At first glance, it appears that I’ll Tell You in Person is the sort of autobiographical book that has no room for anyone else. In the introductory essay, a youngish white girl talks about her lack of long-term ambitions and how hard it is to write in Martha’s Vineyard. Reading it, I could really only think about my pile of student loan debt and the degenerative arthritis in my knees.
What I’m trying to say is that my heart’s not exactly bleeding for Chloe Caldwell. But there’s a constant self-assessment that makes Caldwell’s work worthwhile. She’s obsessed with growth and everything around it: nostalgia, prediction, destiny, mistakes, luck.
When I read her first book, Legs Gets Led Astray, years ago, I wondered what her writing would be like as she started to move around in—if not beyond—the personal history she was documenting. Her writing is and has always been about experience, the doing and feeling of everything there is to do and feel. What comes after the sublime idiocy of youth?
Caldwell wonders the same thing. If Legs Get Led Astray was growing pains, I’ll Tell You In Person is simply growing. There’s a sense of a human being dealing with getting older and changing in irreversible ways. The distance between Martha’s Vineyard and a monthly Great Lakes ass-fucking notwithstanding, to come of age and then continue going is a universal commiseration if there ever was one.
From “In Real Life”:
Then you experience the second half of your twenties. Your hair grows longer or you chop it short. You learn how to cook rice properly (pretty much). You let your belly-button ring fall out and the hole closes up. You fall in love with a woman. You make kale chips. One friend has a heart attack and another has a baby.
People have drawn comparisons between Caldwell’s work and the show Girls, but that’s too easy and not entirely accurate. A closer point of comparison is Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor. The gender and age (and interests, unless Caldwell traded her Tori Amos CDs for some cult classic jazz LPs) are different, sure, but the flow of the storytelling and focus on a day-to-day life instead of sporadic, enduring revelations are extremely similar.
There’s a continuous chase of whatever feels good: Caldwell shows us Portland and upstate New York and Europe and the heroin she snorted and the Craigslist ads she posted trying to get random guys to buy her scotch and steaks and on and on. Sounds fucking exhausting, doesn’t it? But almost every time I started to feel like I was being led around by a little brat, the little brat surprised me by being expertly conscious and, at all the right times, wholly succinct about who and how she is.
The incredible thing here is the recall. Caldwell doesn’t remember every little detail, but she includes all the unforgettables: the movies, the music, the clothing, the nervous habits, the games, the embarrassing tics, the food, the offhanded comments. It all contributes to a frame of reference that is somewhat rooted in pop culture: Abercrombie shirts and that fucking Lou Bega song for her teen years, $75 black shirts and Tilly and the Wall for her twenties.
For Caldwell, like many people who become a collage of the things they like, these are just a roundabout way of explaining who she is, who she’s been. We are the things we say and do, sure, but we’re also everything we’ve ever seen and heard and felt. This book is a document of the development and stasis we all go through as we figure out what in the fuck it is we’re going through—one song, one cookie, one addiction at a time. And Caldwell is an excellent observer.
From “The Music & The Boys”:
Nat’s house was deep in the woods, and he never let you forget that Wyley Gates murdered his father, father’s girlfriend, brother, and orphaned toddler cousin just down the road in 1986, the year we were both born. But Nat’s efforts to freak me out didn’t work, because I found his home cozy. Frank Sinatra sang in the background, and there was always a ping-pong game to play or a hot tub to get into. Nat’s bedroom had two twin beds and its own bathroom attached. We’d gossip in our separate beds, competitively seeing who could eat more clementines. I have no recollection of his parents fighting, only waking up to music and breakfast and conversations over the crossword puzzle.
To summarize this book is like trying to make you see what someone’s yard looks like by showing you a blade of grass. Caldwell is not a “sentence level” writer. Her writing is not particularly clever or poetic. Parts of I’ll Tell You in Person read like a simple diary. But this is the sort of book that will be passed from hand to hand with the phrase, “Just read this.”
When Caldwell has a clear beginning and end to her stories, they more resemble actual stories. Her friendship with the late poet Maggie Estep is a wonderful example. In this storyline, Caldwell has focus, and the amorphous blob of not really knowing what she’s doing with her life falls in place for a simple reason with a real arc: I miss my friend.
Is it fair to be critical of Caldwell’s life instead of her writing? What about the other way around? Where does the person start and the book begin?
To put it in terms closer to the heart of Caldwell herself, I’ll Tell You in Person is the “Summer Nights” part of the Grease soundtrack. There are periods of inertia, the caterpillar-in-the-cocoon part of growing up, but there are also moments of ephemeral love, friendship, and questioning. It exists in the world of beauty school dropouts and fast cars and ridiculous dances, but its morality lies in the ever-fleeting details, the perfectly out-of-tune notes of wanting.
3 responses
Personally, I thought I’LL TELL YOU IN PERSON was one of the best books of 2016 and easily Caldwell’s finest book yet (which is not to diminish her previous efforts.) What strikes you is the immediacy of the intimacy — you feel like you’ve known Caldwell a lifetime and while it might’ve been a while since you last saw her, the friendship is instantly renewed. It is a rare gift to suck the reader in like that.
What’s equally impressive is how — for the most part — the material isn’t all that sensational this time around. Yes, there’s the craigslist ad and the heroin, but much more of this book is focused on the mundane aspects of growing up. Again, what is impressive is that Caldwell’s writing becomes even more interesting as her material becomes less salacious. She makes snack cakes as compelling in this book as orgies were in a previous effort.
While I realize this isn’t overall a negative review, Werner should’ve done more homework on Caldwell’s background. It’s anything but affluent and I believe she’s blogged about still having to put time in at her Dad’s music shop and work side jobs as a wedding server just to make ends meet. Even the Martha’s Vineyard retreat is (I forget where she mentions this exactly) something she paid to go on, not a perk of being a “brat.”
Overall, Werner is working too hard here to say something new and, perhaps, contrarian, even as he reluctantly gives Caldwell her due. To be clear, I am a huge fan of Werner’s own work, but as a reviewer, Ryan reminds people that he’s a great short story writer.
Steve! I’m glad you are into Chloe’s book! I definitely understand the urge to defend the books we love. If someone said one bad thing about Reasons To Live by Amy Hempel I would have had to struggle to be half as civil as you were here.
I really like Chloe’s first book–I did the first published review of it when it came out!–and was looking forward to seeing how her essays changed as she got out of her early twenties. I think I’ll Tell You In Person is a good book, but it didn’t quite match what I thought it would be, or at least what I thought it could be based on LGLA. It’s almost as if the punchline didn’t quite match the setup–perhaps a fault on my part for thinking of it that way in the first place, but everyone’s brain works different.
As always when I review, I hope I didn’t come off as negative, contrarian, or reluctant to give credit where it’s due, but that’s a risk I’m willing to run in trying to be fair to both the work and myself.
As far as research goes, I don’t think that’s always the responsibility of the reviewer. It’s good to have reviews that put the book in question in context of the writer’s life and published work–I’ve definitely done reviews with those elements before–but I think that books, of nonfiction especially, should be self-contained. If there are blogs about working at her dad’s shop and as a wedding server, why isn’t that information in the book? If it’s important, it should be there. Since it’s not, I assume it isn’t.
As evidenced by the rhetorical questions in the penultimate paragraph, I struggled with wondering about how much of her life outside the book should factor into the review. I don’t have answers for those questions. I don’t think Chloe is a brat, just that some parts in her essays make her sound like one. She’s a damn good writer–her recall and grasp of (and maybe on) her feelings are pretty unfuckwithable by anyone’s standards–and I wish her all the best. (Of course, if this information is in a comment on a review, why isn’t it in the review itself? What’s good for the goose . . .)
Mostly I just wanted to reply here–a bit of a gauche thing to do on my own review, I know–to make it clear that I wasn’t trying to do anything other than explain my thoughts in processing the book. If anyone reads my a review of mine and disagrees, they can take comfort in knowing that they heard out a dissenting opinion and now have an even stronger love of the book in question.
If nothing else, remember that I’m just a preschool lunch lady who spends most of his time watching wrestling, something that made it all the more harder not to make a Stone Cold Steve Austin reference of your name. (Gimme a hell yeah!)
Ryan,
Thank you for the cordial response. Just a few quick points.
First, I’d argue that information about Caldwell’s economic situation is inherent in many of the essays and is largely the real focus of the “Hungry Ghost” piece about Lena Dunham’s planned visit. (They recently did a discussion together in NYC where it was confirmed that Dunham was the celebrity in question.) So…I think that information was very much in the book and would respectfully suggest you missed it. But, perhaps, it’s best here to agree to disagree with each other.
(As an aside, I suppose I might’ve been projecting “spoiled” onto “brat,” and that’s on me, not you.)
Second, I liked (but did not love) LGLA. Although I enjoyed it, it was hard to separate the circumstances from the writing. If you’re going to orgies in footy pajamas, masturbating on planes, and talking about how blow jobs are your “safe space,” it’s not hard to hold the reader’s attention. What made me love ITYIP is there’s not nearly as much of the sensational in this book, it’s much more about the course of going from childhood to adulthood and the mundane markers one passes along the way. To sell that to an audience, you have to know how to write. And Caldwell more than proves that she does. As I alluded to in my first response, I knew she had me when an essay about yodels and binge-eating was every bit as compelling as the previous effort about orgies. I always worried — to the extent that you can worry about someone you don’t know — that Caldwell would flame out as a writer if all that there was to her prose was sex and drugs and questionable nineties pop music. Elizabeth Wurtzel, brilliant as she was at times, never really evolved. Caldwell proved with ITYIP that she can and produced an amazing book. (And, yes, it’s one of those rare pieces of art that makes me want to defend it publicly.)
Third, I’ve read your short stories and you, sir, are no mere lunch lady (not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
Finally…wrong Steve Austin. Think “a man barely alive. We can rebuild him…”
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