Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture--and the Magic That Makes It Work - Jesse David Fox (2023)

My first thought-best thought after reading Comedy Book following Doppelganger and The Perfection Trap: it was not as good as either, but offered the most enjoyable reading experience of the three. Should Fox consider that statement, query whether le plaisir du texte is greater than sturm und drang. I am likely using these pretentious-sounding phrases incorrectly. The world may be broken, but comedy is flourishing. 

What can we take from a book? A different way of seeing and understanding the world, maybe. All three of these books made me think, but this one felt most familiar. All of these books are non-fiction, and all of the authors have a very urgent point they are trying to make. 

Actually, I read Sure, I'll Join Your Cult more recently than The Perfection Trap, but yeah they are all non-fiction. However, Maria Bamford did not have a thesis supported by evidence marshalled from primary and secondary sources, like these other three (other than her own experience, examining the nature of cults and cult-like behavior). Doppelganger and The Perfection Trap also discussed cults of various guises, as does Comedy Book. All four of these books are connected. This was more amusing and entertaining and enjoyable than Perfection or Doppelganger, but in the Fox v. Bamford match-up, I am sure both would concede to the other. The primary connecting tissue between all four is one word: compassion.

A year ago, I was taking a stand-up comedy class on Zoom. There was no required text. Sometimes our instructor would send us clips from YouTube, and hold up certain comedians as masters of the craft of joke-writing and joke-telling. Fox has written a book that could function as a class on stand-up, or serve as a key text in such a creatively-centered course. Bird by Bird is to creative writing classes as Comedy Book should be to stand-up comedy classes. Of course, there are far more of the former than the latter, but if this book is any indication, we can expect the latter to grow (and perhaps expect the former to fade accordingly with attention spans). 

*

The very urgent point that Fox wants to make here is that comedy, like Rodney Dangerfield, doesn't get any respect [as an art form]. The first place my mind jumps is to Annie Hall. This is still the only Comedy to win Best Picture (Birdman and Everything Everywhere All at Once both have their share of comedic elements, but neither fit snugly into the genre.) Many people say comedic acting is much harder than dramatic acting. Fox makes the point that Annie Hall (along with M*A*S*H, Tootsie, and The Graduate) are "great, well-made comedic films, but they aren't laugh riots." (56) They aren't "hard comedies." 

From there the discussion shifts to the filmography of Adam Sandler, and it's not exactly Fox's point that Sandler's "lowbrow" or "gross-out" comedies deserve more critical acclaim--rather, intent matters, and Sandler knows audiences connect with this type of humor that has become his calling card. Even as he does more serious roles for other auteurs, he cannot be considered an auteur himself, because he is not P.T. Anderson, the Safdie Brothers or Noah Baumbach. I believe that Fox means to push against this notion--that we can and should consider Adam Sandler an auteur in his own right, even if the films are admittedly execrable. 

He drives this point home by discussing what some consider Sandler's worst movie, Jack and Jill. I had heard enough about this movie that I wanted to watch it, and I got about halfway or two-thirds through it before growing bored and disinterested. That said it is really absurd and I did laugh a fair amount earlier on. (This may have been after the Grown-Ups 3 script was circulated, and I still believe this would make an incredible movie.) Fox and I are probably pretty close in age and so I think Billy Madison holds a special place in both of our hearts (to my mind, actually a good film and borderline-classic "hard comedy"), but it feels like this bothers him a little too much, that critics feel bad about movies that rely on poop jokes. 

But later, he mentions how Blended provided him with "a profound personal realization about the sacrifices my own parents made blending my family," "not in spite of some of the dumbest jokes of Sandler's career, but, in my opinion, because of them, as they told the overthinking part of my brain to take ninety minutes off, so I could feel something." (66) He then quotes Ernest Becker from The Denial of Death for the second time (first time: "[Man is] a god who shits.") to reference Otto Rank, a colleague of Freud's that worked with Henry Miller and Anais Nin who believed that the only cure for neurosis was the "need for legitimate foolishness." (66)

The point is fairly made. Even the films appealing to lowest-common-denominator "lowbrow" audiences present a value proposition beyond their bankability. Sandler has a deal with Netflix that gave him a ton of money and creative control and he chooses to make these rather silly movies, and some people seem to have a problem with that, and Fox thinks such critics are missing the point. Sandler is living the dream, and Fox gets it, and he deserves it after paying his dues, and there's nothing wrong with watching movies that don't necessarily make us think (though not all of us think they're really that funny, either). 

*

Early on in the book, Fox makes his point, and the rest of it reads something like a very long rant about comedy, with some occasional flourishes bordering on profundity. The book references many comedians while examining particular facets of comedy. To perhaps better structure this review:

Jerry Seinfeld
Chris Rock (on "bombing")
Bernie Mac
Janeane Garafalo
Adam Sandler
The Simpsons
Gilbert Gottfried (on jokes that are "too soon")
SNL (post 9/11, and generally)
Jon Stewart (and other outgrowths of The Daily Show)
Bert Kreischer
Louis C.K.
Maria Bamford
Margaret Cho
Tig Notaro
John Early
Kate Berlant
Jo Firestone
Bo Burnham
Kristen Schaal
Hannah Gadsby
Jerrod Carmichael
Drew Michael
Anthony Jeselnik
Lisa Lampanelli
Dave Chappelle
Ricky Gervais
Bill Burr
The Office (on memes)
I Think You Should Leave (on memes)
Ali Wong
Lil Rel Howery
Bowen Yang
Matt Rogers
Mike Birbiglia
John Mulaney
Marc Maron 

If you like any of these comics, you are likely to find something of value in Comedy Book. If it is not already clear, however, Fox works by topics associated with stand-up, and some of the chapter titles include "Funny," "The Line," "Truth," "Laughter," (not required for comedy!) and "Community." Some of these chapters are better than others, and Fox is at his best when he is dissecting the brilliance of someone he admires. 

A quick note on the writing style: it is conversational, and humorous (though more than a few times, lands in "dad-joke" territory, pseudo-intentionally) and a bit long-winded. This is probably better than the opposite. The book feels a little longer than it needs to be, but I appreciated the thoroughness and attention to detail. I am not a comedy fanatic by any stretch, but I knew most of the people referenced above, and some of them quite well. There were some surprising tidbits (like how Maria Bamford did an overnight Zoom stand-up show, sleeping with the camera on), and the occasional petit madeleine truc (like the SNL cold open after Trump was elected, or the Pete Buttigieg "High Hopes" viral video thing--to make up a sophisticated-sounding phrase that may not exist) and we can be reasonably certain that Fox has left no stone unturned, so to speak. You cannot sum up the entire history and trajectory of comedy in a book, but this comes close. I can take "long-winded" when the material feels comprehensive.

*

As I said though, even when I felt the topics had been analyzed to death already, I still enjoyed reading Fox's rants, because his passion is so strong that it drove me to care more. I can't help but include one quote for very odd, personal reasons. 

"It was like I was Sandra Bullock in Gravity, doing routine repairs on the outside of my spaceship, when metal shards from a blown-up satellite came flying through, cutting up the craft, detaching my tether, leaving me flipping and flipping through space, floating away from my ship and Earth." (20-21)

Fox used the metaphor to describe his emotional state following the death of his mother, to highlight how comedy helped him cope with that tragedy (he was only 7), and it was rather moving. Recently Joey Votto used it to describe his emotional state after changing his mind on retirement, after his team declined the option to sign him to a 1 year contract. He called out to George Clooney to save him. 

A lot of people in the arts don't care about sports or consider them irrelevant, but George Carlin made one of his most famous bits about football and baseball, and athletes are entertainers and often rather funny--so Joey Votto matters, too, because he gets that. And maybe he didn't do too well last year (he owns that, and knows he can do better, knows he is not done), maybe the Reds don't want to do him the honor of a final farewell (it would be a redux of 2023), but I really hope the Cubs will step up and be his George Clooney. It is, in fact, one of my 12 wishes for 2024. Votto is a national treasure and will always be one of the most famous Reds in history. He loves hitting at Wrigley Field and it would be a beautiful way to end his career, with a World Series ring, beating the team that didn't want to stick with him for a deja vu trip around the sun. He wouldn't be asking for a lot, just a small contract for a year and the opportunity to play. This is an unfortunate pipe dream, but for the moment, we can fantasize about the beauty that could be. (This tangent wouldn't be allowed in a book, but I have to do what I can for the sake of the enterprise.)

*

So you probably have a good idea of what this book is like by now, but before we wrap, it is best to consider the nexus between this book and Doppelganger, and to include a short note about the material on Dave Chappelle, because it articulated a point that many have made, but few so distinctly. 

I may have written about this before, but here are my top 3 most notable experiences at comedy clubs:

(1) The Comedy Cellar - August/September 2001 - Outside the club, I saw Carson Daly (Chris Rock was also with him, and I believe Fred Durst, too) and dissed him, drunkenly, foolishly, and he graciously admitted he knew he stood for "everything that [was] wrong with the teen pop generation." 

(2) Boston Comedy Club - February or March 2002 - I go with a pseudo-platonic friend to a showcase featuring a person that lived across the street from our dorm (Janeane Garafalo did too, but this was a person named Jordan who had a bit about Mike Tyson having a match-up in the ring with a wild animal, shortly after he announced that he would eat Lennox Lewis's children). There is a two-drink minimum and we are not yet 19. I am put on the spot and asked if she is my girlfriend. I say she is not (I leave out that she wanted to be, once, and that she had a boyfriend now) and the comic generally makes fun of me, like I am dorky or whatever, and then adds that tonight they are going to get me laid. It was extremely uncomfortable, but there was a prophetic element buried in there, too.

(3) The Comedy Store - Sometime in early 2008 - My friend, a manager for a famous jazz musician, is in town for a tour stop and taking a few of the back-up musicians from Africa out for a good time, and we all go for a night of comedy, and are frequently mocked for the oddness of our group. My friend and I are considered the "Jewish handlers," because we were white and wore glasses, and then I am called Harry Potter, and it is only better because there is a women with a really crazy "emphysema laugh" in the audience that the host pivots towards for crowd work, and then later because Pauly Shore took the stage and apparently did not want to make me any more uncomfortable. 

So yeah, it was kind of funny to read this from Fox:

"'Look at Harry Potter over here.' That's what I would get. I had not read Harry Potter or watched any of the movies, but I got what they were trying to say--I had brown hair and glasses. I should say they didn't just say 'Harry Potter.' No, that's not funny enough. 'R*****ed Harry Potter.' Now, that's funny. 'Gay Harry Potter.' Funnier! Honestly, as a group of four guys, it was a lot of gay stuff. It blurs, but I'm pretty sure Lisa Lampanelli called us the 'United Nations of f*****s.' I forgot this, but one of my fellow UN representatives remembers Lampanelli touching another's leg and making some sort of Black penis joke. He also told me he always thought her act was kinda racist. I had no idea. I had not asked my friend at the time. I'm sure I laughed. Maybe I thought this was funny, maybe it was the pressure of the crowd, maybe I was scared she'd notice and go after me next. I know I was not offended. Why would I be? I was not gay, but I also didn't know why I would be offended if I were. But, also, in general I didn't get offended. This is not a point of pride as much a proof of privilege. None of the slurs Lampanelli threw around--and she threw them all around--applied to me, and everyone else seemed to be laughing. I guess she'd call people 'kikes,' but by 2002 that wasn't a word that meant anything to me. Frankly, in retrospect, I was desensitized." (190-191)

Now, I was offended, because it made me feel like a loser, and maybe this segues into the Doppelganger thing, or the anti-woke thing, or the freedom of speech thing, or the punching down thing, because they all feel connected. 

*

When I was about halfway through this book, one night I watched the newest specials by both Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais. Chappelle's was better, but Gervais's wasn't terrible. Both of them are lightning rods for obvious reasons. Perhaps its best to start with something Gervais says towards the end of his special:

"Here's the irony: I think I am woke, but I think that word has changed. I think if woke still means what it used to mean, that you're aware of your own privilege, you're trying to maximize equality, minimize oppression, be anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic....Yes, I'm definitely woke. If woke now means being a puritanical, authoritarian bully, who gets people fired for an honest opinion or even a fact, then no, I'm not woke. Fuck that." 

Rather than pointing out specific examples of people getting fired after being "reported" by a Woke Person (because it is usually not just having an honest opinion or stating a fact that does it), I want to analyze this the way that Fox would. Because on the one hand, Gervais is right, and the authoritarian, bullying Woke Person is part of the "fractured left" that Naomi Klein bemoaned in Doppelganger. On the other hand, when he says "fuck that," it gets a big cheer that sounds too much like a rallying cry. It's a rallying cry against cancel culture, and the "anti-woke" comedians often complain about being cancelled despite the First Amendment (Fox notes more than once that they are on a stage and getting paid for saying these things), and on WTF Marc Maron will talk about how freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences of what you say, which really is how we live as civilians. It's a broad rallying cry against cancel culture, but cancellations are highly specific. 

Fox does discuss Louis C.K. in some detail, but Aziz Ansari is consigned to a footnote as being one of the eighteen acts that has headlined Madison Square Garden (9). Talking about him or Al Franken is tricky (talking about their books is not). There are likely other "woke" people that were cancelled and came off as hypocrites, but these two seem most prominent, and both were cancelled for acts with women that felt creepy, transactional and/or gross. (Let's ignore Bill Murray and James Franco for now--"me too," like sexuality, exists on a spectrum.) In any case, none of them happened just because of words. 

Ansari was the only one to make a "mainstream" comeback, and I am surprised that Fox did not take a moment to talk about his comedy special Right Now but he does talk about John Mulaney's "comeback"* after going to rehab. Maybe there was no point to be made, and I don't know how most people feel about that special, but to me, it was fine, and he did the right thing, and he took his time away, and he did his penance, and he talked about it openly onstage (albeit briefly and vaguely)--he did it mostly the right way.

Most people, however, do not get the opportunity apart from their "apologies" posted to social media, which are often lambasted as "non-apologies" if they contain any whiff of self-defense. Being cancelled is incredibly scary, but there is a whole playbook for it now, PR-crisis mode, and anyone that chooses not to "play the game" runs the risk of committing career suicide, unless their intention is to drop out entirely.   

Fox does address this to an extent with Kevin Hart and his rescinded invitation to host the Oscars (actually just for one joke itself), and Louis C.K. did immediately respond with a mostly appropriate apology in The New York Times (I am not going to hunt it down and analyze it, but that's how I recall it). He didn't later try to get a big special to win everyone back, but instead made his own platform, and you can find him if you want to find him. (Trump has taken a page out of the same book, but you will still find him even if you don't want to.) 

It's hard to treat everyone perfectly equally (some people get away with everything), and some cancellations are deserved and some aren't, and while I pretty much agree with Gervais's statement, I don't think I would cheer for it, or even clap. It's simplistic, neat and tidy. Plenty of people say "gender is a fact," and not all of the authoritarian bullying Woke People think they should all lose their jobs, but they will certainly try to convince them that they are wrong, or write them off. (And yes you can lose your job for any reason, employment is almost always at-will unless you are unionized, and First Amendment Retaliation claims are only cognizable for governmental/public employees.) These people can petition Netflix to remove certain jokes, but they don't bend to them (though the Academy did). The truth is generally found in the details. 

*

Dave Chappelle has said he is "Team TERF," and so perhaps its best to end here, because after his previous special, many people at Netflix protested and their boss told them he heard them, but he wouldn't take it down, and they could leave if they felt that strongly about it. (I think that's what happened, right?) Chappelle cancelled his own show after he realized he was getting laughs that made him uncomfortable, when he perceived a segment of the audience had been laughing at him rather than with him. I don't know how many more specials he has under contract with Netflix, and think what you will about him, but I do not think he can or should be cancelled. 

As a critic, I prefer not to take sides, but it is inevitable, and I do not think Dave Chappelle is socially irresponsible. I do think he could be less "lazy," though his most recent special showcases his joke-book, and I do not want to accuse him of that. He could pander more, I guess, but if there is one thing comics should never do, it is pander. If he panders, his audience will think he's a sellout, and he will lose the juice that comes with being "bad boy." He doesn't feel he has to "repent" for anything, and I did find it curious that Fox left out the "epilogue" part to one of his specials where he spoke at length about his relationship with the trans community and his trans friend that essentially gave him permission to do the jokes. These are really thorny topics and I'm feeling the urge to use the phrase Gordian Knot.

I do think plenty of us growing up in the 80's and 90's dealt with "punching down" humor as a matter of course and reflection of reality, and this may be why many comics of that time period and earlier find censorship of such comedy to be "woke BS." We all had to put up with it, we all have internalized homophobia, deal with it! Yet we don't grow by thinking that way. But if we do grow, our comedy may turn into a Ted Talk. 

This book is about what comedy is for, and comedy is for many things, but most directly, trauma-coping. Comedy can do many other things, as can literature. We can learn from a comedian's set the same way we can learn from a book, and we might become better human beings for having experienced them. There are ways to do both--Nanette being the prime example. But Chappelle can't pivot like that. Hannah Gadsby broke through with that trope. Chappelle broke through the way most comics of his generation did, and he has no reason to do the type of mea culpa that Ansari did. He could only do that if he was cancelled in a major way, and his audience is such that it would never happen, because he is not actually a bad person, he just sometimes tells jokes that offend a lot of people. (That being said, he could make some kind of statement, and most of his fans would continue to follow him, and he does not need to worry about money.)

*

In writing this review, I think I am coming up against the problem that Fox must have had in writing it: the tendency to rant and fight with oneself about taking sides. This was the quote:

"Though the direction of the joke is against North Carolina's bathroom bill, how it is received will vary based on each audience member's prior thoughts and feelings. A trans person or a total ally will have different opinions about the joke itself, but their stance on trans issues would very likely not be impacted at all. Audience members who obliquely support the trans community but feel some trepidation or confusion around the topic might find relief from their worry about this issue, in a way that moves them in the direction of unqualified support. Conversely, for audience members who aren't outright bigoted but are confused, skeptical, or generally weirded out by transgender people, Chappelle's dehumanizing fascination with the biology of the trans community can resonate and reverse any soft allegiances they were forming. For the unrepentant transphobe, Chappelle, just like the satirists of Chapter 5, is giving the audience a vocabulary to talk about trans people--he is giving them ammunition. It's hard to prove anyone ever heard a joke and then went out and committed a hate crime, but people repeat jokes they like. It deems certain speech allowable, and worse, it encourages people who are less funny, who are more oblivious to context, to try to walk the same line, and that will result in vulnerable people feeling bad and more vulnerable." (227)

Basically, to Fox and many younger comedians and audiences, Chappelle is a master of the craft, and a dinosaur. Bigotry is hack. New comedy will find a way to be funny without punching down. Query whether "punching down," now, is actually punching back. 

I personally do not like to punch back. I will take the punch, and walk away, and I know I will be the bigger person for doing that. But I guess now, before you decide to go talk on stage for a living, you really ought to do a lot of work on yourself, and make sure that your heart is in the right place, and make sure that no one will get the wrong idea. That may be impossible. They will always get the wrong idea. It's how you deal with the blowback, how you "respond, rather than react," that will dictate your fate. Just generally speaking as a human being, it is better policy to love than to hate, and we can reflect the ugliness of reality in our art, but we can also imagine different realities and re-think the idea of "targets" in general.  

I'll die on this hill with respect to comedy: everyone should just make fun of themselves. Self-deprecation is life. 

Comedy Book: B+
Review of Comedy Book: D+     

*I watched Baby J last night, and to be honest, it is probably better than Right Now. My only issue with it is that he only really talked about the rehab experience for the entire time. The reference to divorce and lack of further elaboration feels like a missed opportunity to do a super special, back-to-back, but I am sure this was the more emotionally responsible choice to make.  

Doppelganger - Naomi Klein (2023)

Doppelganger is a book that starts in a very small place--Naomi Klein's personal experience of being confused with Naomi Wolf too many times--and ends rather ambitiously, with a take-down of the entire structure of global society. I liked this book a lot and it is probably one of the best books of 2023 (fiction or non-fiction) but sometimes I felt Klein went on a bit too long and became a bit too strident. However, by the very end--especially after the epilogue--I was moved, and felt that "stridency" was necessary. 

I have a friend that identifies as a "liberal, not a libtard." This is a book about language, too, and examining these differences matters, Klein has taught me. I think by "libtard," (a term I'd rather not use, but am parroting for the sake of simplicity) he means the fractured left, the loudest voices shaming and cancelling people for their failures at various purity tests. I would almost say "for not being woke enough," but that word has become weaponized. I never liked the word when people first started saying it back in 2016 or 2017 or so, because it smacks of anti-intellectualism on top of being a grammatical nightmare, as if "conscientious" was too difficult to spell (or wasted too many characters for Twitter). It's been weaponized in particular by Ron DeSantis, and a multitude of comedians and other "content creators" seeking to expand their audience. Naomi Wolf is just one of them. 

I was touched to see Klein write about Wolf's blog, DailyClout, because of the numbers:

"I checked the traffic: in April 2021, the month she started regularly appearing on Bannon's podcast, DailyClout broke 100,000 unique visits--up from a mere 851 one year earlier." (86) [Earlier, Klein notes one month saw "a mere thirteen visitors."]

Miracles can happen when we are willing to accept Faustian bargains, it seems. 

Flying Houses has 264,726 views as of this morning. While "all time" stats only go back until January 2011, I cannot find one month with less than 500 visitors. And so I question whether it is possible that DailyClout had less. I am not a very popular person and reviews of old books are not hot topics and total earnings for this blog since April 1, 2008 amount to $38.17 (yet unpaid). Things could be worse, I guess. 

[FWIW, all of the usual items remain inscrutably popular, with the Beautiful and Damned review towering over all others with 6.04K views (query how the blog itself can have 264,000 views if the most popular post only has 6,000 of those, and the #2 entry--a review of Deerhunter's Microcastle--has 2.44K--I don't trust these numbers).]

For a moment, Klein does address a phenomena of which I am guilty: 

"I was horrified the first time I noticed a colleague self-cite, embedding quotes from his earlier work in a column--'as I wrote here [link] and here [link].' Why was he quoting himself? Quoting is what we do to bring in the voices of others, to expand the frame, not to narrow it further. Now self-citing happens all the time: 'As I wrote here'....'See my earlier tweet'.....'Just bumping this up.' We have to do it, or so many of us believe--we are caught in a roaring river of voices that seems to wash away all that came before. If we don't remind people of what we have said and done, surely we will soon be floating downstream to the sea with all the other cultural detritus." (70)

Yes, we are all too well aware of our superfluousness, our disposability, and the inaudible murmur that we emit from the back alleys of Blogspot. Sometimes we need to lift ourselves up and remember what we have accomplished and what we have said before, to note what has changed and what has not. 

Klein need not grapple with such fears. She has already made her mark on the world as an investigative journalist and activist, and her books (she puts particular emphasis on No Logo and The Shock Doctrine) are not in danger of falling out-of-print. Doppelganger is likely her greatest success to date, and because it is such a huge book in terms of ideas and sheer righteousness, one imagines greater successes to come (though we might predict it will take the shape of an even bigger statement on the topic of Climate Change, which she has spent the majority of her career analyzing). Yet even though she "made it" as a writer, she acknowledges, she still does grapple with these fears of being "outshouted," ignored and forgotten. 

*

Wolf "made it" as a writer, too, with the publication of her debut The Beauty Myth, when she was 29 (which also gave her the same rival as a previous subject). Klein also put out her debut, No Logo, at age 29, albeit 8 years later. The differences do not stop there:

"The logical leaps were bad enough. What made it worse for me was that, with Wolf's new focus on abuses of corporate and political power during states of emergency, something she touched on only briefly in The End of America, I felt like I was reading a parody of The Shock Doctrine, one with all the facts and evidence carefully removed, and coming to cartoonishly broad conclusions I would never support. And while I was not yet confused with my doppelganger all that often, I knew that some people would credit me with Wolf's theories. It was an out-of-body feeling. I went back and took a closer look at the articles about her evening-wear arrest [during the Occupy Wall Street protests], and a line in The Guardian jumped out at me: 'Her partner, the film producer Avram Ludwig, was also arrested.'
I read the sentence to my partner, the film director and producer Avram Lewis (who goes by Avi).
'What the actual fuck?' he asked.

'I know,' I said. 'It's like a goddamned conspiracy.' 

Then we both just burst out laughing." (20-21)

Klein is playing a bit here, because she doesn't write about Avi's films (perhaps because of her collaborative aspect in them), but his political campaign for a position in Parliament representing West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. What makes Doppelganger much more interesting than the usual book of social criticism is Klein's willingness to make herself a major part of the story. (This is often seen as one of the worst things a documentary can do, but if it's in a book, it can be a great thing.) This comes to the fore in her chapter on autism, detailing her experiences raising a neuroatypical child, one of the several unusual tangents the book takes, which feels like veering off course until she wraps everything up and reveals the basic idea at the bottom of all human discord: Manifest Destiny (and later, "killing the brutes"). 

*

This is likely a highly controversial and potentially divisive stance, but I have to imagine that most readers will be fans of Klein's and not Wolf's ("hate-watching" could be a thing, but "hate-reading" is far less common, and the Wall Street Journal did not review this book so I cannot see how the commenters feel about this idea that colonialism is at the heart of our deepest societal ills). The point will not be misconstrued. Exponential growth and expansion are hallmarks of the capitalist framework, and we have been conditioned to see this as a good thing to aspire towards, and while we are told to love our neighbors, the unspoken underlying truth is that we care most about the protection of our own families, and everyone else takes lesser priority. 

"The trouble is, we live in a society that encourages and rewards the uncaring parts of ourselves, while making it hard to care for others outside our immediate family (and often within it) in any sustained way. So, [Sally] Weintrobe [a psychoanalyst who specializes in the climate crisis] argues, if we want more people to make better choices--not to shop for useless stuff as a source of solace, not to spread disinformation for clicks and clout, not to see other people's vulnerability and need as a threat to our own interests--we need better structures and systems." (336-337)

*

Unmistakably, Doppelganger posits the Covid-19 pandemic as the moment when trust in our structures and systems crumbled along party lines. We all had our own unique Covid Experience, but Klein captures the feeling I had about 46 months ago. This was new, and it felt like 9/11, except without the unparalleled death and destruction and horror in the space of a single morning, and spread out across the planet. There was a precedent in the Spanish Flu in 1918, and we saw eerie call-backs to that era, with old photographs of families in masks and old newspaper items about "social distancing." Most conspicuously, we got money, "fake money," and the stimulus propelled the economy through most of 2021 until it arguably created outsized inflation and the raising of the federal interest rate. 

"It seems so distant now, but there were a few months in 2020--a good half a year--when there had been a widespread belief that the pandemic might be a catalyst for a great many of the structural changes our societies had been collectively procrastinating and avoiding. Many of us even let ourselves dream that the emptiness of our highways, the rest the skies were receiving from planes, and all of the talk about missing nothing more than one another would actually lead to a meaningful change in how we decided to live when the pandemic finally eased. These were the weeks when so many of us shared and quoted and posted Arundhati Roy's essay 'The Pandemic is a Portal,' imagining that a global calamity might take us somewhere not just different but better." (149)

I never read this essay at the time, but I have now, and it's hard to imagine the disparity between what we experienced here in the U.S. and the extraordinary impact the virus had on India and its people living under already deplorable conditions. It was as if their pain was magnified. For hospital staff and other essential workers here, that was also the case. If there was ever a time for a raise for the cashier at the check-out lane, this was it, and I don't believe many got that (though one recalls, this was a watershed moment for debate on what truly constitutes a "living wage," particularly in the hospitality industry). 

For the great masses beyond those essential workers here, the pandemic was a reprieve. And while too many Wall Street Journal commenters would berate me for the fact, I happened to be a contingent worker, and more often than not took the "boosted" unemployment income that had been implemented. 

I had been waiting my entire life for something like this. It was a return to childhood. The drudgery of life had been apparent to me since I was 10. It is an endless cycle of tasks and accomplishments and events and exams and tests and established consistencies and challenges and pressure to achieve something "meaningful." You have to keep working to survive, and the rent is high, and everything is more expensive in the places that have the best opportunities. 

Covid came, and someone in government waved a magic wand and gave us what they deemed "enough" money to live (and it was a living wage, and probably more than that), if we were lucky enough to be unemployed. For about 18 months, the tables turned, and us have-nots were envied for our freedom. We could stay up til 3 AM and sleep til Noon. We could play video games all day and no one would really care. If we were bold, travel was suddenly cheap. Of course, it also allowed us to give in to our basest instincts. We had to learn self-control, and how to peacefully co-exist with our housemates and families in a more claustrophobic atmosphere. Mostly though, it was a break. While some people might have accused me of being a lazy worker, experience knows that is not so. I simply worked too many s***ty jobs over the previous 15 years, relentlessly. Any time off in that span could not be fully enjoyed, because it was almost never Paid Time Off. And so here, finally, I had PTO, and a lot of it. 

We could do anything, except not en masse. I loved it. It was occasionally terrifying, but for the most part, I felt safe (I did not get Covid myself until May of 2022; I got it again about a year later; it seems like a lot of us are getting it now). But by September 2021, when the UI "party" ended, it was scary, but it was time. And I motivated myself to get into a real job and prove myself as a capable person in this world, and I got lucky. If it weren't for the pandemic, I'm not sure where I would be.

So it was a portal for me, at least, and maybe a few others--but not for our society. We backslid into the established ways of treating one another. The crazy people came out quickly.

*

Now, I know, they think I am crazy, they think we are all crazy, they think we are "sheeple," they think we are idiots for getting vaccinated. Naomi Wolf is one of them. This book is about them. The problem here, is that I am using "us" and "them." This divisiveness is potentially giving way to a 2nd Civil War. Nobody wants to say that, but that's the undertone. Even Nikki Haley was recently asked about what caused the 1st Civil War, and did not want to upset anyone by talking about slavery--but her answer was likely meant to apply to the present moment: "How government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could, and couldn't do." Sure, it was about people having slaves or not being able to have slaves, and "freedoms," in 1860, but which ones today are truly at stake? Klein acknowledges the absurdity of "freedom protests" from masking and vaccination mandates. Ron DeSantis is running his entire platform on his handling of Covid-19, and Trump and Haley and other conservative candidates want to get these voters that seem, well, stupid. 

But aren't we the stupid ones? They're right, in a way. Epstein did have Clinton to his island (and Clinton doesn't seem credible--and the fact that Naomi Wolf had a role in his White House is another example of her fascinating trajectory). Biden is potentially losing his mental faculties (though they are blind to Trump's own unraveling). Homeless drug addicts are multiplying in cities with "liberal" mayors (and migrants welcomed here stoke further contempt for nanny-states, symbolizing cities in decline, of which San Francisco is the poster child). 

What's refreshing about Klein is that, as an "anti-capitalist," she doesn't endorse the Democratic party, either. She wanted Bernie. Now, I wanted Elizabeth Warren (and could anything better represent the 'fractured left' than that refusal of a handshake between them after that one debate?), but after reading this book, I better understand the appeal of Bernie and the power behind his campaign--it wasn't about us:

"Though rare, I have seen this happen. I have been in factories taken over by their workers and squares occupied by the people and cities in the grips of revolutionary fervor--moments when everyone you meet is your political comrade and lifelong friend rolled into one. And it was there, too, in that U.S. presidential campaign that united millions with three that began as a slogan and became a kind of social justice prayer: 'Not me. Us.' The campaign's pivotal moment took place at a rally in Queens, New York, in October 2019. That's when Sanders, in front of a crowd of twenty-five thousand people, did something he hadn't done before. He exhorted everyone there to look to someone in their midst, someone they did not know, 'maybe somebody who doesn't look kinda like you, maybe somebody who might be of a different religion than you, maybe they come from a different country....My question now to you is are you willing to fight for that person who you don't even know as much as you're willing to fight for yourself?' 

Would they fight to end student debt, even if they had no debt? Would they fight for the rights of immigrants, even if they were citizens themselves? Would they fight for the rights of people who hadn't been born yet to live a life safe from climate breakdown? In the road of the crowd, people were more than moved--they were altered. Altered by the power represented by the idea of standing up and fighting beyond the narrowest conception of self and identity. 

The trouble is, a presidential campaign isn't capable of making good on a promise like that. By definition, an electoral campaign has a finite life span, and it ends when the candidate wins or loses. When Bernie lost and that end arrived, the unselfing we felt so powerfully on the campaign trail seemed to end right along with it. Shut in our homes by the first wave of strict lockdowns, severed from the movement that had held us together, so many of us who had been overcome by the power of 'us' felt as if we had just been summarily dropped into a deep sea of 'me.'" (333)

I should have ended that excerpt a paragraph early and added, "Would they fight for the right of people to party?" but I liked the next one too much because it captured that distinct moment so poignantly. It's perhaps worth asking, though, because with a new election season well underway, it is important to derive counterpoints from predictable arguments: inevitably, San Francisco will be referenced in the coming months as the leading example of a failing city overrun by homelessness and drug addiction (Klein writes about similar problems in her near-hometown of Vancouver, BC). Candidates will be asked how they have managed that in their home constituencies, and how they would on a federal level. What has been done in Reno, NV could be a step in the right direction, the type of intervention that is most effective in curtailing housing insecurity, unemployment, addiction and mental illness. There is a menu of social issues on a growing list of topics for debate, and this is one of the most complex, apart from how to address climate change. 

Immigration and abortion are also political flashpoints, because you want to vote for a candidate that aligns with your values. Student debt....should we really get into it? That was an odd issue for the intense emotions it unleashed. If I ever want to get depressed and question my life choices, I read a WSJ story on student debt relief and read the comments. Nobody that paid off their loans wants younger people today to get a free pass. (Nobody also talks about how to appease such individuals, whom I believe could be "massaged into" a tax credit.) "My tax dollars shouldn't bail you out," they say. 

And yet who receives a tax bill? For property, maybe, or for certain corporate matters--but people don't get tax bills for yearly individual filings. We get W-2s. And we see how much we owe based on our income. It's 20%, or 25% (maybe more in a higher bracket). People seem to think raising taxes is the inevitable measure necessary for the forgiveness of student debt. They are jumping to conclusions and catastrophizing (they ask where we will find the money for it, and recoil in horror at the thought of cutting back on Defense spending). We don't even know what our taxes are going towards now anyways. Another great idea that no one seems to float is the reporting of what percentages or amounts of our taxes paid have been attributed to which programs, which departments, which initiatives, so that we could more effectively vote for the interests we hold most dear. Don't bet on that happening. It can be dangerous to give the people too much information. It is prone to misinterpretation. We have more information than ever on the Internet, and we are also misled down rabbit holes, more than ever, by conspiracy theorists looking for angles, views, likes, donations, and clout. 

*

While Doppelganger is teeming with fascinating tangents, one other merits mention before we close out this review, and it is the lengthy screed on antisemitism, which has permeated global culture for thousands of years, and is experiencing something of a comeback. Doppelganger was published on 9/12/23. Four weeks later, she probably wished she hadn't made her deadline. 

We could go back and provide a roadmap of all of the examples from history she analyzes, or the pages she devotes to exploring the utopian ideals of Red Vienna, post-World War I and pre-World War II, but for the present moment, her statements on Zionism and the issues building towards terrible events that were yet unknown, felt quite prophetic indeed.

The sub-chapter "Erez from Erez," within the larger chapter of "The Unshakable Ethnic Double," is something I would excerpt in full, but I have to set some kind of limit, maybe three paragraphs (as above). In any case, this may be a misleading episode to represent the current state of affairs, because it took place in 2009, but regardless...

"With the aid of many beers, the three of us deconstructed the levels of gaslighting that Erez from Erez appeared to have orchestrated. No, we did not buy that the Israeli military was about to open a ground war in Gaza to rescue three Jews who were not lost. Nor did we believe we had been in imminent danger from Hamas. They had questioned Avi in a makeshift checkpoint inside a shipping container for about fifteen minutes, mainly to find out why he had an Israeli first name if he was Canadian (his mother's youthful labor Zionism). But they were satisfied with his press credentials--and it was the Israelis who had left us on the Gazan side for hours before allowing us through the checkpoint.

It seemed clear that they wanted us to sweat, to wonder if we were being abandoned behind "enemy" lines. And then they wanted to send a very clear message: that whoever we thought we were, and whatever we thought we were doing, here, on these blood-soaked lands, we were nothing but our ethnic doubles, nothing but our Jewishness. That Jewishness would get us kidnapped or killed by Hamas in Gaza, never mind my foolish support for Palestinian rights, and then it would only be the Israeli army that would ride to our rescue, its soldiers risking their lives to save ours, even though they hold us in utter contempt. Because, like Hamas, they don't care about who we think we are as individuals; they care about our Jewish doubles. So, when Hamas attacked us as Jews, Israel would be there to save us as Jews." (314)

I heard a lot about Israel and Palestine all throughout my life, and it was something that would come up in the news every few years or so, and every time I would throw my hands up and say I didn't understand it, and not look into it further. This time it was different. And it hurts my brain to think about the ways we are supposed to feel and the way we actually feel, and the safest way to protest is to protest killing in any sort of guise. Having read the entirety of Doppelganger, I trust that Klein is not losing the thread. I have to think she saw all of this coming. 

*

Doppelganger simply goes too many places to neatly summarize in any review. I could write something twice as long (there should be an entire section of this review devoted to the word "genocide") but I would just say to read the book itself. We all know that liberals and democrats are basically done, because they can't get anything done, and conservatives have banded together, formed a more unified ideology, agreed on most issues, strategized and packed the Court with their appointees (three young enough to spend several more decades on the bench) and remained persistently aggressive and passionate and engaged about their beliefs. It's clear that Klein is tired of the weak and half-hearted activism, i.e. "virtue signaling" and nothing further, that has branded the liberals as ineffectual lemmings. Her journey down the rabbit hole does bring some surprising suggestions:

"Though I hesitate to suggest it, this is a place [Greta's 'blah-blah-blah speeches on climate change] where we could stand to learn a little from Steve Bannon. From his bloody-minded approach to strategy and building winning coalitions despite differences. From his transformation of listeners and watchers into highly organized doers. From his focus on 'Action! Action Action!'" (157)

Is James Carville the doppelganger to Steven Bannon? I cannot tell but I do not see him as the leader we need, or deserve. If anyone besides Trump is responsible for Trump, Bannon is at the very top. And though Trump is gone, kind of, for now at least (maybe), Bannon remains a key organizer of several subsets of conservatives rallied around the idea of MAGA. I think it's still clear that the closest thing liberals have gotten to Bannon is Bernie (and he's not doing his own show every week for two hours, riling up his compatriots). (Ralph Nader + Bernie was a missed opportunity, but maybe that would have been Too Soon.)

So this year is important. It's unfortunate there won't be serious democratic contenders (Biden will not step down) to have the kind of debate we had four years ago, but Biden has been "buying" votes from the radical wing of the party and is likely to appear as progressive as possible (without alienating his core centrists). For now it's more interesting to watch DeSantis vs. Haley. For the record, the only thing I really care about is his relationship with Disney, and I appreciate that both Trump and Haley have called him out as being "destroyed" by Disney. Even they respect the right of corporations to have free speech, and to stand against what they see as hate and intolerance. "Desantislies.com," but the conservatives lie in general all the time, and many of the problems they seek to correct are fake ones meant to rile up and attract voters. 

It's a tall task to "explicate" all of the problems of our current world, but Klein does a damn good job of connecting seemingly disparate events with one another. In Doppelganger, she draws out these connections that maybe we have felt at various moments, but haven't been able to articulate. I can't explain it better than that, but if you read it, I think you'll get it, and I'm sure she could put it better but also wouldn't want to toot her own horn, or go for Too Much Clout.

Like I said, though, this is a depressing book, and I didn't want to say it was one of the Best Books, until the Epilogue. I won't spoil the Epilogue but it was definitely the most powerful part of the book for me (also, those other spare moments when Klein praises Wolf). Wolf did not participate in this book, but perhaps she knew, it would be better that way. Now, the ball is in Wolf's court. Perhaps a third act to her career is around the corner, and the publication of her comeback volume, The Antagonist, will bring us all to a new moment of unity. I like to think of myself as an optimist, but I am not holding my breath. 

Grade: A

Sure, I'll Join Your Cult - Maria Bamford (2023)

Oeuvre rule: I am tangentially aware of Maria Bamford. I tried watching Lady Dynamite on Netflix, and as must be the case with so many other neophytes, "didn't really get what she was going for." I will need to attempt to watch again, after having read this book, because it all went down a lot smoother for me. 

It's actually quite appropriate that we review this following The Perfection Trap, because Maria Bamford is a perfect example of the dangers of parentally-prescribed perfectionism. And also, the enormous success that can follow.

Throughout the book, which is probably the best memoir I've read by a comedian so far (dethroning Bossypants), she continually reminds the reader of her laziness and sheer lack of work ethic. She worked many terrible jobs, as many of us do in the service of our greater artistic dream, especially when in Los Angeles, and she was not passionate about anything except being on stage, because it was there that she felt most herself.

She does not remind the reader that she held impossibly high standards for herself and pushed herself to the breaking point to live up to everyone else's idea of what a successful comedian and beautiful person should be. She does, however, reach a breaking point, likely due to her burgeoning fame and escalating obligations as a performer. And she does emerge as a gloriously imperfect and messy and beautiful human being. 

The book is unabashedly silly (see the recipes that end each chapter). While I am not a deep Maria Bamford "head," I have no doubt that she talks in life just the same as she writes on the page. The book is very funny; only occasionally does it not turn every sentence into a joke. Despite the constant "jokiness," there is so much heart in this book that it feels like the most genuine memoir almost anyone could ever hope to write. 

I heard Marc Maron say on WTF that she is the best stand-up comic in decades (just today, that was repeated, and the guest agreed, she is the best in his lifetime along with Richard Pryor). That designation feels something akin to "inside baseball," or perhaps even a red herring, because she is fully aware that she is NOT FOR EVERYONE and she does not attempt to deliver your standard hour of stand-up. Granted, I have not seen her perform. This is the impression I get from the book and the other podcast interviews I have heard with her and various impressions in visual and social media that have imprinted on me. Clearly, she knows the form well, and probably could do a more "standard" hour, at a very high level, but she prefers to subvert that, and turn her comedy into something along the lines of Nanette or Swimming to Cambodia. She hasn't released films of that stature, but this is such a good memoir (I forget that it's hard to put it over It Never Ends, but Tom Scharpling is not a stand-up comedian) that it feels like the next logical step in her career. I believe that she is capable of making a great film, now that she has written a great book. Yes, it belongs on the Best Books List, along with It Never Ends.

*

The key to this book (and my heart) is radical honesty. TMI. Oversharing. I've done it in the past and learned to be wary of its results, and so I have deployed it when least likely to backfire (only lately!). I am still not perfect about recognizing if and when "loose lips [will] sink ships," but I give just about everyone a pass with this--I appreciate the effort. I appreciate when someone is willing to be vulnerable. I appreciate when they let go of their fears that I am going to judge them. It's a vote of confidence in the compassion of the audience. It's also useful to know the specifics. While we learn more and better from making our own mistakes, we can still learn from the stories that others share about their own struggles. 

Bamford frames her memoir as an exploration of the cult of various 12-step groups. I am not sure if the memoir has 12 chapters but I am going to check now. And I see that I'm wrong. But there are 23 chapters and an appendix, so it's almost "symmetrical." I digress.

She begins with the Cult of Family, and a chapter each on her mother, father and sister. Her relationship with her mother is vaguely reminiscent of the relationship at the heart of Crying in H-Mart, though culturally dissimilar. From her, she inherited body dysmorphia, and the ultimately the medication that worked best. While her mother seemed unintentionally hilarious, it appears she inherited her father's sense of humor, and I can only say he reminds me a little of Parker Posey's dad:

"My dad has always prompted us to call him 'the Best Dad in the Whole World.' He calls my sister 'the Best Oldest Daughter in the Whole World.' I'm 'the Best Youngest Daughter in the Whole World.' It's reciprocal propaganda, but it's true, he is a good guy. He's always been active in our community: trying to help out with mentoring local kids, teaching English to immigrants arriving in Duluth, working with men just out of prison for domestic violence crimes. He sends me cards and cookies, he taught me to drive, he taught me how to change a tire nine times (it didn't take) and chop wood. He attended every play, every concert. All that is true. It is also true that on this trip [to Yellowstone] in the sixty minutes we were away from my mother, he broke a federal law and may have committed a misdemeanor for child endangerment." (57)

Near the beginning of the next section, she acknowledges, "The editors had some real problems with this chapter about my sister because they thought my descriptions of our relationship are too banal, too typical of sisters, not dramatic enough. That is exactly what is so bizarre about it! It is that these tiny-tiny-tiny things that go on between us feel like tsunamis of 'compare and despair.' Examples:

1. My sister always makes food for everybody. She makes a bunch of homemade food and puts it out like it's no big deal. IT IS A FUCKING BIG DEAL. Recently, she invited us on a picnic, didn't ask me to bring anything (I didn't), and yet she brought 2 (TWO) different kinds of delectable handmade sandwiches, organic cherries, salad, a cold VARIETY of drinks, AND cookies. She hauled it all to an idyllic river setting she found outside Duluth and laid it out on a blanket. At no time did she stop and say, 'HEY! YOU GUYS! CHECK OUT ALL OF THIS STUFF I JUST DID FOR YOU ASSHOLES!'
(I have ONLY ONCE made my family dinner, though I am constantly swaggering about my self-serving good deeds. If I have done anything, you will know about it and I will have photographic proof. In my defense, I have picked up the check for family dinners and then tried to write it off as a business expense.)" (66-67)

After exploring these family dynamics, she moves onto her own personal upbringing, which includes learning violin under the Suzuki method and developing eating disorders. Living with a person that plays "twinkle twinkle little star" over and over made me realize that this was about the same thing, and I felt compelled to photograph a couple pages and send them those excerpts by text. The book should be read by anyone that has studied Suzuki violin for that chapter alone. 

*

From there we move into the early 90's and Bamford's first tentative steps into the entertainment industry. Her first gig is basically cosplaying a character from Star Trek Deep Space Nine. It is perhaps worth nothing that I read the few pages detailing this while dining alone at the Black Spire Outpost at Star Wars Galaxy's Edge in Disneyworld's Hollywood Studios theme park. It was ridiculously apropos, but if you have not been there or do not know anything about it, I don't want to explain further.

And 12 pages later, in one of my favorite chapters, about Debtors Anonymous and PRGs (Pressure Relief Groups), she lists 6 suggestions she was given in 1995. Rather than excerpting the entire thing, i will just paraphrase:

1-Call everyone you know to see if you can rent a room from them.
2-Pray for the willingness to earn $2,000/month to pay for rent, food, health care, clothing and debt repayment.
3-Get a job, any job.
4-Take the CBEST (California Basic Educational Skills Test) to be certified as a substitute teacher.
5-Type out form letters for creditors, tell them not to contact by phone.
6-Go to Disneyland.

"I did everything they told me to except for number 6, because I am not going to Disneyland." (141)

She does not elaborate further but this was my least favorite part of the book. For one, she should elaborate further. Why wouldn't you go to Disneyland if you were in L.A.? Of course, it's expensive, and doesn't make sense for a person struggling with debt, totally, but it was 1995 and Disney had not yet instituted Genie+ and it was more affordable. You can justify a trip to Disneyland because it is the happiest place on earth. She had to go to Disneyland, at some point, and if she hasn't, I highly recommend she does. I recommend Disneyworld over Disneyland but it is cool to live in L.A. and be able to do Disneyland without shelling out for a Disney resort and staying 5-7 nights (or however long one needs to do everything there at all four parks). I stayed 4 nights at a Disney official hotel, but not a Disney resort, and spent $2,200 on the entire trip. I wanted to write an entire blog post about this trip. I am not going to turn this review into that. I am just simply going to note that Maria Bamford made a mistake by not doing #6. Because while there are many awful things about Disney, anyone that has been there cannot deny, it is as validating an experience as there is, and sometimes provides the perfect respite from the unrelenting hell that is reality for many of us. 

*

The material on Debtors Anonymous is (dare-I-say) groundbreaking. I have also learned to record all of my expenditures on a daily basis. I have been OCD about this for almost 12 years. Many people will consider this too tedious, and the process of budgeting too onerous. And that very well may be fine for them. But I know, having been in somewhat dire financial circumstances, that when it reaches a critical point, this can be a very useful practice. And having attempted to write some kind of book, detailing my efforts, I am familiar with the issue Bamford ran up against:

"In addition to revealing the financial details of my book deal, I also wanted to include a profit-and-loss statement regarding my business. I argued with my editor AND my manager about this. MANY TIMES. PERSONALLY, I LOVE THIS KIND OF INFO, BUT NO ONE ELSE IS INTERESTED, ESPECIALLY THE EDITORS. If you don't care, as you were. AS YOU WERE." (149)

The next 5 pages consist of a spreadsheet that details earnings and expenses from shows in Ping Pong, AK and Jai-Ho, Belarus, and a P&L statement for the month of September 2022. The only item I question is $1,129 for life insurance. I suppose the numbers go up exponentially when one is a known quantity in the entertainment industry and/or has over $3 MM in assets, but I hope this includes health insurance premiums. I know the SAG provides for some of this, but I don't think it covers everything at 100%. In any case, I don't want to pay $1,100 a month for life insurance, but I guess if I felt like I had to, it's not a bad problem to have. 

*

The next group she joined was SLAA: Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. In this chapter, the TMI and oversharing is probably something the editors loved. Bamford herself would likely appreciate this, because earlier in the chapter about her sister, she writes:

"I have only skimmed her books before feeling overwhelmed. As with all books, I pass swiftly over the text, pausing only for prurient details. From what I've been able to take in, her books are really beautiful, AND there's a great scene in one memoir where she is naked on the floor trying to have some private time to shove a hemorrhoid application up her bum and her four kids break the door down. But a lot of her writing features an experience of spirituality that I do not have, and so I tab through, alighting only upon anything foul." (68)

While this is also a great chapter, I will leave it to the reader to seek out the book and skim and pause as they see fit. The next chapter may be more interesting to address.

* 

Because it deals with her time as a Target spokesperson, which is basically when she starts getting paid. I did not distinctly remember the commercials, but from the one photo she includes, there was a vague recollection. It was her "big break," back in 2008 and 2009, and it is fascinating to read about the effect that it had on her emotionally--for example, when she is introduced at a stand-up gig as a "sellout." Added to that, negative news about Target and its union-busting is relayed to her, which further adds to conflicted feelings. In the middle of this is another chapter about the tragic death of a pet and her own role in it. By this point the book is building towards its denouement. In 2011, she writes a column for The New York Times and talks on the phone to the Ethicist there. An executive at Target finds the column, realizes it is her (she is asked and she lies and says it was not her) and she is not asked to return to the Christmas ad-campaign. 

She then decides to invite everyone she has ever emailed to her Christmas party. By this point she owns a 900 square foot home and estimates that somewhere between 150 and 500 guests came through the party. She gets into what seems to be a relatively serious relationship and then has a pretty abrupt break-up. Meanwhile she is still a successful comedian booking gigs, and she has to go to Chicago for the next shows, and she realizes she needs to try a different medication (Lamictal, which ended up being the one that worked for me) and then checks in for a series of hospitalizations, which goes on for about 20 pages and arguably makes up the strongest part of the book.

*

There is a very brief chapter about one cult that did not work for her, and like many other things in this book, greatly touched me. This is essentially a review of Ten Days to Self-Esteem by David Burns. One of the limited books that I reviewed with an "(incomplete)" is Feeling Good: the New Mood Therapy by David Burns. It also is too long, and has too many exercises about avoiding "should" statements and turning negative thoughts into positive ones. I am sure that this works for a lot of people and that they will swear by it. It did not work for her, and it did not work for me. This chapter is a truc but clearly, it would be wrong to leave it out of the review, for it is another example of the kinship I feel with her. 

*

The book goes on to detail her time doing Lady Dynamite and finally, Couples Anonymous, which she does with her partner Scott. It is similarly unsparing and relatable. I think it is inevitable that any couple is going to fight. Lately I have drawn a distinction: arguments are OK (they can even be important and good) but fighting is bad. Fighting is still going to happen, though, and part of a successful partnership is being able to accept that the other person isn't perfect, and that you aren't perfect, and that you won't always see eye-to-eye on everything, and that the partnership only survives if you can tolerate the bad times and find strength and growth in forgiveness. (Reciprocating in that is also key, I think.) The way all of this is borne out in the text is another one of the more beautiful parts of the book. 

*

Chapter 23, "Obligatory Suicide Disclaimer," is the brilliant ending and amounts to a personal essay on suicide and the judgment that underlies it. While absolutely not condoning the act, she expresses total empathy for those that have done it. Yes, it is a selfish act, and staying alive for loved ones can be a powerful motivator, but it does not help anything to chastise a person that has attempted it, or may be thinking about attempting it. There are better ways to express empathy and compassion. Primarily, that is through listening. And if you are suffering, that is through talking. And if you are going through unimaginable pain and you cannot tolerate it any longer, she does not consider you a bad person that is condemned to Hell for eternity for taking your own life. The essay, however, should bring comfort to anyone and everyone, and perhaps even save lives:

"Please don't hurt yourself or anyone else. Do something else instead. Even if it's harmful! Suicide is a one-off. You can do meth at least twice without consequences! (I don't know if that's true.) Knock yourself out with a forty-ounce keg of Baileys Irish Cream and a Dairy Queen Blizzard. You do not want to miss any additions to the Dairy Queen product line! Did you know they have a FUDGE-STUFFED COOKIE now? Postmate that mess while you wait for your response team (your friend Tookie). If you cannot access these luxuries, go to the pantry. Get a jar of Skippy equivalent and finish it IN HOUSE while asking a volunteer to stand on your lower back. And use this time to try things you never thought you'd do: basic training, plural marriage, improv street comedy." (256)

There is not much more I can say that hasn't already been said above. She fulfilled her contract with this book, and wrote a beautiful one that I could appreciate more deeply than almost any other memoir I've read (and there are quite a few on this blog: Patti Smith, Kim Gordon, Carrie Brownstein, Dean Wareham, Scott Turow, Terri Cheney, Justice Stevens, Justice Sotomayor, Rick Lax, Haruki Murakami, Morrissey, Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, Stuart David, Elizabeth Warren, Al Franken, Robert Gottlieb, Brix Smith, Mandy Stadtmiller, Anthony Bourdain, Tara Westover, Francisco Cantu, David Carr, Lori Gottlieb, Woody Allen, Tom Scharpling, Patton Oswalt, Parker Posey, Michelle Zauner). A few of those were pretty great, and I'm not going to agonize over whether this is really better than Just Kids or Kitchen Confidential or The Night of the Gun--because it is not a SERIOUS book. Suffice to say I loved it, and highly recommend it, especially to anyone that has faced the vicissitudes of mental illness while wading into the cesspool of the industrial entertainment complex. You will find a friend in Maria. 

Grade: A

The Perfection Trap - Thomas Curran (2023)

Flying Houses has never been perfect. From the very first day it emerged and infinitesimally impacted the marketplace of ideas that was the internet on April 1, 2008, flaws have abounded. I have been criticized as a terrible writer, and I acknowledge that much of the content here is, in fact, terrible (see the review of Vampire Weekend's debut album, random shilling for Merge Records, petty concert reviews that I still kind of like, random opening day coverage, second draft posts, reviews of extremely obscure one-off zines, posts inspiring "Christ on wood" anonymous comments, all of those exasperating law school columns, transcripts of unemployment benefits hearings, misbegotten hate-reads, self-congratulatory stuff in general, begging for shout-out fails, story-fails, and most recently, outrageously slow reading).

Over the past half-decade or so, there is an increasing suggestion in the culture that we should be kinder to ourselves, practice sufficient self-care, and treat ourselves more often. I have often pushed back against this notion, and I have said people should be harder on themselves and push themselves to do better and live up to the standards that I set for myself. After reading The Perfection Trap, let's just say I've been convinced that this particular attitude of mine is part of the problem. Now, I know: we are all good enough just as we are, and trying to force other people to strive is counterproductive. We are all the masters of our own destinies and the authors of our own stories and we are all gloriously complex and messy and flawed and imperfect and beautiful human beings. 

***

I first became aware of The Perfection Trap after reading a review of it in The Wall Street Journal. That is a notoriously conservative outlet, but readers of it know, while the op-eds and the comments on items are abrasively partisan, the actual journalism, arts criticism, and "lifestyle stories" appear to diverge (rebel?) from such viewpoints. Oh, to be sure, the reviews panning Killers of the Flower Moon and Barbie waded into Anti-Woke territory, but alongside those, you have a kind and thoughtful celebration of Mitski's recent album. 

The review of this book struck me because I saw myself in it. I too, struggled with the interview question, "What is your greatest weakness?" What an annoying question! (Only "What kind of animal would you be?" is worse.) The best answer, most seem to acknowledge, is "I am a perfectionist." Yet that is a stock answer that they hear all the time, so it's a sign you lack the confidence to say something more honest and meaningful. But who could fault you for that? It's a job interview. You want to be seen as the perfect candidate.

My greatest weakness, now? Protesting too much. Not actual protesting--I could just be more concise. I actively choose to provide too much information, and I have grown more sensitive to context and the appetites and attention-spans of various audiences. But I still wish I was more concise and this is becoming a new guiding principle for me, one I will adopt in 2024 ;)

It's a good, succinct review, and it ends like this:

"'The Perfection Trap' is a strange and imperfect book. It's not every day that someone in his early 30s who has worked as a sports psychologist takes on the entire global economy. The charts in it are abysmal, like PowerPoint slides that escaped an institutional bureaucracy. The author's injunction to accept yourself in all your unique and imperfect glory is too pat. Perfectionism is too deeplyembodied (sic) in our lives. And apart from political action, he offers no clear path forward. But maybe those things aren't his job. As an explanation of how destructive illusion of perfectionism arises and as a critique of the economy that creates it, this is an important book [emphasis, mine]. One day, Mr. Curran hopes, we may rediscover the truth of the old Italian saying: 'Enough is plenty.'" 

***

Kudos to WSJ for publishing the line, "this is an important book," when the book says this:

"Certainly, the conservatives are primarily responsible for this rear-guard action [meeting brave, young environmentalists with "round-the-clock doorstepping, after-dark dumpster diving, and hysterical, off-the-chain screeching in terror until they either stop fighting or are removed from public view completely," i.e. comments on AOC or Greta tweets]. With their allegiance to the rich and powerful, and ever-swelling financial clout, they can use the disproportionate control they have over mainstream channels of communication to frame the terms of debate, shut out 'progressive' voices, and move politics to the right, and further to the right, and even further to the right.

"But it's time we recognize that our current situation represents a failure of the establishment liberals, too. Because most of them, it's sad to say, are complicit in the policing of what's acceptable economics under the surreptitious guise of 'civility,' 'grown-up politics,' and 'compromise.' Which is arguably worse than conservative screeching, because these sensible, Ivy League suits have actually read the reports. They've taken the terrifying projections at face value. And they've been told in no uncertain terms by extremely smart and well-educated scientists--people they like and respect--that transition to an economy prioritizing the conservation of existing resources over indefinite expansion will be essential if we're to avoid global temperatures breaching a no-way-back inflection point. 

"Even so, they won't listen. Why? Because in an economy, political climate, and mediascape contaminated to the core by money, that's hostile to anything but the most tepid of window-dressing reforms, and that swiftly, and often viciously, excommunicates those asking difficult questions, it's just easier, isn't it, to pull the blinds shut, and hope against hope that if the Adults in the Room can't see the giant meteor approaching, then surely it won't come hurtling our way after all. Left or right, Labour or Conservative, Democrat or Republican; when it comes to the economy, it's the same machine. Your choice come polling day is simply what voltage you'd prefer to operate at." (235-236)

***

Yes, Mr. Curran has a vested interest in saying the world won't listen, because, secretly, this book is an imperfect love letter to the Smiths and Morrissey. 

Heaven knows we are miserable now that everyone thinks we should try to make ourselves perfect. Some perfectionists are bigger than others, and perfectionism begins at home, and what she posted is another way of saying I smoke because I'm hoping for an early death, because social media makes me want to kill myself. Both Morrissey and Curran, it seems, share humble origins, and Morrissey's performative depression appears to have an antecedent in the stereotypes hurled at Generation Z (which this critic has been rather guilty of, rather often, in the past). (And we don't talk about Morrissey post-2018 or so.)

Accept yourself, he says, because everyone wants something they can't have, and what we already have is more than enough (at least, most of us do, from a certain angle). But you just haven't earned it yet, baby, and maybe you never will, when the "reward point" is necessarily not fixed--unless reaching the end of this book counts.

Because I wanted to give this a tepid 3-star review, and the stunning Part Four epilogue/postscript moved it up to 4. It doesn't get 5 because it's imperfect, and it celebrates this. Not every single chapter references a song by the Smiths or the Moz. Curran reveals his vulnerabilities, opens up to confess one of his greatest humiliations and the attendant panic attacks it spurred. Sometimes the book has a very clinical tone, and other times it flirts with totally "unprofessional" prose, and I love that. It wouldn't be right to give this book 5 stars, or to call it one of the Best Books--it's enough to say, this book is important, and really, everyone should read it. And that's not something I say about most books.

I wanted to give it a tepid 3-star review because, to be honest, I grew a little bored with it, say, between pages 150-200. Curran is preaching to the choir, and all of us already get it: this crazy economic machine is destroying lives and ravaging our mental health and there is no way to stop it. 

The boldest directives he offers are to experiment with a 4-day workweek, experiment with job-sharing (which I still don't functionally understand--we work with a partner and take 50% of our old salary?) and institute basic income--the boldest of liberal fantasies. That WSJ calls this book important is a reminder that miracles can happen. AOC and Ted Cruz can agree that Robin Hood and Citadel are more manipulative and nefarious than the retail investors that squeezed the hedge funds, and that such market-makers are bad actors that need to be punished and regulated. Few things in this life have made me happier than witnessing that moment.

***

Curran squints into the light that never goes out: relentless striving imposed on us from the moment we exit the womb. At certain stretches, he leans on "harmful social media advertising cliches," but the rhetoric is anything but empty. One example:

"Jean Twenge thinks this link between social media and mental distress is mostly due to smartphones. She makes her case on the back of many data sets, including her own, which show that youth depression and suicide began skyrocketing around 2008. Incidentally, 2008 was also the year socially prescribed perfectionism skyrocketed, too. And when you add these trends to the release of Apple's first iPhone in 2007, there is indeed a compelling correlation. 

"That correlation certainly passes a few smell tests. After all, smartphones give us absolutely no respite from the noise of social media. They link us up all day, every day, and penetrate social comparison into parts of life that were hitherto untouched. With them by our sides, apps like Instagram and TikTok are right there first thing in the morning and last thing at night. We idly scroll through profiles on the sofa and in the bath, during the commute and at the gym. In what used to be meditative moments, where we could breathe and think, now we swipe and compare.

"Smartphones made social media ubiquitous, and that ubiquity, according to Twenge, is what makes it so damaging." (135-136)

The zombification of the masses, basically, is the cliche, but it kind of is the single most depressing feature of our era. And Curran doesn't just keep repeating it. Because of his offering, at the end, a way out (kind of--a way out of perfectionism, not a way out of phone addiction), the entire book lifts itself into a different category. That WSJ review referred to it as a "manifesto," and indeed, it becomes just that, and a powerful one. He converted me into an anti-perfectionist, and for the time being at least, I feel encouraged to think differently about how to best accomplish various tasks (not "overdoing" it, considering the idea that we can sometimes make things worse by trying to make them more perfect) and better manage personal relationships (or at least try). 

***

Finally, this book is, for lack of a better term, cute. Or maybe precious. Regardless, when Curran discusses perfectionism in the context of educational meritocracy, he wears his class-based insecurities on his sleeve, so to speak, and while this is not traditional in a pseudo-academic volume, it's part of what makes the book surprising and engaging. These aren't purely theoretical concepts; "experience knows it is not so" (or rather, here, knows it is so). 

I say cute for two reasons and the first is in his portrait of Karen Horney, whom he identifies as the first sociologist/psychologist to identify the prevalence of socially-prescribed perfectionism in early 20th century. The way he talks about Karen Horney is the way I sometimes think about great writers of the past that are no longer with us, and so I could appreciate that mix of admiration and consolation that he conveys:

"Our perfect self, Horney says, is a complete armory of should: 'should be able to endure everything, to understand everything, to like everybody, to be always productive--to mention only a few inner dictates.' And these dictates are inescapable, she calls them 'the tyrannies of should.' 

"Reading these words, I realized: this woman was a genius. Because that's it, isn't it? I should be cooler, fitter, stronger, happier [bands influenced by the Smiths do not escape easter-egging], more productive, not eating too much, [adding 'regular exercise at the gym, three days a week' would be too much] making time to rest, seeing friends, drinking in moderation, hustling and grinding and saying yes to every possible opportunity, practicing self-care, cooking up a storm, raising smart and respectful kids. These are urgent (and often contradictory) directives that we regularly fire at ourselves. And society fires them, too. They're scattered all over the gallery walls of Instagram, dripping from episodes of the Kardashians, and plastered across posters and billboards. There's no other action we can take to bring these pressures into some sort of unity than to chase perfection. For if not by perfection, then how else will we be someone who society recognizes and accepts?" (105)

"Karen Horney died of cancer at the age of sixty-seven, having lived a tumultuous, courageous and at times troubled life. Despite this, she never wavered from searching for the truth about the neuroses that afflicted her and her patients, and the cultural conditioning that gave rise to them. If you feel seen by Karen Horney, then you, like me, will find in her a close friend. Just like friends are supposed to do, she'll help you feel less confused about your perfectionism, less alone with your feelings of never enough. Her lesson for us is that none of this is our doing. The culprit is culture." (106)

Later, Curran reflects on an ex-girlfriend's Facebook profile to highlight the tyranny of performative perfectionism, and lands here:

"Whenever I visit Sarah's profile, and the great many like it, I think about Essena O'Neill [a former IG influencer who later documented her mental health struggles on Twitter]. And then I remember Karen Horney. I wonder what she would have made of social media. Because no doubt about it, she'd have had plenty to say. I imagine her sitting low in her favorite chair, smoking a cigarette, nursing a large glass of red wine, and cracking a wry smile. You could draw a straight line from her observations of cultural contradictions in the 1950s to the present moment. It's as if she could see social media coming. As if, somehow, she knew this was how a nascent, aggressive consumer culture would eventually shake itself out." (143)

I wanted to excerpt another passage about Helicopter Parents and the management of educational meritocracy in Norway and Finland, because it demonstrates the literary flourish that Curran sometimes deploys, and shines a light on other countries and societies that "get it," but this review is becoming too imperfect. Suffice to end near the end, with one short paragraph that made me go "awwww":

"Democracy is what keeps me from losing all faith in the possibility of change. And on a crystal-clear day, if I creak my neck out really far, if I squint as hard as I possibly can into the distance, I can just about make out what looks like a path. And on that path, I can see a long queue of smart, thoughtful, compassionate, generous, and thoroughly decent human beings just like yourself, walking toward the last corridor of hope. Hope that we can live in a place where we don't have to feel insecure. Where we don't need to be perfect just to get by. Where abundance is enjoyed, by everyone. Where enough really is plenty. 

For your presence on this earth, and for reading this book, I am eternally grateful." (237-238)

From anyone else, this might sound disingenuous. But coming from Curran, after we have gone on this journey with him, there is no reason to doubt he means it. And to me, that is among the most beautiful of sentiments.

Grade: A-