What If This Were Enough? Essays

I bought this one because I'd seen Heather Havrilesky's TV and movie reviews and enjoyed her insights, but there's a whole lot more going on in "What If This Were Enough?" than I bargained for. Havrilesky has a special talent for seeing through the distracting nonsense that fills our super-connected everyday to the logical endgame of much of modern American capitalism. The author seems to have a special talent for nosing out the creeping, discomfiting angst that lurks behind a lot of the institutions of the still relatively new internet age, whether it's guru culture or internet nostalgia or life-hacking or luxury living. The endless choices and opportunities for communication that the internet has facilitated has, in her view, skewed show more both our conceptions of ourselves and our values: the opportunity to live your "best life" can lead to success, but it can also make you feel lonely and alienated, and, should you not get to where you want to be, ashamed. Her central message, which is reiterated throughout this book, is that many of these media environments are more-or-less designed to make us feel weak, needy, insufficient and alienated, and that surviving them takes the courage to push back against the hidden assumptions that they make. Considering that techno-utopianism seems to have had a rough couple of years and many Americans still feel uncertain about both their economic futures and their value in a rapidly changing economy, this might be a message that a lot of people would benefit from hearing. Frankly, I'm probably one of those people myself. I reread several of these essays numerous times: the subject matter she was discussing felt familiar to me, but the implications of judging yourself and the world using internet-age metrics can be a hard habit to break. At its very best -- and there are some very good essays in this one -- reading Harvilesky can feel like getting deprogrammed. Maybe everyone who spends a whole lot of time cruising internet newsboards to no real purpose or who dreads looking at their Facebook feed lest they feel badly about themselves when they see that someone they knew at school has gotten married or published a book or something should read this one.

Of course, polemics against the way we live now can also go too far, and there are some places where I think the author might shade into arguments a bit too sentimental to really move a lot of potential readers. She emphasizes the importance of real human connection, but I think that some will doubt that there was every all that much of that to be found among us, even before we all plugged in to the world wide web. She argues passionately that believing in and loving yourself are essential not necessarily to success but to a certain kind of human contentment, and she might be right, but you can push that argument only so hard before your prose gets a bit too purple. Some readers might be put off by Havrilesky's authorial persona. She's protective, and rightly so, of the right to feel melancholy, conflicted, and wistful in a world that increasingly sees these feelings as signs of weakness. Throughout "What If This Were Enough" we see her describe and fight her insecurities, insist on her prerogatives, and try as best she can to celebrate her successes. These essays were never meant to be dry exercises in media criticism, but how you respond to them may depend, at least a little, on how you respond to Havrilesky herself: she has, after all, put a lot of herself into them. That being said, her diagnoses of what a hyperconsumerist society that insists, however subtly, that anything less than perfection constitutes failure and sees ordinary sadness and ambiguity as things to be eliminated as quickly as possible are as insightful and timely as anything I've read in the past few years. I wish that it was a bit higher up LibraryThing's rankings: this one often feels like the sort of book that many of us need right now. show less

Last night, after watching the first episode of Babylon Berlin, I fell asleep to the police scanner.

A spurned ex, also a sex offender, had abducted and blown a bullet through the brain of a University of Utah student and dumped her body in a parking lot.

I work at the University of Utah.

My brother goes to the University, and texted me the alerts from New Orleans.

Heather Havrilesky understands this cultural moment — the way that, at its worst, we can pipe in our worst nightmares directly to our frontal lobes until we collapse from exhaustion — at a spiritual level.

As I finished this essay collection on the bus, going up Highland Drive, then 1300 East, a rainbow appeared out the window, which is definitely not a sign from God that now show more we'll pass sensible gun control laws (because this nation hates women more than it loves guns, to quote BoJack Horseman S4), but was lovely nonetheless.

And below it was a billboard.

For Fat Boy ice cream sandwiches.

With the hashtag:

#YouDeserveIt

You deserve it, you worthless collection of sentient nuclei, every moment of anxiety and self-doubt and nagging sense if you log into Tinder that you could be bludgeoned in an alley and someone, somewhere would wonder what you were wearing.

Hooray cardboard-like "ice cream" "sandwiches!"

I looked at the Smokes & Vapors shop to my right, the Nielsen's frozen custard shop to my left, and suddenly everything seemed pointless and ugly, in a way I think Havrilesky would recognize as valid.

Then, I came to her final essay, with its highlight of [b: Angle of Repose|292408|Angle of Repose|Wallace Stegner|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1329151576s/292408.jpg|283706] as among the accomplishments that make life feel worth living.

And it came together, why she got it.

I knew from her Ask Polly column and [b: How to Be a Person in the World|27065373|How to Be a Person in the World Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life|Heather Havrilesky|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1453058078s/27065373.jpg|47105785] that like [a: Wallace Stegner|157779|Wallace Stegner|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1252177524p2/157779.jpg], like me, she had lost a parent in her mid-twenties.

That changes you. I've hit year six of the After, and I see every day the subtle ways it shapes your consciousness.

At its best, it can make you more open hearted, more attuned to life's fragility and therefore its beauty.

At its worst, it can crush you in your loneliness, in how lost you feel at 25, 26, 30 on a road where you feel largely alone.

I realized my bus was on a road Stegner himself traveled often, and yet again, I felt so lucky.

I got off at my stop for my writing group, took the Draw as they call it under 1300 East from Sugar House Park to the shopping center.

And this park, Hidden Hollow, which when I was a child was mostly known for drug paraphernalia, felt storybook beautiful.

The late afternoon sun broke through the golden leaves, and kids were playing on the bridge, and I thought, prompted by the sum total of Heather's philosophy:

What if these are in fact the best conditions in which to write? What if being a writer is what I was meant to be all along?

As if to hammer home the book's points, a sign in the Hollow referenced "Appreciating messiness," and a quote by City Parks Idealist R. E. Sleater from 1922 laid out its vision for"natural rather than artificial beauty."

This didn't feel like empty Rousseauian nonsense to me at that moment. It felt like women have been routinely silenced, ignored, even slaughtered, and I was connected to a smart, funny, and weird one through something she invented in her mind.

Stegner was from a poverty-riddled background. He spent time in an orphanage in Seattle. He didn't seem destined for literary greatness. He worked his way through the University of Utah in a tile store.

He thought he might just sell tile the rest of his life; it was the belief of a handful of professors who believed in him that set him on his path.

He wasn't particularly religious, but had an unwavering faith in himself.

I emerged from the Hollow to my well-trod corner of suburbia, specifically Whole Foods, which I frequent because it takes Apple Pay and I like it and it was on the way.

My notes for this review were stained with pepperoni grease, and "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor was piped in.

It felt like second-wave feminism was giving the finger to the forces trying to destroy women before death inevitably comes for us all.

We can't crumple, we can't lay down and die.

Another dessert, another hashtag:

#makesmewhole

I mean can an apple galette solve this? Probs not, but it did look tasty.

"The piano player's playing 'This Must Be the Place'
And it's a miracle to be alive."

No angel came and told Stegner or Havrilesky they had to write, to avenge the injustices of unstable childhoods and dead parents through spilled ink.

It feels even more noble, in a way, that they just did it.

I'm glad they did.

Stegner wrote this in "It Is the Love of Books I Owe Them:"

I am coming along Thirteenth East on my way to an eight o’clock class. It is a marvelous morning – it is always a marvelous morning, whether the air is hazy with autumn and the oakbrush on the Wasatch has gone bronze and gold, or whether the chestnut trees along the street are coned with blossoms ... I am enveloped in a universal friendliness. I turn at the drugstore on Second South and start uphill toward the Park Building at the head of the U drive.

Laura McCluskey's vigil is at the Park Building.

I'm reading those last pages of [b: All the Little Live Things|10805|All the Little Live Things|Wallace Stegner|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1442665463s/10805.jpg|949594], and I can't stop the tears.

I think Heather would understand. show less

A collection of essays, like a collection of most anything, have some brilliant, some damn good, some pretty good, and some that don't connect. Many of the first essays were just perfect, many of the following were quite good. She can write wonderfully. She will also get the reader laughing, and in the midst of appreciating that humor, that reader will realize what a profound point she has made. The range of topics is broad and engaging. I appreciate this collection for how it made me think, ponder, and laugh.

I don't normally quote back cover blurbs, but I can't resist this one by Julie Beck from The Atlantic:
"Havrilesky writes things that are like opening up the fridge and finding the universe inside."

What do Timothy Ferris and Heather Havrilesky have in common? Not that long ago, I hadn't heard of either of them. That's not the answer, just a reflection which it turns out will lead to the answer. It's not even a true statement. I had forgotten who both were but had heard of them. I had reviewed a book in this space (I always wanted to use that phrase!) by chess master and martial arts champion Josh Waitzkin in which Mr. Ferris made an appearance, and I had put one of Ms. Havrilesky's earlier books on my "to read" list. That's because they are both sort of famous people and both became that way by telling us how to live. That's what they have in common.

To be fair, Ms. H does so with much more self-reflection personal disclosure and show more with occasional insecurity which she wishes she didn't have to feel, imagining in the moment that men, e.g. Timothy Ferris, never harbor self-doubt. A second difference is that, outside of a doctor's waiting room, I'd never knowingly choose to read Mr. Ferris, while I actually finished H.H.'s book (though it was touch and go at times.) To be even fairer, in my weaker moments, I have found myself telling people how to live, thus I have a certain sympathy for Ms. Havrilesky's doing so and I imagine that, like me, she also knows better.

I also want to review the actual book at hand and not turn this into a vote for or against her philosophies. It's too easy and not useful to simply oppose consumerism and Trumpism along with the author and rate this book accordingly. It's enjoyable to read the well-composed screeds of those you agree with and mistake that feeling for literary greatness. (If you're the kind of reader who looks for that in choosing a book, I recommend this one to you.)

I'm not being sadistic when I say I found this book at its best when the author was suffering. Not suffering in the masochistic sense, and I don't mean that she suffered through, not just one, but three E. L. James books so that she could deconstruct them for us--going the extra mile for her readers. The suffering I refer to occurred when she found herself swept up in Disney enthusiasm and suddenly realized what had happened, or when she found herself in a bad relationship. In these moments, she joins the rest of us, which is where "her best self" (quoted for irony) wanted to be all along. Her last essay asserts this appreciation for our common humanity as a "way to live" and it feels like she's talking to herself as much as to the reader, reminding us that this is enough. It was the book's title that drew me to it in the first place. I think she blunts this philosophy a bit by bringing in Mozart, as if, though she is careful to deny it, his genius is what makes it enough but I credit that to her own ambivalence which actually adds a certain poignancy as we realize that it's not enough to be told it's enough, even when you're telling your own self and it's the title of your book. show less

Havrilesky’s aptly named book of essays examines and critiques materialism, consumption, and our obsession with consumerism and the pursuit of happiness. Pulling largely from pop culture and current trends and fads, she delves into the world of foodies, 50 Shades, Disneyland, The Sopranos, romance, and so much more. Each essay is strong in their own right and collectively they make a small tome that packs a punch and causes one to examine their own lust for such things.

It was the title that pulled me in. Although self-help is a weakness I am only lately feeling "done" with, I've been uncomfortable for a long time with our culture's emphasis on constant personal improvement. If you're female, with female friends, just spend less than two minutes on Facebook - and that seems to be all it's about. "I'm so awesome, AND I'm improving all the time!" Except you're not and you're not. That's what bugs me. We all look back on the year when we reach another birthday or another New Year's Eve, and we think that we're so much happier and better in every way than we were in years past. But by any objective measure, we aren't - we DON'T CHANGE. Except that we do in fact get older and uglier, but nobody will admit show more that either. It's all such BS, and I succumb to it myself, but I at least acknowledge it as a sometimes-convenient fiction.

So yeah. The title. What if this were enough? It's really simple.

Her essays run across a variety of subjects, but usually end by coming back to that theme in some way - and sometimes it feels forced, but I'm always glad to get back there, so it's OK.

A number of the essays are all about TV shows I've never seen and couldn't care less about. She was a TV critic. I just skipped those chapters. Eliminate the TV commentary, and the book is 5 stars from me. show less

An uneven collection. The writing is always good - slightly showy, well-constructed, and honest. But this often masks ideas that don't seem that well thought out, or that are trivial.

For example, Havrilesky argues that "sitting at the bedside, holding the dying [spouse's] hand" is romantic. There are a million movies with this scene, but she is arguing as if this is a unique and brave argument that she is making.

In another essay, analysing the 2016 election, she asks, "[d]id the passivity of our screen-led lives slowly transform us into nihilists without our noticing?" As a throwaway observation, sure, maybe. As an explanation for the election of Donald Trump, I'd have to put it pretty far down the list.

There's a cluster of more show more personal essays at the end that are the strongest in the collection. Here the prose style suits the content very well, and Havrilesky is in her comfort zone. show less