This casual imprecision would be more forgivable if the book weren’t built around a fundamentally unconvincing perspective: that of the “bad feminist” that Gay wants readers to believe she is. She is “fascinated by strength in women,” and notes that “girls have been written and represented in popular culture in many different ways.” She informs us, in the book’s first sentence, that “the world changes faster than we can fathom in ways that are complicated.” Gay very much likes the word “interesting” and deploys it to describe everything from niche dating sites to Patrick Bateman to Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men.” But Gay squanders much of this intimacy on points more vague than topic sentences in SAT sample essays. Throughout these personable essays, many of which first appeared online, we learn of Gay’s Haitian-American upbringing, the harrowing sexual assault she suffered in adolescence and her conflicted feelings about the civic responsibilities of being a black academic. The book that follows ranges in subject from Gay’s obsessions with childish fiction (“Sweet Valley High,” “The Hunger Games”) to the way race is mishandled in contemporary film (“The Help,” “Django Unchained,” “Twelve Years a Slave”) to the patriarchal prejudices involved in deeming a novel “women’s fiction.” “When feminism falls short of our expectations,” she writes, “we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement.” Gay’s thesis - which is reasonable, if overly reliant on an unreasonable straw man - is that women shouldn’t reject feminism just because their natural inclinations, like reading Vogue or listening to sexist rap music, make it hard to live in perfect accord with contemporary feminist principles. “Bad Feminist,” Roxane Gay’s second book this year, makes the claim that we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good when it comes to identity politics. If there is anything truly shameful left in this world it is self-deception, and Merkin deserves laurels for the willingness she shows in interrogating her own. But in a book brimming with insight (“Children are inherently conservative”) and impeccably precise description (Susan Sontag’s writing has a “crisp and haughty ‘are you with me, you morons’ manner”), Merkin’s most striking trait is her fearlessness with regard to her own denial and rationalization, especially on the subjects of weight and finances.
It can sometimes seem as if the global supply of candor has run dry, all the world’s dirty laundry already aired. Merkin writes from that chic state of mind she calls “cultural egalitarianism.” Her celebrity subjects range from the “wholesome and aboveboard” Marilyn Monroe to the novelist Jean Rhys, whom she describes as forever “doomed to be overwhelmed by first impressions.” Though Merkin is susceptible to “the florid jargon of shrinks” and has an oddly archaic desire to spin coherent narratives from psychoanalytic conjecture, her investigations into the inner lives of icons are conducted with genuine and earnest attention.
She has a particularly keen ability to abridge other people’s lives, and some of her best writing appears in what are ostensibly book reviews of biographies. Like Joan Didion, whose most famous essays are impossible to imagine appearing in any contemporary publication, Merkin often deals in inscrutable genres. The conspicuous suffering that runs through the book belongs to actresses, to novelists, to musicians and to the author herself.
Merkin’s 46 essays share a similar curiosity about the glittering byproducts of personal pain. If all the lamps in the house were turned out If there is a cipher to “The Fame Lunches,” Daphne Merkin’s first essay collection in over 15 years, it is embedded in her profile of the poet Anne Carson, who writes: