What emerges, in the course of this vivid, hilarious, daring self-portrait of a book, is a person who has achieved clarity about her own contradictions, or at least has figured out how to use those contradictions as an excuse to bring lively writing into the world ... This knot of contradictions runs like a rip current through the book, but despite her worries that there is something troubled about her nature, this is not a troubling book. The world is troubling, yes, but this narrator's intelligence, her curiosity about the ambivalence that defines interiority, and the unique light cast by her experiences growing up in Seattle the 1970s and '80s yield insight and laughs on every page.
Sentence for sentence, a more pleasure-yielding midlife memoir is hard to think of ... This is all quite a treat: a 50ish lady memoirist with no epiphanies in sight. Nothing’s figured out and nothing’s getting better, except Dederer’s prose, which has acquired a wonderful sordidness ... The memoir’s constantly shifting vantage points allow Dederer to keep returning to the same themes without wearing them out. What knits things together is, of course, sex—the stranger-fucking of adolescence, the been-there-done-that of married sex, the illicit flirtations, all the men who were and are a delivery system for sex, sex as a delivery system for an elusive sense of self. And the power of sex to unravel everything you thought you knew about yourself ... Indeed, female masochism is a gift that keeps giving in Dederer’s hands. She gets as much mileage from it as Philip Roth did from Newark.
Claire Dederer sidesteps both theatrical prose and broad clichés in favor of frank and colorful admissions of impatience, lust and guilt. Maybe because Dederer never tries to sweeten her suffering with sentimentality, it feels less onerous to ride sidesaddle on her journey through the barren flats of holy matrimony ... Dederer’s comical, erratic storytelling is nuanced and unpredictable, dwelling on the recklessness of youth without ever selling short the courage and daring it took to be so reckless. She brings all of the arrogance and longing of early sexual exploration to vivid life with real empathy and verve ... Dederer is an excellent writer who spins her prose with the casual grace and easy humor of a seasoned professional. Yet by the end of the book, her strange, nonlinear tour ends up feeling a little rushed and incomplete.
Even in these confess-all times, there are secrets many of us dare not speak. Such as the difficulty of reconciling a feminist identity with the desire to be violated. Or the reality that teenage girls can be both wielders and victims of their own seductive power. Claire Dederer, in a ferociously honest new memoir, Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning, walks this minefield. Most shocking of all, she does it with bracing humor ... The momentum lags slightly when Dederer recounts an ill-advised tour through Australia with a stiff, withholding boyfriend. But she is a delightfully mordant companion. You could ask for no better guide to the center of yourself.
Indeed. Love and Trouble is a book of sadness: 'a mid-life reckoning,' or so its subtitle insists. Its power, though, resides in Dederer’s refusal to sugarcoat, to tie up the loose ends, to pretend there’s a world in which our trouble passes, in which we may, finally, be reconciled ... Much of Love and Trouble balances these midlife complications with the ghost or glimmer of its author’s younger self. 'That horrible girl,' as Dederer calls her, emerges in short selections from her diaries, but more than that, she is a kind of animating force ... The result is not merely a self-portrait, but in many ways a depiction of a modern marriage, in which love and lust, frustration and exhaustion, overlap in an ongoing dance of veils.
There is a magnificently frank and angry letter to Roman Polanski concerning his child-rape case; she devotes a chapter to analyzing herself as if she were the subject of a scientific case study. These sections are vivid and bracing, and free from the occasionally rebarbative colloquialism and knowing sarcasm that appear in her more conventionally confessional (and otherwise moving) pages.
At its strongest, Love and Trouble is a story of spiritual possession — partially the story of Dederer’s sudden surrender to her younger self, but also the story of how she spent so many years dearly wanting to be possessed ... Alas, the memoir as a whole is less sharp, less cohesive, than my retelling may suggest ... This is memoir-as-collage ... The wobbly mosaic these chapters create is intentional; still, it’s hard not to wish the tiles were more precisely cut ... Lives, too, are essentially plotless. But if they don’t have an inherent structure, they can be given a shape ...a good deal of the memoir’s force hinges on the reader’s ability to believe that the events of that spring were world-changing enough to make Dederer undertake a forensic examination of her entire youth ... Whatever form it has is inconsistent. But when it’s visible, it’s gorgeous.
The strongest and weakest chapters are those that play with form. One that falls flat is structured around an area map. It’s a neat idea, but just reads as a list of crap bars and record shops around Seattle, before Dederer moves to the liberal arts college Oberlin (famous alma mater of hippies – and Lena Dunham – or, as Dederer acerbically puts it, those who got rejected from Brown).
...edgy, frank, and at times outright hilarious tale of lost youth and midlife angst ... This candid memoir will resonate with women (and quite possibly men) of all ages, but particularly those in midlife. Dederer brings a startling intimacy and immediacy to her version of growing up female in America.
Dederer is unstintingly honest and unafraid as she excavates her motivations and reservations, her fantasies, and the implications of the choices she has made – and those she has yet to make. Insightful, provocative, and fearlessly frank, Dederer seduces readers with her warmth, wit, and wisdom.
