The first thought about Rachel Cooke's profile was, "man, these British journalists are harsh!" Take this description of the 50-year-old Mail masochist: "She is seemingly addicted to fake tan, so she is always a slightly unnatural shade of caramel. She has suffered from anorexia since she was a child, so her round face has always been balanced on a preternaturally thin body."

I mean, don't get me wrong, Jones dishes it out. This is the woman who's called children "germ-brewing sprogs," American women "mindbogglingly stupid" and one politician's wife's outfit as "befitting a six-year-old with attention deficit disorder" with the makeup of an "Eastern Europe refugee." Jones' persistent self-flagellation and orange-levels of overexposure have led more than one reader to question her stability. Most recently, Jones has penned a memoir, The Exmoor Files: How I Lost A Husband and Found Rural Bliss, which chronicles her brutal divorce (with which regular readers are all too familiar) and the healing effects of buying a bucolic farm and relocating there to live with a number of rescue animals, including a cat ("my fur baby"), a dog ("my new boyfriend") and the horses, one of them agoraphobic, who wear boots, require the services of masseur, chiropractic and psychic.

This, you see, is in contrast to a life in which Jones' OCD got out of control (she vacuumed her lawn) and her marriage degenerated into recrimination and desperation. (Her attempts to keep it going, says Cooke, "included oral sex on demand: 'I didn't even stop when one of my sharp back teeth caused an ulcer.'") The new life, according to the memoir, though, feels anything but idyllic. Indeed, Cooke calls it "neurotic, incontinent, contradictory." Because Jones' oversharing has not changed. (Her latest column deals with her plastic surgeries and the sadness of aging.) Says the article,

In Somerset locals have taken exception to the fact that she has written that none of the menfolk over about 40 are in possession of their own teeth, and that the food served in local pubs is heated-up rubbish. She has also described her violent crush on a man whose wife is one of the few locals to have been friendly to her.

So, what's with the urge towards masochism? As the article points out, "the kind of writing she does leaves her marooned on a sad little island of self from which there is, apparently, no way back to shore." Jones says she's lost all her friends, wants no love life (she finds sex "quite tiring and repetitive... it's such an odd thing to do") and is miserable, but she doesn't want the therapeutic intervention many a concerned reader has suggested. "I don't want to be sorted out. This is who I am...You have to have a certain amount of self-esteem to think you're worth saving. I don't care about myself enough to change." The author is highly skeptical about the combination of ego and allegedly low self-esteem that characterizes Jones' columns - a mix of self-pity, self-denigration and obvious self-obsession - but it doesn't seem weird to me. Jones is a deeply unhappy woman, with the narcissist's conviction that she's speaking for others who lack the courage to admit what she does, but she couldn't have the career she does if we didn't want it.

Sylvia Plath is often maligned for launching a thousand confessionals, but it was she who said, "One should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness...with an informed or intelligent mind...it should be relevant." As art, yes; as entertainment, the three-car-pileup voyeurism will do just fine, thanks. Jones is among the most extreme example of this phenomenon, and perhaps the most disturbing, but she's hardly unique. What is perhaps most distressing about her is that it's hard to know - probably for her as well as us - where the reality ends and the story begins. Surely she heightens the drama of her responses, but at what point does that effect those responses? And then too, putting it out there in such a public way, and refusing to treat obvious problems, normalizes - even legitimizes - them for readers: what, 50 years ago, would have seemed mad, is now quotidian, and it's a vicious cycle. If Jones is really unwell, her column is unethical. If she's not, it's manipulative. The truth, probably, lies somewhere between the two. We were glad to learn, though, that she likes Irene Dunne screwball comedies; no life containing The Awful Truth can be all bad.

Enough about me [Guardian]
Question Time: Liz Jones, Fashion Editor [Independent]
Rupert Everett Looks Great, But I'd Rather Grow Old Gracefully Over A Long Lunch Or Two [Daily Mail]
Sylvia Plath Interview [YouTube]

Fortini has a point: the genre of autobiographical writing be pretty dull if everyone wrote about how healthy and self-actualized they were. And, as Fortini's many examples illustrate, confessional journalism is neither wholly new nor wholly limited to women. However, there's a pretty big middle ground between requiring writers to pass a mental health test and applauding "My Boom And Bust Boobs."

Fortini writes,

Freeman not only frets about the women who write confessional journalism, but she also frets about the women who consume it. These are "vulnerable readers" for whom sentiments about disordered eating "are surely just as dangerous and potentially influential as the photos of the skinny models the journalist professes to abhor," to quote Freeman. Journalism of this stripe supposedly makes women appear "self-hating" and "self-obsessed." But why should a female journalist writing an essay be required "to open a window into what life is like for women today?" Why can't she write a singular account of herself, and expect that readers will recognize it as such? Why not trust that they will perceive what is useful or interesting or even damning about an article? How boring if all pieces of writing were made to meet some standard of exemplary behavior and thought. I say, if some women want to write about their miseries, let them. And let readers judge for themselves.

Certainly readers should judge each piece of writing for themselves. But that doesn't make writers above criticism. Saying that a writer bears no responsibility for the effects of her work — that laying any blame on her or her editor is tantamount to "not trusting" readers — is a little like Oprah's claim that she doesn't mean to influence her viewers in any direction. When a writer publishes in a public forum, her voice carries farther than that of an average private citizen. She shouldn't have to speak for all women, but she can no longer claim that her words have zero power. And readers aren't stupid or untrustworthy if they take what she says to heart.

It's true that if writers couldn't write about their pain, we'd be missing a lot of great literature. But there's a difference between exploring one's misery and offering oneself up as a sacrificial lamb to a culture that, on some level, wants to see women suffer. We wouldn't say that Liz Jones, who has previously written intelligently on fashion and weight, shouldn't discuss her struggles with her own body. But her chronicle of a ridiculously ill-advised, gimmicky "treatment" for her anorexia, and her relapse into the depths of the disorder, essentially turns her mental illness into a stunt. This isn't self-examination — it's self-mutilation.

At least Jones tells her readers to get comfortable with their bodies in order to escape her fate. Other practitioners of female confessional journalism have more damaging messages. Under the guise of "facing facts," Zoe Lewis says her choice to pursue career over family has made her miserable — and implies that it will make readers miserable too. She writes, "If you find a great guy, don't be afraid to settle down and have kids because there isn't anything to miss out on that you can't go back and do later - apart from having kids," and, more upsettingly, "every day, minute, hour that goes by makes you older and more desperate." Lewis isn't just describing her experience and letting readers judge for themselves — she's giving explicit advice, advice colored by a jaundiced perspective on feminism and life. The trouble with her piece, and with Lori Gottlieb's, is that they take misery as their vantage point, offering wisdom to women from the depths of of self-loathing. And while self-loathing may sell papers, it doesn't help make good decisions.

Debate still rages about how "confessional" Sylvia Plath's poems really were, but some lines from "Lady Lazarus" leap to mind here. Plath wrote,

There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—--
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

Plath was certainly aware of the mass appeal of female pain, but she may have been aware, too, of the damage that regular consumption of this pain can do. There is a charge for the eyeing of Jones's or Lewis's scars — an image of helpless, self-hating femininity that we cannot un-see once we have seen it. No matter how smart or self-possessed we are, what we read affects us, and the defenders of confessional journalism are disingenuous if they deny that.

Boobs, Bulimia And Breakups [Broadsheet]

Earlier: Female Confessional Journalism And The Business Of Self-Hate

One note about the choices. Of course there are many, many books by men that "should" be read, but just like Esquire's list, most of the extant rosters of must-read classics are full of old white dudes. So our list is going to be mostly women. Anyway, here goes!

• The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
• To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
• The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
• White Teeth, Zadie Smith
• The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
• Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
• The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
• Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
• The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
• Beloved, Toni Morrison
• Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
• Like Life, Lorrie Moore
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
• A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
• A Good Man Is Hard To Find, Flannery O'Connor
• The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
• You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker

Now you go!

75 Books Every Man Should Read [Esquire]

Beauvoir had a famously open relationship with Sartre, but, as Lisa Appignanesi pointed out in the Guardian, Sartre was the one who insisted on sleeping with other people, and Beauvoir was the one who went along with it. According to Appignanesi, "In this lifelong relationship of supposed equals, he, it turned out, was far more equal than she was. It was he who engaged in countless affairs, to which she responded on only a few occasions with longer-lasting passions of her own. Between the lines of her fiction and what are in effect six volumes of autobiography, it is also evident that De Beauvoir suffered deeply from jealousy."

Sylvia Plath famously killed herself after fellow poet, husband Ted Hughes, left her for another woman. Plath had a history of mental illness and one prior suicide attempt, but her obsession with Ted and his betrayal arguably hastened her demise. Although she pursued her own career with vibrant ambition, she still typed his manuscripts for him.

Rebecca West was a 20-year-old, up and coming critic and journalist when she met H.G. Wells. They began a passionate love affair that would last a decade. What's the problem with that? Wells already had a wife, and several children. When West became pregnant out of wedlock with Wells' baby (a big deal when it happened in 1913), she decided to keep the child. According to the book, after she told Wells she would bear their child, An Affair To Remember: The Greatest Love Stories of All Time, "Most of the adjustments were made by Rebecca. She moved from rented house to rented house. She had nothing but Wells — from time to time — and her writing." Most of the time, Wells remained at home with his wife.

The moral of this story is, many great feminists were not so "feminist" in their love lives, and no one can be a shining example of any -ism 24/7. (The verdict is still out on whether or not Carrie's a "feminist" considering the entirety of her "self" is constructed around her love life. Her shoes remain fantastic, though.)

Can A Feminist Really Love Sex And The City? [Guardian]
'Our Relationship Was The Greatest Achievement Of My Life' [Guardian]
An Affair To Remember: The Greatest Love Stories of All Time [Google Books]