excerpt from Bandit appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016.[6] In 2018, she was a recipient of an NEA fellowship for prose.[7]

Brodak's poems appeared widely, including in Granta, Poetry, Fence, Map Literary, NY Tyrant, Diode, New Orleans Review, Ninth Letter, Colorado Review, Bateau, and Hayden's Ferry Review.

Brodak was also the founder of Kookie House, a baking company that specializes in unique cookies and cakes. In 2018, she appeared as a finalist on the Great American Baking Show.

Death
Brodak died on March 8, 2020.[8] According to the New York Times, her husband, Blake Butler, gave the cause of death as suicide and she had struggled with depression since childhood.[9] I didn't get that kind of major depression from the book, maybe because the writing seemed such an exemplary way of dealing w such experiences, incl. thoughts. But now I almost feel guilty, like a friend who didn't see enough. I don't think of myself as naive about the curative powers of art, or anything else, but goes to show once again that you can never be too sure of these things. No great lesson learned, it's just another loss. But I'm gladder than ever for the book, that she was able to get that far (also w the relationship and baking).

― dow, Saturday, November 28, 2020
enormous trigger warning but this piece by blake is... one of the roughest things I’ve ever read https://thevolta.org/im-bbutler.html

― flopson, Thursday, December 3, 2020
thanks for the link, flopson! It is a grueling read, but I think I understand better now. What a brave and eloquent writer. I'll check more of his, incl. the novel, Alice Knott.

― dow, Thursday, December 3, 2020 2:20 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

He's...okay.

― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table), Thursday, December 3, 2020 2:23 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

What he writes about Molly is more than okay.

― dow, Thursday, December 3, 2020 2:35 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

But if not for you, so be it.

― dow, Thursday, December 3, 2020 2:37 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

No, I like his writing on Molly.

His other writing is just okay.

― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table), Thursday, December 3, 2020 3:31 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

I just want to put it out there that while this isn't the case with Butler's writing on Brodak, just because an established writer loses someone in a tragic way doesn't make them writing about it "good writing." Case in point: the J0yelle McSweeney book about losing her infant daughter, which is...really rigid, unfeeling, boring even.

― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table)

lolita is a fairy tale told by the monster who has almost convinced himself he is the hero in an epic romance

unfiction is the new(er) hotness but that begins to stray from pure wordsmithery

afaict imago was expressing distaste for a subgenre most recently rep'd itt by a male writer, & they then offered a work by (what sounds like) a female author as a superior alternative? spill-yr-guts lit is often more girl coded since there's still so much ambient pressure on guys to not feel/talk about their feelings, so dismissal of gossipy confessionals risks aligning itself with misogynistic cultural mores that hurt everybody, but it's also possible to just not like stuff and be irritated that there's a lot of it.

Bandit sounds like The Red Parts - there was concretely something to write about, and apparently written well? I like the sound of it. My problem isn't with memoirs per se, especially ones that shine the light of strange experience, but with precisely this kind of knausgaardian life-becomes-the-work piffle with a side-order of This Is How We All Live Now-core idk maybe they and their ilk are great, I am skeptical

someone like Hollinghurst at his peak turned personal and collective experience into something transcendently literary, sublimated everything into masterfully fresh and luminous narratives, where's the stuff like that coming out nowadays

or going back further, The Bell Jar or Good Morning Midnight etc etc

The good dead women lol.

In any case I wouldn't say those are autofiction. As I see it, this is much more of a memoiristic mode rather than re-setting certain things the writer has experienced. Autofiction feels less created, so Molly in Ulysses -- whether good or not -- feels like a novelistic creation.

I am often irritated by autofiction myself but this genre of books is mostly written by women today. I'd say it's good it's having a run.

my memoir hate is walled-off and has an abundance of exceptions (="any memoir that seems more interested in the book than in its subject," highly subjective criterion obv but I get sent 4-5 US-published memoirs a month for blurbing and I'm comfortable with this standard). autofiction isn't autoficiton discourse imo, two different things. autofiction honestly strikes me as a non-category or a marketing opportunity, so much 19c fiction would satisfy the requirements, so would Defoe for that matter, "autofiction" = "fiction" and it only gets irritating when you enter the "here's something in this category" discourse

enormous trigger warning but this piece by blake is... one of the roughest things I’ve ever read https://thevolta.org/im-bbutler.html

― flopson, Thursday, December 3, 2020

fwiw for people saying they aren't going to read it because of his tweets, things written in a british tabloid, the fact that its subjects are bad people who have affairs etc, ymmv but personally i am going to read molly on the strength of this piece

There are certainly formulaic things marketed as memoir, which in the more mass-marketed/"universal" approach, can come off as what were once called "made-for-TV-movies," AKA "disease-of-the-week movies" (a 70s reviewer term, don't get mad at me, or "novelistic," but either way with sharply cut Scenes! And omg Dialogue! Arcs of pacing and pacing of arcs. Can be pretty obvious, but the appeal is to realness, to belief---with a sometimes equal extreme of anger following debunking, as w James Frey. Who might have been a decent novelist, but dunno, haven't read him.
In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr shows her class the Holocaust memoirs of Primo Levi and someone whose name I'm blanking on, who was eventually exposed, denuded, as a possibly delusional fraud: she asks them to say which account is real, and many of them pick the bogus one. It has dialogue! Scenes! Arresting imagery! None of your freeze-dried TV rations. The guy could write, but (as I think his psychiatrist said, quoted by Karr), if only he'd said, "These are my visions of the Holocaust," in effect, "this is fiction," he would have been alright (as an author; otherwise he was very messed up, and I think the debunking was probably fatal for him). But memory has its own art, retelling and resisting, even in this little post regarding something I read a few years years ago, so how can there be razor clarity of dialogue and shit from so many years ago, in your life, in the rest of history?
Karr then discloses that she too had fallen for obvious bullshit in the fraudulent testimonial, which she didn't realize 'till the debunking was well underway--because she too wanted to believe, to have it both ways: here is a well-told, fortifying story, which is also reallll.
She also discusses how she wrote her own memoirs, in a succinctly forensic way, though not clinical. The only one I've read is Lit, which seems exemplary in references to previous volumes and in non-exploitational use of some pretty hairy material., regarding birth family life, solo treks, incl. unlikely success and more likely crack-ups,"then marriage-motherhood-divorce: "I think it's clear who the asshole was," not meaning her husband or son. Not that she flogs herself; she's too busy, what with rehab and teaching and parenting and so on.But she's still not satisfied with that part of Lit, or of some other relationship narratives in even the most appealing memoirs of others.
The Art of Memoir can be engrossing, maybe even motivating, encouraging, in a cautionary. challenging way, but it's clearly not meant to be inspirational. (Really good book list too, and she's not anti-fiction at all, as long as it's presented as such.)

"Autofiction"! When I first saw it, thought of automatic writing and autohypnosis--and the sort of singer-songwriter-bandleader who had already had me thinking, "What does he need me for? His system is so complete." He needs me to buy his music, dummny, and/or post the kind of reviews that reinforce his self-regard (and yes it usually was a he). Solipsism as a selling point, for the vicarious womb appeal, reinforcement of audience navelgazing and collector's studies (not saying I'm immune).
But I'd rather think of say In Search of Lost Time, say, as "autobiographical fiction." though certainly there's deliberately a lot of projection and mirror play along with the observation of others: his point, fair enough, but also why it can sometimes get too zoned-out-in in a long-ass way, for me.