Romany Arrowsmith's Reviews > Heroines

This is the type of feminist discourse that makes me temporarily want to quit being a feminist, because the label means I am tacitly associated with such a book. 300 pages of white women's tears. My god, the sheer vanity of it, of comparing oneself in one's own sentimental quasi-memoir to really horribly mistreated and uniquely brilliant writers like Zelda Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf—especially infuriating as this comparison comes from a wealthy, independent professor in the 21st century, one who is very proud of her retro cloche hats and thinks living in Ohio or North Carolina is worse than death.

And yes, I say sentimental even though Zambreno has cleverly abrogated any negativity around her book by suggesting all of such emotion-directed criticism is sexist: but "Heroines" is sentimental, and narcissistic, and self-indulgent, like Philip Roth, but without anything interesting to say, also like Philip Roth. At least he was able to write with some shock value here and there, passages I could giggle transgressively to myself about. "Heroines" is just milquetoast, repetitive, punny nonsense—HAGiography and FLOWbert and "the invalid is invalidated", "she is raw material, too raw" SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.

It was a Sisyphean task in itself to wade through her irritating writing style, which is all dramatic pauses and sentence fragments, like so:

Eliot, unfit because of his hernia. Fitzgerald, who enlisted but never actually saw the front lines, much to his disappointment. A return to those old roles we play, that we didn't even originate. All the ghosts of the past. Ghosts that aren't even our ghosts.

WOW, VERY FUCKING DEEP, KATE.

About 250 pages in, I thought I would give it two stars; she provided, after all, a lot of really interesting information about and some decent analysis of underappreciated female authors (Woolf, Fitzgerald, Rhys, Nin, Hardwick, etc). But then I came by the absolutely bone-chillingly stupid scene where Zambreno describes how she physically grabbed an anxiety-ridden student of hers, shook her, and told her to just fucking write. Zambreno jerks herself off over this teacherly moment, wistfully wondering if she could have been more brilliant had she had someone shake her in the same way. First, yuck, second, probably not, third, this reflects the odd lack of self-awareness Zambreno has of her own subject—does she think great female (or male) writers are made by being shaken into awareness? Wasn't the whole point of this stupid book that writers ought just to be given space and social sanction to be true to themselves, and that will be sufficient, no man-handling needed?

Whatever. I'm sick of thinking about it. I didn't hate this because it was "menstrual". I hated it because it was bad; trivial and bad. I think one reliable mark of a really weak autobiography is when the reader is afraid of hurting the writer's feelings. There's no vigor, no talent, no spine behind the writing.