FULL REVIEWS |
This anthology explores the relationship between creativity and self-destruction so common to atists, ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Book Reviews ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Today's Chicago Woman, October 2008 (glossy free monthly, 70,000 distributed) "Chicago's own Sabrina Chap edits this raw collection of art, photography, essays and stories in which several female artists free their fiercest emotions. From experiences such as abuse, depression and other self-destructive habits come courageous revelations of truth. Behind each expression of art lies pain and passion. Even if you thin kyou're completely dense when it comes to art and literature, you'll find wonderful insights and ardent points of view. Available in paperback." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf. Billie Holiday, Diane Arbus. We know the story of the brilliant woman who destroys herself. The woman artist who is, borrowing from Helen Stratford’s Suicide The Musical, “Controversial while alive but sanctified in death.” In this powerful and unique collection edited by Sabrina Chap, we hear from nineteen writers, artists and thinkers who are alive and well—and indeed, often controversial. Contributors including Kate Bornstein, bell hooks, Nan Goldin and Eileen Myles investigate connections between creative and self-destructive forces. The authors forsake narratives of glamorous doom to outline more complex and hopeful outcomes for the madwoman artist. The theme is approached from a variety of angles, with a few interesting surprises. Annie Sprinkle presents artistic documentation of her recent treatment for cancer. Nicole Blackman chronicles correspondence with teenage girls who reached to her for help following performances of her fictional piece involving anorexia. Many entries deal with experiences of childhood trauma and the eating disorders, substance abuse, cutting and eventually art that follows. Playwright Carolyn Gage offers a beautiful essay describing her childhood “sacred ritual” of enacting elaborate dramas with dolls. Live performance of her later plays—rooted in that same impulse—became communally as well as personally cathartic. Particularly striking is a bold, hallucinatory and moving piece by poet Patricia Smith, whose desire to write ultimately supersedes her desire to kill herself. Smith articulates a theme: the need to create a language for oneself. Punk cellist Bonfire Madigan not only develops an idiosyncratic musical language, but also rejects the lexicon of clinical psychology, inventing her own vocabulary for her shifting states of mind. She replaces “depression,” for instance, with “deep pressing end.” Live Through This doesn’t present art-making as a deus ex machina at the end of an otherwise self-destructive story. Often the destructive act—especially cutting—is figured as a necessary step in self-actualization, possibly art in and of itself. The incision etched into flesh is not necessarily a punishment leveled against the body, but an awakening of the body. Not a fatal omen, but rather the first character in a new language to describe suffering. As the mark changes, as skin grows over wound, the mark also grows—into a story of recovery. (Seven Stories Press, 2008) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Across the Page: Books of Discovery Sabrina Chap first decided to put together Live Through This, a collection of stories, essays, artwork and photography about the connection between creativity and self-destruction, when she heard of the suicide of Sarah Kane, a young playwright. A playwright herself, Kane's death forced Chap to consider her own relationship with these two forces. Even more specifically — and more frightening — she wondered if she was headed down a similar path. Chap began to notice that many of the women artists she admired were also scarred: "It got to the point where it became logical: If a woman was fiercely intelligent, outspoken and passionate, I'd look towards her arms for the scars. They were almost always there." In the construction of the book, however, Chap was also aware of the media's fixation on "tragically doomed women" and the "glamorization of this issue." What she was more interested in capturing — and what she succeeded in creating with Live Through This — was a book about the women who struggled with self-destruction and turned it into art. One of the challenges she faced, she explains in the book's preface, was how to define self-destruction. She finally limited it to "when a woman actively takes away from herself or her power." Many of the pieces also explore the circumstances behind these acts, including incest, depression, drug abuse and eating disorders. Within this fairly broad definition, Live Through This features stories and images from a wide range of women writers and artists. Carol Queen's essay "Long, Long Thoughts" shows how losing her virginity to an unworthy suitor inspired her to become a feminist sex educator. Daphne Gottlieb's "Lady Lazarus: Uncoupleting Suicide and Poetry" explores her battle with depression (and the medication to treat it) and its impact on her writing. Diane DiMassa's comic "The Artful Art of the Role of Art in the Ugly Art of Survival" shows how she learned to work out her "ANGER!" on the page. One of the more powerful essays in the anthology is playwright Carolyn Gage's "Rewriting the Script." The essay begins with the question "How on earth can you tell a story you can't remember?" and then proceeds to put together the pieces of an abusive childhood, a marriage to a man and participation in a homophobic church, and Gage's eventual coming-out and emergence as a playwright. In the end, Chap's goal was to change the stigma behind the connection between self-destruction and creativity: "We have been taught that self-destruction is an awful thing. 'It is bad,' we've been told by therapists, psychologists, and those who do not understand its seduction. I would like to edit that. Instead of 'It is bad,' I would like for it to read, 'It is.'" This powerful collection of voices provides new insight into the concept of self-destruction and, perhaps more importantly, offers hope to everyone who has felt these forces. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Not Oprah's Book Club: Live Through This Sabrina Chap's anthology, Live Through This: On Creativity and Self Destruction, strikes me in all ways as a carefully crafted object, which so few books are these days. It is small and pleasing, covered in gorgeous art, and filled with important, diverse, beautiful, heartbreaking, original essays/poems /comics/drawings by some of the most fascinating writers I know of: Eileen Myles, Patricia Smith, Kate Bornstein, Toni Blackman, bell hooks etc. But even more, the message about women and madness is something that has been mined to death in some way's is carefully crafted. In the preface, Chap writes: "The glamorization of this issue, combined with the fear and shame built around it, has made understanding self-destructive behaviors almost impossible." And this is what I'm grateful ”immediately" that she understands. As the curator of a book like this, you are charged with the seemingly impossible task of talking about women’s creative impulses, as coupled with their self-destructive ones, without making the pairing look pretty. Or so ugly its romantic. It just is, or as she puts it: It is. (And it reminds me of the Mad Pride Movement that Vanessa posted about earlier this week). Ultimately, of course, it is about control and power. Our hunger for it, our misuse of it, our experimentation with it, or as the amazing Nicole Blackman (I basically want her poem "Daughter" tattooed on my back) pu it ¦self-destruction is the result of women not knowing how to reign in their power.' And then the question becomes: reign or ride? The anthology offers lots of intriguing answers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LIVE THROUGH THIS In one of the first published feminist novels, The Awakening, Edna, the heroine of the story, in an act that we are supposed to see as liberatory, commits suicide. For the price of recognizing her personhood—and how the culture she lives in will forever deny it—Edna swims out to sea and drowns herself. Some of our greatest creative geniuses—Woolf, Plath, Sexton—also chose suicide. Many women have written of the painfulness of being full awake and present in a world that still treats women as the doormats upon which many men feel entitled to wipe their feet. Things are changing. But as a woman who has been observing the world for 45 years, I wonder whether our glacial progress will bring us to true equality before global warning renders all of it moot. To be creative is to walk around sometimes as if the top layers of skin have been removed from your body and the world is experienced hypersensitively. It is hardly surprising that women creatives are drawn to self-destructive behaviours. Certainly, speaking from my own experiences, they’re not intended to be self-destructive so much as an avenue toward relief. Relief from feeling too much, relief from the constant putting oneself out there and risking rejection, relief from a sense of being so different from everyone else that you don’t belong, relief from feeling like a fraud in thinking that you might have any talent, relief from life itself which on certain days just kicks your ass. Live Through This is a collection of 19 essays by women artists who have walked across the hot coals of their own self-destructiveness. They are confessionals, cautionary tales, but mostly, I think, they are messages of sisterhood to those of us out there who struggle. The dedication of the book is “To the ones who think they are not going to make it.” And so it begins. In an essay by “Anonymous,” she describes the cleaving in two that is so common among those who are driven to create: “Space grew between my two lives. One where I danced, another where I cut. One where I was responsible, another where I was drank too much. (sic) One where I was a feminist, another where I binged on food and starved myself. One where I accepted my sexuality, another where I had sex with people I didn’t want to. One I could control, one I couldn’t. One where I wanted to help. Another where I didn’t. I endured injury after injury and missed shows and opportunities. I became raw from having no skin and no edges, no truth I could withstand.” Each essay tells a similar story of too much feeling, followed by numbing, followed by embracing art and life. Similar tales but all radically different. Yet each has a hook where I found I could connect myself to, even if the story being told bore no resemblance to my own. There was resonance in the voices that spoke of moving through. Toni Blackman writes: And yet, despite the commonality of the hurt, it is not being in a state of hurt that makes great art. Certainly drawing on those feelings can illuminate creation, but it’s not a great place to try to make art from. It’s difficult to see when you’re sitting at the bottom of a well. Daphne Gottlieb writes: "In a depressed state, we might find a few words, a perspective, an idea that can move or delight us or just capture something elusive. But art demands control and perspective, and it’s only possible to make consistently transcendent art when our brains are working right.” The first writing or painting or composing done in the face of trauma can look like vomit on a page. A symptom that someone is hurting, but not something that you wan to get close to. But, as each woman artist explains, when you have worked your way through the pain, and when you have worked and reworked the text, then there is magic. Carolyn Gage: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FICTION CIRCUS
I was sent this book to review by the fine people at Seven Stories Press. I was of two minds about it. On the one hand, the book is filled with delightfully harrowing stories about women who face extremely horrible situations, often knowingly self-created situations, and who thrive on those situations, who use them to generate creative pursuits. This is something I personally like reading about, this "women in trouble" theme, so the book was a guilty pleasure. I read it huddled in the corner of the subway, the book's blood red cover wrapped in a brown paper bag, eyes shifting from passenger to passenger, looking for the too-thin girl who knew. That's on the one hand. The stories are both harrowing and delightful. On the other hand, all of these delightful, harrowing stories are true. The name of this publication is not merely cleverness and guff, you know. It is a crusader's motto. We are into lies here, not true stories, harrowing though they may be. Non-fiction, creative though it may be, requires three things: (1) the ability to access memories in a pretty good level of detail, (2) the ability to sort and organize those memories by common themes or at least common metaphors, and (3) the ability to render those memories in at least three distinct shades of language. Fiction requires you to do all of that, plus throw in some extraneous deaths, add enough extra siblings to pass the "three" mark, and more often than not add a wizard or a reference to a beloved animal getting sick or hurt. It requires three million things and it is something that really should continue innovating to keep up with reality. If our lying technology can't keep pace with our technology technology, we're going to have no means of fighting back against the lies directed at us. If we fail to be responsible liars, only irresponsible people will lie! That said: the book is wonderful. There's an essay on Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle turning Sprinkle's breast cancer into a pornographic odyssey through the medical establishment. There's Diane DiMassa's demented and wonderful cartooning ("Whoops! Forgot to kill myself!" goes one caption), there's Bonfire Madigan Shive giving us all a list of things to do instead of panic when the voices come (among them "play!", "masturbate", and "positive graffiti"), Daphne Gottlieb's account of what it's like to write when you're clinically depressed and chronically resisting medication, and Kate Bornstein's illustration of Scientology concepts from her tenure as first officer of L. Ron Hubbard's flagship, the "Apollo" (really that is worth the price of the book alone, in my opinion.) Where the writing is good, it's outstanding, and where it's not so good the stories remain riveting. Even if you aren't naturally drawn to this kind of anthology anyway Live Through This is manifestly worth your time. But what I would have liked to see: one fictional story. One! I understand that the purpose of the book was something else: this desire to elucidate and explain the link between self-destructive behavior and creativity in women. It is maybe untoward to suggest that the participants in an anthology devoted to telling the truth about self-loathing and artful doom should tell a few lies while they're at it. But really: it's a cop-out to say that truth is stranger than fiction. When you tell a lie you're forcing yourself to make yourself believable to another person; you're constructing yourself within their mind. It's a better way of telling the truth if you do it right. And Live Through This bears that out: one of the most interesting stories (in terms of plot, not necessarily technique) is Nicole Blackman's "She's Lost Control Again (Or How Alice Learned To Drive)". Blackman's piece starts off with a poem about anorexia, "Holy". Blackman then talks about how she wrote the poem without any personal experience with or endorsement of anorexia, how she deliberately tried to put herself in an anorexic's head in order to see what the disease was all about. In short order she becomes an unintentional hero to young anorexic girls across the world who take her poem as a personal validation, an anthem. Blackman in no way intended this mess, and her efforts to get out of this mess come off as a little bit perfunctory, a little bit preachy (compared to the rest of the women in the book, who are for the most part confessing to pretty horrifying things and dealing with them in ultimately healthy ways, all things considered.) But it's the mess that's interesting. Truth gets you understanding. Lies get you identification, get you empathy. If the goal is to communicate something, I know which I'd pick. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Womens' Perspectives on Madness and Creativity Through a wide range of artistic expression, 19 women tell their tale of woe and share the creative outlet they developed as a coping mechanism. The concept of madness manifests itself in a myriad of forms. Women especially seem predisposed to resorting to self-destructive methods as a way to cope with their personal demons. In the anthology, Live Through This: On Creativity and Self Destruction, editor Sabrina Chap compiles a diverse collection of works resulting from the unique personal sufferings of 19 individual women. The Many Faces of Female Madness Madness is no longer a catchall phrase restricted to the confines of mental illness. Madness, especially as it is presented in Chap's anthology, is a general term that includes any and all impulses that cause one to consider self-harm and other self-destructive behaviors. The kinds of madness presented within these pages widens the scope of what is considered typical catalysts for self-destruction: childhood abuse and poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, depression and mania, the disease of a loved one, death of a sibling, domestic abuse and violent relationships, gender identity issues, cutting behavior and sexual preference conflicts. While many of these personal tales have similarities (one parent households, an emotionally stressful trigger event, a childhood trauma), they are each unique in their retellings. Some women reached their madness boiling point in childhood, while some did not meet their madness face-to-face until adulthood. Regardless of the way each woman's madness came about, this book interweaves the tales alongside the basic premise that each woman was able to cope with her own self-destructive urges through her chosen creative outlet. Transforming Self-Destructive Impulses to Works of Art What began as Chap's desire to document what she dubbed the "rage to page" tendency in creatively inclined women, quickly evolved into studying the unique "relationship between creative and destructive impulses" in women (pg. 11). This collection broadens the typical spectrum of depressed poet to include a plethora of creative types. The women who contributed to this anthology are writers and poets, but others are performance artists, photographers, dancers, musicians, graphic artists, spoken word performers, pornographic actresses, sketchbook artists and playwrights. What each contributor has to share about her madness is profoundly enlightening. For instance, in the book's first piece, an essay by Carol Queen called Long, Long Thoughts, the author concludes her tale by expressing her gratitude to her younger self for deciding against jumping from her bedroom window and "turned away from the window and wrote instead of giving up on life" (pg. 25). In another piece entitled Weight Watcher by Stephanie Howell, the author tells an inspiring tale of her life-long struggle with weight by identifying each stage of her life as a number on the scale instead of an age, finally coming to the conclusion at 238 pounds that "the self-doubt and pressure to be skinny allows [her] the opportunity to explore...and create [her] art" (pg. 161). The presentation of each woman's individual journey to counter-balance her madness with art is perhaps the most compelling facet of this anthology. While the majority of the book is composed of essays, there is a decent amount of art ranging from a series of sketched self-portraits and photographic self-portraits to a short graphic story. The book does a great job of presenting alternative creative paths for women to explore. No longer is the tragic muse relegated to writing Plath-esque poetry (though Daphne Gottlieb does a wonderful job of incorporating Plath's Lady Lazarus into her essay, Lady Lazarus: Uncoupleting Suicide and Poetry). These artists each challenge the notion of what it means to be consumed by madness and the ideal of what society expects of them. Women can nurture and exercise their demons compassionately through their chosen art form, giving them the hope and strength to live through whatever the future holds. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Creativity without destruction? Be careful in starting a relationship with a writer, popular culture often warns. Creativity is frequently perceived to go hand in hand with some degree of psychological instability. Mental anguish accompanies -- if not enhances -- the artistic process, we're told. But do those images of scar-accompanied genius tell the whole story? Does self-destruction have just as much potential to stifle the talent it's widely believed to fuel? Those questions stand at the center of "Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction." Edited by Sabrina Chap, the book spans a collection of works by female writers and artists. In the book's preface, Chap tells of learning of the suicide of playwright Sarah Kane -- a life turning point that made the author wonder if her own consuming immersion in creativity would result in a similar fate. "It got to the point where it became logical: If a woman was fiercely intelligent, outspoken and passionate, I'd look towards her arms for the scars. They were almost always there," Chap writes. "Live Through This" focuses on artists with lives affected by self-destructive behaviors -- everything from eating disorders to cutting to traumatic circumstances like abuse that can lead to a period of mental anguish. But the submissions differ from the majority of widely circulated stories about troubled artists in one way: These women have survived. There is an underlying emphasis on overcoming obstacles. An emphasis on finding creative genius not while you're suffering, but after you've conquered the demons that plagued you. One especially poignant selection within the collection is Daphne Gottlieb's "Lady Lazarus: Uncoupleting Suicide and Poetry." At one point, Gottlieb mentions a young male fan who asked her if writing really helps the coping process. She says yes, but offers a disclaimer in retrospect: "But while the page can hold, the page can't heal. Pouring your heart out to a blank notebook might offer some fine, raw writing, but it does not get you the support that you need. It's not therapy, companionship or medication." "Live Through This" has seen its share of criticism. Some reviewers say the book's female-only focus reinforces stereotypes about members of the weaker sex dwelling on their problems. In interviews, Chap has said she considered adding male voices, but instead decided to focus on a female tendency to internalize feelings. When read in the absence of a search for a lesson on gender and mental health, the book achieves that goal. It shows readers what happens when for long, pain can't be verbalized. And in doing so, it presents a valuable lesson that has nothing to do with gender at all: The fact that the page, or canvas, or computer screen alone is rarely enough. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BOOKSLUT Male writers are wont, after years of hard drinking, to head out to the woodshed in Ketchum, Idaho or Bolinas, California or Woody Creek, Colorado and shoot themselves in the head. It's only occasionally that a woman artist does this (Dora Carrington did, a couple of months after Lytton Strachey died of cancer) -- we tend, instead, to asphyxiate ourselves or take our lives by drowning or hanging, after years of residual trauma from incest or other abuse, through self-cutting, drinking, drugging, eating disorders, destructive sex, agoraphobia and other madness, and clinical depression. It's a cliché, a truism, that writers and artists of all kinds are consumed by misery and self-destruction -- that we want to cut off our ears and send them to our lovers. That we are always eyeing the pier with a shadowed longing. It seems almost inevitable that creative women, especially, would need to find some way to express and deal with our thwarted power and vision in a society that denies it. I've always been sold on the idea that, for all creative geniuses, the work itself is so volatile that making it is playing with fire -- a problem that is not to be confused with the spurious claim that trauma causes creative genius. Although, does it, sometimes? It's easy to get obsessed with this question. Creativity and self-destruction are both about stretching the limits of mortality. Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction, a collection of essays by talented badasses, punks and radicals like Nan Goldin, Kate Bornstein, Carol Queen, Eileen Myles and bell hooks, takes up the powerful, complicated question of the connections and correlations between art-making, femaleness and personal darkness. I want to love it. Even though many of the contributors are important and ground-breaking as artists and writers, Live Through This somehow, overall, conflates art with women’s art therapy. This is a grievous problem when, if you are a woman, your memoir of being a novelist from Connecticut whose work got easily published when you were twenty-four and taking a fat advance from your agent to travel to countries starting with the letter “I” will sell better than the works of Wislawa Szymborska, and Gayl Jones, and Elfriede Jelinek, and Eileen Myles, and Bessie Head, and Christa Wolf, and Angela Carter, and Enid Dame, and Emer Martin. By talking about and including only female and woman-identified artists without explicitly addressing why men are omitted, Live Through This unwittingly propagates the malignant, pervasive, pernicious idea that all women's art is therapy, release, and identity-building. After all, male artists and writers are (famously, infamously) self-destructive, too. The creation process wreaks disaster on its mediums and visionaries. How does the experience of the call to create (as art, rather than for personal healing) connect differently to self-destruction depending on one’s race, sex, sexuality, class, or nationality? And how are self-destructive creative geniuses, who happen to be female or woman-identified, different from random self-cutters, anorexics, manic depressives and suicidal ideators? I would contend that they are extraordinarily different. Maybe gender is omitted from the subtitle because some of the contributors are “gender outlaws” (like the fabulous Kate Bornstein, whose My Gender Workbook rocks my world on every rereading) -- but Kate herself has given us a great model for understanding gender as a continuum. The book ends up being heavy on the women’s empowerment, and dishearteningly light on empowerment for writers and artists. I am much more worried that the next Sarah Kane will never be recognized than that she will commit suicide. In her essay “Lady Lazarus: Uncoupleting Suicide and Poetry,” Daphne Gottleib wonders what might have become of the depressive poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton if they “had had more time” and if they “had made it through”? Imagine, though, if Plath had lived to age sixty-eight or seventy, and Sexton had made it to the ripe old age of eighty-three, and they'd both had comfortable lives, but they'd left their poems in scrawled journals in the attic, or publishers had rejected all of their work, or they themselves had burned it -- not in a moment of self-transformation, like when Lee Krasner went into a frenzy and hacked up her paintings, only to turn them into revolutionary collage work -- but because they couldn't face it any more. What if they had stopped working, or never started? It's a sweet, progressive idea -- one that makes me guiltily furious -- that all feminine self-destruction lies at an edge of great untapped creative power. It may be that the journaling, middle class teen anorexic who fights the urge to buy gauze for self-mutilation and allows herself to enjoy the taste of a tomato sandwich (a subject of Nicole Blackman's essay) is simply transforming her own life in some way, working on a process of self-creation, finding a voice as a person without also finding a voice as a writer or as an artist. Well, great. I want “Alice,” the teen anorexic, to sign up for volunteer work too, and to meditate or take notes for her therapy sessions instead of gauging her thigh with a knife or taking too many diet pills. And maybe “Alice,” in rechanneling her power, will awaken as a great artist or writer. But really, maybe she won’t. The earnest documents of self-creation and self-healing can be useful for people in recovery or titillating for lovers of “misery porn.” But to conflate them -- and especially the cathartic process of making them -- with the intense, rupturous (and also cathartic) alchemy of making art gives short shrift to women artists, as artists. The rich, fascinating topic of self-destructive women writers and artists needs to be “uncoupleted” from the also-interesting topic of self-destructive women. I care about keeping women from offing themselves, or cutting themselves, or using too much crystal meth or vomiting up dinner. I just care about it separately than I care about making sure that truly radical work gets created, and honored, and seen. Some -- most -- of the contributors to Live Through This are making great work, but in these essays, they talk more about how they are managing their manic-depression (Fly), or their “negative feedback loop saying that (they) should die” (Bonfire Madigan Shive) or their “brains drunk on malfunction” (Gottleib) than about managing their careers. Only one contributor (Eileen Myles) even mentions, in passing, ever having worried about not getting work published and understood. Toni Blackman recovers from an abusive relationship by spitting rhymes onstage. Inga Muscio chooses writing as an alternative to “heroin, insanity, or full court press emotional retreat,” but then, recovering from her brother's death and so overwrought that she can't eat or sleep for a year, she turns to cutting herself with a bunch of broken glass she keeps in the fridge. Cristy Road detoxes by drawing. Silas Howard uses the “restless energy” that comes from sobering up to start a band. I always used to think that when a woman writer or artist combusted or self-destructed, it was because her work was misunderstood or overlooked, or, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s autobiographical protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” someone tried to stop her from working. I off-handedly assumed that the self-destruction is a side-effect of the fury and shame of believing in your own seismic, mystifying talent and having it ignored (or worse, celebrated but misrepresented) by the gatekeepers of the art world. This is empirically wrong, but it gets at something. I am scared that, increasingly, the only women who get published, or shown at the Whitney, will be those whose work is mediocre and innocuous (hip multiculti reworkings of Howard's End and lives of octogenarian locksmiths as rendered by rich girls from Long Island), or those whose work, though sometimes better than mediocre, is simply and straightforwardly confessional -- an oily pile of bulimia memoirs and bright red screams and institution memoirs and “drunken girlhood” memoirs that are palatable to sexist marketers in a way that radical, cutting-edge poetry, autobiography or fiction by the most original women writers is not. We need some way to talk about the mystifying brilliance of Elfriede Jelinek or Louise Bourgeois or Dorothy Allison’s work, to acknowledge why it’s so different from “rage to page” notebook or sketchbook therapy. It’s a conundrum, because sometimes the processes are similar. Daphne Gottleib writes: As therapeutic as it may be, barfing raw feelings onto the page doesn’t make for great art either. Usually when we’re depressed, we’re not at our best. Our perceptions are skewed, our brains aren’t working right (despite how real these perceptions feel), and we’re not in full control of ourselves… In a depressed state, we might find a few words, a perspective, an idea that can move or delight us or just capture something elusive. But art demands control and perspective, and it’s only possible to make consistently transcendent art when our brains are working right. I do not write when I am depressed, except in a journal. And in the journal… I can see how I am wrong or just writing badly… In the end, it does not matter whether the pills the doctor offers will silence me or not: On its own, depression steals my words. The pills offer at least the hope that I can have them back -- even for a little while. And with my words, maybe myself, too. But clearly, many great writers have written masterpieces during moments of brutal depression, or, for that matter, while stinking drunk, strung out or besieged by a saddening and terrifying madness. In many cases, an out-of-control brain doesn’t stop great writing, but it also doesn’t cause great writing. And, happiness, health and balance don’t cause or stop great art, either. Art isn’t necessarily better if it’s created out of abyss-edge misery, but it isn’t necessarily worse, either. Gottleib’s rationale is, presumably, that maybe if Plath, Sexton and others like them had been helped to stay alive, they could have written even more great work. But it’s clear that lots of great writers and artists have been “at their best” in the throes of depression, and managed to create world-changing art during their short, depressive lives. Every artist, like every human being, is going to die, whether it's in some quick, manly moment in the woodshed or from a crippling disease or from gassing herself after leaving a snack out for her children or from a car accident or from the tedious ravages of accumulated life and gravity. Every artist is a human being, but not every human being is an artist, and not every artist’s work will ever be seen. We need a way to talk about how and why “barfing raw feelings onto the page” is different from writing “Lady Lazarus.” I’m not sure how a book with pieces in it by Nan Goldin and Eileen Myles ended up being more about women’s empowerment and healing than about the frightening, numinous connection between genius, death and the underworld. I want to love it. But a book about how and why the creation process brings many artists and writers too close to self-annihilation is past due. Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction edited by Sabrina Chap
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