"... from an annoyingly 'phlegmy' throat to a similarity to 'a heap of laundry: smelly, inert, useless, almost sentient but not quite.' And these are just his physical faults — or at least a sampling of them. Bill’s putative mental and emotional shortcomings could themselves fill a book. And they very nearly do. That the author has made her particular disgusts (and her generous way of occasionally overlooking them) the basis for a general treatise on matrimony is the abiding problem of 'Foreverland.' How well can an institution be explained by a single instance of it, and especially by one beset with problems that aren’t necessarily widely shared? Quite well, Havrilesky seems to feel, or else she wouldn’t start so many sentences with sweeping prefaces such as 'Marriage is' or 'Having a baby means' or 'The suburbs are' followed by blanket statements of what they are.... 'The suburbs are a place where people go to embrace the dominant paradigm, because the dominant paradigm makes them feel safe and comfortable.' A dominant paradigm? In today’s America?"
Writes Walter Kirn, in "Heather Havrilesky Compares Her Husband to a Heap of Laundry" (NYT)(reviewing "FOREVERLAND/On the Divine Tedium of Marriage").
I'm reading between the lines that Havrilesky is going for humor of the sort once purveyed by Erma Bombeck.
It's fine not to consider that very funny, but I think you need to acknowledge that the author intends to be funny. That line about a pile of laundry telegraphs that humor is intended. Kirn seems offended by the woman-on-man insults, but I'm a little offended by Kirn's failure to consider that a woman is doing humor.Which makes me wonder what Erma Bombeck wrote about her husband. Did she insult him? That's a bit hard to research, but I got far enough to discover that her husband's name was also Bill and that his favorite story of hers was "Daddy Doll Under the Bed." Excerpt:
My dad left the house every morning and always seemed glad to see everyone at night.... Whenever I played house, the mother doll had a lot to do. I never knew what to do with the daddy doll, so I had him say “I’m going off to work now” and threw him under the bed.
When I was nine years old, my father didn’t get up one morning to go to work. He went to the hospital and died the next day. There were a lot of people in the house who brought all kinds of good food and cakes. We never had so much company before. I went to my room and felt under the bed for the father doll. When I found him, I dusted him off and put him on my bed.
He never did anything. I didn’t know his leaving would hurt so much. I still don’t know why.
There's an interesting resonance between the husband as a pile of inert laundry on the floor and the daddy doll under the bed.
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It is nice of the NYT's to point out who their target audience is.
When I read the excerpt, I thought a ripoff of The Odd Couple, not Erma Bombeck.
About the marriage thing, the truth is that there is no perfect mate. They all have faults. Every other person sucks, basically, to some extent. And so do you.
The point about marriage is choosing to live with it. Even that person you put on a pedestal for being Mr. Right or Miss Right you will one day look upon with complete and utter disgust. The key is to ride through it.
"...I think you need to acknowledge that the author intends to be funny." Attempted comedy. A misdemeanor in most jurisdictions.
cf The Odd Couple.
In 1996, Havrilesky was hired as a staff writer at Suck.com.
Seems appropriate.
The doll story is actually quite rich and beautiful. It expresses the bewilderment of childhood loss, woven with the regret of an adult who never really knew her father, and never will. It manages to be both charming and devastating at the same time.
The other is just a cheap shot, against the one person who might actually hope to be loved and understood by her. I hate that kind of humor.
There is no resonance between the two for me at any level. None.
>Althouse said...
That line about a pile of laundry telegraphs that humor is intended. Kirn seems offended by the woman-on-man insults, but I'm a little offended by Kirn's failure to consider that a woman is doing humor. <
That's what you got out of that? That "a woman" (ie, that women) can't do humor? You're trying a little too hard to find slights against women. Kirn might possibly have failed to consider that *this particular* woman is doing humor (though in the article she mentions her doing "comedy") - but nowhere did she remotely suggest that a woman can't do humor.
She's giving her husband the "dirty shirt".
Ah well a long marriage is a sort of continous struggle for moral advantage--and it helps to have a sense of humor--on both sides.
Somehow this takes me back to "Please Don't Eat the Daisies"--a book by Jean Kerr, loosely adapted into a Doris Day movie. Jean was married to a then-famous theatre critic, now forgotten. Her book is still for sale. Part of the book is the story of how the family moved to upstate New York, a long way from Manhattan (although not as far as Connecticut), and the husband, who no doubt would have been distracted at best, lived for some of the time in the city. She coped with and managed renovations, children, and many other things. She includes some parodies of popular literary forms of the day. Does her book provide evidence that she gave up a substantial career as a writer for husband and family? She certainly deals with contemporary themes, such as the expectations imposed on women (including staying thin), and the hopes and expectations they bring to marriage.
Does Ian Frazier's "Cursing Mommy" owe something to this genre? I've also watched/listened to some of Jeanne Robertson (no relation): she is right brain, her husband is left brain.
Bombeck was interesting and sometimes amusing, but I never found her as funny as Art Buchwald on his good days.
"a heap of laundry: smelly, inert, useless, almost sentient but not quite"
Calling a man a bag of laundry used to just mean rumpled or lacking definition. I recall the golfer Lee Trevino used to refer to himself that way.
You should try not to be offended that Kirn doesn't acknowledge that Havrilesky is "doing humor."
You might not have noticed over the past few decades, but the superficial bubbleheaded wife portrayed in television, movies, commercials, etc. has been replaced as American society's punching bag by the lazy, stupid, man-child husband or boyfriend. He's the one in the commercials who the ultra-competent wife shakes her head or rolls her eyes at when he lumbers into the frame and says something stupid. In media, he's competent enough to hold down and job and inexplicably attract a pretty wife, but in the house, he's useless and sometimes dangerous. With children, he's more of a big brother, another sibling for Mom to take care of.
I'm not saying it was right when women were demeaned in mass media in the 50's and 60's, but from watching old reruns, the treatment women received had none of the bitterness shown toward men. I get that the bitterness is a reaction to what came before, but even if it is, men today who have learned how to treat women with respect can still resent the way society portrays us.
It's been a long time, and we know that a lot of it is driven by male ad execs and male producers and writers tailoring their material to women, giving them permission to feel the way Havrilesky suggests she does about the man she chose, so that her attempts at humor resonate for them. The men who write this material probably think they're still subverting expectations, even after 40 years, but all they're really doing is acting as mercenaries in the battle of the sexes.
Like Erma Bombeck suggests, you're going to miss us when we're gone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/magazine/my-father-vanished-when-i-was-7-the-mystery-made-me-who-i-am.html
One of the reasons I read Althouse is because I am exposed to things I normally would not have thought would have interested me. Now, I remember Erma Bombeck and even the specific story because she was one of my favorite writers when I was a kid.
In looking for the entire column, I found the story at the link instead. The link is the story that I normally would not have touched.
"Kirn seems offended by the woman-on-man insults, but I'm a little offended by Kirn's failure to consider that a woman is doing humor."
Kirn offended? Hardly. Figures that Althouse would be offended though. But then, the actual humor is hard to detect when women are "doing humor."
"Whenever I played house, the mother doll had a lot to do. I never knew what to do with the daddy doll, so I had him say “I’m going off to work now”"
Another woman doing humor? Please clarify. Wouldn't want to mistake it for inanity.
The real message here is: do not marry a writer. Especially not a writer intent on "doing humor."
As I've suggested before, the hot-crazy matrix needs another dimension, writer/not-writer. Gentlemen, proceed with caution.
Not snark at Althouse, by the way: I think the way she manages personal info is admirable, where others might have wanted to exploit it.
Heather Havrilesky weighs in on Walter Kirn’s NYTimes review on Twitter:
For the record, it's fine. I've written tons of harsh book reviews. We all have our tastes and opinions. I do think the bigger sexist picture is absolutely rich, though. The righteousness a man can conjure when a woman reveals too much is truly remarkable.
I swear, I woke up this morning and said "The NY Times pan of my book, by a man, should be up by now."
—————-
——————
I was initially horrified when I read an excerpt of Havrilesky‘s book in The NYTimes on December 24
(Marriage Requires Amnesia
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/24/style/marriage-heather-havrilesky-foreverland.html?referringSource=articleShare).
I thought Havrilesky was intolerable and thought the husband should have equal time to list Heather’s shortcomings and physical faults.
I was therefore surprised when discussing the article with my son and daughter-in-law —who talks about my son as if he too is an inert smelly heap of dirty laundry —i.e. in the same less than loving tone. They thought Havrilesky had hit her mark. THAT was marriage.
Perfectionist perfect woman/wife tolerating clueless annoyingly phlegmy man/husband.
In a two career marriage the husband’s luster may be diminishing.
I never grew up where we weren’t working together, meals at certain times of the day: always a routine.
I’m not feeling the resonance? Dirty laundry feels used and useless unless “the woman” washes it clean. The wondering of where daddy was and what he was doing is so less obvious than the dirty pile of inert laundry on the floor b/c it can’t get any lower.
What is the resonance? The floor?
Yes, indeed… fathers… tireless, steadfast workers… favorite targets of feminists, academia, Hollywood, divorce attorneys, etc.
Mine passed away 10 years ago and I miss his friendship, advice and humor. I really miss not being able to talk with him.
There has been a commercial on during football games where the heroic woman kills a man by turning him to stone for flirting with her while not being hot enough, to the delight of her girlfriends. I always wonder how young men are going to take that, and if will make them hesitate to approach women if it appears that women are so offended by it. All of these things go into the neural net of our subconscious, training it. Will it ultimately be good for women that men feel that women hate being approached?
"he righteousness a man can conjure when a woman reveals too much is truly remarkable."
Betrayal is betrayal; it's the enemy of intimacy.
I don't think those 60s TV and movie wives were portrayed as all that fluffy and brainless. Some. But the point of Bewitched and other shows was that this very competent woman had to run things for her husband unobtrusively, observing the proprieties, but she was clearly the one in charge.
More common was the widowed parent, usually the Dad. It was an opportunity for humor and setting up the ironies of him being a fish out of water at raising precocious children. There were a lot of dead moms in those shows.
Your headline seems a little unfair to Meade.
There's a thin line between humor and insult. Imagine if the roles were reversed. Would it still be humor? Or just misogyny? When those old commercials were airing, male writers much better than Heather Havrilesky were freely airing their complaints about women. Now it's getting harder to read them.
Even back in those long ago days, though, Tom Lehrer was talking about popular songs in which women list all the faults of their men and then sing that they love them anyway. Lehrer offered a parody song where a man complains about his wife -- she makes coffee that tastes like shampoo -- but decides that he still wants to keep her. It was funny, one assumes, because it wasn't representative of the era. Maybe the past wasn't as simple as we think
My point is the criticism won't make sense and isn't fair if you don't acknowledge the intent to be funny. That point does not at all depend on whether there's success in being funny. That's a separate matter, but you never get to it if you fail to recognize the intent.
My Mom always says: there’s a little bit of truth in everything you say. That’s why I dislike bullies who are just funning.
Iman: my Dads been gone 7yrs in August. I know exactly how you feel. They did their job well to be missed so much.
She’s also an accomplished cultural critic (Havrilesky served as Salon’s TV critic from 2003-2010), and her expertise in relating TV and other pop culture narratives to how we live forms a throughline in the collection, from celebrating unlikely prophet Marie Kondo's message of ridding our lives of anxiety-inducing clutter to connecting the omnipresent moods of fear and anxiety in the luxury-driven worlds of "Mad Men" and "50 Shades of Grey" to the demented titillation of the Donald Trump presidency, the high-stakes water cooler TV show none of us can turn off.
She’s an advice columnist, as well.
That’s one sentence. Wow, to that.
We, society today, ignore the intent in discriminatory ways.
"I get that the bitterness is a reaction to what came before,"
Oh no. The bitterness is anger against God for making the world the way it is.
When I was a kid I would read all the Erma Bombeck columns - I liked reading the paper (my schoolwork was very undemanding and I liked to read and there was not much new to read except the paper, some days). I always felt sorry for her husband then, but as I got older, I changed my mind - after all, he had married her, and presumably liked her as she was .... Fascinatingly to me (if to nobody else) it turns out she was a conservative Catholic (at least at one point in her adult life...not sure exactly when )...... I had always thought of her as Presbyterian or Lutheran with a name like Bombeck, and the thought never crossed my mind that a Catholic could write thousands of columns for the paper without once mentioning her Catholicism .... (even the Peanuts guy quoted the Bible every once in a while....) ....
Erma Bombeck! Holy Cow! Althouse is really playing to all of us oldsters (I actually feel quite young amongst the commenters here, being about three years younger than Althouse herself).
I vaguely remember reading some Bombeck columns. What has always stood out in my memory is the title of one of her books, from probably 50 years ago: "The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank."
I have actually had a septic tank for lo these many years up in New Hampshire.
--gpm
One arrow in any critic or reviewer's bow is simply not to engage with a work, to view it from a great distance with no sympathy or empathy or desire to understand. That's the death arrow, and it should be used sparingly if one wants to stay in the reviewing business. Kirn may not know that another critic could take the same attitude towards his own work as he does to Havrilesky's--or he may know it all too well-- but he may have had as much fun panning her book as she did writing it.
Certainly the fluff-headed wife was a trope back in the 50s and 60s. Keep in mind the laziness of sitcom writers.
There were a lot of stupid husband, smart wife shows back in the 50s and 60s. Think, for example, of The Honeymooners. Jackie Gleason was a pompous idiot (playing himself, I guess.) Bewitched comes to mind as well.
I remember Jean Kerr's books; my parents had a copy of "The Grass is Greener Over the Septic Tank." I also read the Erma Bombeck columns. I forget where they appeared, but presumably in one of the magazines my parents subscribed to. Or were they syndicated in a newspaper? In any case, I thought they were funny. (I had to have "septic tank" explained to me, though.)
As for Heather Havrilesky, I read her various websites back when the internet was young, and thought she was hilarious. I kind of lost track of her career over time, but this book sounds exactly like her older stuff: snarky and mordantly funny.
Certainly the fluff-headed wife was a trope back in the 50s and 60s. Keep in mind the laziness of sitcom writers.
There were a lot of stupid husband, smart wife shows back in the 50s and 60s. Think, for example, of The Honeymooners. Jackie Gleason was a pompous idiot (playing himself, I guess.) Bewitched comes to mind as well.
I remember Jean Kerr's books; my parents had a copy of "The Grass is Greener Over the Septic Tank." I also read the Erma Bombeck columns. I forget where they appeared, but presumably in one of the magazines my parents subscribed to. Or were they syndicated in a newspaper? In any case, I thought they were funny. (I had to have "septic tank" explained to me, though.)
As for Heather Havrilesky, I read her various websites back when the internet was young, and thought she was hilarious. I kind of lost track of her career over time, but this book sounds exactly like her older stuff: snarky and mordantly funny.
(please forgive if this a double post: Blogger gave an error and I'm resending.)
“If Life is a Bowl of Cherries Why am I in the Pits”? Awesomeness.
I read the excerpt mentioned above, as well as the book description. Erma Bombeck does not come to mind.
This is a memoir, and she's trying to make universal her anxieties and bad behavior.
(Although I did find her description of their horrible vacation in Australia realistic. That's why we didn't take the kids on "family trips" until they were adults.)
I remember being struck by the absence of men in Erma Bombeck's collections. She was interested in women's lives, or maybe her readers were.
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