by Lee Klein

The original Norwegian editions of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume My Struggle series, presented in thick ~500-page installments, have purportedly sold more than a half-million copies and won lots of prizes. If rumors of such critical and commercial success are true, even if only in Scandinavia, it’s good news for humanity, since these volumes lack traditional plot, let alone anything approaching bondage, vampires or wizards. Maybe it helps that Knausgaard, a respected author of two novels before he’d even started My Struggle, has a bold, sensationalist, attention-grabbing title appropriated from Hitler’s polemical autobiography, which forces readers to contrast his representation and impressions of his writing/family life with the Führer’s concerns? Or maybe the series has stormed across Scandinavia because its scope and approach suggest Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, but instead of tracing the past in rapturous, velveteen, serpentine effusions – every passage suffused with chrysanthemum dust – My Struggle presents something comparatively without affectation, a steady, solid, quotidian, flinty (albeit likely to burst into tears, like squeezing water from a rock) representation of and insight into what it’s like for one man to be alive.

In Fall 2012, both my mother and a grad school friend recommended the first volume to me, saying it sounded “up my alley.” They were right. It was way up there, in approach, accessibility, unpredictability, unexpected humor, and heft. For a few years I’ve been saying that fiction that feels like fiction is not my favorite sort of fiction. I’ll turn on a novel for an overwrought simile comparing a Gatorade cap to a crown of thorns. Maybe it’s just me, but I prefer fiction that feels unlike contemporary literary fiction. I’m not necessarily a fan of experimental or explicitly unconventional fiction, either. Turns out I just seem to prefer fiction that feels real. Twain said something like the difference between fiction and non-fiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable. Thomas Wolfe (the guy who wrote Look Homeward, Angel, not the guy in the white suit who wrote Bonfire of the Vanities) said that fiction is fact, selected, arranged, and charged with purpose. Both of these assertions apply to Knausgaard’s recent work, except I don’t think the author, at least as he presents himself in the My Struggle series, charges his selections and arrangements of fact with an explicit purpose other than trying to get as close as he can to the core of life. No conventional plot therefore, yet nevertheless engaging, consistently insightful, and almost recklessly sincere.

This series is a multivolume masterpiece of sincerity. It’s epic literary autobiography, worthy of the traditional and more recent meanings of the modifier epic. A Norwegian living in Sweden may have written it but it fulfills David Foster Wallace’s prophecy about post-ironic fiction in the United States: “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction.” By now, at least as Knausgaard presents Sweden in this volume, the notion of “U.S. life” can be expanded to include Western Civilization’s so-called First World, including Scandinavia. Like DFW, Knausgaard covers significant territory across apparently infinite pages but he doesn’t do it in a look Ma no hands backflipping with a smile sorta way. All the formal elements of traditional fiction are in place, sans gimmickry. No attention-getting footnotes or images or power points or graphs or numbered lists or Danielewskisms. No masturbatory flights of language en route to the celestial sublime. No silly set pieces or big dance numbers at the end. No talking pieces of poo. Nothing included for a joke. No excessive modifiers or anything that feels like it’s not part of the author’s attempt to stay as close as possible to what he perceives as the core of things, the honest truth of life. He also realizes that such a project may seem megalomaniacal, and he addresses this more than once, never mythologizing himself, always his worst critic, always forcing himself to submit to humility.

What happens in this engrossing, readable, plot-less stretch of 543 beautifully formatted pages published by Archipelago? Mostly child care. Instead of the mythologized image of the author of the past, we find a 21^st century house husband, considering himself feminized compared to how fathers once raised children, living in a homogenized culture thanks to international influence (as in Murakami, American fast food joints are name-checked, including Burger King and Subway): “Europe . . . was merging more and more into one large, homogeneous country. The same, the same, everything the same.” Karl Ove is a thirty-something Norwegian who’s left his first wife and moved to Stockholm, where, despite this sense of sameness, he can’t read clues revealing minute social gradients as he can in Norway. The author’s good friend Geir, another Norwegian writer living in Sweden, rants about the differences between Norway and Sweden the way some in Philadelphia may occasionally rant about the differences between Philly and New York. (Sweden is essentially more orderly. In Norway people bump into each other on the street. Norwegian academics don’t dress so well.)

The first volume ended with the author cleaning up the mess his recently deceased alcoholic father made, literally and figuratively. As with the second volume, it started in the recent past and presented a surprisingly fresh vision of the author with young children, at playgrounds, struggling with plastic contraptions meant to convey children across town. As in the first volume, these opening sections create a sympathetic image of a manly, cigarette-smoking Scandinavian author overrun by three children, loving them deeply, trying to control them, aware that this image of a father who gets down on the floor and plays with a rattle with his kids is relatively recent and yet by now pervasive:

What once had irked me, walking through town with a stroller, was now history, forgotten and outlandish, as I pushed a shabby carriage with three children on board around the streets, often with two or three shopping bags dangling from one hand, deep furrows carved in my brow and down my cheeks, and eyes that burned with a vacant ferocity I had long lost any contact with. I no longer bothered about the potentially feminized nature of what I did, now it was a question of getting the children to wherever we had to go, with wishes for an easy morning or afternoon. Once a crowd of Japanese tourists stopped on the other side of the street and pointed at me, as though I were ringmaster of some circus parade or something. They pointed. There you can see a Scandinavian man! Look, and tell your grandchildren what you saw!

His own upbringing had been strict, his father distant and scary, and so Karl Ove struggles with his father’s spirit inside him. He has a history with drink, too. In one riveting recollected scene in which he drinks himself into a world that’s narrowed to a dark tunnel, after the woman who will become the mother of his children humanely rejects him, he smashes a glass and uses its largest, sharpest shard to shred his face.

In both volumes, this opening fatherhood gambit won me over, made me willing to follow him wherever he went. In the first volume, it’s teen years playing in a terrible band and looking for a place to drink on New Year’s Eve. In the second volume, it’s his first days in Stockholm and the story of how he met his wife, Linda, the woman who helped him become who he is today: prize-winning successful novelist pushing around three young children in a stroller.

The central struggle in this volume is achieving a balance between family and art. He wants a family, three children like a little gang, but he also wants to be left alone to write. He has an “all or nothing” mentality, so this conflict drives the story. It’s all pretty deceptively simple:

For me, society is everything, Geir said. Humanity. I’m not interested in anything beyond that. But I am, I said. Oh yes? Geir queried. What then? Trees, I answered. He laughed. Patterns in plants. Patterns in crystals. Patterns in stones. In rock formations. In galaxies. Are you talking about fractals? Yes, for example. But everything that binds the living and dead, all the dominant forms that exist. Clouds! Sand dunes! That interests me. Oh God, how boring, Geir said. No it isn’t, I said. Yes, it is, he said.

David Foster Wallace’s 1990 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” concludes with questions about what will come after postmodern irony: “Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal!’”

To which Knausgaard might reply: “For me it was trees and leaves, grass and clouds and a glowing sun, that was all, I understood everything in the light of this.”

An elaborated elegance makes this series what it is. Its patterns and formations feel organic and humble yet troubled and in no way understated. The form in the first two volumes at least suggests something like quiet majesty. It’s only as complicated as it needs to be, with simply dramatized scenes with plentiful short bursts of dialogue, summarized scenes, stretches of essayistic exposition, all in rotation in a way that I comfortably anticipated over time. Yet, despite what’s essentially a not very experimental form, the project itself as a whole seems unconventional, almost unhinged. Three thousand pages of literary autobiography about a middle-aging Norwegian writer and his wife and kids and friends and family? You kidding me? His kids don’t even suffer from Marcusian language pathologies? No empathic immersion in the presentation of other lives? No specific canonical biggie (despite the title and physical similarity to Proust’s multivolume masterwork) providing explicit formal and thematic support?

Of the young writers I had read there was only Jerker Virdborg I liked; his novel Black Crab had something that raised it above the mist of morals and politics others were cloaked in. Not that it was a fantastic novel, but he was searching for something different. That was the sole obligation literature had, in all other respects it was free, but not in this, and when writers disregarded this they did not deserve to be met with anything but contempt.

By the time of the second volume’s action, Karl Ove has written one well-regarded novel but the money is running out. He hasn’t written much of anything for four or five years. He’s included in an article about writer’s block and authors who’ve only written one novel. But he’s searching for something different, a way out. After seeing Bergman’s production of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” with his future wife, he has a model for the sort of work he wants to do in the future. The play offers a bright horizon for the author, and a guide to the book in the reader’s hands:

Everything was raised, higher and higher, the intensity increased, and within the tightly set framework, which in the end comprised only mother and son, a kind of boundlessness arose, something wild and reckless. Into it disappeared plot and space, what was left was emotion, and it was stark, you were looking straight into the essence of human existence, the very nucleus of life, and thus you found yourself in a place where it no longer mattered what was actually happening. Everything known as aesthetics and taste was eliminated . . . the details disappeared into the state they evoked . . . that was where I had to go, to what I had seen that evening. Nothing else was good enough, nothing else did it. That was where I had to go, to the essence, to the inner core of human existence. If it took forty years, so be it, it took forty years. But I would never lose sight of it, never forget it, that was where I was going. There, there, there.

This inner core of human existence manifests as conversations with friends, dinners at home, fights with a Russian alcoholic neighbor who blasts music in the middle of the night, irritation with his wife’s inability to pitch in around the house and thereby force him to do all the shopping, cooking, and cleaning, all of which gracefully revolve in the present, interspersed with non-linearly proceeding backstory. This sort of structure after a while feels like associative telescopic stargazing into the past, the present naturally filled with expanses of history. Inclusion of non-linear backstory makes the whole story feel real and alive, its edges open and scalloped instead of straight, orderly, contrived, and fictional, since memories tend not to appear in order:

Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or made me happy. This had nothing to do with a lack of desire to wash floors or change diapers but rather with something more fundamental: the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.

A half-million Scandinavians might like Knausgaard in part because this longing for something more meaningful, his attempts to find meaning and beauty in the banalities of life, his struggles at home and with his artistic ambition, are the mark of a conventional protagonist whose obsessive desires are ceaselessly impeded by obstacles. It’s a double-bind in Knausgaard’s case: art impedes family and family impedes art. Like Homer Simpson’s famous revelation about alcohol, art and family are the cause of and cure for all his problems:

After I came home from Idö I realized that this was all or nothing, I told Linda I was moving into the office, I would have to write day and night. You can’t do that, she said, that’s not on, you’ve got a family, or have you forgotten? It’s summer, or have you forgotten? Am I supposed to look after your daughter on my own? Yes, I said. That’s the way it is. No, it isn’t, she said, I won’t let you. OK, I said, but I’ll do it anyway. And I did. I was totally manic. I wrote all the time, sleeping two or three hours a day, the only thing that had any meaning was the novel I was writing.

In the second volume, there are two exaggeratedly extreme acts: the drunken face-cutting when younger and the manic immersion that produces his second novel, A Time For Everything, risking his family for the sake of his art. So often I sympathized with the author’s situation. I read passages aloud to my wife involving discussions about day care so similar to discussions we’d just had. She began referring to the thick squarish hardback as my new best friend. As a father of a three-month-old daughter, a writer learning to balance family and art, this volume was even more up my alley than the first one about teenage drinking/bands and the death of his father. Yet, despite convergences, I would never go at my face with a shard of glass and I would never leave my family to live in an office for weeks to write a novel. Of course, it’s possible that neither of these extreme actions ever happened. It’s possible that these semi-sensationalist moments are straight-up fiction. But it feels wrong to type that, as though it betrays a trust established between writer and reader over more than 1000 pages at this point.

I don’t want to make it seem like this series was written only for me, since most likely its revelations about self, its honesty with itself and with the reader, bring the project close to more readers than one. But still, it’s a rare expanse of recently published prose that opines about Thomas Bernhard in the context of the narrator’s search for what he would do after his second novel: “No space was opened up for me in Bernhard, everything was closed off in small chambers of reflection, and even though he had written one of the most frightening and shocking novels I had read, Extinction, I didn’t want to look down that road, I didn’t want to go down that road. Hell no, I wanted to be as far from that which was closed and mandatory as it was possible to be. Come on! Into the open, my friend, as Hölderlin had written somewhere. But how, how?”

The clear answer to the preceding question is the book itself, a non-annoying narrative loop-de-loop. By the time the above quotation appears on page 409 we have a pretty good idea of how he’ll write his way out. I don’t in any way want to suggest that the book runs cutesy metafictional macros on the reader. It’s more like the second volume begins to catch up to the point in recent history when he began the project. Whereupon I foresaw an ending in which Knausgaard makes it to the absolute present, completely caught up with himself, writing about writing the sentence he’s writing . . .

Early on in the second novel he states that the work is its own reward. Sitting in a room alone working on what he’s writing is all he really wants. There’s something inexplicitly East Asian about his project, his interest in naturally occurring patterns, as though writing is not about creating another form of narrative entertainment or gaining an audience of readers but a meditation that produces text as traces of where his mind traveled whenever it achieved the solitude he longed for. As such, the primary enlightenment Knausgaard offers involves humility and endurance, presented in uniquely formatted short bursts followed by hard returns, amounting to the volume’s thematic climax on page 501:

If I have learned one thing over these years, which seems to me immensely important, particularly in an era such as ours, overflowing with such mediocrity, it is the following:
Don’t believe you are anybody.
Do not believe you are somebody.
Because you are not. You’re just a smug, mediocre little shit.
Do not believe that you’re anything special. Do not believe that you’re worth anything, because you aren’t. You’re just a little shit.
So keep your head down and work, you little shit. Then, at least, you’ll get something out of it. Shut your mouth, keep your head down, work and know that you’re not worth a shit.
This, more or less, was what I had learned.
This was the sum of all my experience.
This was the only worthwhile thought I’d ever had.

Again, part of the struggle for the author is to triage eventual criticism that he’s a self-serving megalomaniacal freak. He’s successful in this. He wins the reader over thanks to what seems like sincere introspection throughout. But also through well-phrased contempt for unnamed examples of the sort of self-serving mediocrities he’s afraid he might be or become:

How can you sit there receiving applause when you know that what you have done is not good enough?
I had one opportunity. I had to cut all my ties with the flattering, thoroughly corrupt world of culture where everyone, every single little upstart, was for sale, cut all my ties with the vacuous TV and newspaper world, sit down in a room and read in earnest, not contemporary literature but literature of the highest quality, and then write as if my life depended on it. For twenty years if need be.
But I couldn’t grasp the opportunity. I had a family and I owed it to them to be there. I had friends. And I had a weakness in my character that meant that I would say yes, yes, when I wanted to say no, no, which was so afraid of hurting others, which was so afraid of conflict and which was so afraid of not being liked that it could forgo all principles, all dreams, all opportunities, everything that smacked of truth, to prevent this happening.

Which pretty much sums up his struggle and suggests something hopeful about humanity if such a project has been so well-received in Scandinavia (and most likely will be in this country over time). Knausgaard succeeds in presenting the particularities of his conflict with such steadiness and clarity that it appeals on a deep level to a large readership. There are very few sensationalist details or betrayals of confidence that trigger voyeuristic impulses in readers. There’s very little sex, for example, and when it occurs it’s procreative, on a couch after watching a crappy movie. Ultimately, the sense you get from reading this series, the mental and emotional state achieved when silently immersed in its pages, is of connection with another human being, a man from a distant yet familiar place, like yourself in some ways but not in all ways, a man concerned with achieving existential fulfillment, stability, peace. In the end, the project itself seems like proof that he’s achieved a productive balance. There’s a sense that he’s able to write this My Struggle series while maintaining his family. Wikipedia says he’s still married to Linda and they live with their three children, and he’s clearly lived up to manifesto-like spiels about fiction in My Struggle:

Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought this is something someone has made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories. It had got out of hand. Wherever you turned you saw fiction. . . . It was a crisis, I felt it in every fiber of my body, something saturating was spreading through my consciousness like lard, not the least because the nucleus of all this fiction, whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant. In other words, it saw the same. . . . I couldn’t write like this, it wouldn’t work, every single sentence was met with the thought: but you’re just making this up. It has no value. Fictional writing has no value, documentary narrative has no value. The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.

I suppose just because a purported half-million Scandinavians have read Knausgaard’s series doesn’t mean I should lump them together. But a great novel seems to bring its readers together, those who’ve shared an experience, each similar yet unique. There’s no question that this volume continues a remarkable series that I expect will have long-lasting influence, at least on me as I gulp down the remaining 2000-plus pages as they appear in English over the next few years. If Knausgaard’s project influences a generation of literary autobiographers, in theory, for now, it’s fine with me. I’d love to see more fiction that feels unlike fiction because it consists of fact selected, arranged, and charged with the purpose of presenting itself as real. Not hyper-real reality or semblances seen through the scrim of tasteful artifice, but as real as it gets, raw, unadorned, and awesome.

*

Discussed in this essay:

My Struggle: Book Two: A Man In Love by Karl Knausgaard.  Translated by Don Bartlett  Archipelago. 2013. 543 pages. $26.

Lee Klein’s writing has appeared in Agni, Barrelhouse, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007, The Black Warrior Review, Canteen, Full Stop, and many other sites, journals, and anthologies. Since 1999 he’s edited Eyeshot.net and in 2006 he earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in the Cheesesteak Gardens neighborhood of South Philadelphia with one wife, one newborn daughter, two cats, and lots of books.

Photo: Éclusette

by Teow Lim Goh

I have been trying to write about Kate Zambreno’s Heroines for months, but each time, I find what I have to say inadequate. The book is about many things: the shadow histories of the modernist “mad wives” such as Vivien(ne) Eliot and Zelda Fitzgerald; a memoir of Zambreno’s struggles as a trailing spouse and beginning writer; a subjective mode of criticism; a reconsideration of the canon; a battle cry for women to write our true experiences. As a historian, critic, and woman who writes outside of institutional structures, I could ramble on these subjects.

The title of my first draft: A Work of Her Own. Reacting to the way women like Vivien(ne) and Zelda were not allowed to work, whether for pay or on their art. I have a job and carve out time to write, which comes from years of compromise and discipline, and yet I often feel that my independence is provisional, that my voice may one day be taken from me.

My second working title: Her Story. Excavating the ways women’s voices are devalued and dismissed. Even though I rarely write directly about my private life, I recognized these dynamics of silencing. I still remember the years when I could not write the word ‘I’, even in fiction; the letter at the tip of my pen filled me with terror.

“For my criticism came out of, has always come out of, enormous feeling,” Zambreno writes, arguing that reading is a bodily experience. “There is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.” She argues that taking the ‘I’ out of essays is a form of repression. I don’t always use the first person; sometimes I find it clouds rather than enlivens my work. But Heroines cut me deeply and I cannot avoid the ‘I’.

The first time I read the book, I finished it in two days, putting it down only when I was at work. Around this time, I began formulating a new project of my own, imagining the lost voices of women in a particular episode of history. Now I see that it is a reply to the central question of Heroines: whose stories are remembered, and whose are erased?

*

I keep circling back to an early passage:

In Cleveland the local bibliophilic society explicitly prohibits women from joining. John [Zambreno’s husband] attended a meeting at the invitation of his colleague at Oberlin. (I was not happy.) One of those quasi-secret societies of rich white men with bizarre rituals, held in some grand Victorian home. The series of tableaux that begin Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, her treatise on the material conditions that could allow a woman to write, to write well. Her scenes illuminating women banned from the grounds and libraries and luncheons of the fictional college Oxbridge, to show that a woman of her time would be banned from all the public spaces of reflection and socialization and higher learning that Woolf argues are important in order to begin to have the interior space to roam about in, to think the lucid thoughts that foster Great Texts.

I don’t know the specifics of the bibliophilic society, but most of these organizations are outgrowths of an era when women were not allowed to enter the professions or own property and their power derived from their dependence on men. In maintaining this tradition, the bibliophilic society perpetuates the belief that women can at best be dilettantes, never equal to men.

Zambreno juxtaposes this exclusion with the stories of Vivien(ne) Eliot and Zelda Fitzgerald. T.S. Eliot published his wife’s satirical sketches of their Bloomsbury society under a pseudonym, but when scandal ensued, he exposed her as the author. This betrayal led to her first breakdown. F. Scott Fitzgerald accused his wife of stealing his material – their shared life and marriage – in her novel Save Me the Waltz. He enlisted a psychiatrist to certify her unfit to write, using, among other things, her poor housekeeping as evidence of her insanity.

Why did these men feel threatened by their wives writing? Scott wanted his wife to be his muse, his “complementary intelligence”. He freely used her speech and even her diaries as material for his novels.

Writing is a form of power.

In writing Save Me the Waltz, Zelda tried to create herself as her own character and take back her power.

Zambreno points out that women like Vivien(ne) and Zelda did not have room to become their own authors. But she also asks: if they hadn’t married authoritarian men, would they have become artists? Or would they still have internalized their roles as dilettantes?

*

What about the women who did become writers?

Zambreno describes an adult education class she led. A woman says of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, a novel on the breakdown of a woman no longer in her prime, “I just feel like Ford Madox Ford [Rhys’s patron and sometime lover] put a pen in her hand and said, write your diary dear, we’ll just edit it a lot.”

Rhys could not have been her own author. A man had to turn her words into art.

Echoing Scott Fitzgerald’s dismissal of Zelda’s writing as automatic, undisciplined, and diaristic.

This trivialization of the diary form, Zambreno charges, is a covert way of discouraging girls and women from writing:

The diary especially is read through the context of modernism as a form of automatic writing, but worse, of automatic feeling, it is the intensity of emotions expressed that seems to render it unserious, unliterary, which connects in general to literature by women that comes out of the diary form. This is because girls write in a diary.

Rhys was dependent on a succession of unreliable lovers and husbands. At her lowest point, she begged old lovers for money. Her fiction depicts the material reality of disempowered women.

I think of Muriel Rukeyser, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”

She could not be her own author. She did not have authority.

Zambreno notes that many literary women, acclaimed and forgotten alike, kept diaries, including Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, Anais Nin, Vivien(ne) Eliot, and Zelda Fitzgerald. Their notebooks were integral to their creative processes; they could record their observations, analyze their experiences, and play with ideas without judgment or discipline.

In writing their diaries, they began to roam in their interior spaces.

Heroines is organized as an accretion of fragments that brings to mind a notebook. This form allows her to weave history, criticism, analysis, memoir, and asides into her arguments. The passage on the bibliophilic society I quoted above is exemplar of the form: she begins with a marital dispute, enlarges her lens to a pernicious form of ongoing gender inequity, and references a seminal essay to consider its implications. The conclusions are not always tidy, and as my obsession with this paragraph shows, the ideas remain open to interrogation and interpretation.

This associative style allows Zambreno to reference a wide range of authors and texts and begin building an alternative canon of the girl. “How we buy into this idea of the canon, its memory campaign that verges on propaganda, that the books remembered are the only ones worth reading.” In discussing the books she loves and that formed her as a writer, which also include Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, and Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies, she brings them back into the conversation.

A role of the critic: shaping the discourse on what is worth remembering.

*

Zambreno moves to Akron, Ohio, where John has a position as a rare books librarian. Bored and isolated, she begins a blog, where she connects with a community of women writers. She posts long rants about the mad wives, a subject that has obsessed her for years. Chris Kraus, an editor at Semiotext(e) and author of I Love Dick, a novel of a love affair and a performance of abject female subjectivity, contacts Zambreno about turning this work into a book.

Heroines was born of a blog. Zambreno argues that online media such as blogs and Tumblrs are public notebooks in which women and girls can reclaim our stories and write our experiences. Like in the handwritten diaries of the past, we can experiment with ideas and identities. But these reflections are posted in a public space.

A bibliophilic society of sorts. A way to reclaim our authority in the public sphere.

I see the possibilities Zambreno describes. I think of Dodie Bellamy’s the buddhist, on the aftermath of an affair with a Buddhist teacher. I think of Emily Rapp’s The Still Point of the Turning World, a chronicle of her infant son’s decline from Tay-Sachs, a fatal and incurable genetic disease. Both began as blogs. Online, they could write with immediacy and document a period of their lives, and especially for Rapp, keep friends and family updated when she was too overwhelmed to speak to them in private.

But I also think about why I don’t keep a regular blog. I already log many hours in front of the screen. Blogging is also a performance, and like in the physical world, women are expected to conform to certain roles. I don’t need the anxiety of constantly monitoring my online persona.

Sometimes withholding is more powerful than disclosure.

I also think of Virginia Woolf in Street Haunting, “As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room. For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience.”

The screen can be isolating. After a day in front of it, I want to wander outside.

I also wonder whether, in hiding behind a screen, we are further sequestering ourselves in the home, acquiescing to our cages.

*

It frustrates me that Zambreno conflates women’s writing with autobiographical writing about madness. I say this with trepidation, for Heroines is also an attempt to recover the lost stories of the hysterics. Like Vivien(ne) Eliot, whose papers at the Bodleian Zambreno could not access. The Eliot estate put up a tangle of red tape.

Hysterics are more often romanticized than understood. Their stories written for them.

Think of Dora suffering from aphonia. Freud diagnosed her as having misplaced sexual longings for the man who molested her.

Zelda, the beautiful, flamboyant flapper. She went crazy, sadly. The damaged girl.

There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s all in your head.

For Zambreno, writing and madness are intertwined. In her early twenties, when she was aspiring but not yet formed as a writer, she had a breakdown and a series of misadventures in psychiatry that decimated her confidence as an artist:

It cemented something in me, that maybe I wasn’t a writer, that maybe I was just fucked-up, still these voices come at me in the dark, when I’m blocked, sometimes even when I’m too productive – what if this is all just word salad? What if I’m just crazy?

She wonders if hysteria is a somatic response to women’s limited roles.

She wonders if hysteria is a label for women who transgress their social roles.

(I think of the FEMEN activists who stage topless protests for women’s equality. Labeled crazy for reclaiming their bodies as their own.)

In writing about the lives and work of the “mad wives”, Zambreno is also performing an act of personal exorcism.

But I also see that charges of madness, or in a more surreptitious form, an inadequate grasp on reality, are often leveled at voices, and not necessarily those of hysterics, that threaten the status quo.

In the final paragraphs Zambreno writes,

If I have communicated anything to you I hope it is the absolute urgency to write yourself, your body, your own experience. The absolute necessity for you to write yourself in order to understand yourself, in order to become yourself. I ask you to fight against your own disappearance. To refuse to self-immolate.

I read this as a challenge to write not just about hysteria but also the truths that shake our complacency. The complexities beneath the gleaming surface.

*

Discussed in this essay:

Heroines by Kate Zambreno. Semiotext(e). 2012. 312 pages. $18.

Teow Lim Goh is a writer and critic living in Boulder, Colorado. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Open Letters Monthly, Full Stop, and The Common Online, among other publications.

Photo: Vivien Elliot

by Kathryn Matlack

What’s it like to grow up as an outsider? As a boy who doesn’t like baseball or fishing? A boy who doesn’t feel the way other boys do about kissing girls? In If You Knew Then What I Know Now, a series of fourteen linked essays, Ryan Van Meter unravels his own experience of growing up and then, years later, coming out.

To classify If You Knew Then What I Know Now as purely memoir or coming-of-age story misses the fact that this collection is also a meditation on love, sexuality, and gender in a patriarchal society. Its relevance is broad. I can’t say I know what Van Meter’s experience was – “queer male” is an identity that can still get you straight-up killed in lots of countries, “straight female” has its drawbacks, but is at least less immediately dangerous. Yet, like Van Meter, I was also a late bloomer and a bookworm, and related deeply to his depictions of how the scrawny loner with the outsized imagination feels.

The essays fall into three groups: Van Meter’s earliest memories describing his burgeoning awareness that he was different; pivotal moments of adolescence; and investigations and reflections on love, relationships and what being a gay man has meant across the past half-century.

In “First,” the narrator confesses, at age five, his love to his next-door neighbor. The narrator’s mother overhears, and tells him he can’t feel this way. This marks the end of a time the narrator and his mother had no conflict, and sets the stage for his family to try to shape what he does and says. Further loss of innocence comes in “Lake Effect.” On a father-son houseboat vacation the narrator is caught staring at his father’s bare-chested friend; his father reprimands the narrator in front of everyone. Reflecting, the narrator realizes his father speaks out to assert his masculinity in front of friends, wondering “what kind of man” would raise “[his] kind of boy.”

The compassion Van Meter displays for former antagonists is a hallmark of the collection, though Van Meter remains honest in recalling the humiliation his antagonists inflicted on him, holding them accountable. In the awkward moments that follow the incident with his father’s friend, the narrator watches as a fish is reeled in. Feeling as out of place as a fish out of water, he imagines stepping off the boat to escape:

I want to drop silently and lose myself in [the water] without fighting the way the fish do when they’re pulled into the air. I’d like to just step off the boat—it would be something my body wants to do, an accident, and nobody knows why.

Most of the essays in the first section of the book concern Van Meter’s inability to fit in. “Discovery,” however, shows the narrator finally finding a place in the world. In a quietly brilliant scene that captures the endearing and often funny things kids think and do, along with the quiet danger of the forbidden, the narrator wriggles into his aunt’s blue satin dress which he found in his grandmother’s closet. His world is transformed; in the moments before his grandfather will finish farming and come home for supper, the narrator sets the table in the late afternoon sun, wearing the dress, senses and self-confidence heightened. It’s as if he’s seeing himself for the first time. The narrator’s grandmother, who sees him in the dress, silently recognizes and accepts her grandchild as someone who is most comfortable occupying this forbidden world.

The second group of essays explores deception, both of the self and others, as a way of coping with “transgressive” sexuality and truths that are unpleasant to face. They follow Van Meter as he grows up, at church camp and school, and in his earliest romantic relationships. The title essay captures a moment in the 6^th grade when two of the narrator’s male friends pretend to kiss to try to coax Van Meter to admit he’s gay. At a high school reunion one of the friends apologizes to Van Meter, who realizes the incident also scarred his friend and made him feel ashamed.

In illuminating how these brief moments play out for not just the victims but also the aggressors, Van Meter investigates our accountability for cruelty, and the visible and unconscious ways we are damaged by, and carry this pain. In “Cherry Bars,” the narrator blames himself for hurting his high school girlfriend, Claire; he’d pretended to like her so that he could fit in. The essays about adolescence also shed light on the stigma associated with being gay; we glimpse the way the narrator was assailed from all sides any time anything about him even hinted at homosexuality; we gain some insight into why denying and wholly burying homosexual feelings, though complicated, can still feel like a safer alternative than expressing them.

In the final group of essays Van Meter explores love, his relationships with men, and how what happened in his past affected his adult life. “The Goldfish History” depicts the narrator’s fragile relationship with his first real boyfriend, and his betrayal of his best friend (he drops her after meeting the boyfriend she’s been standing in for). In this first relationship with a man, the stakes are high. Van Meter captures what many of us may have felt after the end of a relationship that once offered shimmering promise. About the goldfish itself—which he and his best friend bought and which dies as his relationship with his boyfriend fades—Van Meter writes:

As he dried in the air and the luster of his scales dulled, all the colors I’d always noticed in his body seemed to disappear, and I wondered if I had always imagined the green, blue, red and grey.

The goldfish symbolized Van Meter’s hope for the relationship. Who hasn’t second-guessed the entire premise of a relationship after it’s over? Yet for Van Meter, the second-guessing extended beyond the scope of his relationship, and demanded that he reevaluate his whole life.

Later, in the second-to-last essay, “Things I Will Want To Tell You On Our First Date But Won’t,” Van Meter summarizes what all his trials have taught him about love:

For a long time, I thought that it wasn’t possible for two men to love and be happy together forever…later, I started believing in this kind of love again, even though I’m still not sure it’s possible.

In the collection’s final essay Van Meter explains what makes love between two gay men so complicated. Gay men of his generation didn’t just have the trouble of finding a compatible partner, as all of us do; they also had to reinvent love. Much of the previous generation of gay men had died of AIDS, or lost partners to AIDS, so few models of love between gay men existed. As they came of age, gay men who grew up in the 80s and 90s had to build love from scratch, make it rise through the ashes of the devastation wrought by HIV and AIDS.

The book’s title, “If You Knew Then What I Know Now” implies that, with the clarity of hindsight, Van Meter wishes he could have helped his younger self grow up with more confidence. The title also suggests that it gets better—a message popularized by syndicated columnist Dan Savage, whose campaign to tell LGBT youth that it gets better has mainstreamed anti-bullying measures. In essence, Savage’s campaign tries to make sure kids like Van Meter hear “It gets better” enough to believe it. Is hearing it enough?

The painful moments Van Meter depicts early in the collection helped shape the sensitive, compassionate, and talented person who authored this book. It is a book infused with optimism bolstered by the confidence he sees in young out men today. Likewise, works like this are part of a wider, and more honest and inclusive discourse accessible to gay men of Van Meter’s generation and the next.

Ours is a loaded political moment, primed for social change. On one hand, social media and information access is empowering formerly ostracized groups like LGBT and other minority communities to call for social justice and mobilize to work towards it. On the other hand, conservative religious and political forces can also mobilize quickly and amplify their opposition to what they see as dangerous threats.

Van Meter’s approach, notably non-polarizing, can be viewed as part of a tradition of nonviolence that has effected successful social change throughout history. Empathizing with those who bullied him and exploring ways he deceived and hurt those close to him, Van Meter seeks to establish common ground, showing ways that patriarchal social norms are limiting and destructive to everyone. Because of the way Van Meter is at once an insider (male in a male-run world) and an outsider (gay in a heteronormative society), he and others who share this dual identity are poised to have their message amplified better than most. He knows what it feels to be left out, yet he is at the same time a part of the dominant group in society that oppresses those who don’t conform.

In the title, Van Meter could also be addressing the men in his life who couldn’t accept his homosexuality or gender expression because of their attachment to a particular and ingrained definition of heterosexual masculinity. A piece in The Atlantic –written by a transgender man—from late last year asked if we might be seeing the end of “violent, simplistic, macho masculinity.” The author articulated a similar opinion to Van Meter’s: many men who conform are at war with their private selves. He observed that “men are socialized to push past pain, [yet] if you can’t recognize your own pain, how can you do it with someone else’s?”

These complicated power struggles exist not only in the United States, but abroad as well. In Argentina, a notoriously male-dominated, heterocentric society, same sex marriage was declared legal for the first time in any Latin American country in 2009. The couple who were the first “husband and husband” under the law immediately leveraged their visibility to broaden their struggle for LGBT rights into a struggle for human rights. The couple, Jose Maria Di Bello and Alex Freyre, launched an activist movement called 260 Men Against Violence Against Women, calling on men to reflect on their abuses of power that are legitimized by a patriarchal society.

I was able to attend one of their protest events when I lived in Buenos Aires (the number “260” alluded to the women that had died as a result of femicide in 2010). I was struck by the obvious truth Di Bello and Freyre pointed out; it is necessary for those in the oppressing group—men who are perpetrators of violence against women—to come out against oppression for real change to happen. In other words, social change seems most possible when awareness and protest comes from within the group that holds the most power.

More recently, in the United States, an organization called Men Can Stop Rape commented in the aftermath of the Steubenville rape trial that for change to happen, we must ask why things are as they are now, rather than demonizing those who are links in a chain of violence that society condones. The founder of the organization observed that stopping sexual violence means being a role model for healthy, non-violent masculinity, and quoted Frederick Douglass, who said, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” Van Meter’s text contributes to an oppositional discourse, part of a new, growing call for alternative role models and for movements to rewrite and redefine what men in modern society are—and aren’t, who they can be, and what they can become.

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Discussed in this essay:

If You Knew Then What I Know Now by Ryan Van Meter. Sarabande. 2011. 176 pages. $16.

Kathryn Matlack is a freelance writer living in Austin, Texas.

Illustration: Ryukin Goldfish by Shinnosuke Matsubara