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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”
“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.”
“I’m at the point in my life where I masturbate to memories of cuddling.”
“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.’”
“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?”

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.”

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.

feel like i should stop commenting now. hope i’m not pissing anyone off.

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.