I actually 100% agree with the clunker of a sentence from the Emily Witt piece, and think the insight that perhaps we read it like auto-fiction was astute. On the other hand, when I think of autofiction I don't exactly think of it as an especially empathetic genre. So, dinging the piece for not trying to reconstruct "Andrew's" perspective is a blind alley for me. And it's clear that the New Yorker is aiming for some of the Cut's turf here. So, at a meta-level at least, it's interesting. And it falls with in Witt's beat. Substantively, it strikes me that the piece splits the difference between In the Dream House and All Fours. Formally, it sets up the role of drugs, then COVID, then revolutionary situation, and finally concludes with a very mundane and banal story that is much more relatable. The kind of lowkey abusive relationship is familiar, but rarely represented in the media as abusive. Most of us who have been in relationships that resemble the one described in the piece need a fair amount of therapy to get to the place that Witt arrives in understanding that codependency and abuse can be separate phenomena of the same relationship. Consider yourself lucky if that's a tale old as time.
I actually 100% agree with the clunker of a sentence from the Emily Witt piece, and think the insight that perhaps we read it like auto-fiction was astute. On the other hand, when I think of autofiction I don't exactly think of it as an especially empathetic genre. So, dinging the piece for not trying to reconstruct "Andrew's" perspective is a blind alley for me. And it's clear that the New Yorker is aiming for some of the Cut's turf here. So, at a meta-level at least, it's interesting. And it falls with in Witt's beat. Substantively, it strikes me that the piece splits the difference between In the Dream House and All Fours. Formally, it sets up the role of drugs, then COVID, then revolutionary situation, and finally concludes with a very mundane and banal story that is much more relatable. The kind of lowkey abusive relationship is familiar, but rarely represented in the media as abusive. Most of us who have been in relationships that resemble the one described in the piece need a fair amount of therapy to get to the place that Witt arrives in understanding that codependency and abuse can be separate phenomena of the same relationship. Consider yourself lucky if that's a tale old as time.