Reviews and Comments

I have been on a serious Bechdel fan-girl kick. Tascha gave me this book as a spontaneous gift. I devoured it, and then worked my way backwards through her memoir, Are you my mother? and Fun home.

I'm writing this as an overall review, not really a summary, just some scattered remarks about my journey. First, it is amazing how Bechdel can keep retelling her life from different perspectives, using different lenses to make sense of things in a way that is entertaining. Second, I really like how in this latest once she really gets to the madness / banality / desperation of exercise culture, but does so from a point of empathy and personal involvement, so instead of coming across as judgemental she is insightful and compassionate (reminds me a bit of that article on barre). Third, maybe the fact that, on this third read, I found Are you my mother? fascinating (event the parts about therapy) is a sign of aging. Dense and slow, at times eye-roll inducing and far-fetched, often navel-gazing and irritating, but I didn't skip a single page. Fun home is an amazing twin-portrait of her and her father, sweet and angry. TCLS, I loved all three of them, all over again.

This was actually a pretty good book, albeit very straight and male. It essentially a pop-history book, but made arguably more elegant by having an overarching if somewhat simplistic argument throughout: that Amsterdam is the birth place of liberalism, both meant as a set of ideas concerning freedom, tolerance and human rights, and also as an ideology promoting individualism and self-enrichment. Indeed, those are two side of the same coin. The argument kind of works, connecting disparate topics that seem important to Amsterdam's history: land reclamation (which requires collaboration but was carried out so that individuals retained control over land), trade, bourgeois portrait art, the resistance to and complicity with the Nazi, coffee shop and counter culture, social housing. In the chapters about the more recent history, however, I struggled to overlook the book's smug celebration of Dutch (and US) society, its quick glossing over the horrors of colonialism, the unthinking treatment of anti-squatting laws as common sense.

Gist (no major spoilers): in many situations, from the personal scale of relationship to geopolitics, people tend to react to perceived abuses through group shunning. We experience discomfort, pain or fear, identify a culprit, and direct punishment at them, which often involves a refusal to talk. This dynamic is often fueled by traumatic experiences or a sense of Supremacy: the two are remarkably similar, and often coexist in the same person. Our reaction is enabled by people who belong to the same group as us, being a family, a social group or a nation, who ‘take our side’ and help to implement punishment. But what if many of these situations where not instances of abuse, but simply conflict, which can only be resolved through open confrontation? This would require us to engage in many uncomfortable conversations, being honest and ‘rigorous’ with our friends and family members even at the risk of upsetting or even losing them (being a bystander is one of the worst things one can do), and confront our own feeling of righteousness and superiority. It probably wouldn’t ‘feel good’, but it’s the way to get better.

Some thoughts: Schulman opens the book by asking readers to approach the book like a theatre piece: something to engage with rather than agree or disagree with. This is very helpful advice, and perhaps something to apply to many more books. I thought of it often while reading, trying to delay judgement and instead focusing on understanding what she wanted to say. I did not think I would like the chapters about personal relationships, I suppose because I feel almost scared to entertain the thought that perceived abusers deserve being heard. But when you spell it out like that, doesn’t it sound very reasonable? And isn’t it true that most people are at some points both victims and perpetrators, at various scales, and that by isolating them unconditionally we don’t give them a chance to heal? From there, Schulman makes an argument about avoiding to involve the state unless someone is in danger, linking this to a critique of the heteronormative family. Again, this seem eminently reasonable, although I think I have a slightly less negative view of family, as long as we don’t see genetics as a condition for family ties. In later chapters, Schulman expands her argument to racial politics and Israel/Palestine. She sets it up by sharing her admiration for (Jewish) psychoanalysts who left Germany as refugees, and then devoted their career to understanding Nazi behaviours, and dreamt of treating their oppressors. Put it like that, it's a crazy thought, and, indeed an extreme case of refusing shunning in favour of understanding. At the same time, I always find it difficult to apply psychology to structural groups – let’s say, White people, or Israelis. Not because I don’t think it plays a role, but because it seems to me that most people have a genuine desire to abide by some moral standard, and be ‘decent’, however their define that. But to what extent can one expect this kind of concerns to guide group behaviour?