A Press Release is A Perfidious Thing
Marie Calloway, What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life
Tyrant, 200pp, £12.35, ISBN 9780985023584
reviewed by Alexis Forss
What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life, the debut work of blogger Marie Calloway, is a work that is formally distinguished and thematically urgent in ways that both belie and betoken the author’s 21 years, but that’s not what’s really at stake here. Indeed, reviewing this book has made me guilty of a number of things, among them two minor infractions of Anthony Lane’s maxims for critics:
1) never read the publicity material, and
2) whenever possible, pass sentence on the day after it comes out – otherwise, wait fifty years.
I read the publicity material, and the book was published last month – I have been in possession of an advance copy for longer than I care to admit, but I hope what follows will explicate my cunctation. While these transgressions may seem negligible they are part of a greater vice in my approach to What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life – a book whose title reveals both a personal plea and a wider-ranging indictment.
A press release is indeed a perfidious thing, and it behoves the critic who wants to do more than simply write copy to not just dismiss it but regard it as a red herring. In the case of the present book, though, I find myself both baffled and frustrated by the extent to which Miss Calloway’s publishers have not only mis-sold but under-sold her work as one which allegedly ‘questions if internet relationships are the way of today’s modern sexual revolution and the new normal for social contact.’ This sounds like the sort of confessional, navel-gazing tome that leaves itself wide open to the same vitriol that Lena Dunham’s Girls inspires in its critics.
Still, my press-release frustration may guide me towards an adumbration of the copywriter’s under-reaching. Among other things, Calloway’s is a narrative about the erosion of the false binary opposition between the Internet and the so-called ‘real world’, one which demonstrates how our online exchanges register on the same cognitive and emotional plane of experience as those on the street and in the workplace. Over the course of the stories we follow Marie Calloway – at once protagonist and pseudonymous author – through her sentimental education in Oregon, her experience of sex work in London to an affair with a New York intellectual. That story, ‘Adrien Brody’, is both the collection’s centrepiece and fulcrum around which it turns, as what follows it is the story of becoming Marie Calloway: the young author of a succès de scandale, the protégée of Tao Lin and the toast of muumuuhouse.com.
Even a cursory Google-search on the writer throws up numerous references to ‘Adrien Brody’; add to that the emphasis on it in the press release and the story arrives with the onerous creak of hype. Read in the context of the preceding pieces, ‘Adrien Brody’ emerges as both the culmination and the strongest expression of Calloway’s narrative agenda in the collection’s first half, which might have been titled ‘Becoming Marie Calloway’. As the protagonist blunders into an exploitative affair with the title character, the affectless deadpan of Calloway’s voice contours the sexual dysfunction at play – a sexual dysfunction which we have previously seen fermenting over the course of cybersex, three sex work experiences and an emotionally demeaning affair with an Irish photographer. Short paragraphs made of simple declarative sentences are the mean mode of Calloway’s emotionally sterile sexual reportage, in which the nominally emotive import of the words become both charged with and defused by irony:
He went to get a condom, but by the time he was back in the bed and had unwrapped it, he had lost his erection.
It then seemed really strange and unfair to me that the possibility of sex relies on just one thing, the man’s ability to get an erection.
[...]
I then just masturbated until he was erect enough to put the condom on.
He penetrated me and I was happy. I felt a strong sexual connection with him.
Whether they’re found writing how-to’s and manuals or leading seminars and retreats, many self-appointed teachers of creative writing are fond of imposing upon their audience a false dichotomy: ‘always show – never tell’. I call this dichotomy false, because a writer like Calloway is capable of doing both, often within the same breath. This is her achievement in the collection’s second half, which is part narrative of the fallout ensuing from the online publication of ‘Adrien Brody’, and part found-art collage of the backlash. The latter component is truly disturbing: images of the writer herself, several of them sexually explicit, overlaid with what she ironically euphemises as ‘criticism’:
Awful prose that’s borderline pornographic
A female train-wreck, a creeper, a woman that gets obsessed with boys and her looks, and who lacks any moral component
i want her body to be cold in the morgue
Wipe away the cum, and make some room for the glitter
marie calloway is a lazy, boring writer who i know through a friend to be histrionic, predictably ‘unpredictable’ and most likely autistic
Part of the brilliance of Calloway’s structure is how it allows her to embalm a process and make it comprehensible to us: the maddeningly asymmetrical quid quo pro of how the Internet has provided a platform for young writers like herself while leaving them exposed to a bedlam of Neanderthal ad hominem and vociferous criticism that scarcely merits the term. Given the ferocity of Calloway’s critics, I cannot but react emotionally to an exchange which occurs between the writer and her mentor, Tao Lin. Having been asked her opinion on Good Morning, Midnight, Calloway replies: ‘I started it, but I don’t know. I like writers like Raymond Carver and Tolstoy and Joyce Maynard.’ Lin doesn’t think she writes like any of them, and sees more of a resemblance with Jean Rhys. Is she not interesting in reading writers similar to her? She doesn’t know.
For my part, I am guilty of an association of ideas. I find myself uncomfortably agreeing with Lin in invoking Rhys as a touchstone, but my discomfort stems from the comparison’s non-stylistic origins. The association of which I am guilty is the conflation of female writers in a way that entrenches the notion that ‘women’s writing’ is a genre unto itself – a fatuous and poisonous notion, and an example of the sort of strategic essentialism deployed to preserve the cultural monolith of the white, male author. If the present writer finds himself checking his privilege it is because Calloway has alerted him to how little has changed in the decades separating her from Rhys – both writers found that to be a female writer is to be a political entity, she receives the response she does because she has chosen not to comply with those societal codes which keep women writing in socially acceptable modes.
In Judith Keegan Gardiner’s analysis, Rhys emerges as Calloway’s authentic precursor in terms of the relationship her act of writing has forced her into vis à vis those coercive discourses that aim to suppress women by keeping them ashamed of their sexualities:
When a writer like Joyce or Eliot writes about an alienated man estranged from himself, [such a figure] is read as a portrait of the diminished possibilities of human existence in modern society. When Rhys writes about an alienated woman estranged from herself, critics applaud her perceptive but narrow depiction of female experience and tend to narrow her vision even further by labelling it both pathological and autobiographical.
Harold Bloom has theorised that if writing is an agon, then reading must necessarily be so too. This notion of agon, of struggle, is pertinent in this case because the act of reading a text by a female author plays its part in bigger societal mechanisms of oppressing women – struggle goes both ways, and the kyriarchy is infinitely malleable. Just as the internet has democratised writing, it has multiplied the possibilities for the direct participation in oppression.
Surely it is no longer adequate to merely canvass the established periodicals when talking of the response to or reception of a work like Calloway’s. As we have seen, the response to ‘Adrien Brody’ and its precursors – ‘Sex Work Experience One’ (and Two and Three), ‘The Irish Photographer’, and others – has been truly shocking in its gendered viciousness: ‘And lastly, there’s the fact that Marie Calloway makes me embarrassed and ashamed to be a female writer in my twenties,’ as one anonymous pundit has it. Imagine a gender-flip of that statement – it cannot be done; slut-shaming is unidirectional and the corrosive gender politics it betrays encompasses all of us.
Responding to some early press attention, Calloway admits that she ‘felt uneasy to be suddenly upheld as a “feminist writer”, which I had never thought of myself as and which seemed like a tremendous burden.’ What this book demonstrates, both in itself and in the ripples it has made, is that the enterprise of feminism is far from over. To be a young female writer like Calloway is still to be a political entity, like Rhys was before her. We need feminism because writers like Calloway go on being upbraided for the sexual indiscretions of their entire gender. Ultimately, for all her publishers’ vaunting of the book’s Internet-era trappings, Calloway is an allochthonous beast whose fight was picked for her, who did not choose this mantle, but who over the course of a fascinating, maddening book has shown us how she has dealt with both.
1) never read the publicity material, and
2) whenever possible, pass sentence on the day after it comes out – otherwise, wait fifty years.
I read the publicity material, and the book was published last month – I have been in possession of an advance copy for longer than I care to admit, but I hope what follows will explicate my cunctation. While these transgressions may seem negligible they are part of a greater vice in my approach to What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life – a book whose title reveals both a personal plea and a wider-ranging indictment.
A press release is indeed a perfidious thing, and it behoves the critic who wants to do more than simply write copy to not just dismiss it but regard it as a red herring. In the case of the present book, though, I find myself both baffled and frustrated by the extent to which Miss Calloway’s publishers have not only mis-sold but under-sold her work as one which allegedly ‘questions if internet relationships are the way of today’s modern sexual revolution and the new normal for social contact.’ This sounds like the sort of confessional, navel-gazing tome that leaves itself wide open to the same vitriol that Lena Dunham’s Girls inspires in its critics.
Still, my press-release frustration may guide me towards an adumbration of the copywriter’s under-reaching. Among other things, Calloway’s is a narrative about the erosion of the false binary opposition between the Internet and the so-called ‘real world’, one which demonstrates how our online exchanges register on the same cognitive and emotional plane of experience as those on the street and in the workplace. Over the course of the stories we follow Marie Calloway – at once protagonist and pseudonymous author – through her sentimental education in Oregon, her experience of sex work in London to an affair with a New York intellectual. That story, ‘Adrien Brody’, is both the collection’s centrepiece and fulcrum around which it turns, as what follows it is the story of becoming Marie Calloway: the young author of a succès de scandale, the protégée of Tao Lin and the toast of muumuuhouse.com.
Even a cursory Google-search on the writer throws up numerous references to ‘Adrien Brody’; add to that the emphasis on it in the press release and the story arrives with the onerous creak of hype. Read in the context of the preceding pieces, ‘Adrien Brody’ emerges as both the culmination and the strongest expression of Calloway’s narrative agenda in the collection’s first half, which might have been titled ‘Becoming Marie Calloway’. As the protagonist blunders into an exploitative affair with the title character, the affectless deadpan of Calloway’s voice contours the sexual dysfunction at play – a sexual dysfunction which we have previously seen fermenting over the course of cybersex, three sex work experiences and an emotionally demeaning affair with an Irish photographer. Short paragraphs made of simple declarative sentences are the mean mode of Calloway’s emotionally sterile sexual reportage, in which the nominally emotive import of the words become both charged with and defused by irony:
He went to get a condom, but by the time he was back in the bed and had unwrapped it, he had lost his erection.
It then seemed really strange and unfair to me that the possibility of sex relies on just one thing, the man’s ability to get an erection.
[...]
I then just masturbated until he was erect enough to put the condom on.
He penetrated me and I was happy. I felt a strong sexual connection with him.
Whether they’re found writing how-to’s and manuals or leading seminars and retreats, many self-appointed teachers of creative writing are fond of imposing upon their audience a false dichotomy: ‘always show – never tell’. I call this dichotomy false, because a writer like Calloway is capable of doing both, often within the same breath. This is her achievement in the collection’s second half, which is part narrative of the fallout ensuing from the online publication of ‘Adrien Brody’, and part found-art collage of the backlash. The latter component is truly disturbing: images of the writer herself, several of them sexually explicit, overlaid with what she ironically euphemises as ‘criticism’:
Awful prose that’s borderline pornographic
A female train-wreck, a creeper, a woman that gets obsessed with boys and her looks, and who lacks any moral component
i want her body to be cold in the morgue
Wipe away the cum, and make some room for the glitter
marie calloway is a lazy, boring writer who i know through a friend to be histrionic, predictably ‘unpredictable’ and most likely autistic
Part of the brilliance of Calloway’s structure is how it allows her to embalm a process and make it comprehensible to us: the maddeningly asymmetrical quid quo pro of how the Internet has provided a platform for young writers like herself while leaving them exposed to a bedlam of Neanderthal ad hominem and vociferous criticism that scarcely merits the term. Given the ferocity of Calloway’s critics, I cannot but react emotionally to an exchange which occurs between the writer and her mentor, Tao Lin. Having been asked her opinion on Good Morning, Midnight, Calloway replies: ‘I started it, but I don’t know. I like writers like Raymond Carver and Tolstoy and Joyce Maynard.’ Lin doesn’t think she writes like any of them, and sees more of a resemblance with Jean Rhys. Is she not interesting in reading writers similar to her? She doesn’t know.
For my part, I am guilty of an association of ideas. I find myself uncomfortably agreeing with Lin in invoking Rhys as a touchstone, but my discomfort stems from the comparison’s non-stylistic origins. The association of which I am guilty is the conflation of female writers in a way that entrenches the notion that ‘women’s writing’ is a genre unto itself – a fatuous and poisonous notion, and an example of the sort of strategic essentialism deployed to preserve the cultural monolith of the white, male author. If the present writer finds himself checking his privilege it is because Calloway has alerted him to how little has changed in the decades separating her from Rhys – both writers found that to be a female writer is to be a political entity, she receives the response she does because she has chosen not to comply with those societal codes which keep women writing in socially acceptable modes.
In Judith Keegan Gardiner’s analysis, Rhys emerges as Calloway’s authentic precursor in terms of the relationship her act of writing has forced her into vis à vis those coercive discourses that aim to suppress women by keeping them ashamed of their sexualities:
When a writer like Joyce or Eliot writes about an alienated man estranged from himself, [such a figure] is read as a portrait of the diminished possibilities of human existence in modern society. When Rhys writes about an alienated woman estranged from herself, critics applaud her perceptive but narrow depiction of female experience and tend to narrow her vision even further by labelling it both pathological and autobiographical.
Harold Bloom has theorised that if writing is an agon, then reading must necessarily be so too. This notion of agon, of struggle, is pertinent in this case because the act of reading a text by a female author plays its part in bigger societal mechanisms of oppressing women – struggle goes both ways, and the kyriarchy is infinitely malleable. Just as the internet has democratised writing, it has multiplied the possibilities for the direct participation in oppression.
Surely it is no longer adequate to merely canvass the established periodicals when talking of the response to or reception of a work like Calloway’s. As we have seen, the response to ‘Adrien Brody’ and its precursors – ‘Sex Work Experience One’ (and Two and Three), ‘The Irish Photographer’, and others – has been truly shocking in its gendered viciousness: ‘And lastly, there’s the fact that Marie Calloway makes me embarrassed and ashamed to be a female writer in my twenties,’ as one anonymous pundit has it. Imagine a gender-flip of that statement – it cannot be done; slut-shaming is unidirectional and the corrosive gender politics it betrays encompasses all of us.
Responding to some early press attention, Calloway admits that she ‘felt uneasy to be suddenly upheld as a “feminist writer”, which I had never thought of myself as and which seemed like a tremendous burden.’ What this book demonstrates, both in itself and in the ripples it has made, is that the enterprise of feminism is far from over. To be a young female writer like Calloway is still to be a political entity, like Rhys was before her. We need feminism because writers like Calloway go on being upbraided for the sexual indiscretions of their entire gender. Ultimately, for all her publishers’ vaunting of the book’s Internet-era trappings, Calloway is an allochthonous beast whose fight was picked for her, who did not choose this mantle, but who over the course of a fascinating, maddening book has shown us how she has dealt with both.