In Praise of Messy Lives

This book, a collection of bitingly insightful essays from journalist Katie Roiphe, has been my lifeline of leisure-reading while I've been skim-ploughing through a large stack of books and papers on metaethics and theology (many of which have been excellent reads, but they still count as work so I get to emphatically sigh upon reading something else). Being a collection of social and cultural insights from an articulate cynic, I was pleased by how easy to read they were, and still thoroughly stimulating*.

   Irrelevantly, but I want to mention; the copy I've got was discarded by the public library in Phoenix, Arizona. The fact that it's ended up on a windowsill in Sheffield amid several other miscellaneous non-fiction books supporting a dying-for-want-of-sunlight houseplant seems an excellent ending to its journey. One of those quirky little nicenesses that occasionally make me half-smile. Almost a tribute in itself to the values of anticlimax and haphazardness that Roiphe extols in her book.

   What are her essays about? Well, all sorts. They're gathered into four rough sections:

• Life and Times - mostly extended prosaic portraits and memoirs, warm and cold snapshots and reflections on some aspects of her own life.
• Books - technically literary criticism, though maybe better described as discourses on the character, style, and variable merits of authors and trends in authorship.
• The Way We Live Now - dissecting current social and cultural norms to expose the dark tides beneath them before biting bloody chunks out of their necks and leaving readers feelings relatively uncomfortable about things they had before considered normal for want of not considering them much.
• The Internet, Etc. - same as above but specifically digital norms and trends. Includes the last chapter which is, in contrast, and extended and very human portrait study of a young New York woman who works as a bespoke sadomasochistic fetish-fulfiller.

   Yeh, there's quite the variety of topics. Recurring topics (because they're so readily relevant to so much about what one has to say about present culture once examining it critically) include feminism, the exclusion of people living outside an idealised middle-class existence, the bizarre twists of communication that occur in the press and online, the vindication of our own standards and values by the indignant capacity of other people to live without them (and vice versa). There's insight into the wholesale incorporation of Joan Didion's unique journaling style into contemporary feature-writing; musings on why angry commenters do what they do; a story about how a close friendship was deliberately but unthinkingly severed; damning appraisals of how the use of sex in male novelists' works has changed from aggresively patriarchal a few decades ago to only embarassedly patriarchal now.

   The common theme underlying each essay is, as the title suggests, mess. Katie Roiphe is, assuming no change of status since she wrote the various pieces in which she proudly describes herself as such, a woman in full-time employment with two children from two different men neither of whom she is married to. Like giant swathes of modern westerners then, she is marooned in social "messiness" - sustaining a lifestyle that defies both tradition and prudential convention, and having an excellent and valuable life despite it, thank you very much. She implies that the expectations of normality and tidiness in modern middle-class lives are unrealistic, unhealthy, even oppressive. So much of "surviving" nowadays is to be coddled and to coddle; to take far too seriously the prospects of perfection in all we do, with sour erosions in our friendships, careers, passions and even familial affections when the reality of flawed humanity sinks in despite our refusals to scrub it better; we'd be far happier to shrug off the imperfectible nature of our acquaintances, our homes, our work, our families, and to get on with enjoying them in the midst of the mess. Though a large part of what she discusses will be alien to someone who is not a middle-class American parent** I'm sure anyone vaguely familiar with a certain western-middle-class culture of paranoid perfectionism will get the gist of her gripes enough to see the truth in them and be made to squirm or frown slightly.

   I don't know who I'd recommend this book to, if anyone. The content is so broadly variable that it would make more sense to track down individual articles online and send links to people who are interested in that topic. To read the book entails several pieces that one would almost never read online simply because they are so irrelevant to most interests - however there is a value in reading the book rather that just disparate components to get a wider thoughtscape of her conception of messiness and a deeper insight into the pervasiveness of what opposes it. If you like reading and you're not fussy what as long as it's good; if the modern compulsion to derive the absolute best out of everything in denial of future disappointment also unsettles you as it does me and Katie Roiphe, then yeh you'd probably enjoy this.

* I use this word rather than "interesting" or "thought-provoking" because the topics of most of the essays were not things which I would typically be interested in reading, nor did I spend much time after reading each one thinking about it very much at all. However while reading each I was stimulated with vague grips of engagement with new ideas and perspectives that were either new to me or that I had not heard put in such terms before.

** Including me. As a poor (ish, I'm a student, that kinda counts as poor) childless Yorkshireman I was able to only superficially grasp most of the conventions she was skewering, through their incessant seepage into TV and film, even here across the pond.