Scratched
Page 19
My collusion with perfectionism is hard to admit. I would give a lot to be able to portray myself as having bravely fought through to sanity. I yearn to have been wholeheartedly on my own side, but in the contest I’m describing here, in which tolerance for inevitable flaws and errors stares right into perfectionism’s yellow eyes and just says No!, both sides are equally mine. If I am complicit, it’s not with an alien intruder like cancer, but with a phenomenon devised by my own mind, my perfectionism as much me as my writing is. More, really, because when I’m not writing I have no idea what writing is, or is like, but I always know what perfectionism is like, how it feels, what it wants. It’s not elusive. Conceivably for a person like me, terrified of abandonment, there is reassurance in the ceaseless availability of perfectionism’s sabotage.
For a self under threat, perfectionism creates a story. As a child in church I always loved when the minister intoned Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way. If the gate was wide, I wouldn’t have believed in it for one second. Straitness, narrowness—those I recognized as likely. So it is with the stories perfectionism authors, in which a soul—mine, say—is offered the slimmest possible chance of getting through.
There’s a chance, maybe even a good chance, Cognitive-Behavioral or some other form of therapy would have proved more efficacious in ameliorating perfectionism than the talk therapy I loved, possibly I started out on the wrong track and stuck to it too credulously at the moments when greater curiosity regarding alternatives was called for. To write that perfectionism has taught me something is to obscure the messiness of my backsliding transit, to write that I’ve learned to extend a welcome to mishaps, failures, rifts, smudges, to effortfulness in general, to what I’d call, in talking with my students, process, is to conceal a thousand, ten thousand, eruptions of repudiation. I worry that to present myself as having made even small gains is an affront to the pain that can animate the question How do you deal with perfectionism? To tell the truth: I have written this book not knowing. To the question But how did you get this book down on paper if you’re not over your perfectionism? I have only partial, peculiar answers: there are days I’m able to defuse the scathing condemnation perfectionism directs at whatever I’m doing by saying Sure, okay, this is totally fucked up, but let’s just see what happens, some days when perfectionism lights the flame of Fort-Da my inarticulate response goes something like You are not that interesting, there are days I can live without the radiant book this one has failed, over and over, to be, the ravishing book now absolutely beyond reach, because it’s become this one instead.
As long as the stitches were in I either had to keep my mouth shut or risk their tearing. Even after they came out, the mend was vulnerable, and I was supposed to keep the movement of my mouth to the bare minimum, not to speak or laugh or take any nourishment except through a straw for five weeks, and once the five weeks were over I was left with a vertical hot-pink scratch, about which I told the antiques dealer when we gazed at it together in the mirror, “My face is ruined. My face.” She said, “Can we be a little grateful? A little relieved this is the outcome, a small scar? That’s going to fade? Get paler and paler till it’s barely there?” I said, “Next you’ll say It could have been much worse. Next you’ll say I could have lost you.” She said, “No, next I’ll say, ‘Try to love this incarnation.’”
And I said, “I do.”
Notes on Sources
Epigraphs
Paul L. Hewitt, Gordon L. Flett, Simon B. Sherry, Marie Hobke, et al. “The interpersonal expression of perfection: Perfectionistic self-presentation and psychological distress.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, July 2003.
Yohji Yamamoto. The Past, the Feminine, the Vain in Talking to Myself. Kiyokazu Washida, ed. Steidl/Carla Sozanni, 2002.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Hogarth Press, 1927.
Other Sources
Nicholas W. Affrunti and Janet Woodruff-Borden. “Perfectionism and Anxiety in Children,” The Psychology of Perfectionism, Routledge, 2018.
Jay Appleton. The Experience of Landscape, John Wiley & Sons, 1995.
John Bowlby. Attachment, Basic Books, 1969.
John Bowlby. Separation: Anxiety and Anger, Basic Books, 1973.
John Bowlby. Loss: Sadness and Depression, Basic Books, 1980.
Freud. “Thoughts for the Time of War and Death,” 1915.
Paul L. Hewitt and Gordon L. Flett. “Perfectionism in the Self and Social Contexts: Conceptualization, Assessment, and Association with Psychopathology,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1991.
Henry James. “The Art of Fiction,” Partial Portraits, Macmillan, 1888.
Adam Phillips. “The Perfectionist,” On Balance, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Sylvia Plath. “Child,” Collected Poems, HarperCollins, 1992.
Sylvia Plath. “The Munich Mannequins,” Ariel, 1965.
Kenneth G. Rice, Hanna Suh, and Don E. Davis. “Perfectionism and Emotion Regulation,” The Psychology of Perfectionism, Routledge, 2018.
Rainer Maria Rilke. “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” translated by Stephen Mitchell, poets.org, 2007.
Maurice Sendak. Where the Wild Things Are, HarperCollins, 1967.
Joachim Stoeber, Philip J. Carr, Martin M. Smith, and Donald H. Saklofske. “Perfectionism and Personality,” The Psychology of Perfectionism, Routledge, 2018.
D. W. Winnicott. Holding and Interpretation: Fragments of an Analysis, Grove Press, 1994.
D. W. Winnicott. Home is Where We Start From, Norton, 1986.
D. W. Winnicott. Playing and Reality, Routledge, 1989.
Acknowledgments
I can’t believe my luck in meeting the editor Wendy Lesser when she, I, and Threepenny Review were young; this book and its predecessors gained greatly from her genius combination of clarity and ardor.
To Joy Harris, lioness among agents, my forever gratitude.
Thanks to Terry Karten for the keenest subtlety and most graceful editorial guidance.
My thanks to Michelle Latiolais, extraordinary friend, writer, and reader.
My thanks to Amber Oliver, Christine Choe, Robin Bilardello, Joy O’Meara, Trina Hunn, Fritz Metsch, Mary Beth Constant, and everyone at HarperCollins.
Calvert Morgan, for his enormous care and exuberant love of writing.
Adam Schorin for his insight and exceeding generosity.
Kate Larson for kind encouragement.
Julia Meyerson for her jeweler’s eye and constancy.
For transformative conversations, my thanks to Jeremy Glazer, to Shannon Pufahl, to Nina Schloesser Tárano, to Ruchika Tomar.
Thanks to Dagmar Logie, Alyce Boster, Christina Ablaza, and Ose Jackson for great kindness and support.
Vincent Scarpa, radiant reader.
Sylvie Lenox for loving the four-legged ones.
Thank you to my son’s father for the miles, the years, the beauty. For one winter night’s fire in the kiva fireplace.
To Gabriel for the joy.
To Harriet who can be trusted with human hearts.
Wild gratitude to Gloria for every minute.
It gives me pleasure to say: Errors are all mine.
About the Author
Elizabeth Tallent is the author of a novel and four story collections. Her work has appeared in the Threepenny Review, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Tin House, and ZYZZYVA, as well as in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses anthologies. She teaches in Stanford’s creative writing program and lives with her wife, an antiques dealer, on the Mendocino Coast.
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Also by Elizabeth Tallent
In Constant Flight
Museum Pieces
Time with Children
Honey
Mendocino Fire
Copyright
scratched. Copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth Tallent. All righ
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Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-241038-2
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