I’m reading David Shields' Reality Hunger in preparation for our North 24th Writing Group retreat on Monday, where I’m expected to write for hours on end without getting up and eating potato chips, one at a time, which requires numerous trips downstairs to the kitchen. Most everyone else is staying three days. I am staying one and a half.
I have gotten over my man-hating observation and subsequent irritation that only men write manifestos, although I think it’s both true and annoying. At first I compare Shields’ book unfavorably to Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse, because its form is similar – numbered little literary bullet points, and a surfeit of hyperbole. And because it’s the only book like that on my bookshelf.
But this particular manifesto does, like Barthes’, have some interesting parts and some beautiful parts. So even though Shields, like other manifesto-writing men includes many too many declarative statements that allow no room for disagreement or even much in the way of eyebrow-raising, he does address the reality conundrum, and writes stuff like (about poor James Frey who wrote a memoir that was not true in every exact detail or even very many of them, strictly speaking) “I’m disappointed not that Frey is a liar but that he isn’t a better one.”
I’ve always believed that a true memoir is impossible. Or if possible, impossibly dull.
I read this book while doing planks in a bikini. It’s a girl thing, having to do with trying on swimsuits to see which one looks least hideous – in anticipation of the sitting around by the lake part of the retreat – and then feeling like a big fat pig. The semi-true part of this is that I read four pages, tops, while in a plank wearing a bikini. The true and boring part is that I read most of it while sitting at the kitchen table, with sesame seeds scattered around me. Or on the sofa. Plus I‘m only on page 53.
