Letters to the Editor
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Hariette Surovell on mental health
A woman who's written a book on how to use the pseudoscience of handwriting analysis in order to Find True Love is perhaps not the wisest assessor of Lamott's (or anyone's) mental health. Not to mention that she quotes Lamott's funniest, most over-the-top lines as if Lamott earnestly believed and delivered them -- demonstrating either intellectual dishonesty or extremely poor reading comprehension. Considering the fact that Lamott frequently references the fact that she's in therapy, and Surovell repeats the injunction, "Get some help!" throughout her rant, I'm going to bank on the latter.
The icing on the cake is the part where Surovell excepts her own two articles for Salon from its body of egregiously bad writing. That's not a crime in and of itself. The only one of the two links she posted that's still active is an interview with Andy Dick, printed in Q & A format. I expect writers to be full of themselves. I do not expect them to conflate writing with transcribing tapes.
Still, Surovell makes a more honest attempt than just about anybody here to justify her reaction to Lamott. That is, she limits her rant to things Lamott has actually said or written, not assumptions she's made about what Lamott is like. If you're going to call a writer smug when she devotes so much copy to cataloging her flaws, you've got to do a better job demonstrating your choice of pejoratives. And anyone who assumes Lamott felt no remorse for the slap (the whole essay was about that, about hitting bottom) is simply being willfully ignorant; assuming she never apologized to Sam is rather absurd as well, considering they are both in therapy now.
Personally, I'm fascinated by failure. Surovell (inadvertently I think) makes the point that in making the same joke over and over about how fucked up she is, and how she failed and was redeemed this time, Lamott perhaps tells us more than she means to about her true nature. I disagree, but I appreciate this, because I feel the same way about (actual unrepentant child abuser) Woody Allen sometimes. That's also what makes some of his films work (if also making many other Allen films unwatchable). But I still enjoy reading Lamott, because, well, she fucks up. Again and again.
I'm fascinated by how people pull themselves back together after they have fucked up -- how they move on. And those are the moments Lamott captures best. I can understand finding her personally strange for having fucked up so frequently (and, in some cases, so dramatically), and uncouth for confessing it so publicly. That's legitimate. But to condemn her for fucking up at all (or more strangely, for seeking grace -- or as I read it through my secular lens, attempting to move on) is, I think, missing the point.
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Kristen
It seems that if you write in irony-speak like all writers do these days then you're exempt from any and all criticism.
It seems we can praise Lamott for the smart things she says- but we then excuse the dumb things, because they're supposedly ironic and self-mocking.
I don't buy it. Lamott has shown a pattern of bad parenting as shown in Harriette's article. I'm sure that some incidents were exaggerated by Lamott for comic effect- but I'm not laughing.
There's nothing particularly funny about admitting to being too rough with your son, or calling for others' kids to be smacked.
There's nothing ironic about consistently writing about your own son who you name (again and again) on the internet, so that the pieces will follow him for the rest of his life.
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Oh, and I agree with you that handwriting analysis is a load of bunk.
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It's Christen, not Kristen, but anyway...
I didn't say Lamott was exempt from criticism. In fact, I acknowledged the points that you made: I can well understand not appreciating the joke. I also did not contend that she presented the slap as a funny event, or that you should find it funny, although there are some fine, funny lines in the essay. An effective criticism of any work at least acknowledges what the author is attempting, and gauges whether she succeeds or fails at that task.
And let's not make any assumptions about the effect of Lamott's parenting or writing on Sam's emotional state. I find this to be in poor taste for the same reasons (I think) you find Lamott's writing to be in poor taste: Sam hasn't had a chance to speak for himself yet. But he likely will someday, and in the meantime, he is getting help. In the meantime, hate the mother's writing all you want to, but don't assume you know everything there is to know about the reality of her domestic life, and don't assume you are doing something bold and brave in the interest of the child, who is after all getting help.
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Christen
I got the spelling of your name wrong mostly because of the way the Salon letter submission works in not allowing you to see any previous letters in the browser window as you're typing a new letter. So- I recalled the phonetic sound of your name, but not alas the spelling.
You're right that I don't know the details of Lamott's parenting, and it would be in poor taste to question it- if she didn't write about it so much.
As long as Lamott continues to write confessionals about her parenting she should expect people to debate her abilities as a parent. Harriette's essay was only concerned with Lamott's own words- and the essay made a convincing case (to my mind) that Lamott's approach to parenting has been consistently poor in some regards over the years.
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Just Thanks
Dear Ms Lamott,
Your work has been helping me return to grace for a number of years now, and I just wanted to say thank you.
That's it.
:)
Hava Levitt-Phillips
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Thoughts On the Intensity of Hateful Responses
It's my experience that our culture produces a real allergy to kindness, compassion, and the regular human vulnerabilities and fallibilities. I find that when I try to communicate to someone in pain that there's nothing wrong with them in any fundamental, original-sin type of way, that they do indeed have problems and are not perfect and no doubt could grow in positive ways, but that all of that is simply fine and normal because it is the human condition, s/he as frequently responds with anger or hostility as with relief or any sense of actually having been comforted. Makes me sad, but there it is. I fully respect and welcome critical dialogue that challenges all of us to push our analysis of our own thinking, but I also wish that we might emulate my freshperson comp students, and balance our critical reading/responding with empathic reading/responding.
Yep.