Personal stories and moral ambiguity

In late April I wrote an essay for Vulture about the new Netflix limited series, Baby Reindeer, which I thought was phenomenal. The show is based on creator, writer and star Richard Gadd’s real-life experiences, both of being groomed and sexually abused by a powerful television writer and later stalked by a mentally ill older woman. It’s intense, and a really tough watch; I got through all seven half-hour episodes in one sitting, even though I almost abandoned it out of frustration with the protagonist halfway through. The show’s brilliance is in large part due to its structure—the way it plays with then totally subverts our expectations.

Here’s an excerpt from the full piece:

The reason this show works, and works so remarkably, devastatingly well, is because Gadd was willing to reveal his darkest shames, his internalized bigotry, his crippling self-doubt, every moment when he could have made a different, better choice. The story is Gadd-as-Donny figuring out how to tell the story to others and, perhaps more importantly, to himself. Baby Reindeer doesn’t set out to score political points, or to “raise awareness,” but to expose the complexities and contradictions of the human heart. … Treating this narrative like a whodunit and an excuse to gawk at somebody’s severe mental illness does it a disservice, reducing its characters to one-dimensional villains and victims. Real life is never that simple; great art tells us so.

I’m glad Baby Reindeer got made. Watching it, sticking it out, my mind changing and changing again as more was steadily revealed, experiencing annoyance and rage and sadness and pity and shock and awe, as well as recognizing elements of my own self-hatred and tendencies toward self-destruction—it reminded me of the great universalizing power of narrative non-fiction, of why we turn personal stories into art.

When they’re done well, there’s few kinds of stories I like better than ones told in first person. I love memoir. I love personal essays. Of course I’ve gobbled up every single one of the mega-viral ones The Cut’s been publishing this year, including Emily Gould on the lure of divorce and a finance writer’s bizarre tale of getting scammed out of $50,000. I both love and hate when a personal essay is all the timeline can talk about. It’s fun to gossip about juicy pieces, to debate about style and craft. It’s much less fun when the (mostly female) writers of these personal stories are presumed naive or even delusional for daring to out an unflattering part of themselves in public in service of their story. I responded to one of these sexist criticisms back in March, tweeting “I wonder if people think the point of writing personal essays is to convince other people that you’re a good person.”

Playwright and author Jen Silverman argured in a Times op-ed last month that art isn’t supposed to make you comfortable, but the current cultural moment has produced a lot of bland, gutless drivel. She writes that, while she shares many of the progressive values of the young writers she works with, she’s been “troubled by their concern for righteousness over complexity. They do not want to be seen representing any values they do not personally hold. The result is that, in a moment in which our world has never felt so fast-changing and bewildering, our stories are getting simpler, less nuanced and less able to engage with the realities through which we’re living.” She adds that she can’t really blame these students when executives in publishing, theater, television and film are all too eager to strip big-ticket stories of moral ambiguity or nuance in favor of neat, unoffending narratives that can plod on in the background of our lives while we fold laundry or buy things online.

I get what young writers are afraid of. I often wonder what my own career would have been like if I came up during the golden age of magazine journalism, and whether I’d be a different, perhaps braver writer. Imagine being able to publish a huge piece in print and hear nothing but sweet, sweet silence! Now your essay or book or movie gets dissected instantly online, and being privy to so much unsolicited feedback about your work is dizzying, disorienting, often miserable. But today’s writers and artists persist. They must.

The kind of complexity and moral ambiguity we deserve in personal and fictional storytelling, however, cannot and should not be applied to political and philosophical criticism. I thought about the cynical value of relying on an “it’s complicated” stance toward Palestine when literary darling Zadie Smith published a mealy-mouthed piece scolding student protesters in the New Yorker earlier this week. The writer and former academic Steve Salaita had a good response on his blog: “While positioning herself as a Deep Thinker detached from primitive loyalties, Smith painstakingly tethers expressions of ambiguity to the status quo, the most primal loyalty of all.”

“It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay,” Smith writes towards the end of her piece. And yet it’s the hints of the personal that reveal a much more interesting essay lurking beneath all her handwringing about language. She recalls a recent climate protest rally in London, “where I was asked by my fellow-protesters whether I’d be willing to commit an arrestable offense—one that would likely lead to a conviction and thus make travelling to the United States difficult or even impossible—[and] I’m ashamed to say that I declined that offer. Turns out, I could not give up my relationship with New York City for the future of the planet.”

In his critique, Salaita notes that “Smith speaks of activism that can lead to arrest or other forms of punishment, concluding that it ‘represent[s] a level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us.’ This royal ‘us’ betrays Smith’s position as outsider and poseur. In reality, sacrifice is eminently imaginable to the countless people who have chosen to act on their conscience and subsequently languished in prison, lost jobs and careers, or suffered exile and ostracism. It is eminently imaginable to the very students on whom Smith lavishes so much scorn. They are being punished in horrible ways and yet they keep going. Sacrifice isn’t unimaginable to ‘many of us.’ It is unimaginable to Smith and her cohort of frivolous lickspittles.”

I’ve seen a lot of chatter online from liberals and conservatives alike who are flabbergasted that college students in the US are risking arrest, suspension, and their future careers for the sake of an oppressed people on the other side of the world. These young people must simply be protesting because of peer pressure, because it’s cool and on trend. Or because they’re “virtue signaling.” These soulless careerists can’t imagine that students have real values of solidarity and compassion they want to see realized in the world, like a free Palestine within our lifetime.

It’s typically the same soulless careerists who are judgey and appalled when writers reveal their messy insides to commune with others via their art—the kinds of people motivated purely by their own self-interest. In a way, I feel sorry for them, incapable as they seem to be of even imagining being a part of something larger and more sacred than themselves.

Israel is currently bombing Rafah, where over a million people are sheltering. No fuel or humanitarian aid is getting into Gaza. Israel has seized control of the Rafah crossing, the only way Palestinians have been able to escape this genocidal hell. Please keep donating, keep agitating, keep speaking up. If you can’t throw your own body on the gears of the war machine, you can always support those who are.

Thanks for reading.

See you next time,

xxSK