On Self-Indulgence

Some Recommendations:

-Patrick Cottrell’s Afternoon Hours of the Hermit. One part existential detective novel, one part Thomas Bernhard homage, very funny, very dark, completely unpredictable. It was sort of like I Heart Huckabees about grief, if the lead had also been a recently transitioned man confronting his Midwestern family.

-Listening to the audiobook of something you loved when you first read it 20 years ago, and think of as one of your favorite books, but haven’t revisited in a while. I started doing this a while back, first with The House of Mirth.

-Kevin Sampsell’s Baby in the Night. A baby starts going out in his neighborhood alone at night because he thinks the moon is his absent father. An impulse acquisition after hearding Kevin read at the Frontera Festival in Dallas because the reading was so great. (Isn’t that the best way to find a new book?)

-Join us for the next meeting of The Irregular Bookclub on May 17th! We’re talking about Donald Antrim’s story collection, The Emerald Light in the Air.

Now this week’s rant—

I’ve been thinking about it for years— the insufficiency and impotence of using the accusations “self-indulgent” or “overly personal” in a work of literary criticism —but any time I tried to put it in writing, I felt pre-tired of the argument I’d been making in my head, leveed at no one in particular, and I’d give up before getting too far.

But last month the Irregular Book Club met to discuss Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love, so I read the few reviews I could find online about it in preparation for our discussion. Two of the three were hugely disappointing.

I first read Sedgwick’s memoir in 2020, and I found it unusual and valuable in that it goes into great detail about her relationship with her therapist and the contents of her therapy sessions in the immediate aftermath of surviving breast cancer. (She died of cancer a decade later.) The book takes Japanese form of haibun— a kind of travelogue interspersed with haiku— so, at times the prose breaks into verse, then back to prose. I see it as an attempt to articulate the journey into the mercurial, private, transformative space of therapy for all those years.

While there are many books about therapy and psychoanalysis from the professional’s point of view, there are very few books (or even archives) out there that detail the experience from the patient’s point of view. (I’ve been looking for more— if you know of any, let me know.)

And I don’t know why I was surprised, but two of the published reviews I came across were critical of the book for, it seems, making the critic uncomfortable with its disclosures. (Though there is this one incredible essay about the use of failure and error in the book.) The Publisher’s Weekly review just came right out and said it: “Sedgwick's reflections can come across as tediously self-indulgent.” Another, longer review in the Fall 1999 issue of Rain Taxi seemed extremely confused and confounded by the book, and both wanted Sedgwick to tell less and tell more—

The result of so many disclosures is not exactly a tone of intimacy, nor is it altogether off-putting: if anything, the reader feels perplexed by the author's motivation—or is it compulsion?—to put affairs of so confidential a nature on such public display. The disclosures might be better understood if they served to elucidate Sedgwick's academic writing on sexuality, yet they have no discernible bearing on the politics of queer identity or the oppression of homosexuals. This absence of any meaningful connection between Sedgwick's work on gay studies and her own sexuality is never really examined in the book, and it only makes her erotic revelations all the more puzzling.

First of all— a writer’s motivation is totally beside the point when it comes to a critic’s work. You’re not reviewing the writer; you’re just reviewing the text.1 Second— a memoir, a book formed of the author’s memories and personal revelations, is indeed a confession. It is full of disclosure. It is full of personal details. Now, if someone cornered you at a party and started telling you personal details such as these, I’d call that perplexing, over-sharing, trauma dumping, etc. The context is not appropriate for confession. But the space of a memoir is always appropriate; I don’t think its possible for an author to tell too much in that space— or rather, the only person who decides what is too much is the author. As readers, our job is to make our own sense of it or else give up.

This isn’t to say there’s nothing to critique in a memoir in general, or in this memoir in particular. The language sometimes gets soupy and unclear. It’s a bit repetitive at times. Occasionally, I felt a little claustrophobic while reading. It’s possible that these bits of discomfort could have been avoided if Sedgwick had found an alternate path to take through the story.

But the accusation that a memoir (or even a novel) is self-indulgent— what is that really about? The self is always the subject (at least in part) of a memoir. The subtext to these kinds of accusations is kind of Who Cares? Who cares that she has these memories or feelings or desires? Well, I do. I care. I care how other people understand their lives and make sense of them and narrativize them. That’s why I like reading essays and memoir. Not because I think this memoirist’s life is uniquely more important than someone else’s, but because no one’s life is more important than anyone else’s.

There’s a moral judgment at play here, too. The writer who has indulged herself in public has made an ethical failing. She has told us something she wasn’t supposed to tell us. She had misjudged her own significance in this world.

It feels related to this idea I posted over a year ago that for some reason I still occasionally get notifications about—

Ultimately, I think when a critic accuses a memoir of being self-indulgent or over-sharing or too personal, I think what we’re seeing is the critic’s shame or discomfort over the level of disclosure on display.

It’s been almost a year since I put out The Möbius Book, which is at least half a somewhat straightforward memoir. (You can pre-order the paperback if you were waiting on it.) Since it was my first nonfiction book after 10 years of novels and stories, I thought a lot about what it would mean to share specifically personal details from my life and therefore from the lives of other people I’ve known.

My father was the only person I spoke to who was upset about what I wrote, not because it wasn’t true, but because it was true, and also because there was one story I told briefly, but not in full.