Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood
An editor walks a tightrope.It’s part of an editor’s job to let and/or to help the writing be what it is.It depends on the content undergoing the editing, of course, and whether a house style pertains, and not every editor will agree on where to put the line (or even if there is a line), but it’s my feeling that you shouldn’t see more of the editor or the editing than you do of the writer or the writing.
At the same time, though, if “what the writing is” is…okay, “crappy” is a bit broad, but basically, if it’s not succeeding for whatever reason, it’s also part of an editor’s job to do what’s required to get it to succeed.A good editor stays out of the way, while also getting the writer out of his or her own way when it’s called for.A good editor gets the writing to work, without doing the writing work herself.
It’s a tricky balance, it takes a lot of time, and not every writer is going to let the editor step in and make the changes anyway.Not every editor knows which end is up in the first place, either, I guess, but you can have as many ideas for streamlining the narrative as you can fit in a Hefty bag, and Buzz Bissinger is, I suspect, not going to incorporate any of them.He won a Pulitzer, he’s written bestsellers, and if he wants to wax moist about Kenny Lofton, by God he’s going to whether he should or not, and there’s probably just not a whole lot you can do about it.
And I can’t characterize myself as completely immune to you-can’t-kill-my-babies-itis, either.Less sensitive than most, comparatively, when it comes to cuts and edits, sure — I worked with a writing partner for ten years, on nutty-short deadlines, two factors guaranteed to hone your battle-picking skills in that regard — but ask the fact-checker on the TWoP book how graciously I handled some of the notes we got.Better yet, ask Wing, who really has a bright future as a hostage negotiator.
It’s not easy to diagnose what a piece of content needs to make it better, it’s not easy to execute on the diagnosis or know whether it’ll even solve the problem, and it’s not easy to get the writer to accept the diagnosis either way — it’s not easy.Sometimes writers won’t hear you, and sometimes writing is just not good and you can only clean up the usage and try to live with it.
I empathize, is my point.But it’s still frustrating to read a book and wish the editor had taken a more forceful role, and I wished that every few pages while reading Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood, because the book is not very good, but the editor could have made it quite good if he or she had insisted on 1) more documentation and 2) less self-involved blathering about mirrors.
Julie Gregory isn’t a bad writer, but every image is overwritten; yes, you can inhabit a metaphorical system in which fire is a sentient being, but once you have turned 14, you shouldn’t, anymore.Ditto the Oatesian-flat-affect “I disappear, I do not feel”-type prose, which Joyce Carol Oates herself can’t always get to work and which should not be attempted by amateurs.The central story here is that Gregory’s mother, among other deeply fucked-up things, made Gregory sick on purpose in order to get attention for herself, but the storytelling is too whiffy and in love with its own depressive vagueness to have the impact it should.The timeline is confusing; Gregory doesn’t follow up in any clear way with the physicians from her childhood; she doesn’t seem to have enough distance from her family or what happened to go back and report on her own life, so instead we get a wilted salad of workshoppy clichés about reflections and becoming.It’s a great and terrible tale, but Gregory’s writing style has the unfortunate effect of annoying the reader instead of engendering sympathy.
And in her editor’s shoes, frankly, I wouldn’t have known what to do with it either.How do you even go there?”The thing is, your depiction of this horror you survived is really cheesy in spots, so I’ll need you to chuck out what you’ve got so far, spend six months outlining and reading Evelyn Waugh, and completely rewrite this indescribably painful experience from scratch, oh and also promise me you’ll give away that dog-eared copy of Leaves of Grass kthxbye”?Because I don’t doubt Gregory’s telling the truth; this isn’t a James Frey situation.She’s just not very good at unhazing the truth and making it compelling.She can do it, i.e. she is capable of doing it; she doesn’t do it.The book has good bits, and when Gregory sticks to straight description or gets snarky about her therapist Myrna, you can see a good story in there.But she’ll retreat almost immediately to the safety of a sophomoric Kafka reference or a comparison of hands to claws.
Gregory missed a lot of school, after all, so it doesn’t feel entirely fair to harsh on her for writing that comes off young.I think she’s bright and she has the tools, but we all wrote watery, derivative, hysterical tone poems in high school; she didn’t get around to doing it until later and she didn’t get to see/make fun of everyone else’s.But her editor must have seen them, should have recognized them here, and needed to ask for a dehumidified rewrite.Again, I empathize; I would agonize over it, and it probably would take me three days to find the right way to express it, but some variation on “you need to trust your writing and your story more” is a good start, and you know, you’ve got to do it.You owe it to the reader, so she doesn’t get annoyed; you owe it to the writer, so she doesn’t end up looking like the sort of hair-eater who names her characters after muses; and you owe it to yourself, so you don’t stare dully at the galleys and contemplate substituting “Allan Smithee” for your own name in the acknowledgments.
I don’t really know what else Sickened‘s editor could have done under the circumstances, but because it didn’t get done, I can’t recommend the book.The plotting is disorganized, the symbolism is stale, and the well-turned phrases get waterlogged in the overflow from everything else.
Tags: books Buzz Bissinger Joyce Carol Oates Julie Gregory Kenny Lofton Walt Whitman
So disappointing to hear. This book has literally been on my wish list for 5 years, but I haven’t checked it out of the library in that time for whatever reason (expecting it to be horrified is a good deterrent).
The subject matter is so fascinating; sucks that storytelling isn’t equally so. I don’t want to read clinical texts on the illness, but I would like a first-person account of the experience, from either side. I guess I’ll go search for a better one.
Also, I’m evil, but “Gregory missed a lot of school, after all, so it doesn’t feel entirely fair to harsh on her” gave me a wee chuckle.
The last book I remember reading when I thought the editor really fell down on the job was Bill Clinton’s biography. He led an interesting and varied life and has an insane memory for detail, but when the book is pushing 1K pages, you can’t mention every single interesting person you ever met at a fundraising dinner or in college or in your hometown or on the campaign trail or waiting in line at the deli, etc.
I imagine it’s hard to crack the whip with a former POTUS (just like it’s hard to tell someone that her abused childhood is coming off sort of flaky and dull), but that’s the job and it must be done.
I give you props for even getting through it. I wanted to like this book – lord knows the subject is engaging enough – but I had to quit after several chapters.
A good editor — by “good” I mean “tough and willing to risk the author getting mad at him/her” — makes such a difference in how a book turns out. I once read an Acknowledgments section (yes, I’m the person who reads the Acknowledgments section even if I don’t personally know the author) where the author thanked her editor for “cruelly forcing me to throw away passages I’d slaved over for weeks, because taking them out really did make the book better.” I remember thinking that the author was smart for being able to recognize that her editor was doing her job well, instead of throwing a fit about her pages ending up on the chopping block.
Throughout my life as a reader, I’ve fallen in and out of love with authors who write great early books, but then turn out later books that are overly long, turgid, and boring. I can’t help wondering if the fame went to their head and made them unwilling to accept editorial criticism (or if their later fame frightened their editors into not saying anything negative lest the publisher lose the author). It would explain a lot about the careers of certain writers.
Had the same issues with this book – was interested enough in the subject matter to finish it, but was unimpressed with the writing, which for some reason made me kind of irritated her. I guess my mind equated “writing badly” with a “my story is good enough that I don’t have to write it well” attitude. Not fair of me, but…meh. I keep meaning to reread it to see if I’m remembering it “correctly,” but I’m thinking that I am.
Oh the stories I could tell. Pulitzer or no, there are some authors who just Will Not Here It. I always try to remind my authors that I am a reader–sometimes their first one–and if have questions, so will the people who eventually buy the book. If this is what it’s like now, I would pay money to see what the manuscript looked like when it came in.
Judging from the quality and/or level of errors I’ve seen in recent books, I don’t think even publishing houses value editors the way they should. If I were an author, I’d want the toughest editor around, someone who would make me fight for passages or help me realize that sometimes the paragraph you’re madly in love with throws off the tone of an entire chapter. But if that type of editor were still around, we wouldn’t have dreck like Tom Wolfe’s *I Am Charlotte Simmons.*
@Molly: You are. The writing can slip into adolescent tics, and…okay, you know that Matt Groening strip that’s called something like “Advanced Poetry Techniques,” and it has that “I am a barn, creaking, creaking” line on it, plus a bunch of other stuff making fun of college poets? I had that strip on my wall for a decade. Almost every single sin on it, I committed multiple times in my college thesis alone. But I was 20. I thought my metaphors were really profound and a re-imagining of blah blah whatever; I hadn’t lived long enough or read widely enough to know better, it’s a common symptom, and I don’t really want anyone ELSE reading the shit, but I can forgive myself.
From a woman my age, who had an editor assigned to her? Like I said, Gregory doesn’t have the formal training I had (not that mine did much good sometimes), and the reason is also her subject. But I do feel like SOMEONE should have found a gentle, constructive, writing-based way to point out to her that her standing around naked in an empty house inspecting her own elbows is not interesting if nothing else is going on with it but derivative diction.
I read it a few years ago. It was far less interesting than it should have been, given the subject matter.
“Brian, please. I’m just not sure the general public is going to understand all this symbolism. ‘Like an echo from the caves of Coccamaura, I came forth, whilst Deirdre wept cool tears.’ Wouldn’t it be simpler to just say that on the day I was born it rained in Buffalo?” — Auntie Mame
I found this book by accident at the library and read it. A cursory internet search shows that Ms. Gregory’s account has been questioned by various sources.
I know Munchausen’s by Proxy exists; I know there are psycho-abusive parents out there who do what Ms. Gregory describes, I don’t doubt that. I also know that the abusers deny it and may not even accept in their own minds that it actually happened.
I had a hard time with this book for those reasons. The subject matter made it compelling enough, I felt. I was interested to see how other people felt about it, though.
Also, I discovered Evelyn Waugh by accident last year. Someone in my old building tossed a big box of books in the basement to rummage through, and I found a book that now resides on my bookshelves – “The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh.” Great find!
Also, @ Leslie – I agree. I’ve found so many errors in so many places, without trying. (I used to do quite a bit of proofreading at my old job; it became a ingrained habit.) When I found them in my school textbooks, it was particularly disappointing.
I have to wonder who’s reading these things before they get printed!
@Isis, and Sars, I agree. It seemed like a really really long “It Happened to Me!” from the salad days of Sassy magazine.
Speaking of dreck… I somehow managed to read two James Patterson books recently.
I’m working on avoiding having that happen again.
Can anyone recommend a good book on MbP? Fiction, memoir, case study? It shows up on TV medical dramas every once in awhile and I’ve always wondered what the trufax are.
As someone who has worked as an editor, I know it can be hard. You have to deal with a lot of people who just don’t understand the language or who get incredibly emotional about revisions and that sucks.
In my first six months at a now defunct arts magazine, I spent my time either being threatened by unstable writers or rehauling incredibly $h!tty text. Seriously, one time, there was this girl who submitted a book review for the satirical memoir I Was Hitler’s Cat and she concluded it with the sentence “If you like Hitler or you like cats, this book is for you!” And this was in no way a joke on her behalf. *sigh*
The thing that bugs me is when they assign editors who obviously don’t even give the words a mechanical glance. I was recently reading a book by an author who was one of those people who didn’t know the difference between there/their/they’re and the damn thing went to print with her using them all willy-nilly!
There are too many editors who act like doing the job of an editor is an affront to writers and that’s wrong. It’s not stiffling their creativity, it’s making their writing better, and, really, that should be everyone’s goal in the process.
“When I found them in my school textbooks, it was particularly disappointing.”
RJ, I’ve sent worksheets back to school with errors corrected in red…TEACHER errors, in spelling or grammar, with a note asking the teacher to do better, the kids should have a good example to follow, etc.
My poor daughter…
But those were mimeo worksheets, not edited, bound & published BOOKS! Yow!
GirlonthePark, and Margaret in CO, I’ve corrected mistakes made on JOB APPLICATIONS. Yeesh. Heh. On the other hand, I’ve also corrected mistakes made in the graffiti at school.
I’m getting crankier as I get older, too; one of my big indulgences is collecting research books, and I’m really REALLY annoyed when errors in substance find their way into print. I’m also REALLY annoyed by the fact that the writers to whom I’ve written have basically responded with “… Eh. No big deal.” When I wrote to one woman, who specializes in historical writing – not fiction, but American history – suggesting that the error be corrected in the next printing, since it was a sizable clunker, her response was that I should have all my friends buy her book, since the current stock has to be sold before the reprint occurs. Now, while that may or may not actually be true, why the heck would I suggest that the people I know buy a book with an uncorrected clunker in? Mostly I managed to get twice as annoyed, for the same amount of money.
Wow. I read this book when it first came out and had the exact same issues with it even though I have zero writing/editing experience. The mirrors really got to me. I was disappointed, I really wanted to like it.