I’m, uh, not great.
No one I know is doing well.
Everything is severely awful everywhere.
C’est la vie, at least under the savagery of capitalism.
At least until we do something about it.
Last week, while house-sitting for Sarah, I rifled through her extensive book collection. I don’t know if it was the depression, the heartbreak, or maybe both, but I decided 2023 is the right year to finally read Heroines by Kate Zambreno.
If you were on Tumblr back in 2013 or so, you probably remember the book, published in 2012 by Semiotext(e), and the cultural impact it (sort of) had. People were eating this shit up. It was a different time: no one gave a fuck that Chris Kraus was landlordin’ all over the place, and clearly, no one seemed to be put off by Zambreno’s privileged, neurotic ramblings.
Heroines is the kind of book I would have lied about having read back then; that’s the sort of power it had over both the literary community (I don’t know what the fuck I mean by that, don’t ask me) and certain pockets of the internet.
It is a classic Semiotext(e) pick, and it mirrors I Love Dick’s American Void, self-inflicted bourgeois “homelessness.” Jittery and clutched babblings of chronic dissatisfaction. Both are unfunny versions of Albert Brooks’s 1985 gem Lost in America, but maybe that’s just me.
I’ve known so many of these couples — upper middle class, anxious and self-obsessed, who have enough privilege and means to uproot their lives every so often, on some constant quest for satisfaction, some princess and the pea type shit. They feel like a by-product of fractured American culture, a certainty now. There will always be more.
Sometimes Zambreno can write. I like it when she talks about Henry Miller and how she thinks he could “fuck me, so I stay fucked”. That’s a good line. Maybe she should write a poem. I like how the book is structured; it is easy to read. Just not pleasant.
Nothing about this book has aged particularly well. The vegan victim narrative and deep-seated hatred for the midwest are powerfully cringe. Constant finger-pointing, trying to find an external solution to an internal problem. I’ve rarely read a book that made me mutter shut the fuck up under my breath as much as this one, frustrated as she reaches for yet another comparison that doesn’t work, another attempt to juxtapose her comfortable situation with cases of genuine pain.
In 2021, Zambreno became a Guggenheim Fellow. She’s more than fine, more than comfortable.
She’s always been.
And yet.
The professional class and its attachment to ennui as though it signals depth of feeling and not just shakes of dissatisfaction, the inability to settle, to appreciate. Desperately trying to taste the Freedom they’ve heard about their whole lives, convinced it still exists in at least one of the fifty states.
It’s not that I don’t have any sympathy for what she’s writing about. I’m no stranger to heterosexuality and all of its cruelties, no stranger to being Fucking Crazy. I am cringe; I write incessantly about relationships, and I definitely need to shut the fuck up.
What I can’t relate to or even remotely empathize with is a constant, restless, bourgeois disappointment, which seems to warp every moment of this lady’s fucking life.
We can breathe easy, though, knowing she’s found peace in the most wonderful place of all:
Brooklyn.
Speaking of Brooklyn….
The results of last week’s poll showed personal essays winning by a landslide. So while I’m never going to stop writing about class, I’ll happily include more personal essays, though everything boils down to class, always, even love, as we know.
Recently I told a friend that I was sick of writing about Him, about the man who broke my heart.
I feel like I’ve said what I want to say, you know? But then I go to write, and he keeps slipping in.
This is what poetry is for, I know. This is how heartbreak plays out, I know. Some memories, however, require more space, words, and structure.
Case in point: the 500$ pants.
This is a short one, personal and about class, and hopefully, the last thing I ever write about Him.
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