📕 All the Way to the Memoir, Part Two

"The misfortunes of others taste like honey"

Catch up on part one first:

📕 All the Way to the Memoir

“Once upon a time, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love. Gilbert pioneered the idea of getting free, baking a very specific type of spiritual language into the act of reinventing oneself. She wasn’t fleeing, she was Seeking: the language is important because it redefines and shapes the narrative, Gilbert’s true superpower. In her new book, Gilbert grafts the language of a Goop retreat onto the bones of an addiction memoir. Chaos ensues.”

—Tell the Bees, “False Gods”

Are we all obsessed with Elizabeth Gilbert? Not necessarily . . . although I personally still can’t resist reading new think pieces and reviews about All the Way to the River (heretofore ATWTTR, which aptly sounds out to “atwitter.”)

I suspect it’s more that we miss the water cooler days of appointment television—Friends, The Office, SATC, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones—and Gilbert has poured us book nerds a big tall glass of cultural conversation.

LG, who leans heavily on mystical experiences and the “God of [her] understanding” throughout her writing, is certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. I’m not here to attack or defend, more to observe.

In yet another New York Times piece on the book (the fourth in as many weeks), Opinion columnist Jessica Grose takes issue with how the genre of memoir has shifted, which isn’t solely Liz G’s doing. “Memoirs don’t have to be guides for living,” the article’s subhead says.

Grose writes, “Throughout the book — which is a combination of self-help, poetry and memoir — Gilbert keeps telling readers what they should think and how they should feel. She can’t help shifting into spiritual counselor mode and universalizing her own unusual experiences of relationships and grief.”

And a few other snippets throughout her OpEd:

“I kept wishing that Gilbert would just tell us her story, without wrapping it in psychobabble and assurances that everyone involved is a good, kind and beautiful person, and generalizations about how women are burning themselves out on caregiving.

. . . I miss the lady who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, or more accurately, I miss books like The Liars’ Club and Cherry by Mary Karr, or any of Maya Angelou’s memoirs, which stick with the writer’s story and don’t come to TED Talk conclusions.

. . . ‘Nothing is what it was before, and everything is better,’ Gilbert writes, just a few pages before explaining that she wasn’t lying when she told us she had discovered enlightenment at an ashram by the end of Eat, Pray, Love, yet she didn’t have ‘a program to help me keep it,’ which is why she drove her ‘life off a cliff all over again.’

I don’t know if Gilbert really has discovered inner peace, but I am definitely not following her over any cliffs to find out.”

Nobody respects a hypocrite or a liar, but Gilbert seems to have been as honest as possible about what she is learning during and immediately after any given era. She doesn’t know what she doesn’t (yet) know. (Although, yes, even on this latest podcast tour, she seems to have absurdly high levels of confidence in sharing polished pearls of wisdom along the way.)

Still, I’d love for authors, agents, and editors to weigh in here, as it seems publishers practically require “self-help takeaways” so that books like these will be more marketable and commercially viable. Memoirs are known to be a competitive category, and the market for them is tough unless you are a celebrity. One of my friends wrote a book of essays, and it wasn’t until she self-helpified her submission that she got a book deal. Another shopped a memoir only to be told it would do better if transformed into a business book. Are these just two people, or part of a larger pattern?

I feel a strong pull in my own writing to present as an expert (something I did out of youthful hubris for the first fifteen years of my career as a “thought-leader”), and it requires an active effort to resist this impulse when writing personal essays here on Doh.

I’ve had several people close to me critique not just what I’m sharing and how (or how much), but me as a person—all my character faults and failings—that I myself have displayed for them here, which means I am aware they exist. Would they prefer I return to pretending? Sometimes it seems that way. My best guess is that such messy, open sharing sans tidy takeaways is deeply uncomfortable for them. I should sweep it all under the rug until I can reliably craft a beautiful dust bunny for display instead.

In parallel to the critical discourse around the book itself, much character-based vitriol is swirling around LG, too. Both

Steph Sprenger

and

like other girls

address “the culture of crucifying women for being honest.” (In her piece, “Why is everyone so pissed off at Elizabeth Gilbert?” Steph offers a comprehensive summary of the most common critiques.)

It’s one thing to critique the book itself—the craft and storytelling—yet, it has seemed irresistible to so many to hold Gilbert herself up to ruthless judgment on who she is as a person, and the choices she made, no matter how unflinchingly she admits these exact personal failings first. This is what

Brooke Warner

addresses in her post (mentioned in part one), “Memoir is a Mirror.” She writes:

“So many indignant comments littered my social media feeds this week from people who asserted that they would not read this book. The usual rounds of diagnoses and name-calling followed: narcissistic, hysterical, unstable, exploitative, manic, problematic, an asshole.

Witness me bug-eyed watching all this unfold as I was reading The Guardian excerpt. How we love to knock people down. How self-satisfied we are when we get to pathologize someone who’s soared just a little too high.”

“The misfortunes of others taste like honey.”
—Japanese saying via Schadenfreude by cultural historian Dr. Tiffany Watt Smith

My working theory is this: not only do we crave collective water cooler conversations, but during stressful times, we seem to need a sort of schadenfreudic release as well. It’s sad that we feel so threatened by tall poppies, insisting on cutting them down just as soon as we’ve “lovingly” watered them to their highest heights, yet it seems to be one of the realities of being human.

I suspect a little schadenfreude is healthy. German for “hate joy,” my favorite overview comes from Dr. Tiffany Watt Smith, author of a little yellow tome that packs a punch, Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune. In it, she points out five reasons we experience this taboo emotion:¹

1. An opportunistic pleasure, a spectator sport, felt when we stumble across another’s misfortune which we have not caused ourselves.

2. A furtive emotion, and no wonder. Outbursts of merriment at another’s catastrophes are generally a sign of great villainy.

3. When the other person’s suffering can be construed as a comeuppance—a deserved punishment for being smug or hypocritical, or breaking the law.

4. A form of respite—the failures of others appease our own envy and inadequacy, and give us a much-needed glimpse of superiority. It says as much about our own vulnerabilities as our attitudes to the behavior of others.

5. Glee at minor discomforts and gaffes rather than at dire tragedies and deaths.

While we’re all busy dissecting Liz Gilbert’s confessed addictions, it turns out dopamine is also delivered via gossip (I’m not immune) and take-downs. As Embolden Psychology writes on The Neuropsychology of Schadenfreude (emphasis mine):

“Research in neural science shows the experience of schadenfreude activates the brain’s reward centers. Psychologically, there are three primary theories regarding schadenfreude: concerns of self-evaluation and self-esteem (feeling better about oneself by lowering another), social identity (identifying with a group with exclusion of others), and justice (feeling that somebody ‘got what was coming to them’ due to their own behaviors).

Dopamine from our limbic system from laughing at another who is struggling can have an addictive quality to it. Think of the perpetual gossips and snipes. Over time, when people make mean words and mockery a habit, the logical and reasoning part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, can shut down, and we are then acting on our most primitive emotions. The dopamine delivery from this can insidiously erode an individual’s ability to empathize.”

As I proposed in my piece on Kevin Costner’s big cinematic bet, there is a way to weave empathy back into schadenfreudic release. In jest, I offered the ridiculous-to-pronounce fictional alternative, mitgefühlversagenfreude, a German amalgam of empathy+failure+joy.

Deep down, maybe what at least some of us are really trying to say is:

Wow, your life sure was a mess, and maybe still is, and while I am shocked (even mortified!) at your stories, I am a little happy to know you are only human, no matter how perfect your life seemed on social media. I’m secretly grateful that you were hiding darker sides of yourself, because I know there are ways I do that too.

Although I seethe at seeing my shadow sides reflected in you, when I take a step back, I am relieved to admit the ways that my life is a mess too. It shames and pains me to admit, much to my chagrin (and others who judge me the same way I first leapt to judge you), that I am not perfect or enlightened yet either.

So really, I appreciate you splaying open your failures with us, so that in the midst of life’s chaos, we might feel just a little less crazy and alone. And if nothing else, have some juicy conversations about your work. Thank you.²

❤️

Continue reading the next installment:

🦌 On Fawning—and Why I Was Wrong About My Most Toxic Trait, Part One

And share your thoughts in the comments of our monthly community prompt:

💬 What are your favorite qualities in a memoir or personal essay?

1. Check out this Reddit thread for a fun foray into phrases other cultures employ to describe this strangely delightful taboo feeling.

2. 👉 If you enjoyed this post, you might also appreciate:

The Self-Imposed Pressure to Be an Expert

🍌 Is Kevin Costner in His Flop Era?

🙏 Why aren't you enlightened yet?

🪉Not All Feedback is Created Equal

🌟 My Favorite One-Star Review

🤥 My Most Toxic Trait, Part One

🎧 Listen to the Rolling in Doh Podcast Playlist