Chelsea Martin’s strange collection of miscellany evokes the loneliness of life lived through technology.
Chelsea Martin is a mood swinger. Sometimes she’s an inveterate self-doubter, a vindictive bitch, a woman who needs to be kept safe from herself. She goes to sleep before the sun sets—she can’t take a happy ending. Bending to whatever winds blow, she lets the hours slip.
At other times, Chelsea Martin has unwavering eyes, wide-open ears, and a pitch-perfect voice. She doesn’t have much time so she cuts through the bullshit. She sees through people whose lives are lived through electronic devices, and in chat rooms where conversations are crammed with FAs (Frequent Acronyms).
But she’s also bored and tells bullshit stories, and her sternum must have a welt from all the times she’s poked it.
Chelsea Martin is a happening waiting to accident.
Some, all, and none of this is true. That’s the trouble with conflating fiction with what happened IRL (In Real Life)—it doesn’t necessarily get you any closer to understanding Martin, her obsessions, her successes, her failures, or her book, Everything Was Fine Until Whatever.
EWFUW begins with “Baby’s First Words,” a log detailing a newborn’s extraordinary growth spurts and “inventive manipulation tendencies,” while also cataloguing the signs of a deteriorating marriage, a marriage in which “time to think” means “practicing infidelity.” And it ends with “What the Tabloids Are Saying about Me,” an unfunny ending to what is often ostensibly the mad memoirs of a meandering mope tromping through her uncertain life. Squeezed between these two pieces is a provocative smattering of sudden fiction, short shorts, prose poems, and lists. Sarcasm and irony are de rigueur.
EWFUW’s characters could have stumbled out of a Harmony Korine film. Like the kids in Kids, they’re young, irresponsible, and unhinged. They disturb like Gummo’s oddballs, the sad sacks swimming in some nameless town’s backwaters. And like Julien Donkey-Boy’s dysfunctional family, they’re often overbearing and abusive. In “Maybe Her Pending Corpse Is a Window,” Ira watches a woman die after presumably being knocked off her bike by a car. An “Internet stranger,” he’d met Kate through “an online social network catering to travelers.” As she dies, Ira, emotionally ill-equipped, clinically describes the events as they happen. Noting “her unfamiliar stomach fat drooping over her pants unpleasantly,” he thinks, “It’s like live reality television.” And later, he thinks about life without blood and
feels himself becoming alone and stranded, sees himself standing on the concrete uselessly, a lone parasite that has found himself without a host, staring blankly at the pending corpse of what was once an abstract sexual fantasy. He sees the thoughts in his head as if they were lines of an instant message:
(3:46) Does the world know it doesn’t need me?
(3:46) It does, it definitely does.
(3:46) Maybe the world needs me. It’s possible, I think. Is it?
(3:47) It doesn’t. It’s not. No.
Like many of Martin’s characters, Ira filters his life through various screens. A woman in another story admits that she tries “[e]ven on Christmas… to be in a text message conversation at all times.” Later, a woman says, “I hope it’s okay that I’m not referring to all the text messages I’ve received while writing this.” And in “Life Is Time Consuming”—a title worthy of Bill Hicks, as are “I’m Not Drunk, I’m Big Boned,” “Do you want me to be sincere or do you want be [sic] to be myself,” and “Today Is the Worst Day of My Entire Life (I Always Live in the Present)”—after a botched attempt at flirting with a telephone operator, a woman begins emailing a guy she used to babysit.
Martin’s hyperactive one-liners act as refractions, and her characters often use self-deprecation to sidestep criticism. “Watch this,” she writes in one aside. “I can make fun of myself in a way that makes you feel bad about yourself and I can do this and make you think I’m insecure at the same time and you will think it’s totally charming.” Another recurring disruptive device is the probing lines running in tiny type at the bottom of some of the stories. “My diary used to be filled with positive body affirmations, but now it is filled with anxiety about debt and weekly observations of this weird mole I have,” reads one. Another says, “Sometimes I read my own poetry and think that’s not right. Or I read it and call my mom and ask her to be nice to me.” In still another: “I accidentally shat on a person once. There, I said it.” These asides have the same cringe-effect you feel when a performer rambles into the microphone about how they don’t deserve to be there, and then lash themselves for their own intellectual and creative lapses. They make for powerful moments of discomfort, but don’t necessarily endear the reader to the writer.
EWFUW opens with a letter detailing what Martin expects from the reader, but it’s really just Martin’s first effort at misdirection, another veil you have to try to pull aside. While I certainly didn’t meet any of her expectations, what EWFUW did do, AFAIK (As Far as I Know), was make me draw my face into a BEG (Big Evil Grin) as I read about people who are FUBAR (Fucked Up beyond All Repair/Recognition), who suffer from FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt), and need to GAL (Get a Life). I don’t mean to be a PITA (Pain in the Ass), but I’m glad her characters are NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard). Sometimes I found myself LOL (Laughing Out Loud), or LMAO (Laughing My Ass Off). And that’s AFN (All for Now).
16 responses
I just heard of Chelsea on HTMLGiant, but then I started reading some of her stuff and found it familiar (but I can’t remember where). Anyway, I think she’s pretty great and we’ll no doubt run away together one day, eventually, tomorrow.
A person who shall remain nameless ::wink:: introduced me indirectly to Ms. Chelsea’s work through his/her tumblr, and now I can’t stop watching her read her poem “deer grazing” over and over.
what is with this whole thing of not separating a writer from her work? frankly, i don’t feel like you would review a dude’s book the way you did with this. granted, that’s pure speculation, but the intimate nature of chelsea’s writing doesn’t give you permission to assassinate her character. why do you feel like you need to “understand” martin? every girl i’ve known that has read her work has related to it on a very deep level, which leads me to believe your review and the “discomfort” you seem to have felt while reading this book has more to do with your own insecurities as a man than with the text at hand. the idea of calling these “memoirs” is misleading and something about martin’s work seems to invite a very personal type of response from people (see above for examples) but that doesn’t mean it needs to make its way into a review. and if you think i’m calling you a sexist, i think i am.
I had a totally different reaction to this review. It made me want to read the book.
stephen, as someone who’s read and enjoyed your work i can see what you mean. but after reading the review again i still think the framing is somewhat troubling, although not really inaccurate.
Reynard, you might take another look at Martin’s letter to the reader, signed “Love, Chelsea,” in which she says, among other things, “I want you to think about me when I’m not around. I want you to think about me, in a non-sexual way, when you’re in bed at night… I want your heart to break from seeing so much of yourself in me.” Not “in my work” – “in ME.” Also, look at her blurb from Mike Topp: “She’s insane.”
Normally I’d be the first one to criticize a reviewer who conflated the characters with the author, the imaginative act with the autobiographical. But Martin has gone out of her way to blur or erase this line – and in fact the reader’s inability to separate the one from the other is one of the things that makes the book so strange and interesting – so no one can complain when the author is mistaken for the persona or vice versa. Indeed, “something about Martin’s work seems to invite a very personal type of response from people,” and that something is Chelsea Martin.
andrew, i know what you’re saying, but i stand by what i said before and i don’t think you’re really acknowledging what i’m suggesting about the framing of this review. it’s just not necessary to criticize the author for their material, and admitting that this is what you’re going to do doesn’t make it right (i.e. “that’s the trouble with conflating fiction with what happened IRL”).
but, in response to the letter as some sort of excuse for defamation. as john madera himself suggests, the letter is probably an attempt at misdirection; not that it isn’t sincere in its own way, and really this brings up an interesting question that chelsea suggests in a title john quoted, “Do you want me to be sincere or do you want be [sic] to be myself,” in our cultural moment i feel that we are literally watching irony and sincerity do some sort of strange dance, where one is often indistinguishable from the other, for better or worse.
on another note, nothing mike topp says should be taken at face value – that wouldn’t even make any sense, for fairly obvious reasons.
oops… when i said “it’s just not necessary to criticize the author for their material” i didn’t mean it like that, obviously that’s what a review does. what i meant to say was “i don’t think it’s necessary to ‘condemn’ the author for their material”
feel like i should stop commenting now. hope i’m not pissing anyone off.
Dear Reynard Seifert,
You’ve misread the review. It should be clear that I think that Chelsea Martin is adept at blurring the boundaries between memoir and fiction. Character assassination was not the intent of my review. Somehow after reading the introductory paragraphs’ ironic riffing on Martin’s many voices and personas and characters, you missed the critical departure. Here it is, taken out of context (something it appears you’re very comfortable with): “Some, all, and none of this is true. That’s the trouble with conflating fiction with what happened IRL (In Real Life)—it doesn’t necessarily get you any closer to understanding Martin, her obsessions, her successes, her failures, or her book, Everything Was Fine Until Whatever.â€
Actually, a misreading of the review strikes me as ironically appropriate and it is perhaps another tribute to what Chelsea Martin has accomplished in her complex and multi-layered book.
Some of my original piece was necessarily edited. One part of the posted review compares her favorably to Bill Hicks. I go on in the unposted version to say:
Speaking of Bill Hicks, Martin, who claims that “everyone who grew up poor has a somewhat decent sense of humor,†might consider moonlighting as a comic. Imagine these excised texts delivered in a rapid-fire monologue:
“I dated a boy who wouldn’t have sex with me for a long time because he said he liked me too much and didn’t want to ruin anything.
When we finally had sex he put his finger in my butthole.â€
“I’m at a point in my life where I wake up in the morning and literally don’t know what to do.
My mom says this feeling is my hormones telling me to have children, but it feels more like my hormones telling me to buy Goosebumps series books on eBay.â€
“I’m at the point in my life where I masturbate to memories of cuddling.â€
“Once I overheard my mom telling my aunt that I was a mistake…and [when I] told her what I’d heard…she said, ‘What do you want, I’m only five or six years older than you.’â€
“I’m confused about my sexuality, not my sexual orientation.
As in, is this my labia minora? It seems big.
Or should I be running out of lube this quickly?â€
Another aspect of the book that I touched on in my original review was a discussion of Martin’s drawings:
Martin’s black and white drawings, interspersed throughout the book, are reminiscent of Marlene Dumas’s wishy-washy portraits. In one, a young man and woman dance stiffly under a ceiling fan (a resonant symbol for Martin). Like paper cut-out dolls, a perforated line is drawn around them. Beneath, Martin writes:
“I bought some pills, morning after pills, to plant in my purse so that one day they might spill out and someone might see them and believe, however briefly, that I was having sex or even had a boyfriend.â€
Since you missed it, here’s a distillation of how I feel about Chelsea Martin and EWFUW:
Chelsea Martin successfully blurs the already tenuous boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, between autobiography and fiction. Through a collection of sudden fiction, short shorts, prose poems, and lists, Martin engagingly and provocatively navigates diverse narrative trajectories and emotional registers. Her characters are reminiscent of the ones in Harmony Korine’s phenomenal films. And she is often funny in a tragic-comedic manner that would make Bill Hicks proud.
But this is a hack blurb not a review.
And in response to your calling me a sexist, I could, while reflecting on your misreading, call you an idiot. But where would that get us? Since I don’t know anything about you other than your inappropriate, ill-informed response here, I would perhaps be making a mistake. It’s better instead to say that you have some blind spots, namely, in this case, a tendency to misread and of making ill-informed judgments. (I haven’t even gone into your nonsensical conjecture that since, as you write, “every girl i’ve known that has read her work has related to it on a very deep level, which leads me to believe your review and the “discomfort†you seem to have felt while reading this book has more to do with your own insecurities as a man than with the text at hand.” Girls? Girls? Who’s the sexist here? (But then again, maybe you hang out with girls. Who knows?) First of all, does one need to be a woman to assess/critique/praise a woman’s writing? And what happens to your argument when a woman (or in your case, girl) expresses her “discomfort†about EWFUW? Is a woman allowed to express her “discomfort†reading Chuck Palahniuk? Gaspar Noé? Dennis Cooper? Or are only men of a certain bent allowed to?) I’ve got some blind spots but you haven’t targeted mine.
As you build your claim against my character I’d suggest you take a look at these reviews I’ve written:
Review of Amelia Gray’s AM/PM (Word Riot); Review essay of Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s The Mirror in the Well (Tarpaulin Sky); Review essay of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn (The Quarterly Conversation);
Review essay of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck (Open Letters Monthly); An interview with Leni Zumas (Word Riot); Review essay of Can Xue’s novel Five Spice Street (The Quarterly Conversation); Review essay of Leni Zumas’s Farewell Navigator; Review of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain; Some Reflections on Annie Dillard; Review of Lia Purpura’s On Looking
Links to all of these may be found on my website.
john,
want to say publicly that i’m sorry for calling you a sexist. i think the framing of the review is problematic in that it focuses on FUBAR characters in what i see to be an extremely honest and true reflection of femininity among today’s ‘young women’ or ‘girls,’ and because of the framing it seems to me that you are holding her feet to the fire for doing that. there are other things that could have been discussed that would not make it seem like chelsea is just a fucked up person who happens to be a good comedian.
for what it’s worth, i’ve enjoyed thinking about these issues, even though i disagree with you.
Wow. That was quite a comeback – three snaps up in a circle! It even came with the book reviewer’s review resume. (!!!)
Anyway – on a more positive note – I’m glad to see Martin’s book getting so much attention! I just finished it and enjoyed a lot of it, especially the shorter pieces (“Narnia is for babies”? I laughed so hard I snorted. In general I think she’s at her best in poetry, lists, etc.) Hopefully she gets to read at one of the Rumpus Events. Her phone number is in the book (if it’s real I think I love her). Give her a call.
Also, a big thanks to The Rumpus for reviewing off-the-beaten-to-death-path books like this one.
We actually have asked her to read and I think she’s going to be doing the November event.
THX Reynard. Peace.
I’ll respond to your email with a PM later, but I wanted to give this ACK to you AEAP. I hope it’s finally clear that I don’t think that Chelsea Martin is really an ACORN person. It’s just one of the various personas she presents/assumes on EWFUW. She also has a GSOH. But I’m repeating myself. ITFA, we have very different POV regarding her work, among other things.
And yes, I certainly ATWD.
BTW I’m always up for civil B&F and I believe that D&M conversation is possible but DAMHIKT.
I’m off now to find an AFZ.
Well, AMBW to U and yours.
BBFN.
John
P.S. Hey E. Lou, BION, when I listed some of my reviews I thought of adding my ASLMH but figured that would be OTP.
TXT me 707-888-1744
5th person to TXT me will win an original piece of artwork from Everything Was Fine Until Whatever.
Nice discussion here. It just goes to show that Chelsea’s work is complex and worthy of deep discussion. But most of all, it’s FUN!
Just finished EWFUW. My response to my favorite piece, “I $ You,” as with many other parts of Martin’s book, was simultaneously “WTF??!!” and “hahaha!”
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