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What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life
"What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life is moving, unprecedented, threatening, and surreal—the exciting, rare work of someone with nothing to lose. It's intuitive and overpowering, concise and extreme. And, like a plant or a comet, it doesn't pause to explain what it's doing, defend or rationalize its existence, or attempt to obscure or distort its intentions. If you're attentive toward it—and earnest and open-minded and non-malicious in your attention—you will likely question and examine what you yourself are doing and why, and how to change." — Tao Lin
240 pages, Paperback
First published May 17, 2013
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3368 people want to read
About the author
Marie Calloway
1 book120 followersMarie Calloway (born 1990) is an American author. Her first book, what purpose did i serve in your life? was published by Tyrant Books. Calloway grew up in Japan and Oregon. She currently lives in New York.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 164 reviews
March 19, 2013
What's frustrating about this book is that you can see the potential. This is the kind of writing that will always get a reaction because it is as painful as it is provocative. Calloway is either fearless or terrifying or both in how she exposes herself in these stories? Or are they essays? There's something interesting going on here about the sexuality of young women and the intentions of men but just when Calloway starts to get to the really interesting stuff, these piece abruptly end, leaving the reader with the vague dissatisfaction of what this writing could be.
February 22, 2022
(Review originally published on my blog, January 2014)
I didn't really know anything about Marie Calloway before I read this book. I'd heard her name, and I had heard of her well-known story 'Adrien Brody' (though I hadn't read it), but I was (and remain) largely ignorant of the minimalist literary 'scene' she is part of. I mention this because it means I can't really assess what purpose did i serve in your life in context, only on its own merits as a standalone piece of work.
Calloway's writing is matter-of-fact, honest, often clinical and very candid. In a collage of short stories/autobiographical pieces, excerpts from conversations and Facebook screenshots, she describes a number of experiences, which range from a fling with a writer who is in a relationship (the subject of 'Adrien Brody'), forays into sex work in London, a threesome with internet acquaintances, and experimentation with BDSM (short, sharp excerpts which must be about the same person she describes in this article), to details of the start of her fledgling career as a writer, primarily her anxieties around whether she deserves success and attention, as well as dealing with the accompanying criticism. As she uses a pseudonym and changes people's names (although it's not much of an attempt to disguise them; it took me seconds on Google to identify the real 'Adrien Brody') it's technically possible to see these pieces as fiction, but in the act of reading them it is near-impossible to see them as anything other than non-fiction.
It's interesting to see Calloway and her peers hailed as the first wave of writers from the internet generation, because parts of this book reminded me a lot of stuff I used to write and frequently saw others write back in the day on Livejournal, Diaryland et al (more than a decade ago in some cases). Interesting to note how in those days, online journals had a very confessional feel and were more like no-holds-barred diaries, whereas now that everyone (not just the weird kids) is all over social media, blogging has become a much more impersonal, almost corporate thing, and writing like Calloway's is again regarded as unusually frank. Before this book I'd forgotten all about it, but I was reminded of a similarly candid and numb bad-casual-sex story I wrote up in my Livejournal years ago, which elicited a mixed response from my 'audience'. (I really wish I could find it for comparison, but I think the only copy is a printed version which is buried in a folder somewhere, probably at my mum's house.) I remember my friends writing about all sorts of sordid experiences in a similarly straightforward, if not quite so detached, style. Anyway, my thought was that it's quite easy to read what purpose did i serve in your life and think 'absolutely nobody would ever do that' or 'thank god I haven't had sexual experiences like that' but, if you imagine things that have happened to you and things you've done written down in this same detached, warts-and-all style...
At certain points I related to Calloway so much I felt I could have written parts of this book myself; at others I felt completely alienated from the narrative to the point that I found myself thinking 'surely things like this don't actually happen/people don't actually behave like this in real life'; at others I just felt really sorry for her. What I think I came to realise most of all over the course of reading this was that you rarely see writing this embarrassingly honest, and it really highlights how different and surprising the experiences of the individual can be. I kind of agree with those who've said anyone could have written this, but I don't think that necessarily has to be a bad thing or a reason to dismiss the book. In fact, I think it's a big part of what makes it interesting: so few people write about their life in this fashion, especially so publicly, that it seems fresh and different. Although whether you'll agree with that depends on your perspective, and what you're used to reading. Personally, I have encountered writing like Calloway's 'privately' but rarely in the public sphere or in widely read fiction/autobiographical pieces. It does very much feel like you're reading the thoughts of someone who is still processing and coming to terms with the effects of the very events she is describing (another way in which Calloway's book is very similar to those Livejournal posts of old); it even seems that you can sense Calloway maturing as the narrative progresses.
A few times in the book, Calloway writes about not being able to articulate what she really wants to say, and it feels as though the reader is expected to either infer this meaning from what surrounds it, or draw their own conclusions, like the critics whose vicious comments she displays in one chapter, superimposed over a gallery of her own 'selfies'. I find it similarly difficult to articulate everything this book made me feel and think. I found it so interesting, but can't really say I enjoyed reading it, as such - I sometimes found it quite exhausting/stressful, and that's the primary reason I haven't given it a higher rating. It's more of a piece of work to analyse and assess than it is a novel/biography/collection of stories to take pleasure in reading. In that, it is arguably closer to true art than most books. I may not have found this to be a technically 'good' book but it is certainly one of the most thought-provoking things I have read in a while, and I will follow Calloway's future progress as a writer with great interest.
I didn't really know anything about Marie Calloway before I read this book. I'd heard her name, and I had heard of her well-known story 'Adrien Brody' (though I hadn't read it), but I was (and remain) largely ignorant of the minimalist literary 'scene' she is part of. I mention this because it means I can't really assess what purpose did i serve in your life in context, only on its own merits as a standalone piece of work.
Calloway's writing is matter-of-fact, honest, often clinical and very candid. In a collage of short stories/autobiographical pieces, excerpts from conversations and Facebook screenshots, she describes a number of experiences, which range from a fling with a writer who is in a relationship (the subject of 'Adrien Brody'), forays into sex work in London, a threesome with internet acquaintances, and experimentation with BDSM (short, sharp excerpts which must be about the same person she describes in this article), to details of the start of her fledgling career as a writer, primarily her anxieties around whether she deserves success and attention, as well as dealing with the accompanying criticism. As she uses a pseudonym and changes people's names (although it's not much of an attempt to disguise them; it took me seconds on Google to identify the real 'Adrien Brody') it's technically possible to see these pieces as fiction, but in the act of reading them it is near-impossible to see them as anything other than non-fiction.
It's interesting to see Calloway and her peers hailed as the first wave of writers from the internet generation, because parts of this book reminded me a lot of stuff I used to write and frequently saw others write back in the day on Livejournal, Diaryland et al (more than a decade ago in some cases). Interesting to note how in those days, online journals had a very confessional feel and were more like no-holds-barred diaries, whereas now that everyone (not just the weird kids) is all over social media, blogging has become a much more impersonal, almost corporate thing, and writing like Calloway's is again regarded as unusually frank. Before this book I'd forgotten all about it, but I was reminded of a similarly candid and numb bad-casual-sex story I wrote up in my Livejournal years ago, which elicited a mixed response from my 'audience'. (I really wish I could find it for comparison, but I think the only copy is a printed version which is buried in a folder somewhere, probably at my mum's house.) I remember my friends writing about all sorts of sordid experiences in a similarly straightforward, if not quite so detached, style. Anyway, my thought was that it's quite easy to read what purpose did i serve in your life and think 'absolutely nobody would ever do that' or 'thank god I haven't had sexual experiences like that' but, if you imagine things that have happened to you and things you've done written down in this same detached, warts-and-all style...
At certain points I related to Calloway so much I felt I could have written parts of this book myself; at others I felt completely alienated from the narrative to the point that I found myself thinking 'surely things like this don't actually happen/people don't actually behave like this in real life'; at others I just felt really sorry for her. What I think I came to realise most of all over the course of reading this was that you rarely see writing this embarrassingly honest, and it really highlights how different and surprising the experiences of the individual can be. I kind of agree with those who've said anyone could have written this, but I don't think that necessarily has to be a bad thing or a reason to dismiss the book. In fact, I think it's a big part of what makes it interesting: so few people write about their life in this fashion, especially so publicly, that it seems fresh and different. Although whether you'll agree with that depends on your perspective, and what you're used to reading. Personally, I have encountered writing like Calloway's 'privately' but rarely in the public sphere or in widely read fiction/autobiographical pieces. It does very much feel like you're reading the thoughts of someone who is still processing and coming to terms with the effects of the very events she is describing (another way in which Calloway's book is very similar to those Livejournal posts of old); it even seems that you can sense Calloway maturing as the narrative progresses.
A few times in the book, Calloway writes about not being able to articulate what she really wants to say, and it feels as though the reader is expected to either infer this meaning from what surrounds it, or draw their own conclusions, like the critics whose vicious comments she displays in one chapter, superimposed over a gallery of her own 'selfies'. I find it similarly difficult to articulate everything this book made me feel and think. I found it so interesting, but can't really say I enjoyed reading it, as such - I sometimes found it quite exhausting/stressful, and that's the primary reason I haven't given it a higher rating. It's more of a piece of work to analyse and assess than it is a novel/biography/collection of stories to take pleasure in reading. In that, it is arguably closer to true art than most books. I may not have found this to be a technically 'good' book but it is certainly one of the most thought-provoking things I have read in a while, and I will follow Calloway's future progress as a writer with great interest.
Read
January 17, 2017This is a good book that's rather painful to read. I think it will pose a challenge to most readers, unless you take the obvious easy approach--which is to dismiss it--or unless you are one of the people who only like to read books that you can relate to, and you do somehow relate to this one (if so... sorry).
To me the book is alien and alienating, but it portrays a person that needs to be portrayed. It has truthiness.
Speaking of the easy solution, which is to dismiss this book, I almost did dismiss it after the first couple of chapters/stories. In thinking about why I wanted to dismiss it, part of the reason was that I felt the author had made some kind of mistake in choosing not to give her book (or her character) "personality." I understood that this was a choice of sorts... or to put it in another way, I didn't want the book to be a histrionic mess or to "have a point" exactly, and I knew that the author was mainly interested in portraying, rather than commenting on... but I wasn't sure, for some reason, that this was right. I wanted to say this seems as though it should be compelling, but it's not. (Also, there is personality to come--or perhaps it's better to say personality disorder--and what I found I liked least, initially, was anything that seemed to answer my doubts by attempting to render a more transparent "point").
By the time I got to the chapter/story about the Irish photographer, I finally came around to accepting the book on its own terms.
There's no dazzling word-play in this book. One can never know whether the author chose to be reserved, or if this is just... her. But it doesn't matter. The book--being a kind of meta-fiction in that it writes about itself, and invites confusion between the author, the character, the narrative voice, and contemplation of the relationship between author and text--seemingly tends to provoke a criticism leveled at the author as a human being, and a challenge to the legitimacy of whatever authorial intent there is. Yet authorial intent is mostly opaque here, and I think it's a huge mistake to try to read this book to puzzle out who is the person behind the book.
Look, the thing is, the character of Marie Calloway exhibits a kind of psychology that's extremely enigmatic, one that she herself will never penetrate, and you the reader will never come to a satisfying, sensible, complete understanding of it. So you've just got the cold and rather unsettling facts to deal with, and those facts are enacted on a stage where the principal actions are sexual degradation, self-obliteration, disassociation, carnality, dehumanization. And there will be words. And those words will be clumsy, awkward, flailing about, creating a cloud of confusion by offering occasional "insights" which are false, attempts to rationalize which are false. Look, what you're going to get is dicks and semen and a girl forced to eat vomit, and a humiliating exposure of a writer's anxiety to be some kind of genius when she feels stupid, and the discovery there's no love to be had there. And a hell of a lot of blame falling on the stupid bitch who whored herself (And I don't want to think about her that way, but hateful critics do, some fans do too, and she certainly aims at times to make you think that way too. How else can her degradation be complete?). Well, that's not very nice, but that's what the book will deliver, and you'll have to find a way to cope with it. Or not.
Meanwhile, on some level I want to believe that there is no Marie Calloway... that this book wasn't written... that it is a kind of ghost that spontaneously generated out of a sick culture because the book had to be... spontaneous generation akin to the birth of maggots from rotting meat. But since spontaneous generation has been deemed by the egg-heads of science to be an invalid theory, then I guess there must be an actual author behind this. Let's see what's delivered in the next volume.
To me the book is alien and alienating, but it portrays a person that needs to be portrayed. It has truthiness.
Speaking of the easy solution, which is to dismiss this book, I almost did dismiss it after the first couple of chapters/stories. In thinking about why I wanted to dismiss it, part of the reason was that I felt the author had made some kind of mistake in choosing not to give her book (or her character) "personality." I understood that this was a choice of sorts... or to put it in another way, I didn't want the book to be a histrionic mess or to "have a point" exactly, and I knew that the author was mainly interested in portraying, rather than commenting on... but I wasn't sure, for some reason, that this was right. I wanted to say this seems as though it should be compelling, but it's not. (Also, there is personality to come--or perhaps it's better to say personality disorder--and what I found I liked least, initially, was anything that seemed to answer my doubts by attempting to render a more transparent "point").
By the time I got to the chapter/story about the Irish photographer, I finally came around to accepting the book on its own terms.
There's no dazzling word-play in this book. One can never know whether the author chose to be reserved, or if this is just... her. But it doesn't matter. The book--being a kind of meta-fiction in that it writes about itself, and invites confusion between the author, the character, the narrative voice, and contemplation of the relationship between author and text--seemingly tends to provoke a criticism leveled at the author as a human being, and a challenge to the legitimacy of whatever authorial intent there is. Yet authorial intent is mostly opaque here, and I think it's a huge mistake to try to read this book to puzzle out who is the person behind the book.
Look, the thing is, the character of Marie Calloway exhibits a kind of psychology that's extremely enigmatic, one that she herself will never penetrate, and you the reader will never come to a satisfying, sensible, complete understanding of it. So you've just got the cold and rather unsettling facts to deal with, and those facts are enacted on a stage where the principal actions are sexual degradation, self-obliteration, disassociation, carnality, dehumanization. And there will be words. And those words will be clumsy, awkward, flailing about, creating a cloud of confusion by offering occasional "insights" which are false, attempts to rationalize which are false. Look, what you're going to get is dicks and semen and a girl forced to eat vomit, and a humiliating exposure of a writer's anxiety to be some kind of genius when she feels stupid, and the discovery there's no love to be had there. And a hell of a lot of blame falling on the stupid bitch who whored herself (And I don't want to think about her that way, but hateful critics do, some fans do too, and she certainly aims at times to make you think that way too. How else can her degradation be complete?). Well, that's not very nice, but that's what the book will deliver, and you'll have to find a way to cope with it. Or not.
Meanwhile, on some level I want to believe that there is no Marie Calloway... that this book wasn't written... that it is a kind of ghost that spontaneously generated out of a sick culture because the book had to be... spontaneous generation akin to the birth of maggots from rotting meat. But since spontaneous generation has been deemed by the egg-heads of science to be an invalid theory, then I guess there must be an actual author behind this. Let's see what's delivered in the next volume.
September 5, 2013
It's dangerous for me to comment on this. Some reviewers (see Sarah Nicole Prickett's contemptuous attack on Stephen Marche's Esquire review) are clear that no one male and over 30 should be allowed to like, dislike, or comment on Marie Calloway's work or (presumed) life. Nonetheless, I've been reading Calloway's work since the first web furor over her "Adrien Brody", and I did rather like "What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life".
The "alt-lit"/Tao Lin style that seems to turn so many readers off isn't a Millennial discovery. Let's just note that. It has a history that stretches back at least to Joan Didion's work--- that affectless, chill, blank voice. You either like that or you don't. I rather like it--- when it works, it's a powerful voice. And it does work here.
Yes--- sex is a major framework for the book, and Calloway writes about putting herself in sexual situations that are always some combination of hot, dangerous, fraught, and strangely/bleakly funny. And Stephen Marche is right--- she went into them as chances to write about them later. Her narration is disturbing and intriguing in equal parts, and the FB chat sections between chapters are actually hilarious.
I won't try to analyze Calloway as a phenomenon; I won't raise the issue of "micro-fame". I will say that the character she's created for herself is one that has a strong literary history, and that the stories she tells are worth reading. Read this, It's very much worth your time.
The "alt-lit"/Tao Lin style that seems to turn so many readers off isn't a Millennial discovery. Let's just note that. It has a history that stretches back at least to Joan Didion's work--- that affectless, chill, blank voice. You either like that or you don't. I rather like it--- when it works, it's a powerful voice. And it does work here.
Yes--- sex is a major framework for the book, and Calloway writes about putting herself in sexual situations that are always some combination of hot, dangerous, fraught, and strangely/bleakly funny. And Stephen Marche is right--- she went into them as chances to write about them later. Her narration is disturbing and intriguing in equal parts, and the FB chat sections between chapters are actually hilarious.
I won't try to analyze Calloway as a phenomenon; I won't raise the issue of "micro-fame". I will say that the character she's created for herself is one that has a strong literary history, and that the stories she tells are worth reading. Read this, It's very much worth your time.
December 29, 2014
I got into Marie Calloway last year, because of Momus. (If I were 15 years younger it probably would have been the other way round.) The flat style of the Muumuu House / alt-lit school of internet-focused writers isn't one I especially like. So when I say "got into", I mean I became somewhat fascinated by her, not in the most enjoyable of ways, because she reminded me of aspects of my younger self and because the debate surrounding her, and her responses to it raise some interesting questions.
1) A review as if this were fiction [3.5]
(This binary concept of fiction/ non-fiction is old-fashioned and artificial and is a load of rubbish when related to several books I've enjoyed this year, including Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose sequence, The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman by Bruce Robinson, and Alfred de Musset's Confession of a Child of the Century. Yet by re-naming the characters and being open about the fictionalising of some events, those works are definitely classified as fiction. Calloway appears to be very public about certain aspects of her life, but less so about her writing methods, with only a little commentary here. I feel that considering Calloway's book as fiction is a way to get past the idea of reviewing her as a person which the current top review on here acknowledges much of the public discourse around her has done and which has, on the evidence of this book - in particular one email from a friend combined with the "Criticism" chapter - hurt her a lot.)
It seems, to me, pretty innovative - though there are great swathes of new writing I'm unaware of or haven't read, including publications by the rest of the Muumuu House crowd. It's far from the first time a writer has included emails or screencap pictures but the extent here really does transmit a life lived online, and especially via sites favoured by younger people: a kind of organised chaos of innumerable contacts and moments of upset. The world created by a traumatised young digital-native woman who keeps most people at a distance and lets a few become, rapidly, very close. Who experiments with little comment or consideration with formats of sexual relations now frequently mentioned in the media: the graduate who becomes a call-girl to pay off her debts; the female submissive. It's about how the internet can accelerate and widen access to such avenues. Not that a few people didn't always get into them quite young, but it was perfectly possible once upon a time for troubled middle-class kids like her only to know factually that such things existed - they seemed dark and distant - and only age and experience would lead one to run into people who'd been part of them.
The internet has also, more than ever, made it possible for younger people to connect with older works and ideas and she juxtaposes the mostly unpleasant experiences she has with men alongside quotations from feminists who wrote long before she was born ... the two combine to confirm the sadly negative view of men which her earlier experiences began. Hers is a heteronormative, gender-binary world in which men have power and women are angry victims, which does seem at odds with the very 21st century youth universe otherwise on display here: where are all the friends who do queer studies and the Tumblr gender-benders and bi-switches? I find it odd that the narrator never delves into this side of life. But it's not really a story about women and men anywhere near so much as a story about trauma and attachment styles.
I am reminded also of my younger self so caught up in post-traumatic ways of feeling and relating that I didn't really consider the alternative views which didn't strike a chord with me. (Unlike the narrator I didn't tend to feel particularly socially or intellecually identified as "female": it only really felt relevant when I was with straight men I was attracted to. And I've never been at all negative about men as a class; I like them and have a very positive view of most of the friendships I have/had with them. Though I did have very fixed ideas about what they wanted in sexual and romantic relationships (a couple of which the narrator has too) - formed from media as I simply didn't know any real ones to form any other ideas from until I was a student. The only useful generalisation about men I've learned in the intervening decade and more-than-a-half is that men, like women, and people who reject those gender labels, are all different. It rarely helps to approach people with templates and assumptions; get to know them individually.)
Quite a few of my recent reviews have contained personal material, but in this one, it's a more considered choice than in any of the others. In response to Calloway's own mode of writing and to a review here from the books designer suggesting I think the most interesting way to read what purpose did i serve in your life is to "implicate" yourself in the reading, not Marie Calloway. What does it make you think about yourself?
The dull flatness of the style unites with occasional mentions of past trauma to gave the feeling - or non-feeling - of numbness (including most indicatively when the narrator says that past events made her physically unable to feel some things, and she says she dissociates ... this must have been severe, way worse than anything I've ever experienced). The numbness - and the occasional moments of overwhelm - gives a very authentic sadness to the story: a life lived between random male conquests (conquests by whom she feels conquered and laid waste) who provide attention, rudderless, un-anchored by any secure attachment to anyone. Trying to find a secure base in abstract intellectual ideas, but those sorts of ideas don't really do that. She always seems to feel discarded; she mentions no experience of having to dump someone else, which would have made her feel more equal and perhaps give her insight into the experiences of those leaving her. (The uncomprehending resentment and self-commodification of the title seems related to this, as well as to the idea of book and Calloway as public product.) The saddest thing is that she hardly ever seems to be having any fun despite all this sex; there's so little real sensuality and practically no laughing, only fear.
Towards the end she makes a connection which really gives an arc to the story: "I was really scared of being assigned that label [a girl with daddy issues] so I shied away from discussing or even allowing myself to think about those things. But I realize this is ... kind of at the core of my whole project"
This book wasn't fun to read, even if it was compulsive. As mentioned above, I am interested in reading tales of such lives in literary mode. The narrator of what purpose is a brilliant portrait of someone still within her time of trauma aftershocks rather than looking back on it. But I prefer reading the story as looked back on, with synthesis, psychological integration, wise reflection, elaboration, humour and most of all a strong writing style. (The author's blog shows a quotation from Zadie Smith on the subject of narrative voice - but Smith's style is still so much more stylish and alive.)
I could also see a fiction-writing Calloway as a critique of this particular corner of the literary world: one which likes to think of itself as more modern and forward looking but in which the easiest way for a female writer to get noticed appears to be through sex, nudity and exploitability. The mainstream literary establishment, by contrast, looks much more egalitarian and to judge on its own ideas of intellectual merit; somehow I don't think Hilary Mantel won the Booker that way.
2) Notes relating to this as non-fiction / memoir / elaborated memoir
When I was at school, if I felt lazy about creative writing homework, I would sometimes write a story featuring myself and people I knew; the plot was more or less invented, the characters were not. The teachers thought this was rather brilliant, but it just meant that a) I knew from reading the papers a lot that this was something modern writers did and b) I knew didn't really know how to invent characters well. (Something I actually only understood recently after reading A.L. Kennedy's On Writing.) I don't honestly know if all writers are being lazy and glib when they create such work. But because of those experiences of mine, I tend to think so in the back of my mind unless they bring brilliant style, structure or humour to it.
what purpose sort of has an unusual experimental style, but it's also one that any person could cobble together in a few hours using some long blog posts and a bunch of chopped up screencaps and quotes in different font sizes. Or does it feel like a cliche because its motifs are so familiar, rather than because they're commonplace in books?
It's a response to modern web culture, a 21st century version of the epistolary, but the fragmented bits and pieces of an online life make real synthesis into narrative a greater aesthetic challenge than when stories always took much more coherent forms. I'm just old fashioned though.
Also, I think it's unethical to print bits of other people's emails and chat conversations and other private interactions in substantial detail, but this, a norm I feel is accepted among all my various friends, itself appears to be an old-fashioned boundary to the alt-lit crowd and to plenty of younger web users. I don't like it.
[Have now read that she got permission from friends. Did she from all sources? Can't tell... possibly, actually when considering the lesson she learnt after the "Adrien Brody" scandal. But there's something uncomfortable about the sight of it still, as people weren't necessarily writing them in the knowledge they'd be published. But that might be too rigid and judgemental a view.]
I can't deny that, like thousands of other readers, there's stuff I wish I could say to Calloway. Her "Criticism" chapter of quotes and screencaps includes one of the subset I'd belong to: "detailed advice from older women who've sort of been there and got over it a bit". I'd want to give her a reading list of a bunch of the most compassionate and intelligent books on trauma and attachment and responses to it I've encountered, by authors such as Daniel Siegel, Babette Rothschild and Bessel van der Kolk, Francine Shapiro, Carl Rogers and many more. Stuff about ditching this black and white heteronormative gender binary that really doesn't have to be part of the life of a middle-class creative person in the West (lucky as we are), that shows how equally women are actually regarded in such a context, rather than these delvings into a radical feminism that seems to bear no relation to life here. That having a period of deliberately not relating to anyone on a sexual level can make all the other human connections seem valuable in the way they didn't used to. Stuff about being more in control of kink, learning to feel what she truly enjoys and doesn't, and that she can have agentic choice and care for her safety, regardless of whether past experiences are among the reasons she's drawn to it (though I wonder if she may go on to reject all kink, not just the extreme stuff in the penultimate chapter, for a while, or permanently). Then there's really good writing that shows how art and creativity can be employed as a response to such experiences and which shows how much more it can say than the reductive labelling she clearly fears from pop-psychology, how it can be an eloquent conquest of such ideas.
(I could list a number of motivations behind this, some of which will already be apparent in what I've written; the other being my frustration that due to physical ill-health I had to discontinue formal study of psychology & counselling - and any work where I could have used what I'd learned and read before I started trying to actually get qualifications related to it - and wishing I could give the knowledge to others who participate more in the world, especially those who remind me in any way of myself...)
But for all that one can look at Calloway's book and blog and see her in various states of undress and hear intimate details of her sex life, there's so much we possibly don't see. IS her life so centred around these random men? What about all the friendships and connections and conversations we don't see? Who can tell, except her, what they are like?
By the looks of things, Calloway wants to be a public intellectual. She creates such personal work but it's prefaced by a Kate Millet quote (thereby implying "the personal is political") and she takes part in debates on how writing is seen. But I honestly think that debate misses the point a bit. There are many well-respected women writers out there producing serious books which win prizes. They are not at all rare in the same way as female film directors. Male "confessional" style writing makes a stir and gets described as narcissistic: look at Augusten Burroughs or Karl Ove Knausgaard. This isn't a male/female issue. There is stil a partial separation of the personal or sensational and the intellectual in the literary world. I think Calloway's really missing out and excluding herself by not being more overtly intellectual in her writing in this book. But hey, that's her call.
Much of Calloway's criticism of her critics appears to focus, ultimately, around the idea of agency and validity. The language of "cannot be controlled" is hip young rebel stuff but it's also a protest against the feeling of powerlessness that stems from trauma (like the more overt "you pathologize my emotions to invalidate my reality" on her Tumblr) and dismissing her and labelling her as she says, feeds into that powerlessness and traumatic memory. A liberal / libertarian / person-centred response of acknowledging her right to agency even if she is doing things she might be embarrassed about in future (or exploring ideas we disagree with such as radical separatist feminism) is what's right and required. Reflections near the end of the book and on her blog show someone in process in the Rogerian sense, connecting past and present and wondering how to change things. It makes me curious about what she'll say and who she'll be a decade or two.
(For a minute I was surprised to read this interview from 2011 in which she stated she'd already done a lot of therapy. But then these things go in layers and stages, much like a plane gradually circling in from an infinite height...there nearly always is more to do.)
Full marks for making me think, for being a hype phenomenon, but this is y'know, a book, and the writing style itself isn't phenomenal.
[Further comments in the "reading progress" section.]
1) A review as if this were fiction [3.5]
(This binary concept of fiction/ non-fiction is old-fashioned and artificial and is a load of rubbish when related to several books I've enjoyed this year, including Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose sequence, The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman by Bruce Robinson, and Alfred de Musset's Confession of a Child of the Century. Yet by re-naming the characters and being open about the fictionalising of some events, those works are definitely classified as fiction. Calloway appears to be very public about certain aspects of her life, but less so about her writing methods, with only a little commentary here. I feel that considering Calloway's book as fiction is a way to get past the idea of reviewing her as a person which the current top review on here acknowledges much of the public discourse around her has done and which has, on the evidence of this book - in particular one email from a friend combined with the "Criticism" chapter - hurt her a lot.)
It seems, to me, pretty innovative - though there are great swathes of new writing I'm unaware of or haven't read, including publications by the rest of the Muumuu House crowd. It's far from the first time a writer has included emails or screencap pictures but the extent here really does transmit a life lived online, and especially via sites favoured by younger people: a kind of organised chaos of innumerable contacts and moments of upset. The world created by a traumatised young digital-native woman who keeps most people at a distance and lets a few become, rapidly, very close. Who experiments with little comment or consideration with formats of sexual relations now frequently mentioned in the media: the graduate who becomes a call-girl to pay off her debts; the female submissive. It's about how the internet can accelerate and widen access to such avenues. Not that a few people didn't always get into them quite young, but it was perfectly possible once upon a time for troubled middle-class kids like her only to know factually that such things existed - they seemed dark and distant - and only age and experience would lead one to run into people who'd been part of them.
The internet has also, more than ever, made it possible for younger people to connect with older works and ideas and she juxtaposes the mostly unpleasant experiences she has with men alongside quotations from feminists who wrote long before she was born ... the two combine to confirm the sadly negative view of men which her earlier experiences began. Hers is a heteronormative, gender-binary world in which men have power and women are angry victims, which does seem at odds with the very 21st century youth universe otherwise on display here: where are all the friends who do queer studies and the Tumblr gender-benders and bi-switches? I find it odd that the narrator never delves into this side of life. But it's not really a story about women and men anywhere near so much as a story about trauma and attachment styles.
I am reminded also of my younger self so caught up in post-traumatic ways of feeling and relating that I didn't really consider the alternative views which didn't strike a chord with me. (Unlike the narrator I didn't tend to feel particularly socially or intellecually identified as "female": it only really felt relevant when I was with straight men I was attracted to. And I've never been at all negative about men as a class; I like them and have a very positive view of most of the friendships I have/had with them. Though I did have very fixed ideas about what they wanted in sexual and romantic relationships (a couple of which the narrator has too) - formed from media as I simply didn't know any real ones to form any other ideas from until I was a student. The only useful generalisation about men I've learned in the intervening decade and more-than-a-half is that men, like women, and people who reject those gender labels, are all different. It rarely helps to approach people with templates and assumptions; get to know them individually.)
Quite a few of my recent reviews have contained personal material, but in this one, it's a more considered choice than in any of the others. In response to Calloway's own mode of writing and to a review here from the books designer suggesting I think the most interesting way to read what purpose did i serve in your life is to "implicate" yourself in the reading, not Marie Calloway. What does it make you think about yourself?
The dull flatness of the style unites with occasional mentions of past trauma to gave the feeling - or non-feeling - of numbness (including most indicatively when the narrator says that past events made her physically unable to feel some things, and she says she dissociates ... this must have been severe, way worse than anything I've ever experienced). The numbness - and the occasional moments of overwhelm - gives a very authentic sadness to the story: a life lived between random male conquests (conquests by whom she feels conquered and laid waste) who provide attention, rudderless, un-anchored by any secure attachment to anyone. Trying to find a secure base in abstract intellectual ideas, but those sorts of ideas don't really do that. She always seems to feel discarded; she mentions no experience of having to dump someone else, which would have made her feel more equal and perhaps give her insight into the experiences of those leaving her. (The uncomprehending resentment and self-commodification of the title seems related to this, as well as to the idea of book and Calloway as public product.) The saddest thing is that she hardly ever seems to be having any fun despite all this sex; there's so little real sensuality and practically no laughing, only fear.
Towards the end she makes a connection which really gives an arc to the story: "I was really scared of being assigned that label [a girl with daddy issues] so I shied away from discussing or even allowing myself to think about those things. But I realize this is ... kind of at the core of my whole project"
This book wasn't fun to read, even if it was compulsive. As mentioned above, I am interested in reading tales of such lives in literary mode. The narrator of what purpose is a brilliant portrait of someone still within her time of trauma aftershocks rather than looking back on it. But I prefer reading the story as looked back on, with synthesis, psychological integration, wise reflection, elaboration, humour and most of all a strong writing style. (The author's blog shows a quotation from Zadie Smith on the subject of narrative voice - but Smith's style is still so much more stylish and alive.)
I could also see a fiction-writing Calloway as a critique of this particular corner of the literary world: one which likes to think of itself as more modern and forward looking but in which the easiest way for a female writer to get noticed appears to be through sex, nudity and exploitability. The mainstream literary establishment, by contrast, looks much more egalitarian and to judge on its own ideas of intellectual merit; somehow I don't think Hilary Mantel won the Booker that way.
2) Notes relating to this as non-fiction / memoir / elaborated memoir
When I was at school, if I felt lazy about creative writing homework, I would sometimes write a story featuring myself and people I knew; the plot was more or less invented, the characters were not. The teachers thought this was rather brilliant, but it just meant that a) I knew from reading the papers a lot that this was something modern writers did and b) I knew didn't really know how to invent characters well. (Something I actually only understood recently after reading A.L. Kennedy's On Writing.) I don't honestly know if all writers are being lazy and glib when they create such work. But because of those experiences of mine, I tend to think so in the back of my mind unless they bring brilliant style, structure or humour to it.
what purpose sort of has an unusual experimental style, but it's also one that any person could cobble together in a few hours using some long blog posts and a bunch of chopped up screencaps and quotes in different font sizes. Or does it feel like a cliche because its motifs are so familiar, rather than because they're commonplace in books?
It's a response to modern web culture, a 21st century version of the epistolary, but the fragmented bits and pieces of an online life make real synthesis into narrative a greater aesthetic challenge than when stories always took much more coherent forms. I'm just old fashioned though.
Also, I think it's unethical to print bits of other people's emails and chat conversations and other private interactions in substantial detail, but this, a norm I feel is accepted among all my various friends, itself appears to be an old-fashioned boundary to the alt-lit crowd and to plenty of younger web users. I don't like it.
[Have now read that she got permission from friends. Did she from all sources? Can't tell... possibly, actually when considering the lesson she learnt after the "Adrien Brody" scandal. But there's something uncomfortable about the sight of it still, as people weren't necessarily writing them in the knowledge they'd be published. But that might be too rigid and judgemental a view.]
I can't deny that, like thousands of other readers, there's stuff I wish I could say to Calloway. Her "Criticism" chapter of quotes and screencaps includes one of the subset I'd belong to: "detailed advice from older women who've sort of been there and got over it a bit". I'd want to give her a reading list of a bunch of the most compassionate and intelligent books on trauma and attachment and responses to it I've encountered, by authors such as Daniel Siegel, Babette Rothschild and Bessel van der Kolk, Francine Shapiro, Carl Rogers and many more. Stuff about ditching this black and white heteronormative gender binary that really doesn't have to be part of the life of a middle-class creative person in the West (lucky as we are), that shows how equally women are actually regarded in such a context, rather than these delvings into a radical feminism that seems to bear no relation to life here. That having a period of deliberately not relating to anyone on a sexual level can make all the other human connections seem valuable in the way they didn't used to. Stuff about being more in control of kink, learning to feel what she truly enjoys and doesn't, and that she can have agentic choice and care for her safety, regardless of whether past experiences are among the reasons she's drawn to it (though I wonder if she may go on to reject all kink, not just the extreme stuff in the penultimate chapter, for a while, or permanently). Then there's really good writing that shows how art and creativity can be employed as a response to such experiences and which shows how much more it can say than the reductive labelling she clearly fears from pop-psychology, how it can be an eloquent conquest of such ideas.
(I could list a number of motivations behind this, some of which will already be apparent in what I've written; the other being my frustration that due to physical ill-health I had to discontinue formal study of psychology & counselling - and any work where I could have used what I'd learned and read before I started trying to actually get qualifications related to it - and wishing I could give the knowledge to others who participate more in the world, especially those who remind me in any way of myself...)
But for all that one can look at Calloway's book and blog and see her in various states of undress and hear intimate details of her sex life, there's so much we possibly don't see. IS her life so centred around these random men? What about all the friendships and connections and conversations we don't see? Who can tell, except her, what they are like?
By the looks of things, Calloway wants to be a public intellectual. She creates such personal work but it's prefaced by a Kate Millet quote (thereby implying "the personal is political") and she takes part in debates on how writing is seen. But I honestly think that debate misses the point a bit. There are many well-respected women writers out there producing serious books which win prizes. They are not at all rare in the same way as female film directors. Male "confessional" style writing makes a stir and gets described as narcissistic: look at Augusten Burroughs or Karl Ove Knausgaard. This isn't a male/female issue. There is stil a partial separation of the personal or sensational and the intellectual in the literary world. I think Calloway's really missing out and excluding herself by not being more overtly intellectual in her writing in this book. But hey, that's her call.
Much of Calloway's criticism of her critics appears to focus, ultimately, around the idea of agency and validity. The language of "cannot be controlled" is hip young rebel stuff but it's also a protest against the feeling of powerlessness that stems from trauma (like the more overt "you pathologize my emotions to invalidate my reality" on her Tumblr) and dismissing her and labelling her as she says, feeds into that powerlessness and traumatic memory. A liberal / libertarian / person-centred response of acknowledging her right to agency even if she is doing things she might be embarrassed about in future (or exploring ideas we disagree with such as radical separatist feminism) is what's right and required. Reflections near the end of the book and on her blog show someone in process in the Rogerian sense, connecting past and present and wondering how to change things. It makes me curious about what she'll say and who she'll be a decade or two.
(For a minute I was surprised to read this interview from 2011 in which she stated she'd already done a lot of therapy. But then these things go in layers and stages, much like a plane gradually circling in from an infinite height...there nearly always is more to do.)
Full marks for making me think, for being a hype phenomenon, but this is y'know, a book, and the writing style itself isn't phenomenal.
[Further comments in the "reading progress" section.]
April 11, 2013
The conversation about this book seems to tend toward (and against) who the author is, what is she doing, how she is failing -- even as the stories and collages complicate that by showing (1) how cruel such a reading is, (2) how unqualified most of us are to offer such judgments, and (3 and most importantly) how off-base and unnecessary it is to consider the author of this book at all. Case in point, she doesn't comment on what readers say about her in "Criticism."
I think the most interesting way to read what purpose did i serve in your life is to "implicate" yourself in the reading, not Marie Calloway. What does it make you think about yourself? As its designer (as it were), I've stared at this book for ~150 hours, naked collages and all, and I've gone to some dark places, been disgusted, and I'm glad about it.
One of the things I've thought about is how it's going to frustrate me when people talk about this book, because whatever its merits or lacks, it is the most provocative book published in America since Madonna's Sex. This is not going to bore anybody. We will relish talking about it, as is our wicked and stupid nature. It's not interesting to talk about provocative books, though. Who cares about your opinion of Marie Calloway or even her writing? What new things do you have to say? what purpose did i serve in your life fails at the water cooler, but I think it succeeds if you let it mess you up. It succeeds because of the things it makes you want to NOT talk about.
I think the most interesting way to read what purpose did i serve in your life is to "implicate" yourself in the reading, not Marie Calloway. What does it make you think about yourself? As its designer (as it were), I've stared at this book for ~150 hours, naked collages and all, and I've gone to some dark places, been disgusted, and I'm glad about it.
One of the things I've thought about is how it's going to frustrate me when people talk about this book, because whatever its merits or lacks, it is the most provocative book published in America since Madonna's Sex. This is not going to bore anybody. We will relish talking about it, as is our wicked and stupid nature. It's not interesting to talk about provocative books, though. Who cares about your opinion of Marie Calloway or even her writing? What new things do you have to say? what purpose did i serve in your life fails at the water cooler, but I think it succeeds if you let it mess you up. It succeeds because of the things it makes you want to NOT talk about.
Read
June 27, 2013I don't understand how anyone could deem this 'pornographic'. I don't know. In "sex work, experience one", she writes about feeling relief at the dude's "two pump chump" swiftness. Like, that's all I would think one would need to arrive at some semblance of 'getting it'.
(...I'm trying to write this, to talk about this book in the way it deserves, without hemorrhaging personal information, and it's hard.)
It's very strange to me, the reactions to her work as if she's pushing some third wave sex-empowerment agenda. Or 'whoring it up'for fame, or whatever.
Uh, because she definitely is not.
When I read an interview with Marie Calloway in which she said she identified more as a sex negative feminist, I thought, GIRL I KNOW. But really, the sex in her work is far more complicated than that, than sliding toward an end of one spectrum or another. There are no ends, there are no planes. I feel weird talking about 'Marie' as if I know the author's intentions, or her thoughts. I feel my mind nesting subjectivites to such a degree that they funnel into a compound version of objectification. I do know that her work is more complex than it's being cast.
"...Sex is often transactional..."
And that's it, really.
Also, I think this interview is important.
(...I'm trying to write this, to talk about this book in the way it deserves, without hemorrhaging personal information, and it's hard.)
It's very strange to me, the reactions to her work as if she's pushing some third wave sex-empowerment agenda. Or 'whoring it up'for fame, or whatever.
Uh, because she definitely is not.
When I read an interview with Marie Calloway in which she said she identified more as a sex negative feminist, I thought, GIRL I KNOW. But really, the sex in her work is far more complicated than that, than sliding toward an end of one spectrum or another. There are no ends, there are no planes. I feel weird talking about 'Marie' as if I know the author's intentions, or her thoughts. I feel my mind nesting subjectivites to such a degree that they funnel into a compound version of objectification. I do know that her work is more complex than it's being cast.
"...Sex is often transactional..."
And that's it, really.
Also, I think this interview is important.
September 21, 2013
“Hemingway was such a whore.��� This is one sentence you’ll never hear even though Hemingway, like most modern novelists, wrote explicitly about his sex life in autobiographical prose that was very loosely veiled fiction. Like, it wasn’t so much a veil as a thin piece of leaky latex. But when contemporary women write about their sex lives without the pretense of fiction, they don’t get their books added to university syllabi. They’re rarely called daring or profound. They’re usually called narcissistic slutbags—or worse. Marie Calloway’s publication of an essay about her one-night stand with an older intellectual made her the manic pixie poster child for millennial self-involvement. Sadly, the collective Internet’s most common reaction to her and her work has been STOP WRITING YOU STUPID WHORE. The Internet, it turns out, is kind of an asshole.
Calloway’s debut essay collection details how she lost her virginity, how she became a bourgie sex worker in London, and how she had a threesome with two men—illustrated throughout with sexts, dirty Facebook chats, and blurred photos of her naked body. As this description suggests, it’s kind of a mess. While it’s certainly self serious, repetitive (we get it, you like to be humiliated), and often REALLY disturbing, her deceptively simple writing is onto something. She grapples with the contemporary—often technologically enabled—desire to reveal oneself, to make oneself vulnerable. Unlike generations of men who used the word “novel” as a shield against vulnerability, Calloway is—in more ways than one—standing naked in front of us all.
Calloway’s debut essay collection details how she lost her virginity, how she became a bourgie sex worker in London, and how she had a threesome with two men—illustrated throughout with sexts, dirty Facebook chats, and blurred photos of her naked body. As this description suggests, it’s kind of a mess. While it’s certainly self serious, repetitive (we get it, you like to be humiliated), and often REALLY disturbing, her deceptively simple writing is onto something. She grapples with the contemporary—often technologically enabled—desire to reveal oneself, to make oneself vulnerable. Unlike generations of men who used the word “novel” as a shield against vulnerability, Calloway is—in more ways than one—standing naked in front of us all.
August 18, 2013
disconcertingly brilliant or brilliantly disconcerting? both, and all the way through.
January 20, 2019
131018: i like it. the content is neither offensive nor new, but the format intrigues such digital naïf as me, the artistic ambition intrigues, and of course this perhaps ironic view of the present world and of present sexual and literary relationships, from perspective of a young woman i do not know, intrigues as well. she writes clear prose perhaps obviously trying to escape burdens of received knowledge and trying to find meaning in direct experiences recounted. she writes deliberately emotionally vacant dialogue and acts out from youthful something like ignorant innocence, acts out, feels, talks and writes, in no more offensive ways than say acker. she writes no less blank minimal prose than young easton ellis i read at her age and found so effective in register. she writes i guess from a ‘post-‘ situation (of theory, of ideology, of style), any problems i have are down to being of a different generation, of different psychological history, of lack of ideological familiarity, revealed in particular in allusions to her popular and college culture and current embedded discussed ideas and critiques psychological and literary and feminist, of objectification and degradation and rape culture and inevitable literary sexism, then views on worlds of experience i did not know much at her age and little know much at my age. so this is somewhere to start. it will be interesting to see where she goes...
March 7, 2014
This book is just blood and guts. Pure, pathological exhibitionism. It's like jumping into the mind of a fucked up girl who knows she's fucked up and wants you to see her fuckedupness from every possible angle. It's uncomfortable at first - a parade of sexual degradation, tortured insecurity, and blatant masochism. But then you start to understand how her brain works and how it feels to be so unreasonably needy and difficult and self-hating and how good she is at showing you the gnarly underbelly of her tweaked out psyche. After that, you (if you're me, anyway) can't help but like her and find the whole thing oddly charming.
August 3, 2013
I decided to check out this book because I liked the title. Yeah. I didn't know anything about Marie Calloway and if I did I'd probably be one of the detractors she quotes so heavily in the book. There is no context for anything, it just has this very New York attitude of "you already know all about me because everyone knows all about me" and is very navel-gazey. She is smart at times, or presents herself that way (like in "Adrien Brody" she at least has an adult vocabulary), but the screen shots of Facebook/OKcupid/texts/etc. are absolutely devoid of anything that could be construed as worth reading. I quit this book halfway through "Jeremy Lin" because I didn't fucking care. This shit is fleeting. Is it art, though? I don't care. I will never care. Sorry.
March 13, 2020
In this book we read about Marie’s sexual encounters, her insecurities, fears and swinging psych. I found it scary that she opened up this much even though she got harshly criticized- some of the criticism is cited in the book. I liked this book and I can’t even begin to explain why.
Read
October 2, 2018No idea how to rate this one, but I'll take a stab at it.
This is simultaneously sad and repulsive but vulnerable and relatable, so fascinating and predictable and dull, so weakly strung together but fragile as well. I both want to be the person who slaps her and comforts her, then feel slapped myself. This book is exhausting and hollow and vacuous as well as physical and concrete and full of weak breaths between desperate words.
You ever have those friends you know who just continue to do the same stupid things over and over again? The ones who whine about how dumb they are for loving a guy while begging the crappy boyfriend to love them over text? I imagine Marie as this kind of person.
You know what though? I haven't met any young woman at this age who didn't have a period of time that she was like this, and that stands out to me. We are taught that our worth is in what other people can get out of us and to do things to please others. In the next breath, we hear how stupid we are for trying so hard to please. Marie, as many young women, exists in this space between. Some of us pick a side eventually. Some learn to please themselves, some learn to live for others, but most of us don't ever really get rid of the fact that we are expected to be both and punished either way.
Is Marie's way of jumping headlong into that punished position any better if she chooses it herself? Does it seem to pay off for her or make her any more empowered? Does she even care at that point?
All I know is that I like the idea of women having the space to feel their experience and say it aloud, whether or not others approve. I applaud Marie for that.
This is simultaneously sad and repulsive but vulnerable and relatable, so fascinating and predictable and dull, so weakly strung together but fragile as well. I both want to be the person who slaps her and comforts her, then feel slapped myself. This book is exhausting and hollow and vacuous as well as physical and concrete and full of weak breaths between desperate words.
You ever have those friends you know who just continue to do the same stupid things over and over again? The ones who whine about how dumb they are for loving a guy while begging the crappy boyfriend to love them over text? I imagine Marie as this kind of person.
You know what though? I haven't met any young woman at this age who didn't have a period of time that she was like this, and that stands out to me. We are taught that our worth is in what other people can get out of us and to do things to please others. In the next breath, we hear how stupid we are for trying so hard to please. Marie, as many young women, exists in this space between. Some of us pick a side eventually. Some learn to please themselves, some learn to live for others, but most of us don't ever really get rid of the fact that we are expected to be both and punished either way.
Is Marie's way of jumping headlong into that punished position any better if she chooses it herself? Does it seem to pay off for her or make her any more empowered? Does she even care at that point?
All I know is that I like the idea of women having the space to feel their experience and say it aloud, whether or not others approve. I applaud Marie for that.
April 11, 2013
I don't really know what to say about this book, which is, I suppose, one way of talking about it. These stories are choked with sex and (often) quiet brutality, told in a voice both panicked and yet tinged with self-assurance. Calloway's writing is sometimes charming, sometimes a bit lifeless, and sometimes somehow a little of both. I don't know if Calloway is the next "great" thing in writing, and this collection actually seems a little out of character in the Tyrant Books catalog, but it was an intriguing read, even if I couldn't fully get my head around it.
May 24, 2013
TRULY MADLY DEEPLY
a little hesitant to write about this book
a little afraid that it's one of those books that
if I find out you don't like it, I won't like you—
as much
I have more to say, though,
later
a little hesitant to write about this book
a little afraid that it's one of those books that
if I find out you don't like it, I won't like you—
as much
I have more to say, though,
later
June 8, 2013
dumb dumb dumb...pointless drivel of a insecure girl trying to get men to like her through sex..anybody can write in a journal and call it a book...boring..
August 19, 2013
I finished this book today and saw this in the description of it on goodreads:
"It is a brave and pitiless examination of yearning in an era of hyper-exposure and a riveting account of the moments of transcendence seized from an otherwise blank world."
I actually picked it up totally unknowing of the tao lin/calloway phenomenon, which might be a good thing. I've since done a little research.
I should clarify that I think she's a good writer. I also think it's a little depressing that a good writer can or would want to get away with this sort of livejournal style rambling about the most banal of navel gazing/prurience/rooting around in the trashcan of human experience.
The quote above sort of highlights what's missing: any analysis at all or any 'moments of transcendence' of any kind--it's just a flat retelling of some pretty alienating interpersonal relationships through a lens of meaningless sex with strong gendered power dynamics (which aren't even unique in any way: she's insecure/stuck in her head/submissive/narcissistic; and every guy in the book almost uniformly dominant/uncaring and 'using' her).
Also--how is this fiction? The long passages of text/facebook messages, the 'fictional stories' that are essentially essays with names changed--much of it is just too banal to stand as fiction.
There are long segments of Calloway talking to 'Jeremy Lin', the stand in for Tao Lin which had some revealing passages:
-she talks about her admiration and interest in 'academic' or 'literary' writing, and a desire to write about 'political' stuff, fearing she doesn't have the intelligence to do so--which is funny given the total sort of studied artlessness of her writing (and maybe that of Tao Lin? I haven't read him and probably won't). I doubt she lacks the intelligence to write about politics but it seems like she is so richly rewarded for writing about her underwear drawer, why would she bother?
-both Lin and Calloway seem to think they're at the vanguard of a new exciting literary tradition! I'm not a literary scholar but in terms of self reflective, masturbatory prose, Nin, Kerouac, the entire 90s era brat pack all come to mind. I like that sort of flat, nihilist, observational writing but this just seemed sort of gratuitous.
-Lin's proxy in Calloway's account mentions that he feels writing's value is entirely subjective, and that a 10 year old's scribbles have the same inherent value as James Joyce. I just can't start with this, it saddens me that there is some negative value judgement attached to having aesthetic standards.
I don't think this book or this type of livejournal style writing is without value. I agreed with some of Calloway's anger at her critics stripping her of artistic agency or implying that her narrative voice isn't intentional or doesn't have an artistic purpose. I just don't really know what the purpose is.
I feel like if you're going to write about stuff like extremely rough sex and sexual degradation (and not in a titillating way--she dwells on the vomit covered towel too much)--you might serve the reader better by communicating the WHY of the thing--maybe the act of exposition is the why? I put this book down feeling a little depressed.
She touches on the idea of 'daddy issues' or I think mentions the idea that young women who act out sexually are thought to have abuse histories, and I think that's probably a little reductionist.
We live in a culture that fetishizes women's sexual degradation; this book is a symptom of that.
"It is a brave and pitiless examination of yearning in an era of hyper-exposure and a riveting account of the moments of transcendence seized from an otherwise blank world."
I actually picked it up totally unknowing of the tao lin/calloway phenomenon, which might be a good thing. I've since done a little research.
I should clarify that I think she's a good writer. I also think it's a little depressing that a good writer can or would want to get away with this sort of livejournal style rambling about the most banal of navel gazing/prurience/rooting around in the trashcan of human experience.
The quote above sort of highlights what's missing: any analysis at all or any 'moments of transcendence' of any kind--it's just a flat retelling of some pretty alienating interpersonal relationships through a lens of meaningless sex with strong gendered power dynamics (which aren't even unique in any way: she's insecure/stuck in her head/submissive/narcissistic; and every guy in the book almost uniformly dominant/uncaring and 'using' her).
Also--how is this fiction? The long passages of text/facebook messages, the 'fictional stories' that are essentially essays with names changed--much of it is just too banal to stand as fiction.
There are long segments of Calloway talking to 'Jeremy Lin', the stand in for Tao Lin which had some revealing passages:
-she talks about her admiration and interest in 'academic' or 'literary' writing, and a desire to write about 'political' stuff, fearing she doesn't have the intelligence to do so--which is funny given the total sort of studied artlessness of her writing (and maybe that of Tao Lin? I haven't read him and probably won't). I doubt she lacks the intelligence to write about politics but it seems like she is so richly rewarded for writing about her underwear drawer, why would she bother?
-both Lin and Calloway seem to think they're at the vanguard of a new exciting literary tradition! I'm not a literary scholar but in terms of self reflective, masturbatory prose, Nin, Kerouac, the entire 90s era brat pack all come to mind. I like that sort of flat, nihilist, observational writing but this just seemed sort of gratuitous.
-Lin's proxy in Calloway's account mentions that he feels writing's value is entirely subjective, and that a 10 year old's scribbles have the same inherent value as James Joyce. I just can't start with this, it saddens me that there is some negative value judgement attached to having aesthetic standards.
I don't think this book or this type of livejournal style writing is without value. I agreed with some of Calloway's anger at her critics stripping her of artistic agency or implying that her narrative voice isn't intentional or doesn't have an artistic purpose. I just don't really know what the purpose is.
I feel like if you're going to write about stuff like extremely rough sex and sexual degradation (and not in a titillating way--she dwells on the vomit covered towel too much)--you might serve the reader better by communicating the WHY of the thing--maybe the act of exposition is the why? I put this book down feeling a little depressed.
She touches on the idea of 'daddy issues' or I think mentions the idea that young women who act out sexually are thought to have abuse histories, and I think that's probably a little reductionist.
We live in a culture that fetishizes women's sexual degradation; this book is a symptom of that.
June 29, 2013
There are some things in this book that confuse me, but the parts of it I love I adore so much that they alone earn every one of these stars. OK, here, let me be unbearably narcissistic and quote myself:
"Reading the sex work episode in marie calloways’ book, and am heartened by her lack of scruples about noting down how she made every mistake in the book. And I know some might find this irritating about her writing, but I’m a great fan for her eye for the banality of the vast majority of interaction, and the pervasiveness of self-consciousness around the most trivial things." (http://marginalutilite.tumblr.com/pos...)
"I also love how when calloway’s client asks if he can get her something, she actually takes the pro forma request seriously and orders up toast with marmite and coffee according to her specifications, without even looking to see him open a sealed container of anything. And I love how she depicts the time honored sequence of orgasm followed by faux fatherly concern. And how she interprets 'Listen, Emily. I don’t want you to do something that you really don’t want to do. You don’t have to have sex with me, you can take the money and go,' as genuine concern and feels out of sorts about him being 'nice' without recognizing, as she would if she were more seasoned, that he’s going through a certain set of gentlemanly motions. And how she doesn’t have the nerve to argue with him about paying her 20 pounds less than the agreed upon price. And when she reflects about how 'surreal it was for there to be a gang of kids talking politely to a man who was with a prostitute.' It’s all so authentically newbie hooker, down to the idea that sex work is something that’s not organically part of the rest of the world, so that in the first few months of sex work everyone thinks, in the back of their mind, like a punch line, 'I’m a prostitute and I’m getting my laundry done, who would ever IMAGINE?' " (http://marginalutilite.tumblr.com/pos...)
The parts that baffle me become a bit more problematic in that calloway has said in interviews that a lot of her book is a joke, gaming the system. In that case I have to admit that some of the time I just didn't get said joke. For example, calloway is brilliant, but screenshots of her facebook chats are no more interesting than screenshots of anyone else's facebook chats, so I wonder at their inclusion in the book.
Anyway, more to come in an upcoming TAS review of the book.
"Reading the sex work episode in marie calloways’ book, and am heartened by her lack of scruples about noting down how she made every mistake in the book. And I know some might find this irritating about her writing, but I’m a great fan for her eye for the banality of the vast majority of interaction, and the pervasiveness of self-consciousness around the most trivial things." (http://marginalutilite.tumblr.com/pos...)
"I also love how when calloway’s client asks if he can get her something, she actually takes the pro forma request seriously and orders up toast with marmite and coffee according to her specifications, without even looking to see him open a sealed container of anything. And I love how she depicts the time honored sequence of orgasm followed by faux fatherly concern. And how she interprets 'Listen, Emily. I don’t want you to do something that you really don’t want to do. You don’t have to have sex with me, you can take the money and go,' as genuine concern and feels out of sorts about him being 'nice' without recognizing, as she would if she were more seasoned, that he’s going through a certain set of gentlemanly motions. And how she doesn’t have the nerve to argue with him about paying her 20 pounds less than the agreed upon price. And when she reflects about how 'surreal it was for there to be a gang of kids talking politely to a man who was with a prostitute.' It’s all so authentically newbie hooker, down to the idea that sex work is something that’s not organically part of the rest of the world, so that in the first few months of sex work everyone thinks, in the back of their mind, like a punch line, 'I’m a prostitute and I’m getting my laundry done, who would ever IMAGINE?' " (http://marginalutilite.tumblr.com/pos...)
The parts that baffle me become a bit more problematic in that calloway has said in interviews that a lot of her book is a joke, gaming the system. In that case I have to admit that some of the time I just didn't get said joke. For example, calloway is brilliant, but screenshots of her facebook chats are no more interesting than screenshots of anyone else's facebook chats, so I wonder at their inclusion in the book.
Anyway, more to come in an upcoming TAS review of the book.
August 6, 2013
Awkwardness is the last acceptable signifier of authenticity. We are meant to believe that authenticity is rare, pure, all-powerful and essential to our existences. But as methods of proclaiming authenticity become commodified and made inauthentic, the options becomes narrower. Basically, the only thing left is making other people uncomfortable with a sincere inability to NOT make them uncomfortable. Continuing to be awkward after is has been publicly noted that you are awkward will enrage some people and make others your most ardent fan.
I guess that's not really a description of the book so much as an inelegant expression of the inarticulate thoughts that came to me as I was reading what purpose did i serve in your life. But, since one of the main features of the book is its inelegance and inarticulateness, I'll let it stand as a related comment.
For most of the book I could not understand why it was considered to be so shocking - is sex for money really that unheard of? Talking about sex, meeting people with the specific, openly-stated intention to have sex? Not until the BDSM chapter near the end did I actually find this at all shocking.
For all the cultural bullshit and fear that she so effectively dismisses with her dispassionate delivery, she introduces just as much. I can't decide if she is effective in conveying importance of the cultural bullshit she focuses on - gender, politics, inequality, intellectual honesty and dishonesty.
But, it was worth reading.
I guess that's not really a description of the book so much as an inelegant expression of the inarticulate thoughts that came to me as I was reading what purpose did i serve in your life. But, since one of the main features of the book is its inelegance and inarticulateness, I'll let it stand as a related comment.
For most of the book I could not understand why it was considered to be so shocking - is sex for money really that unheard of? Talking about sex, meeting people with the specific, openly-stated intention to have sex? Not until the BDSM chapter near the end did I actually find this at all shocking.
For all the cultural bullshit and fear that she so effectively dismisses with her dispassionate delivery, she introduces just as much. I can't decide if she is effective in conveying importance of the cultural bullshit she focuses on - gender, politics, inequality, intellectual honesty and dishonesty.
But, it was worth reading.
May 21, 2013
The author's allergy to artifice makes these autobiographical stories of sex and degradation almost grindingly dull. As a character and a construct, Calloway fascinates. Who would expose themselves like this? To what purpose? But aside from serving as a cautionary tale regarding the perils of the Internet, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from this.
June 17, 2025
A book and writer I had heard a fair amount about and was rather intrigued by some 10+ years ago (a natural consequence of me being on Tumblr in my late teens and early 20s) but somehow never actually got around to reading until now. Definitely the most interesting work of alt lit I’ve read. More than anything, I think I’m fascinated with it as a cultural artifact. It captures the zeitgeist of a really specific moment in time (the early 2010s) for a really specific group of people (educated, middle-class millennial women who thought of sex, subjugation, the self, and all the implications that follow on a scale previous generations of women could not really afford to, all while sleeping with men of similar backgrounds and/or interests who at least pretended to be doing the same—and processing it all publicly online).
It’s certainly explicit, but it seems a little darkly funny to me that this was ever considered pornographic. Reading Calloway’s writing feels like bearing witness to someone poking and prodding at an open wound, and she basically describes her actions as such several times throughout this collection. The language is largely clinical, and the scenes are often disturbing with no clear resolute end. I think a lot of people’s natural inclination to a work like this would be (and clearly was) to ask: What’s the point of it all? In other words, what purpose did it serve in my life? (Wherever you go, there you are.)
The fact that Calloway used a pseudonym and has effectively disappeared from the literary world since suggests that she may have satisfied her own curiosities regarding such questions. Maybe that means something too. But then again, maybe not. For me, the book works because I was adjacent to that kind of life, albeit mostly in the abstract and nowhere near as extreme: Things happen to you, or maybe you even make them happen, and you don’t really know why. You know (hope?) that it means something more, even if that something more is probably something inescapably awful, and how could it not when you can never escape The World Of It All, but there’s little else you’re sure of. I appreciate the fact that anyone was willing to log the experiences she did with such naked honesty. I think this is a feat in and of itself—even if only for posterity’s sake.
It’s certainly explicit, but it seems a little darkly funny to me that this was ever considered pornographic. Reading Calloway’s writing feels like bearing witness to someone poking and prodding at an open wound, and she basically describes her actions as such several times throughout this collection. The language is largely clinical, and the scenes are often disturbing with no clear resolute end. I think a lot of people’s natural inclination to a work like this would be (and clearly was) to ask: What’s the point of it all? In other words, what purpose did it serve in my life? (Wherever you go, there you are.)
The fact that Calloway used a pseudonym and has effectively disappeared from the literary world since suggests that she may have satisfied her own curiosities regarding such questions. Maybe that means something too. But then again, maybe not. For me, the book works because I was adjacent to that kind of life, albeit mostly in the abstract and nowhere near as extreme: Things happen to you, or maybe you even make them happen, and you don’t really know why. You know (hope?) that it means something more, even if that something more is probably something inescapably awful, and how could it not when you can never escape The World Of It All, but there’s little else you’re sure of. I appreciate the fact that anyone was willing to log the experiences she did with such naked honesty. I think this is a feat in and of itself—even if only for posterity’s sake.
March 8, 2014
I kind of feel weird about how I feel about this book. I feel like I've just finished reading something that is absolutely a masterpiece, something I've never come across before and know I could now only ever come across pale imitations of it. The attention Marie Calloway has received is phenomenal and known to anyone who goes to literary places on the internet, but a huge amount of it is negative; lots of name-calling and slut-shaming, disregarding her writing, writing her off as a pseudo-intellectual attention seeker and all this other crap. Which is why I feel this book is a masterpiece, because so many people think it's a load of offensive trash. Think American Psycho, The Satanic Verses, The Monk, On the Road, 2666. They polarise opinions because of their immense ambition and staying power.
But I'm also confused about what exactly this is. It's definitely a book, but only in that it is pages bound together to be read in the standard "novel" order. Otherwise it pushes fiction and non-fiction so close together they become ridiculously indistinguishable; it progresses like a novel in that it develops a character throughout several sections, which could be called chapters or stories, but which are also internet screenshots of social media sites and webcam photos. Basically it just doesn't feel like any other book.
Two of the stories I'd already read online, "Adrien Brody" and "Jeremy Lin", I found strangely captivating. It was like peeking into a personal diary, but one that had been meticulously constructed to tell stories while always in a stream-of-consciousness, personal, literal style. The rest of what purpose did i serve in your life magnifies this and gives those stories context, making them part of a whole. Marie Calloway as a character is unmatched in any literature in my opinion. She instantly feels real and the book becomes an exploration of her "self". Because of this she resists any representative label, but it's almost impossible not to call her a representative figure of the current generation of twenty-somethings.
Now, I'm just waiting for what comes next. Which feels unfair and greedy and expectant, but I believe Calloway is a huge new talent and I'm excited by what I she's done. And even if it's nothing else, I still have this.
But I'm also confused about what exactly this is. It's definitely a book, but only in that it is pages bound together to be read in the standard "novel" order. Otherwise it pushes fiction and non-fiction so close together they become ridiculously indistinguishable; it progresses like a novel in that it develops a character throughout several sections, which could be called chapters or stories, but which are also internet screenshots of social media sites and webcam photos. Basically it just doesn't feel like any other book.
Two of the stories I'd already read online, "Adrien Brody" and "Jeremy Lin", I found strangely captivating. It was like peeking into a personal diary, but one that had been meticulously constructed to tell stories while always in a stream-of-consciousness, personal, literal style. The rest of what purpose did i serve in your life magnifies this and gives those stories context, making them part of a whole. Marie Calloway as a character is unmatched in any literature in my opinion. She instantly feels real and the book becomes an exploration of her "self". Because of this she resists any representative label, but it's almost impossible not to call her a representative figure of the current generation of twenty-somethings.
Now, I'm just waiting for what comes next. Which feels unfair and greedy and expectant, but I believe Calloway is a huge new talent and I'm excited by what I she's done. And even if it's nothing else, I still have this.
May 2, 2022
She's absolutely right and I'm glad she said the things she felt she had to. That in and of itself is the right thing to have done. Thinking through using clear uncomplex honest language, it is ok that some of the conclusions were never reached or spelled out for the reader. I have no judgements about the 'personality' that everyone who reads this seems fixated on. There are a lot of different ways to be and this is one of them, there is some insightful thinking being done in front of our eyes here at the expense of this person, who has had bad things said about them even as they have offered us their vulnerability to examine. I don't necessarily like this personally but I do relate to it, it made me feel some things I maybe didn't need or want to feel, but that's ok. Not everyone has to like everyone or everything.
June 23, 2014
I was reading this book in a bar on Morrissey's birthday, waiting for the all Smiths DJ set to begin. I'd just gotten off of work(at the public library) and was using this great new bookmark I had found. After reading 3/4 of this book in the back of the bar, ranging from anxiety to arousal, an hour had already passed. It was time to dance and yet, I didnt want to leave this book unfinished. Sadly, this book along with all my other personal effects was stolen from said shitty bar and I had to order a new copy to replace the library's copy and to finish the book. This all seems relevant and connected to a post post modern confessional about teenage prostitution and introspection. Or something.
July 25, 2013
While perhaps not entirely sophisticated formally as a finished (or even enjoyable) product, what interested/fascinated me was the odd amalgam of disposable source material and the questioning/moving forward of our preconceptions of what a novel should or could be. While some authors work is thinly-veiled autobiography (tao lin's taipei), this book literally reprints evidence of social media to prove Calloway isn't pulling a James Frey (unless they were doctored). Still, I found the long section about attending a reading with Tao Lin to be tedious--an attempt to imitate Lin's themes but lacking his terrific, loopy style. Calloway has a bold honesty that's refreshing, however.
June 16, 2016
This is experimental fiction in the vein of Chris Kraus' I Love Dick mixed with an element of Dennis Cooper's masochism. It is experimental in the sense that the narrator "Marie Calloway" incorporates (or appears to incorporate) Gchats, FB posts, and critical reviews of (and responses to) her controversial story "Adrien Brody," a first person account of a sexual encounter with a literary idol. The author becomes the character, or almost indistinguishable from the character in the critical reviews. In this way the character herself becomes a a cipher, and the titular question is all the more intriguing.
January 19, 2013
I liked this book. In The Tangential, I wrote ten possible first paragraphs of a review.
October 17, 2021
Most of this is a chore to read, especially her minute-by-minute transcription of the ennui she feels during encounters with actual writers. Her gaze never moves from the mirror, and her prose about sex is written with the same verve as a grocery receipt. Her sole success seems to be in revealing Adrien Brody as the sort of tedious individual many had suspected, except she herself is even more vacuous.
December 12, 2020
Wat kun je nog zeggen over een boek dat zichzelf al recenseert halverwege? Het kwam binnen, sure, maar ik weet niet of ik het prettig vond hoe het binnen kwam. Wat me vooral opviel is dat het laatste verhaal een stuk beter geschreven was dan het eerste. Ik wou dat het daar was begonnen.
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