MY LIFE AS A VILLAINESS
Essays
By Laura Lippman
In the late aughts, there was a small boom of personal essays written for media outlets online. Sites like xoJane and Thought Catalog all dined out on memoir-type writing, often by young women. Some of this writing was very good, and some heinous, and most of it lived in the in-between. The reason for the boost was partly financial — the recession had gutted media companies and it’s a lot cheaper to buy a personal essay than it is a researched feature. Personal essays, my favorite kind of writing, became commonplace. It was as if everyone thought they could do it. This is, of course, completely untrue. Writing an essay collection, or a great one anyway, requires profound self-awareness, real personal risk and writing talent.
These days, the personal essay industrial complex isn’t dead, but it’s certainly slowed down — maybe because people realized that merely having a life, interesting or not, didn’t necessarily translate into essential nonfiction.
Laura Lippman is best known for her crime fiction and her Tess Monaghan series. Her first personal essay collection, “My Life as a Villainess,” features stories about motherhood, her family, exercise and Anthony Bourdain. In first person, Lippman is funny and sharp at her best; she can sling a hell of a one-liner. “They now make tweezers with ingenious little lights,” she writes in “Natural Selection,” about aging and plastic surgery, “and who’s going to buy those if you get rid of all the old women?” There’s something delightful about a 60-year-old mother admitting that some of the girls her daughter goes to grade school with are “absolute bitches.”
At times, however, she’s mundane in her insistence that actually, she’s very troublesome. The book’s title suggests someone who’s living her whole life as a villain; the reality is, Lippman is someone who got in trouble with her daughter’s principal for one lousy tweet. (It involved a revenge fantasy involving aforementioned schoolmates.) The rebellion that Lippman seems to want to convince the reader of is sort of tedious — her writing on menopause, though cheeky, isn’t really risky in the time of writers like Samantha Irby or Patricia Lockwood, women who bare themselves in their books. Some of her writing includes strange pronouncements, like her argument that she and her husband are “solidly middle-class people no matter what our tax return says.” (Strange for many reasons, including the fact that her husband wrote and created “The Wire” along with a few other successful television shows, and thus is likely not actually middle-class.)
Regrettably, you leave “My Life as a Villainess” wanting more of something. More introspection on her role as an “old” mom, more vulnerability when she talks about her body or her father, more detail, more heart, more heft. It’s not enough to just enjoy the lilt of her writing (though the chapter titled “Men Explain ‘The Wire’ to Me” made me laugh). Essay writing requires that you be not just a gifted writer — which Lippman is — but that you have a point, a purpose, an insight, or at least a memorable conclusion.
The personal essay bubble never really burst, it just settled into something more comfortable once everyone realized that you can’t sustain a publication with essays just because they’re “easy.” Maybe part of that epiphany was the understanding that a personal essay requires a good story and some kind of perspicacity. Essay writing is, indeed, the most accessible kind of writing around. But just because you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean you should.
