Ain't She Sweet
L.A. based writer Caitlin Flanagan gets profiled, and demonstrates some of the more hypocritical aspects of her personality, in this month's Elle. Ms. Flanagan has been criticized before, in places like Beverly-Hills based Ms., but the Elle article is particularly well-written, and Elle is not generally known for having a set political agenda, unless you count the trumpeting of one shoe designer over another. (Thanks to Salon.com's Broadsheet for pointing it out.)
Both articles address some controversies over Ms. Flanagan's opinions about women who work as professionals rather than stay home with their children. All right, that is a consistently controversial subject, but if she really wants to stay home with her kids and takes pride in it, fine, good for her. But both of these articles contest her ideas while praising her writing style, which is, in fact, barf-inducing.
In the introduction to the anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, its editor Phillip Lopate writes, "So often the "plot" of a personal essay, its drama, its suspense, consists in watching how far the essayist can drop past his or her psychic defenses toward deeper levels of honesty." He adds that the essayist's job is to explore the contradictory self, in fact, that "The harvesting of self-contraction is an intrinsic part of the personal essay form."
The thing about Flanagan is that on the surface she seems, like a great essayist, to introspect, to explore shadowy aspects of her own character. For example, this excerpt from the controversial "Serfdom" essay:
It was entirely snotty and rude and most of all silly for me to have this attitude toward those mothers. In the first place, the day-care center was in no way tony, nor were the cars that pulled up to it in any way luxurious; I'll bet that all those mothers worked more because of economic necessity than because of a desire for professional advancement or emotional fulfillment. More to the point, a majority of my sainted hours noting every little moue of delight or displeasure that crossed my children's faces were spent in the company of a highly capable and very industrious nanny who did all of the hard stuff. There was no need for me to be moping around the apartment all day; I really could have lightened up and had a little more fun, clicked off the TV and gone to the movies or lunch or shopping.
See, she admits to behavior both snotty and silly. Because, silly her, she forgot for a moment that not everyone can afford a nanny, or to go shopping in the middle of the day! But she admits to it! Isn't she sensitive? Doesn't she, being so sensitive and honest, deserve her coddled life? In case you are wondering, all the introspection in all of the four or so of Ms. Flanagan's essays we read in the New Yorker before learning to recognize the name and quickly flip the page doesn't get deeper than this: Caitlin Flanagan introspects, feels sensitive, and ultimately decides not to change anything about her life (which is, by the way, better than yours) or, really, her point of view on herself. She's no Joan Didion; she's more like Regina George. Which means she's almost funny, if you can laugh without barfing first.
photo by sectionz via flickr