What If This Were Enough?: Essays

DNF after a few chapters. I was willing to give this a chance after her weird library Twitter kerfuffle–I do generally like Ask Polly–but the first few essays were soo very “remember what it was like before we all used our PHONES so much?” that I felt free to just nope on out of this and return it to the library from whence it came.

the last essay I read before I quit was about how she used to be very grumpy about the concept of Disneyland because it's so fake, but then she took their kids there and had a good time, but then she was grumpy again afterward because it was so fake. okay Heather! cool story I guess!

I really enjoyed the majority of the essays. Some seemed to pick and choose pop culture references to make a point, which is fine but doesn't convince me of much. Some relied on pop culture references that I am not familiar with, so they weren't very relatable for me. I liked her writing style but it didn't blow me away in this collection.

I've been reading this off and on since January. I really liked what Havrilsky had to say about being a person in today's world, and she especially has me convinced that I now need to read everything Shirley Jackson has ever written. I did find it difficult to really get into an essay if if focused on some pop culture thing I've never seen or heard but, hey. That's with anything.

I am a huuuge fan of the Ask Polly advice column in The Cut. I come back again and again because I feel some kinship with her. She's got sharper edges than a Dear Sugar, but like Sugar is deeply compassionate. Polly is funny, but not flippant or sarcastic like Choire Sicha's NYT Styles section advice column.

I guess what I love the most is that she has become the person that people like me—millennial weirdos who feel stuck because all we seem capable of doing is looking around in shock and disappointment asking “oh my god, is this really it?”—send their deepest questions. And we have changed her in turn.

Like any book of essays, there are some that speak right to me, some that don't speak to me at all, and some that I hope to god speak to some future, more courageous and secure form of myself.

Read it, and feel free to skip the one about Tony Soprano unless you really like the show.

👍🏽Pick it: If you find yourself addicted to optimization and dissatisfaction.
👎🏽Skip it: If you can't stomach conviction.

Cultural criticism is often penned from the throne of a writer who removes himself or herself from the dysfunction they judge. Which is perhaps why I have a hard writer crush on Havrilesky.

She does not excuse her participation in our society's obsessive pursuit for the bigger, the better, the next – anything other what we have, who we are in the NOW.

And it's because she writes as someone in the arena, searching out and screwing up, a reader will not feel threatened by her observations, but feel enrolled to deem the present enough.

Each essay can stand and shine on its own. But thread together, it's one of the most-focused collections I've ever read.

I've been a fan of Heather Havrilesky since the prehistoric days of the internet when she was writing for Suck.com. An ancient past when my pre-work routine would consist of reading long form stories called blogs, back when paragraphs weren't so intimidating. Thankfully our modern era, sensitive to our time constraints, has since concentrated my mornings to scrolling memes, instagram pics and 140 character tweets.

Heather is smart and acerbic and I love her voice - she writes like I imagine I one day could, wry observations heaped with the gloss of 10 dollar words. Unfortunately I fear I've started with the wrong book. It's still her erudite and cutting wit applied to the mundanity of everyday life, but it veers too close to earnest screed. It's easy pickings decrying the capitalist fantasies of Fifty Shades or the insufferability of foodies, Disneyland and Crossfitters. To claim we need to get out more, and online less.

But unfettered by the constraints of blogging and fleeting online attention - free to truly flex in book form, the chapters can tend to the baggy. Things used to have to be tighter, or maybe my attention has just shrunk. Maybe in this environment I need my reasonable edicts to be delivered as precise, ranting screeds, eviscerating polemics that point and laugh at the misguided other in 1000 words or less. ...insert appropriate gif meme here.