Eight deadly words

[lydy]

So, I was trying to read Nancy Kress's _Beggar's Ride_. She's got a fairly good rep, and I don't know that I've actually read anything by her, but it was lying about the house, it was time for a new book, and it looked interesting. So, I was then afflicted by the eight deadly words. Now, this is pretty unusual, for me. I tend to find most people at least interesting, and if I don't like them, I can usually entertain myself by disliking them. I wasn't real happy with the frequent reports on the state of one of the main character's erections. I dunno, maybe it's a girl-thing, but really erections are pretty much only interesting to me if they are of immediate relevance, that is to say, clothes are about to be removed and people are about to get busy. Nor am I particularly interested in fleeting and inappropriate sexual responses in non-sexual situations, unless what you are trying to do is make your character particularly unlikeable. I mean, everybody has fleeting, inappropriate thoughts. I get that. Why the only inappropriate thoughts that the author chooses to share with me are all of a sexual nature suggests that she thinks that this is somehow important. I'm still not sure if she actually wanted me to dislike the character, but I don't really care. Because he was basically very uninteresting. As was, you know, everybody else.

But then. But then. Then there was a chapter which began with a paean to clinical depression. And I was done. Out of there. Finished. No more of this book thank you very much.

Yes, friends, it is possible that it got better, that Kress doesn't actually think that pain and growth are synonymous, that the other characters have interesting motivations, that the world is profound in some sort of way. But I do not care. Sixty-six pages. I read sixty-six pages, and I'm done, now.

(Pro tip: clinical depression is not a gift. It is just barely possible that clinical depression, in some people, also comes with a gift attached, because brains are weird and squishy. But the depression? Not a gift.)

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think this was a case of "I had a pretty good novella, and then they told me to expand it into a trilogy." This was the third book of the trilogy, when the "pretty good novella" had long since been left in the dust and she was wandering around trying to figure out what the hell she was doing.

When I first read that book as a teenager, I thought that The Erection Report (note: nobody needs to write a book called that) was attempting to be a subtle satire on the male authors who give you The State of the Tits Bulletin when writing female-perspective characters. As an adult, I think I was probably giving her too much credit and it was more or less exactly the same thing as The State of the Tits Bulletin.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

Or (and I'm coming at this as someone who's never read the book in question), it's possible that your first impression was right, and it was attempting to be a subtle satire, but it was just too subtle and so didn't really work.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Heh. I don't usually read the back covers, and so failed to notice that this was the third in a series. Possibly I would have liked the characters if I had met them a bit earlier? However, honestly, the paean to clinical depression is enough to give me a sour feeling about Kress for some time to come.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, having read them in order, I can honestly say that reading them in order seems to me to be unlikely to have helped.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Was The State of the Tits Bulletin actually a thing? The only place I remember seeing it was in _Number of the Beast_ by Heinlein, and in a spectacularly bad book, that was particularly memorable. I read it in my twenties, I think, and I kept on wondering if other women had magic nipples, 'cause I sure didn't. But did other people do that, too? Really? If so, very weird.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sometimes with nipples, but more often I will see male authors who have attempted to write female characters and not done a very good job of it acting as though one is just constantly going to be going, "Ooh, hey, I have boobs! Here is what size they are! They're right here! Let me think about them again, just to be sure!"

She said, typing boobfully.

(I just had the hope that somewhere there is a piece of male-on-male porn in which the phrase "he said manfully" is used rather more literally than usual. I don't want to see it. I just hope it's out there somewhere.)

And no one writes about awareness of one's breasts in a way that's like I have when I'm just wearing a pair of panties and a big T-shirt and the phone rings and I sort of reflexively scoop up the tits as I jump up so that I don't give myself a black eye running for the phone without a bra, because that's completely unglamorous. Nobody would go, "Oh, how hott, the way she skittered through the kitchen with one arm keeping everything more or less corralled, that's sexy with at least two extra x's." So it doesn't get described.

Similarly, Nancy Kress wasn't writing, "And then I adjusted my balls so that I didn't pinch myself, because, duh, ow," because erections are apparently a lot more glamorous. Wheee.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I remember when I was a teen-ager and working in a library, one of the things I did was to put the plastic protective sheets around the hard cover dust covers. What with the height of the desk and only having two hands and such, quite unconsciously, I developed a system where I would hold down the dust jacket (which was trying to fold back up) with my tits while my hands were dealing with the top edge of the dust jacket. This amused and bemused my co-worker (the very, very hot Englishman, who eventually dated me for a while). I actually hadn't noticed I was doing it, it was just convenient. And this, or something like it, I have never seen in a book.

The times I have looked in a mirror and admired my own tits are not zero, but it sure isn't something that happens often, and it was most often when I was young and contemplating impressing some particular someone that I was going to be seeing soon. So, aspirationally, rather than recreationally, if you see what I mean.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I use mine to open jars.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

whoa! Now that's a useful superboobpower.

[laurel]

"!!!," said the smaller-busted woman who is always a bit agog at the notion of, you know, holding things with one's breasts or whatever.

When I encounter too much description of erections or nipples and their moods (!) in fiction, it always takes me out of the story. And then there's crazytown stuff I've seen in fanfic where a woman's uterus jumped or something. Ovaries did a jig? Also according to some bad fanfic, cocks twitch an awful lot, like divining rods or something at anyone who is attractive I guess. I think nipples sometimes do that too, in fanfic-land. Which is a very very strange land.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I think it might be Amy Thompson who is known for being able to keep an improbable number of fairly large objects in her cleavage when wearing a corset. Pen, paper, stapler, that sort of thing. Ok, I made up the stapler, but seriously, many and large objects. So, the tits themselves aren't particularly useful, but they do create space. I guess.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I'm actually trying to figure out how this works. Mine, at least, don't have much grip strength.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I do still have to use my hands, I hope obviously, but my cleavage is a useful place for wedging the jar when I'm trying to get it to open. Stick jar between breasts, push breasts together slightly with upper arms, proceed with jar opening as normal.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

Right there with you on the "clinical depression is not a gift." I lost several years to depression before getting it recognized and diagnosed, then lost parts of others while getting it treated, and I totally do not see that as a gift. (Not to mention the ensuing self doubt I'm now plagued with: Anytime I'm not at 100% I find myself obsessively poking at it, trying to figure out if this is just a bad day or a need for a nap or an appropriate reaction, or if it's a return of the depression. Again, not a gift.)

Also, I'd never heard of the "eight deadly words" prior this, so thanks for introducing me to that.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Oh, god yes on the constant self-doubt. I had a brief spate a couple months back where nothing seemed to be working particularly well, and I kept on wondering if maybe I needed to go back on the meds. And while the meds helped enormously, they then stopped helping and started hurting, and I failed to notice the transition, so I lost a lot of time to being over-medicated. Which was a little better than being under-medicated, but still less fun than actually being functional. But it's very hard to create enough space to be a little down without starting to panic and thinking that one needs to _do_ something.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

Exactly. In my case, my biggest problem was that because of the way people misuse "depression" and "sadness" as synonyms, I didn't recognize what I was experiencing as depression until it had been going on for 3-5 years. I shudder to think how much longer I'd have gone undiagnosed if I hadn't stumbled upon an article detailing the difference.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Ah, the problems of a technical term being used colloquially because the technical term was first stolen from common usage in the first place before it became a term of art. Me, I got the crushingly sad, too, complete with tears and stuff. But the real issues were not being able to get up off the fucking couch for, you know, a glass of water, much less anything more important. The crying, while not all that pleasant, was much less of a problem than being unable to prosecute my daily life on a consistent basis.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

I can understand that. On the other hand, had I had the sadness, it might have clued me in earlier as to what I was dealing with. But what I really wish is for there to be some sort of understanding of depression on the part of more people who've never experienced it - that's just not something you can shake off and "cheer up" from.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Oh, gods yes. The piece of advice that drove me completely spare, and which I got over and over again, was "You should exercise." Ye fucking gods on pogo sticks. I lack the motivation to get myself a glass of water in 90 degree weather when I am clearly dehydrated, and you somehow think that the answer to this is to go on long walks? Just how is this long walk to be accomplished? With the power of the mind? The mind that is currently profoundly broken? That mind? Are you out of your fucking mind?

Hmm. I appear to still be angry about this.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

My clinical depression comes with the gift of writer's block. Not a very awesome gift.

I bounced hard off of Kress' Beggars in Spain when it started off with parents making decisions about whether they'd rather have a special child or a normie, and how hard it is to bond with or love certain types of children, and how painful it is to have a child that isn't exactly what you want it to be...

[redbird]

Is anyone's child exactly what they wanted? Fortunately, many parents are more flexible than that.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

A good point. I loved them, but read them before considering kids.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

This seems like a common trope, the coupling of genetic engineering and failure to bond. Which is, you know, really weird. It is certainly true that humans do fail to bond with small humans in their care, but they are the exception, not the rule. We write whole long scary stories about them. But normal humans bond with little humans most of the time, also with cats, dogs, horses, cars, clocks, and rugs. Bonding is a thing that we _do_. So the idea that having an active hand in the design of a little person would somehow short-circuit that very strong emotional programming is just plain badly thought out.

I also have never really understood the alarmist nature of the stories about potentially genemodding children. I mean, were I in the market for a baby,and got to have a choice about sex, eye color, and IQ, and susceptibility to cancer, I would probably go ahead and make those choices. But then, a lot of these stories seem to think that genetic makeup explicates a great deal of human behavior, when it doesn't appear to do any such thing. At least, not in any simple and predictable way.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

This is a good point about bonding. As for picking what a child will be - as an adoptive parent-in-waiting, I filled out a checklist of which disabilities and situations I was willing to consider, and which I wasn't. Cocaine exposure, yes; excessive alcohol exposure, no; ongoing contact with birth parents, yes, non-consenting or unaware birth father, no. It's a creepy and surreal experience but it's also how good matches are made. Not quite the same as creating a child from scratch, of course.

In the case of Beggars in Spain it didn't seem to be the tailored nature of the child that was the problem, but the "I wanted a normal child! I can't love this freak!" thing. I'm sympathetic to parents who unexpectedly have a disabled child and struggle with reality vs. their prior expectations - but parents who don't love their child because the child doesn't match what was in their head give me twitchy strangly fingers.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I sympathize with your twitchy strangly fingers. It seems like an extreme form of people failing to understand that children are, you know, people, actually separate from their parents, and that while having expectations happens, they are still their ownselves.

[laurel]

"a paean to clinical depression"

How? What? I can't even--

And then I thought some more and realized that I have encountered stories and books and movies and so on and so forth that depict it as a glamorous artistic sort of thing, I suppose. And special and blah de blah blah. (Yes, it can be an eye-opener and a learning experience and a great many things, but that's in addition to the crippling debilitating horribleness.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

You know all those people who tell you that you shouldn't medicate yourself, that treating your depression is attempting to medicate away your personality? Those people? They also think that there is some intrinsic value in depression.

Fuck 'em.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

And fuck Nancy Kress, too.

Hmm. Still angry. Fascinating.