Last week my time travel rosary ticked over into 2012, The Year I Quit Drinking. In honor of the event I revisited a novel I read in my last days of drinkin, Michelle Huneven\u2019s Blame<\/em>, and also finally dove into Cat Marnell\u2019s memoir, How to Murder Your Life<\/em>. In tone of voice they couldn\u2019t be more different. Blame<\/em> is serious and kind of stodgy; Murder<\/em> is dizzy, glitzy, and damaged. Sample sentence from Blame<\/em>: \u201cThat life, she thought, that beautiful life is over.\u201d Sample phrase from Murder<\/em>: \u201capplied NARS Cruella to my lips and dabbed a little Laura Mercier Secret Concealer on my crusty forehead wound.\u201d<\/p>\n But I liked Blame<\/em> a lot anyway! Blame<\/em> is about a professor who wakes up in jail; she tries to joke around with the cops, they\u2019ve all seen her before since she puts the DUI back in Ph.D., but this time everybody\u2019s really angry and grim, and she doesn\u2019t know why until they pull out her case file and she sees the label: HOMICIDE. They tell her that when she was blackout she struck two people with her car. That life, she thinks, that beautiful life is over.<\/p>\n I\u2019m going to spoil a part of the novel\u2019s big twist, partly because I think telling you this will make you more likely to read it and partly because imo knowing what the twist is but not which direction it will come from makes the book a lot more suspenseful. But skip down to the Marnell stuff if you hate all spoilers.<\/p>\n Here we go: Our abhorrent hero Patsy was not at the wheel that night. She won\u2019t learn this fact until like the last forty pages of the book, though. She\u2019ll go to prison, she\u2019ll meet with the surviving husband and father of the people she killed, she\u2019ll fight wildfires and get sober and go to therapy and do anything she can to accept and somehow live through the horrific lightless tidal wave of guilt. She\u2019ll turn her life around and become generous, patient\u2013someone who knows herself to be permanently in the wrong, because she killed two people while driving drunk. Walking that razor line between humility and self-hatred. She restricts herself from anything that seems like it\u2019s insufficiently selfless. In that mentality she gets married. Whoo boy. She even knows that her husband picked her out because he likes to rescue people, he likes women who feel their terrible need of rescue. This will end well!<\/p>\n The prose is fairly workaday and when I did notice it, it was sometimes because a simile didn\u2019t quite fit the person through whose eyes we were seeing the scene. But the relationships in Blame<\/em> are real, nuanced, complex and vivid. I loved Huneven\u2019s description of the power of sex\u2013Patsy\u2019s erotic hunger, when she gets out of prison, is overwhelming and Huneven gets us right inside her feelings, so we understand exactly why she doesn\u2019t care that she\u2019s making Unwise Choices. I found myself guessing which person was really driving that night, and whether it\u2019s somebody we know; I won\u2019t give away the answer, but there are a few candidates, and assessing their attention to Patsy from that angle makes you really feel the tenuousness of her life, how shattering it would be to try to reinterpret the life you\u2019ve built with decades of brutal effort.<\/p>\n If there\u2019s a thematic overlap with the Marnell memoir it\u2019s that both of them explore, without ever saying these words, the AA cliche, \u201cSee your part.\u201d \u201cSee your part\u201d means, Make an honest reckoning with what you\u2019ve done. In the hands of a clumsy or callous sponsor it can become a weapon, making it seem like other people\u2019s<\/em> actions are your fault: because you reacted selfishly when they acted thoughtlessly, say. Or because you were drinkin\u2019 when they harmed you. I think<\/em> the purpose of \u201csee your part\u201d is not only to expose what you did but also what you didn\u2019t do. See your part, but remember that your part is rarely the whole. Often we react badly in circumstances where we were harmed, and our reaction is our part but the harm isn\u2019t. Often we make bad, self-absorbed decisions and then other people make us suffer for them, and their choices are still theirs even once we\u2019ve entered our choices into our inventory.<\/p>\n Blame<\/em> has a couple painful scenes which explicitly address the ways people try to make Patsy take the whole of the events of her blackout instead of only her part. But it also always remembers that the contempt she experienced in prison wasn\u2019t some kind of karmic balance or purgatorial cleansing. Other people\u2019s contempt is completely separate from her own amends. Other people\u2019s contempt was never her part.<\/p>\n Marnell I\u2019ve loved for a long time, back when she was liveblogging her addiction for xoJane. MORAL JUSTIFICATION OF READING ANY MEMOIR BUT ESPECIALLY THIS ONE TK TK TK. How to Murder Your Life<\/em> not only brought back all my love for her writing\u2013she writes like a prison memoir scrawled in glitter pen, her sentences grabby and glowing and then suddenly heartbroken. Murder<\/em> also helped me identify something deeper in her prose, and feel free to laugh, because I\u2019m about to become once more a self-parody: What makes Cat Marnell\u2019s writing so great is her humility.<\/p>\n Her description of her first beauty internship is a capsule explanation of her appeal and also her addiction history, like an excerpt from The Life-Changing Magic of Having No Boundaries or Self-Respect<\/em>: \u201cIf I said no even once, then game over\u2013or so I imagined. I never said no, so I didn\u2019t get a chance to find out!\u201d She sounds like a monk, if his elder was a beauty editor! \u2026She sounds like a person who a hundred or so pages later will be saying, \u201cThank you,\u201d when a guy decides not to date-rape her.<\/p>\n She\u2019s so in love with her work, and so submissive to it. More than once she makes clear that one of the things she most judges and fears in herself is being \u201cdisrespectful.\u201d It\u2019s bad to have pride and good to have self-respect, but if you don\u2019t have either, how can you tell the difference?<\/p>\n (One reason the book works so well is that when she does get a little power at her job she absolutely abuses it, which she describes unsparingly.)<\/p>\n There are a lot of truly harrowing sequences here; a \u201ccontent warning\u201d for this book would sound like Stefon from SNL. This club has everything! Suicide attempts, multiple abortions, several DIFFERENT kinds of sexual assault, self-mutilation, fancy rehab, sketchy rehab, hallucinations, bulimia\u2013and the world\u2019s worst mouse!<\/em> Marnell handles it all with so much grace, really\u2013she knows the real weight of what she\u2019s telling you (or, mostly she knows) and her defensive performance of insouciant dizziness only lets her real emotions bleed through more clearly. Part of the book\u2019s honesty is the way it shows nothing helping until Marnell is ready. (If then!) Harsh punishment, total impunity, care and support, balanced consequences, second\/third\/fortieth chances\u2013you can Just Say No to all of that, if you want to.<\/p>\n The book wraps up super fast, that\u2019s a flaw in both style and persuasiveness. This is not The Night of the Gun<\/em>, where even the chapters about the bad old days are really about life in sobriety. This is a classic addiction memoir where the stuff about not being addicted is tacked on at the end of the gutter crawl like the song you play to get everybody out of the bar at last call. There\u2019s also the \u201csee your part\u201d issue. With her parents, especially her father, Marnell describes a lot of pretty destructive parenting, and then says, basically, He loves me and I love him, and we\u2019re really close now, and if you think he was a bad parent then you can go kick rocks! Understandable, from a certain self-abasing angle admirable, and yet\u2026. There\u2019s a moving paragraph where she gives an understated account of just how badly her own chaos traumatized him; she also calls herself a brat when it\u2019s pretty clear that she was a scared, unguided teenager. There are just a bunch of defenses of people here, that don\u2019t prove what she thinks they prove. Or maybe it\u2019s not my place to say that, maybe she gets to be right about her own personal dad. But I can say that her account of her own character is sometimes (only sometimes!) unpersuasively harsh.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to tell the difference between humility and self-hatred. It\u2019s hard to tell the difference between \u201cseeing your part\u201d and bogarting the blame.<\/p>\n Broken glass via Wikimedia Commons.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week my time travel rosary ticked over into 2012, The Year I Quit Drinking. In honor of the event I revisited a novel I read in my last days of drinkin, Michelle Huneven\u2019s Blame, and also finally dove into Cat Marnell\u2019s memoir, How to Murder Your Life. In tone of voice they couldn\u2019t be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":13472,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,177],"tags":[1472,202,34,52,55,41],"class_list":["post-13471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","category-too-much-is-never-enough","tag-cat-marnell","tag-et-exaltavit-humiles","tag-humiliation","tag-if-whiskey-were-a-woman-id-be-married-for-sure","tag-prayers-to-ven-matt-talbot","tag-reading-and-repentance"],"yoast_head":"\n