What’s particularly calculating about Attenberg describing her assault is that it brilliantly inoculates her from criticism. “Oh, you don’t like my book? Well, clearly, you stand on the side of toxic masculinity!” Hardly. But I have to wonder — in light of Alice Sebold identifying the wrong man who assaulted her — how much of this story was invented or embellished or even fact-checked by the people at Ecco. It’s easy enough to suss out who “Brendan” is. (It took me three minutes to find him on Google.) And since the dude is now dead, we have no way to corroborate the story. We also get a casual detail about a suicide attempt, but no effort by Attenberg to examine what led her to this state. Victimhood has become the currency of “memoirs” of this type. Victimhood is also the very quality that a narcissist flails about to anyone who will listen. From Here.
And the above is quoted.
And validation. Yes, the New York Times treats her account of the assault as validation.
“I Came All This Way to Meet You” is at its most affecting when Attenberg follows the darker thread of her own experience, sharing the story of an assault she endured from a classmate in her writing program. It’s not the revelation that makes this story so powerful; it’s Attenberg’s vituperation over how the university handled the assault, and how she is — and is not — valued as a writer, and how these two things are bound up together.
From Here.
What the New York Times forgot to say– or maybe the repetition police stepped in– is just how fucking courageous that makes her. So courageous. So amazingly courageous. Oh my god, that’s so courageous. How brave! Oh my.
It must be noted that the person Attenberg accuses of assaulting her is conveniently deceased and unable to counter her allegations.
We get more:
All of this rings painfully true; above all, Attenberg’s rage — the rage of the writer, especially the female writer, who’s suffered not just assaults but endless indignities and unfairnesses.
The problem always is, how do you know if the “assaults”, “indignities”, and “unfairnesses” were caused by sexism? How do you know if this treatment might have been deserved? Did you know that everybody occasionally suffers “indignities” and “unfairness”, even if they don’t all make themselves into martyrs. Maybe Attenberg was a self-aggrandizing narcissistic bitch? She was obviously– from her own testimony– a ruthlessly ambitious writer who might have been tempted to use people along the way.