My wife is a writer so we have a house filled with galleys and many of them are from this same modern genre of "Young woman from relatively privileged background writes a memoir about her life struggles"—and they all have the same ingredients: various mental illnesses, teen alienation, turning the struggles of dealing with men/boys into a battle against the "Patriarchy" and the struggles of an immigrant integrating into American society into a battle against the evils of "White supremacy", all of it narrated usually from one of our liberal urban enclaves after the author has graduated from one of our more upscale universities. (This genre fits alongside all the other books we have about being black and/or gay and the struggles of some young person dealing with their supposed marginalization.)
One thing that strikes me is the intense fetishization of victimhood, the rigid ideological lens where every setback is some manifestation of political oppression and the Mad Libs-style of uniformity in all these narratives—same ideas, same problems, same stale stilted academic jargon, same parading of wounds, same politics etc, the only difference being the writers' identity markers.
Also, there is just something very unseemly in all this: all these young memoirists seem so desperate to show their scars that they're blind to how good they have it, how safe and prosperous their lives really are, and how their success obviates their claims of victimhood—not to mention how boring and self-absorbed they are.
All these works are more or less instantly disposable and will be looked back on as a relic of our weird time where claiming to be an oppressed victim was the fastest way to accrue social and political clout.
Yes, this is so on point. The "intense fetishization of victimhood!" There's been a memoir or two from young Asian-Americans that I simply stopped reading past the first chapter or two. Usually if the author is younger than me, I am hesitant in reading it - they haven't had the time and space from their experience to really reflect deeply.
it is pretty funny, this idea of the memoir written by someone barely out of college...
it is a combo of a certain amount of cluelessness that comes from living in our time of great safety and prosperity and of our therapeutic mindset of "I share, therefore I am".
but, while I would never read these things, I do try to minimize my scorn: i would hate to be young today and they are just responding to the incentives of social media, which are more or less: it's most important to be known and to get attention while every other consideration is secondary.
this is why I think "Show my scars" is the most common genre of all: we all have pain and we all think our pain is special and unique...but this doesn't necessarily make you a good writer/thinker/artist.
Thanks for a really enlightening essay. I married a Korean woman with two daughters from her previous marriage. I guess my wife was too busy running a business - where our daughters worked as soon as they were old enough to see over the deli counter - to be a Tiger mom. As for me, I was a Lit major at a Big Ten school for a few years before I quit to pursue my dream of never ever sitting in a classroom again. I became carpenter (a young man's career which I LOVED) and then a recording engineer. I was a dreamer and an under-achiever's under-achiever. In my defense, I've yet to find a single instance of a correlation between a person's GPA and their worth as a human being. My wife is more typical. She got a degree from Busan University. She studied (and competed in) classical piano. Our oldest daughter was born in Busan, our younger one in Nashville where they were both raised. They're both smart and driven, but not because we've pushed them in any particular direction. Our younger daughter would come home from school and say, "guess what I got on my physics exam." I'd usually say something like "hmm, let me think, uh, 76," to which she'd roll her eyes and say, "no! a 91." My wife would reply something like, "wow, that's great!" To which Doona (our daughter) would exclaim, "no! that's not great! I need a 93 for an A." My wife and I would console her. "Oh, come on. It's fine. 91 is really good. Don't worry about it." Sometimes she'd storm off, disappointed that her parents couldn't appreciate the gravity of those two points. Maybe we were just lazy. When my wife went to her Korean church she would have to play a familiar game. All the mothers there would exaggerate (or maybe not, who knows) the academic virtues of their daughters and sons (and, of course, gossip about the sons and daughters of everyone else.) My wife would play along without really revealing anything, feigning enough interest to prevent suspicion. They would bait her too. They'd want to know Doona's GPA; what she got on the ACT; where she's applying to school, etc. My wife would deftly navigate the inquisitions and then come home and tell me all about it. And then we'd congratulate ourselves for raising two girls who have done really well in spite of the fact that we gave them the option of doing really average.
Yes, the comparison of children amongst moms is intense. It still affects me and creates self-doubt and I homeschool! My son has never taken a test in his life. The only thing I would worry for your daughters is not from the pressure from you and your wife, but the pressure just from their social group. Growing up, my parents didn't really "pressure" me to excel. I just absorbed it from my friends and compared myself to every other high-achieving Asian student in my community. When the kids in your community that you know personally are getting perfect SAT's, it does affect you. Your daughters may not have given themselves the option to just be "average," which is the main concern.
You are spot on. The pressure our girls experience comes from comparing themselves to their peers. Gen Z is so credential-fixated and there is no way to insulate them from that. Doona came home from work one day distraught because her co-worker at the Bubble Tea shop got into Berkley. And she was unmoved when I inquired, "isn't that the same girl who couldn't figure out how the mop and bucket worked?" Yup, her. "She's the same girl who got mad at you when you told her that to make a double batch of Boba, you just need to multiply the ingredients by two and make one batch rather than mix two separate batches? That girl?" Yup. "Why would you be jealous of someone who couldn't find her a** with both hands?" It didn't matter. Only the credential matters. Now that she's in college in a really challenging engineering major at a really good school, she's just trying to keep her head above water. It's very encouraging. She came home at Christmas and told us, "just so you know, my grades aren't going to be very good this semester and I don't really care. I'm just trying to survive." My wife was like, "it's fine. Everything will be ok." And I was like, "were your grades good last semester?" She rolled her eyes.
Excellent essay! Thank you for breaking this down! It’s great to see your perspective on these issues.
I’ve noticed the same victimhood trends. I’ve luckily never encountered much sexism in my work outside of people asking me “Did you get rejected because sexism?” or “Why aren’t you writing about sexism?”
It’s stories like this one that made it take so long for me to describe my misdiagnosis/high school as legitimately traumatic. And while I’ve certainly had conflicts with parents, I wouldn’t call them “abusive.” One doesn’t need to be abused or traumatized to be hurt and in need of support.
Perfect timing, actually, because I was just posting about how overuse of therapy can make things worse. And the yellow notepads!!! I included this exact detail in my novella. Doctors would pathologize everything and everything and everything, there’s “unhealthy behavior patterns” and “depressive thoughts” and never room for “person having a hard time.”
I’ve found the diagnosis in that case makes it HARDER, suddenly it’s a big deal, more permanent, and it feels impossible to grow naturally. You go through months of thought labeling and practicing repetitive breathing exercises while being discouraged from natural, non-therapeutic things like, “I need to find a hobby.” and “I just need a friend.”
yes, absolutely. The diagnosis in many ways can be so limiting. Everyone benefits from friends, nature, sunshine, hobbies and passions. Not everyone benefits from therapy though. But mainstream culture is promoting that therapy solves everything, when in reality, it may just make things worse.
You said something I was going to say - have friends, they're the ones you cry in front of and who you comfort when they cry. A therapist has no skin in the game. We have outsourced all our friendships to paid contractors. You don't listen to a person cry and take notes at the same time!
right?!! I think I just needed a hug - not a notetaker. And now they are selling ROBOTS to be your kids' friends. A therapist has skin in the game..... their salary. lol.
Parents are clueless. Children are suiciding and younger at younger ages and more often. Our culture sure is in sad trouble. We just take all this as "statistics" but it affects all of us. Humans are not living as we should. We are living fake lives and we think that if we didn't do things this way, that we would be worse off. But nothing could be further from the truth. The culprit is money based on debt. That is the most idiotic and dangerous thing about humanity. And the entire world lives by it. That is why everything is discombobulated and twisted. This was a great read.
You're totally right. Our societal values have completely gone off the rails. When kids who live in one of the best and free countries in the world want to end their lives, or all are on anti-depressant meds, something is totally wrong. Society isn't promoting the message of how wonderful life can be. Instead, we are highlighting all the "problems" like racism, sexism, the patriarchy, climate apocalypse, .... blah blah blah.
My wife is a writer so we have a house filled with galleys and many of them are from this same modern genre of "Young woman from relatively privileged background writes a memoir about her life struggles"—and they all have the same ingredients: various mental illnesses, teen alienation, turning the struggles of dealing with men/boys into a battle against the "Patriarchy" and the struggles of an immigrant integrating into American society into a battle against the evils of "White supremacy", all of it narrated usually from one of our liberal urban enclaves after the author has graduated from one of our more upscale universities. (This genre fits alongside all the other books we have about being black and/or gay and the struggles of some young person dealing with their supposed marginalization.)
One thing that strikes me is the intense fetishization of victimhood, the rigid ideological lens where every setback is some manifestation of political oppression and the Mad Libs-style of uniformity in all these narratives—same ideas, same problems, same stale stilted academic jargon, same parading of wounds, same politics etc, the only difference being the writers' identity markers.
Also, there is just something very unseemly in all this: all these young memoirists seem so desperate to show their scars that they're blind to how good they have it, how safe and prosperous their lives really are, and how their success obviates their claims of victimhood—not to mention how boring and self-absorbed they are.
All these works are more or less instantly disposable and will be looked back on as a relic of our weird time where claiming to be an oppressed victim was the fastest way to accrue social and political clout.
Yes, this is so on point. The "intense fetishization of victimhood!" There's been a memoir or two from young Asian-Americans that I simply stopped reading past the first chapter or two. Usually if the author is younger than me, I am hesitant in reading it - they haven't had the time and space from their experience to really reflect deeply.
it is pretty funny, this idea of the memoir written by someone barely out of college...
it is a combo of a certain amount of cluelessness that comes from living in our time of great safety and prosperity and of our therapeutic mindset of "I share, therefore I am".
but, while I would never read these things, I do try to minimize my scorn: i would hate to be young today and they are just responding to the incentives of social media, which are more or less: it's most important to be known and to get attention while every other consideration is secondary.
this is why I think "Show my scars" is the most common genre of all: we all have pain and we all think our pain is special and unique...but this doesn't necessarily make you a good writer/thinker/artist.
cheers
Thanks for a really enlightening essay. I married a Korean woman with two daughters from her previous marriage. I guess my wife was too busy running a business - where our daughters worked as soon as they were old enough to see over the deli counter - to be a Tiger mom. As for me, I was a Lit major at a Big Ten school for a few years before I quit to pursue my dream of never ever sitting in a classroom again. I became carpenter (a young man's career which I LOVED) and then a recording engineer. I was a dreamer and an under-achiever's under-achiever. In my defense, I've yet to find a single instance of a correlation between a person's GPA and their worth as a human being. My wife is more typical. She got a degree from Busan University. She studied (and competed in) classical piano. Our oldest daughter was born in Busan, our younger one in Nashville where they were both raised. They're both smart and driven, but not because we've pushed them in any particular direction. Our younger daughter would come home from school and say, "guess what I got on my physics exam." I'd usually say something like "hmm, let me think, uh, 76," to which she'd roll her eyes and say, "no! a 91." My wife would reply something like, "wow, that's great!" To which Doona (our daughter) would exclaim, "no! that's not great! I need a 93 for an A." My wife and I would console her. "Oh, come on. It's fine. 91 is really good. Don't worry about it." Sometimes she'd storm off, disappointed that her parents couldn't appreciate the gravity of those two points. Maybe we were just lazy. When my wife went to her Korean church she would have to play a familiar game. All the mothers there would exaggerate (or maybe not, who knows) the academic virtues of their daughters and sons (and, of course, gossip about the sons and daughters of everyone else.) My wife would play along without really revealing anything, feigning enough interest to prevent suspicion. They would bait her too. They'd want to know Doona's GPA; what she got on the ACT; where she's applying to school, etc. My wife would deftly navigate the inquisitions and then come home and tell me all about it. And then we'd congratulate ourselves for raising two girls who have done really well in spite of the fact that we gave them the option of doing really average.
Yes, the comparison of children amongst moms is intense. It still affects me and creates self-doubt and I homeschool! My son has never taken a test in his life. The only thing I would worry for your daughters is not from the pressure from you and your wife, but the pressure just from their social group. Growing up, my parents didn't really "pressure" me to excel. I just absorbed it from my friends and compared myself to every other high-achieving Asian student in my community. When the kids in your community that you know personally are getting perfect SAT's, it does affect you. Your daughters may not have given themselves the option to just be "average," which is the main concern.
You are spot on. The pressure our girls experience comes from comparing themselves to their peers. Gen Z is so credential-fixated and there is no way to insulate them from that. Doona came home from work one day distraught because her co-worker at the Bubble Tea shop got into Berkley. And she was unmoved when I inquired, "isn't that the same girl who couldn't figure out how the mop and bucket worked?" Yup, her. "She's the same girl who got mad at you when you told her that to make a double batch of Boba, you just need to multiply the ingredients by two and make one batch rather than mix two separate batches? That girl?" Yup. "Why would you be jealous of someone who couldn't find her a** with both hands?" It didn't matter. Only the credential matters. Now that she's in college in a really challenging engineering major at a really good school, she's just trying to keep her head above water. It's very encouraging. She came home at Christmas and told us, "just so you know, my grades aren't going to be very good this semester and I don't really care. I'm just trying to survive." My wife was like, "it's fine. Everything will be ok." And I was like, "were your grades good last semester?" She rolled her eyes.
Great job, Michael. What a delightful story!
Excellent essay! Thank you for breaking this down! It’s great to see your perspective on these issues.
I’ve noticed the same victimhood trends. I’ve luckily never encountered much sexism in my work outside of people asking me “Did you get rejected because sexism?” or “Why aren’t you writing about sexism?”
It’s stories like this one that made it take so long for me to describe my misdiagnosis/high school as legitimately traumatic. And while I’ve certainly had conflicts with parents, I wouldn’t call them “abusive.” One doesn’t need to be abused or traumatized to be hurt and in need of support.
Perfect timing, actually, because I was just posting about how overuse of therapy can make things worse. And the yellow notepads!!! I included this exact detail in my novella. Doctors would pathologize everything and everything and everything, there’s “unhealthy behavior patterns” and “depressive thoughts” and never room for “person having a hard time.”
I’ve found the diagnosis in that case makes it HARDER, suddenly it’s a big deal, more permanent, and it feels impossible to grow naturally. You go through months of thought labeling and practicing repetitive breathing exercises while being discouraged from natural, non-therapeutic things like, “I need to find a hobby.” and “I just need a friend.”
yes, absolutely. The diagnosis in many ways can be so limiting. Everyone benefits from friends, nature, sunshine, hobbies and passions. Not everyone benefits from therapy though. But mainstream culture is promoting that therapy solves everything, when in reality, it may just make things worse.
You said something I was going to say - have friends, they're the ones you cry in front of and who you comfort when they cry. A therapist has no skin in the game. We have outsourced all our friendships to paid contractors. You don't listen to a person cry and take notes at the same time!
right?!! I think I just needed a hug - not a notetaker. And now they are selling ROBOTS to be your kids' friends. A therapist has skin in the game..... their salary. lol.
So many victims around....
ain't that the truth
Parents are clueless. Children are suiciding and younger at younger ages and more often. Our culture sure is in sad trouble. We just take all this as "statistics" but it affects all of us. Humans are not living as we should. We are living fake lives and we think that if we didn't do things this way, that we would be worse off. But nothing could be further from the truth. The culprit is money based on debt. That is the most idiotic and dangerous thing about humanity. And the entire world lives by it. That is why everything is discombobulated and twisted. This was a great read.
You're totally right. Our societal values have completely gone off the rails. When kids who live in one of the best and free countries in the world want to end their lives, or all are on anti-depressant meds, something is totally wrong. Society isn't promoting the message of how wonderful life can be. Instead, we are highlighting all the "problems" like racism, sexism, the patriarchy, climate apocalypse, .... blah blah blah.