March Memoir of the Month #2: What If This Were Enough?

Cultural criticism from the sharp-witted Heather Havrilesky.

What If This Were Enough? (2018)

by Heather Havrilesky

There’s a group of cool people I’ve never hung out with because they are (did I mention cool?) writers who lived in New York. The particular ones I’m talking about are Gen Xers who started early internet webzines like Suck.com.

This month’s pick is by one of those Gen Xers named Heather Havrilesky, an early writer for Suck. In this Atlantic article, Heather talks about what it was like to be part of that 1990s zeitgeist:

Reading Suck was like finding an eye-rolling teenager with a Lit Theory degree at an IPO party and smoking clove cigarettes with him until you vomited all over your shoes.

Cool, right? I listened to this podcast interview with her and discovered she’s written many books, one of which is What If This Were Enough?:

The first few essays cover cultural phenomena like the underlying capitalist evil of Disney and society’s unquenchable desire for the next best thing, as evidenced by our collective worship of cultural icons like Don Draper.

Another contains an unexpectedly in-depth analysis of the TV show Entourage. Even if pop culture isn’t your favorite topic, you’d be hard-pressed to argue with her commentary.

One of my favorite essays is “Bravado” about how boldness manifests itself differently in men and women. She describes watching her highly capable and intelligent mother serve as the typist for a completely incompetent (highly regarded, brilliant) man. She writes:

We should all learn to play nicely with others, sure but not so nicely that we’re the ones organizing and scheduling and remembering while some dude gets to wander around, unfocused but still sure of his place in the world. Sometimes, when you are good at hard work, you give yourself too much of it. And with too much hard work in front of you, you might not also have the time and space to be truly brilliant.

If cultural commentary isn’t your jam, Havrilesky’s more recent memoir is Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage. It received a mixed review from the Times (others loved it).

She also writes an advice column (formerly for New York Magazine) now on Substack called Ask Polly

Happy reading!