Enjoy me among my ruins, Juniper Fitzgerald

I was lucky enough to get an advance readers copy of this book from Feminist Press — I follow them on Instagram (their feed is awesome) and they asked if any reviewers or booksellers or bookstagrammers wanted one, and I asked and they sent me one! I was so excited!!

I read it immediately, which means that I read it as I was still mulling over this conversation between Anna Kornbluh and Merve Emre on personal essays and “auto-theory.” Both of them are, not against the personal essay per se, but suspicious of its current massive popularity and what that popularity says about our cultural moment. They connect it to the crisis in the humanities and a loss of appreciation for theoretical concepts. Merve draws an intriguing connection to the rise of the college admissions essay, and reminds us how differently British college admissions work — something that I keep thinking about. Both are frustrated by how “thin” the texts labeled as auto-theory are; that they don’t actually offer any kind of original theory, especially when considered in contrast to the works of essayists and feminist theorists of the 60s-80s. It’s the difference, in Anna’s wonderful words, between “the use of personal experience to produce concepts versus the use of concepts to bedazzle personal testimony.”

Much of this, I should say up front, is persuasive to me, and I definitely share that frustration, especially when it comes to certain texts (Eula Biss’ On Immunity especially bothered me in this regard), ones where I keenly feel that the personal experience isn’t really telling us anything we didn’t already know. But I also…like a lot of those books. I don’t read all that much memoir, but when I do, I like a little theory bedazzled in sometimes! And now I feel compelled to account for that enjoyment somehow, and to think about what it is that I enjoy in this kind of writing; what I get out of it.

This was all on my mind as I started Enjoy me among my ruins, which, the back cover (of the ARC — could well change with the published version!) tells us, “combines feminist and critical theory, X-files fandom, and personal memoir.” It is described as a manifesto. One that “draws together a kaleidoscopic archive of Juniper Fitzgerald’s experiences”. From a marketing perspective, this is probably the perfect way to describe the text, but I don’t think it’s a very accurate one (and this use of the term ‘archive’ makes me twitch), and it definitely could invite the kind of critique that Merve and Anna are leveling. Certainly, the book is not a manifesto, though it does repeatedly condemn the way our culture both perceives and treats sex workers. But I wouldn’t say it’s generating any new concepts in feminist or critical theory. Or making any sort of argument. Which is fine! There are other things to like about it! But maybe don’t call it a manifesto.

I admit though, that my initial impression was that this was a fairly familiar (in its general shape, not in the specific details) narrative of trauma. But 30 pages in, there is a letter that Juniper has written to her child. That’s when the text sort of clicked into place for me. It begins as a confession that she’s stolen money from the kid’s piggy bank, and then jumps to a year later, pandemic times, still taking money occasionally. Then weaves into a broader set of reflections about mothering and trauma. It’s extraordinarily affecting, and it somehow crystallizes all the various themes and issues of the previous pages and makes them matter — not because now there’s a child involved, but maybe because it introduces a sort of doubleness that leads into the kind of abstraction that Merve and Anna are talking about: how my relationship to my own life is altered through my child. As Fitzgerald explains, she would not want to re-do anything in her own life, which ultimately led to her child, but she would never want her child to have the life she did. The story of your life matters differently; it becomes two different kinds of stories, and the friction between them.

There’s another line in this section that also stuck with me, where she is recounting some of the (horrific) experiences of her childhood, noting that they happened when she was the same age as her child is now, and she says, “These things are absolutely insane to revisit.” And they are. The things she describes are so awful that they seem unreal — how can this happen? How can men do this to women, how can they keep doing this to women? It is actually insane. And part of what this book is about is how woman keep going nonetheless — how they scrape out survival in these atrocious conditions. Here there is a potential towards something more abstract (maybe born of the dissociative impulses that this kind of experience produces), but it’s one that isn’t entirely followed through.

In that podcast episode, Anna asks, “is it really the case that performing or emanating one’s misery counters the forces of immiseration?” And I guess I think the answer is: sometimes. But I also don’t think that’s the only valid reason to write about your miserable experiences — it’s just the most socially acceptable one.

What is this book doing? We could say, it is countering the dehumanization of sex workers by giving us a glimpse into their lives. But that is both oversimplifying and doesn’t really seem right. It’s more like, Fitzgerald putting pieces of her life together — her teenage diary entries, a string of various experiences and encounters, some reflections — and inviting us to see how they form a whole, however improbably. I know, that’s vague and unsatisfying, but that’s what I’ve got so far.

Ultimately, actually, I think what I most enjoyed in this text were the interwoven 1-2 page descriptions of various women Fitzgerald has loved. There were entire worlds in those brief accounts — they were like mini novels in their own right! I can hear Anna’s voice in my head going, “well, exactly!! That’s the point!” And she’s not totally wrong…