bambamramfan:

I disagree with some of his stance on universality vs particularity, but overall this is a well thought out analysis of urban memoirs, and includes some amazing lines.

Mistaking the task of self-inquiry for the task of describing the wider world is endemic to contemporary writing. Take the ludicrously popular essay topic, that guy who likes David Foster Wallace too much. I’m not going to link but fifteen seconds of Googling will reveal a dozen such pieces. They have emerged from the least self-aware corners of the internet with a numbing regularity. As my friend Roxanne Palmer said, “Half-baked essays about annoying men recommending DFW to you are now as much a cliche as annoying men recommending DFW to you.”

It should go without saying, but these essays speak to an incredibly small slice of the human population. They are written by, about, and for bobo types who grew up middle class and above, went to private liberal arts colleges, left immediately for an urban enclave, and got jobs in creative or creative-adjacent industries. And even beyond those demographic features, we’re talking about people who have a certain set of affective and cultural commitments related to being perpetually blankly sarcastic online as a way to desperately seek the approval of their peers. You could fit the audience for these pieces comfortably into a football stadium. But, crucially, if you’re in media it’s an audience full of the kinds of people who could give you a job or invite you to a party.

My reaction to these essays is always the same: no one knows what the fuck you’re talking about. And the fact that we have not just a few of these essays but an entire genre of essays about tiny little classes of people known only to a tiny little class of people says a lot about how our media is broken. That’s because these essays are always written based on an assumption of universality — the aren’t-DFW-guys-so-annoying genre always comes packaged with claims of “everybody knows that guy!” when in fact nobody knows that guy. Walk out into the street and pick out a hundred random Americans and I would be shocked if more than one or two had the slightest idea who he was. And the number of people who could therefore identify a particular slice of the fans of this obscure, experimental, not-at-all-populist novelist…. I suspect that the Venn diagram of people who write these essays and the people who know what they are talking about is just a circle.

…

Indeed, the basic problem with this endless string of essays about increasingly-specific flavors of urbanite asshole is that they justify their existence through fake universality while fulfilling the social function of speaking only to the very few. The whole point of this type of essay is that only a certain kind of person can understand them. And that kind of person just happens to be the cool, savvy, ironic, fuckable city dweller that the writer wants to be and to spend time with. When you say that a bro is a guy like Jonathan Safran Foer when 99% of the world thinks a bro is a guy like Rob Gronkowski, you are transparently identifying yourself as a member of a particular social milieu. There are easier ways to announce your value to your potential sexual partners, thanks. And if you think Steve is an asshole just send a group text where you declare Steve an asshole. Spare the rest of us the trouble and stop flogging the corpse of a tormented author who hung himself 10 years ago. It’s fucking ghoulish. And I don’t even like Infinite Jest.

So very true.

And yet, everyone knows the type of writers he’s talking about, right?

I agree with the basic ideas here, but I do wonder where it leaves us.  “Write what you know and don’t pretend it generalizes” is good advice for producing art and writing that avoids one particular error (over-generalizing from the writer’s own experience), but I don’t think anyone wants all art and writing to be like that.  The people producing magazine articles and TV shows are always going to be a pretty small sliver of humanity, and the rest of us want them to talk about things other than their own lives sometimes.

Think of the cliche of the “first novel that’s about being a bohemian writer, drinking a lot, and feeling lost in your 20s.”  Every such novel does in fact capture an authentic piece of experience, and insofar as the author doesn’t over-generalize, it’s a perfectly good instance of the “memoir-type” writing that de Boer is endorsing here.  But if people don’t want to read more stuff like this, it’s not because of over-generalization, it’s because there’s a glut of it.

In other words, my reaction to this –

Don’t get mad at Girls for being about people who are mostly like Lena Dunham; work to create an industry where a black woman would have the same professional opportunity as Dunham.

– is that we are a long way away from that world now, and indeed we will always be a long way away from a world where our most visible creative people look like a representative sample of the population.  So we’ve got to put some value on creative people stretching beyond what they know, even at the risk of producing “utterly tone deaf, wince-inducing” results.

That said, I really think there is something bad about the current level of pressure to make everything “about” some broad societal phenomenon.  It definitely feels like there’s an implicit attitude in the air that good, important art has to be “about” big stuff.  Merely individual stories are devalued.  (More than they were in the past?  IDK, that’s my intuitive sense of things.)

Not only do I disagree with this as a view of art, I also think it tends to reduce the range of stories we can tell.  On the one hand, there are plenty of individual experiences that are interesting in themselves but are atypical of broad trends, and thus “make incorrect points” if one insists on generalizing from them; on the other hand, there are plenty of individual experiences that are interesting in themselves but utterly typical of broad trends, so that they “state the obvious” or “retread old ground” if generalized.  There are a lot of ways to lose this game and relatively few ways to win, and it’s not even clear if winning it is necessarily better than losing it.