I used to listen to Tina Fey’s Bossypants, every morning when I walked to work. The walk took me past Boys and Girls High School, under the overpass at Atlantic Avenue, past a very old clapboard church that everyone liked to pretend had been standing for hundreds of years but I knew, because the job I was walking towards required me to know, had only been built maybe fifty years before. I listened to that memoir so many times that I had it memorized. There was something extremely soothing in her familiar voice, in the breaks for laugh lines, in the cadence of comedy writing, that it was easier to focus on the comfort than in all the ways the jokes didn’t especially land.
I love this -- it's getting at something I've often felt. The only tweak I'd make is this: "the disconnect felt in a piece of culture, how you can nonsensically wish you could connect with it while still knowing that you fundamentally can’t and don’t and in fact have questions" -- for me it's not knowing that I can't connect with it, it's the long process of not understanding why it doesn't work for me. If I knew all along, this advice is not for me, I feel like it would have saved me many years of struggle and confusion.
THANK YOU for this! I'm 60. Watching Bill Cosby and Woody Allen and Michael Jackson be revealed to be...well, you know...has been really challenging for me. Of COURSE they deserve every bit of opprobrium they receive. Of COURSE the seeds of some of this is apparent now. And yet. Their work helped shape me--there's no way for that to unhappen. And as far as the work itself, I wouldn't want it to. Annie Hall is one of my favorite movies and I have my late father's old VCR tape of it as a memento of him (it was his favorite movie too--he said it was beautiful.) I firmly believe that there'd be no Obamas without the Cosby show (side note: I interviewed Bill Cosby many years ago--no, he didn't try anything heinous, but I remember thinking what an unpleasant person he was). I can't TELL you what the J5 meant to a black girl in Cleveland in 1968. I realize that what I'm saying here isn't exactly what you're saying--being a rapist is of COURSE not the same as being culturally tin-eared/biased etc. But the discomfort of having to parse your love for someone's work with their dark side (so dark as to be truly evil or less dark but still troublesome, as in Fey's case) feels familiar. I appreciate your willingness to go there--I remember your piece about Little Women grappling with the same stuff.
This was me with “Lean In”. I felt like the fact I couldn’t connect with it was a sign that something was wrong with me, rather than the work culture in which so many others seemed to thrive.
I love this -- it's getting at something I've often felt. The only tweak I'd make is this: "the disconnect felt in a piece of culture, how you can nonsensically wish you could connect with it while still knowing that you fundamentally can’t and don’t and in fact have questions" -- for me it's not knowing that I can't connect with it, it's the long process of not understanding why it doesn't work for me. If I knew all along, this advice is not for me, I feel like it would have saved me many years of struggle and confusion.
THANK YOU for this! I'm 60. Watching Bill Cosby and Woody Allen and Michael Jackson be revealed to be...well, you know...has been really challenging for me. Of COURSE they deserve every bit of opprobrium they receive. Of COURSE the seeds of some of this is apparent now. And yet. Their work helped shape me--there's no way for that to unhappen. And as far as the work itself, I wouldn't want it to. Annie Hall is one of my favorite movies and I have my late father's old VCR tape of it as a memento of him (it was his favorite movie too--he said it was beautiful.) I firmly believe that there'd be no Obamas without the Cosby show (side note: I interviewed Bill Cosby many years ago--no, he didn't try anything heinous, but I remember thinking what an unpleasant person he was). I can't TELL you what the J5 meant to a black girl in Cleveland in 1968. I realize that what I'm saying here isn't exactly what you're saying--being a rapist is of COURSE not the same as being culturally tin-eared/biased etc. But the discomfort of having to parse your love for someone's work with their dark side (so dark as to be truly evil or less dark but still troublesome, as in Fey's case) feels familiar. I appreciate your willingness to go there--I remember your piece about Little Women grappling with the same stuff.
This was me with “Lean In”. I felt like the fact I couldn’t connect with it was a sign that something was wrong with me, rather than the work culture in which so many others seemed to thrive.