Two memoirs
Oct. 31st, 2022 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy, and Sick, Porochista Khakpour.
Both recent memoirs; I really liked the first and really didn’t like the second.
Jennette McCurdy’s mother was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer when Jennette was 2; she died when Jennette was 21. In between, she made Jennette become a child star, as she herself had always wanted to be, and bent and distorted not only Jennette but the whole family around her needs. But there’s always this laser-like focus on Jennette, on her body (she introduces Jennette to calorie-restriction as a way to delay puberty, but also does regular vaginal and breast exams on her daughter; her reactions to her daughter’s teenage boyfriends are equally unhinged). Also, they’re Mormons.
McCurdy’s voice is fantastic. It’s a bleak story, but she makes it as funny as it is terrible, and she really gets across how enmeshed she was in becoming what her mother wanted (the bit where she walks out of therapy when a therapist points this out is painful; you just want to reach into the pages and grab her), and the short, punchy structure works very well.
Khakpour’s memoir, on the other hand, is more disorganised and less persuasive. It’s loosely grouped by geography, but what it circles round to, again and again, is that Khakpour has always been sick. She is eventually diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease, which maybe she got in the early 2000s, or maybe she’s had since childhood; every part of her past is picked over for possible significant exposures. Along the path to this eventual diagnosis, she seeks out treatment and other causes of her problems, rejecting those that don’t fit with her self-image (there's a bit where she's told she has a particular autoimmune condition but discounts this as she feels women with it look like lobsters); relapses, seeks again; fortunately she has a knack for finding people to support her, especially a near-interchangeable cast of rich boyfriends (there is a weird late parenthetic mention that she is queer (“I try not to dwell on bisexuality in these pages”) that came across as a rather grumpy disclaimer in case any of the possibly similar ex-girlfriends objected to their erasure).
There are some interesting points in here. Khakpour was born in Tehran, in 1978, and she ponders at one point if she would still be sick if she had a home, as well as the dislocating effects of early trauma; she also looks at how chronically ill people can use self-destruction as a form of control, and obviously there is the constant undercurrent of how mainstream medicine treats women and non whites who do not fit obvious paradigms. But the self-obsession in this was hard to get past (Khakpour talks wistfully about the heroin-chic of the 90s at one point; it's impossible to not think that at some level she likes being fragile and interesting), and any mainstream concerns about her diagnosis or ultimate treatment regime (massive doses of supplements, ozone shots, bee sting therapy, etc) are discarded. Any doubt is a betrayal.
(and then to keep up with the memoir theme I read Dave Grohl's The Story Teller - which is good - but I'm still thinking about what he does and doesn't say in that, so it will have to wait.
Both recent memoirs; I really liked the first and really didn’t like the second.
Jennette McCurdy’s mother was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer when Jennette was 2; she died when Jennette was 21. In between, she made Jennette become a child star, as she herself had always wanted to be, and bent and distorted not only Jennette but the whole family around her needs. But there’s always this laser-like focus on Jennette, on her body (she introduces Jennette to calorie-restriction as a way to delay puberty, but also does regular vaginal and breast exams on her daughter; her reactions to her daughter’s teenage boyfriends are equally unhinged). Also, they’re Mormons.
McCurdy’s voice is fantastic. It’s a bleak story, but she makes it as funny as it is terrible, and she really gets across how enmeshed she was in becoming what her mother wanted (the bit where she walks out of therapy when a therapist points this out is painful; you just want to reach into the pages and grab her), and the short, punchy structure works very well.
Khakpour’s memoir, on the other hand, is more disorganised and less persuasive. It’s loosely grouped by geography, but what it circles round to, again and again, is that Khakpour has always been sick. She is eventually diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease, which maybe she got in the early 2000s, or maybe she’s had since childhood; every part of her past is picked over for possible significant exposures. Along the path to this eventual diagnosis, she seeks out treatment and other causes of her problems, rejecting those that don’t fit with her self-image (there's a bit where she's told she has a particular autoimmune condition but discounts this as she feels women with it look like lobsters); relapses, seeks again; fortunately she has a knack for finding people to support her, especially a near-interchangeable cast of rich boyfriends (there is a weird late parenthetic mention that she is queer (“I try not to dwell on bisexuality in these pages”) that came across as a rather grumpy disclaimer in case any of the possibly similar ex-girlfriends objected to their erasure).
There are some interesting points in here. Khakpour was born in Tehran, in 1978, and she ponders at one point if she would still be sick if she had a home, as well as the dislocating effects of early trauma; she also looks at how chronically ill people can use self-destruction as a form of control, and obviously there is the constant undercurrent of how mainstream medicine treats women and non whites who do not fit obvious paradigms. But the self-obsession in this was hard to get past (Khakpour talks wistfully about the heroin-chic of the 90s at one point; it's impossible to not think that at some level she likes being fragile and interesting), and any mainstream concerns about her diagnosis or ultimate treatment regime (massive doses of supplements, ozone shots, bee sting therapy, etc) are discarded. Any doubt is a betrayal.
(and then to keep up with the memoir theme I read Dave Grohl's The Story Teller - which is good - but I'm still thinking about what he does and doesn't say in that, so it will have to wait.
