something you sought out, yearned for, actively pursued

Claire Dederer’s Monsters is extremely quotable.

There is no longer any escaping biography […] Biography used to be something you sought out, yearned for, actively pursued. Now it falls on your head all day long.

Claire Dederer, Monsters, p47

That may be its greatest shortcoming, too, in a way? I have no intrinsic beef with writing that leans toward the aphoristic—Team Zarathustra, right here—but the sheer volume of whitespace in some parts of this book can make it feel somewhat bitty.

(Perhaps it’s the legacy of internet-first writing—perhaps it’s tweety, rather than bitty? Dederer is a decade older than me, and got her start as a writer after high school, reviewing films for her local alt-weekly in Seattle; it sure ain’t a generational thing.)

Style aside, the thought is great: Dederer’s willing to take you on the trip with her, rather than setting the thesis out in miniature at the start and then unpacking it patiently like an academic. (She’s a memoirist, so this is presumably an instinctive mode for her, or at least an accustomed one.) That means you get to follow the twists and hairpins that necessarily come with a difficult topic, and there’s a sense of discovery and WTF to pull you through… and that in turn means if the conclusion turns out to be “there’s no simple answer to this question” (which, I suspect, will be where we end up), then that conclusion will have been earned by both writer and reader. Which is the way you want it, right?

Right. I’ve not finished it yet, but I can tell it’ll need more than one read—not because it’s difficult, but because it’s got a lot going on.

Perhaps I should be grateful for all that whitespace, eh?

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