Janowitz’s account of all this is not self-pitying but quite funny, in the David Sedaris tradition ... If you’re looking for profound insight about growing up with difficult parents, about the vagaries of literary life or about the hardships of elder care, this memoir won’t do it for you. Janowitz doesn’t interpret or analyze much ... [a] wry, unpretentious memoir.
Janowitz’s greatest strength has always been her bluntness, and there’s certainly no lack of it in Scream ... When Janowitz gets coy or retreats into cliché in passages about her famous friends, it doesn’t seem to be out of discretion. You get the sense, rather, that it pains her to give readers the gossip they want ... Once you get over your disappointment at Janowitz’s refusal to detail her wildest nights of 'semi-fame,' the irreverence of an author who’s desperate for money but still won’t submit to expectations is thrilling ... rarely ha[s] the emotional impact she intends.
The author’s dysfunctional family life in Western Massachusetts and the Boston suburbs is squarely in Running With Scissors territory; so too is her broad use of humor to depict the domestic freak show. But where Augusten Burroughs wove his horror story with rich detail, cutting insight, and plain old craft, Janowitz unloads anecdotes like freight from a dump truck — unsorted and a little smelly ... It’s hard to know how Janowitz feels; her inner world is buried under a pile of extraneous incidents, bewildering sarcasm, and whining.
...if her family is Exhibit A in humanity’s capacity for awfulness, she makes her way through the full alphabet, complaining about everyone ... Like a punk arriving late to class with neither paper nor pencil, she raises lack of curiosity to an art form ... The book is so raw it’s literally unfinished. In place of a conclusion, she has a chapter called 'No Conclusion,' in which she wonders how her brother’s case against her will turn out.
While there are some fine and even heartbreaking chapters in Scream, the books is surprisingly scattershot in its depiction of Janowitz’s life ... Most of Janowitz’s fish-out-of-water anecdotes about rural life backfire: one sympathizes with the so-called hicks she’s lambasting, rather than the poor little 'it' girl ... Still, Scream's final chapters, dealing with her beloved mother’s death, are harrowing and heartrending.
The laziness of these tactics has the effect of suggesting the entire book to be a feat of will, and that it is not on any register a literary project, but an obligation ... Repetition in memoir is rarely a compositional strategy, and this book could have benefited from more editing ... The joy one feels reading Janowitz comes despite her lack of craft—from the cult of personality she cannot help but conjure, a thick smog blanketing life and writing ... I don’t know why she gave us Scream, this self-portrait of a woman postlapse, but I can’t help but look.
Ms. Janowitz has a knack for uncovering the beauty and intrigue in the banal and bizarre ... Sometimes so-called 'rags to riches' tales can quickly shift to navel gazing. Ms. Janowitz stays clear of that by balancing stories of her successes with brutal honesty ... Scream reads a lot like a diary. Ms. Janowitz jumps around in time and place and memories unfold with a stream of consciousness flow. Consequently, and unfortunately, some places and people lack description and come across flat. On the other hand, information in some of the later chapters is repetitive and redundant.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
