TBR: To Hell With All That
So I finally got around to reading Caitlin Flanagan’s To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife. I sort of felt that it was my obligation, given the topics I cover on this blog. I shouldn’t have bothered. I’d read most of the essays that were adapted into the book, so there wasn’t much new here. Moreover, Flanagan seems to have thought better of some of the most over-the-top lines in the essays; while I agree with the substance of the move, it takes away most of the elan in her writing. And elan and a willingness to make breathtaking leaps are pretty much all that Flanagan ever has going for her.
Most notably, Flanagan now describes her Atlantic essay, "How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement," as "a convoluted and slightly insane cover story on the topic [social security benefits for nannies] for a national magazine." The most infamous line from that piece — "when a mother works, something is lost" — has migrated into the preface, where Flanagan transforms it into a platitude:
"What few will admit — because it is painful, because it reveals the unpleasant truth that life presents a series of choices, each of which precludes a host of other attractive possibilities — is that whichever decision a woman makes, she will lose something of incalculable value."
I also don’t remember reading in the original article Flanagan’s description of summoning her nanny when her son was throwing up. Flanagan writes that Paloma would
"literally run to his room, clean the sheets, change his pajamas, spread a clean towel on his pillow, feed him ice chips, sing to him. I [Flanagan] would stand in the doorway, concerned, making funny faces at Patrick to cheer him up — the way my father did when I was sick and my mother was taking care of me."
If it had been there, I can’t believe that any of us would have taken Flanagan’s attempt to claim the moral high ground as worthy of anything but snickering. (I’d love to hear her try to explain why hiring someone to pick nits out of your kid’s hair is "perilously close to having someone… come in and service my husband on nights when I’d rather put on my flannel nightie and watch Dateline NBC" but calling someone to change him out of his pukey PJs is not.)
Overall, the main thing that jumped out at me reading the collection is how much better a writer the late Marjorie Williams was than Flanagan. Compare these lines:
"The slip of paper [her 11th grade report card] was not a testament of past academic glory, only of a hard new fact: there was no longer anyone in the world who loved me enough to save my report cards and school pictures and Christmas poems. I wasn’t anyone’s daughter anymore." [Flanagan]
and
"Yet still there are moments when it stops me in my tracks to realize that I will never peel an orange the way my mother once did for me. And sometimes those moments are too much to bear." [Williams]
Or compare the "few will admit" passage above to Williams’ tart: "On a personal level, and as a matter of social policy, we often seem to be waiting for the No-Fault Fairy to come and explain at last how our deepest conflict can be managed away."
So, go read Sandy’s review of Flanagan, and then go read The Woman at the Washington Zoo.
September 12th, 2006 at 10:46 pm
Thanks for comparing the Williams and Flanagan collections. I have been waiting for someone to do that. I recall in one of her last essays in the collection (I skimmed it before my husband staged an intervention and removed the book from the house), Flanagan recalls her husband carrying her from the car to her chemo treatments and saying something like, “And if that’s the wages of a traditional marriage, then I’m glad about it.” The implication being that employed wives will have to crawl from the car to chemo, clutching only their Blackberry for comfort. When I read that, I immediately thought of Williams and her graceful, moving, entirely different essays on cancer and her family. It’s a pity that we have to be reminded that it is possible to be reflective, ambivalent, honest and serious on deep topics like family and work and what “work” means without firebombing someone else. Can I recommend that you put a link to Williams’ book in your “books I’m talking about sidebar” so more people are likely to go after it?
September 12th, 2006 at 10:53 pm
How how I love and hate Flanagan. She is like a big bag of Kettle chips — you tell yourself no, no, that will be bad for me, and then you dive in against your better judgement (having done it before), eat the whole thing and feel just sick afterward …
September 13th, 2006 at 9:52 am
I read them both, was pleased to have read them both (I am from Berkeley, and about Flanagan’s vintage, so I really like her local references) and, yes, the No-Fault Fairy is wonderful, wonderful.
Flanagan is still with us, and takes on current pieties, and some of those pieties need a little challenge, so I value her and read new pieces she has written when they come out. Williams was consistently swell, as well. Interestingly, I remember an incident from her Darman profile when I first read it (claimed 800s on his SATs, went to substantial effort to prove it to her after the interview was over) which for some reason wasn’t in the book, and I wondered why Noah pulled it.
September 13th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
I must get the Williams book. Flanagan’s confessions felt false, her truths felt strained, and even her angst was too sugar-coated.
September 13th, 2006 at 7:41 pm
One of the main problem I have with Flanagan’s writing is that she’s from a world that is so financially privileged. There’s no way she can very accurately speak for me or most working mothers I know, no matter her tone. Nannies? Personal organizers? High falutin’ LA private schools? Hey, not part of my personal problems as a mother. Affordable, quality daycare, good public schools, finding a job with good benefits and a work schedule that my family can live with–those are more my issues. And you certainly look at the issue of women working differently when you HAVE to work to support your family, as I and countless other women do (even though my husband works, too).
September 21st, 2006 at 9:26 pm
‘No-Fault Fairy’ is quite wonderful, but Flanagan gets her own in too:
“If you want to make a feminist sputter with rage, remind her of those dark days in America’s past when girls took home ec classes and boys took shop. But to watch yuppie parents squirm with dread and confusion when anything in their households goes on the fritz is to wonder whether it was such a bad thing for one half of the marriageable population to know how to mend a fallen hem and the other half to have rudimentary knowledge of the workings of a fuse box.”
She is a genuinely talented writer. If I could write as well as she, I’d be making my living at it.