I was cleaning behind a bookcase the other day and came across an old New Yorker dated October 29, 2018. Well, it’s a heavy bookcase and it doesn’t get moved that often, she said defensively.
In it was an article by staff writer Janet Malcolm, a personal history called Six Glimpses of the Past in which she explores six photographs, some taken before her family left Prague in 1939, and some after their arrival in New York when she was five years old.
The first shows her as a toddler in a sun suit, and Malcolm says she has no memory of who took the photograph or when or where it was taken.
“If I were writing an autobiography, it would have to begin after the time of that photograph,” she writes. “I am in the country on a fine day in early summer and there is a village festival. Little girls in white dresses are walking in a procession, strewing white rose petals from small baskets. I want to join the procession but have no basket of petals. A kind aunt comes to my aid. She hastily plucks white petals from a bush in her garden and hands me a basket filled with them. I immediately see that the petals are not rose petals but peony petals. I am unhappy. I feel cheated. I feel that I have been given not the real thing but something counterfeit.”
Malcolm doesn’t like peonies, although not because they struck her as counterfeit when she was a child. “Peonies have a brief blooming season, from late spring to early summer. It is tempting to buy bunches of them at the florist’s, with their lovely tight round buds, pink or white or magenta. But once they open they are blowsy and ugly. You’re sorry you bought them. Sometimes they have a delicious fragrance, but often they don’t smell at all. In the garden, they are battered by rain and smashed down, and have to be staked. Roses bloom all summer and stand up to rain. As they open in the vase, they grow more beautiful. There is no question of their superiority to peonies. The rose is the queen of flowers.”
I like peonies. We have five bushes in our garden, two white, two magenta and one pink. When they bloom there are so many flowers I can fill several vases to overflowing and put them on polished wooden tables. I don’t think they’re ugly or blowsy, and they smell lovely, scenting the house. When they droop, the petals can be kept in a bowl as potpourri. Yes, I have to stake them in early spring, but it’s not hard, and the leaves grow around the stakes and hide them. I like roses, too. They’re not competitors, and I don’t see how flowers can be ranked by anything other than taste.
Yet reading her firm declarative sentences made me think of Malcolm’s most famous line, the opening sentence in her 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer, which first appeared in a two-part New Yorker story the year before: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
I have no interest in replaying the controversy raised by her assertion, which centred on a journalist who probably grew too close to a murderer. Malcolm was criticized for her position at the time, although it’s been broadly accepted since. I see some truth it in myself, and also believe it has helped propagate an unfortunate blanket condemnation of the media that now bleeds out of Donald Trump’s Twitter feed into common discourse, even among people who have no use for Trump. ‘Of course I don’t trust the media,’ people say, without reckoning the difference between, say, Fox News and The New York Times and Buzzfeed; National Public Radio, the Globe and Mail, the National Enquirer, the Guardian and People magazine.
But I digress. What mostly interests me is the lack of modifiers in Malcolm’s sentences, even when she ends the section on peonies by taking a few steps back. “The idea of absolute aesthetic value is a debatable one, of course,” she writes. “I have inclined toward it, but sometimes I have turned from it.”
It interests me partly because of a new book that’s all over social media lately. At least, quotes from it are. Playing Big is a self-help book written by a self-defined personal growth coach named Tara Mohr. It began as a popular article on Gwyneth Paltrow’s site goop (uncapitalized), and the quotes floating around seem to originate in a recent interview she did there. In it Mohr says women should excise qualifiers from their writing the way Malcolm does.
“Here are some of the ‘little things’ women do in speech and writing that aren’t really ‘little,'” she says. “In fact, they have a huge impact in causing us to come across as less competent and confident:
- Inserting just: “I just want to check in and see…” “I just think…” Just tends to make us sound a little apologetic and defensive about what we’re saying. Think about the difference between the sound of “I just want to check in and see…” and “I want to check in and see…” or the difference between “I just think” and “I think…”
- Inserting actually: “I actually disagree…” “I actually have a question.” It actually makes us sound surprised that we disagree or have a question—not good!
- Using qualifiers: “I’m no expert in this, but…” or “I know you all have been researching this for a long time, but…” undermines your position before you’ve even stated your opinion.”
Changing your emails the way she suggests in goop (uncapitalized) sounds effective. It’s clean, and it makes you sound like Malcolm, who’s an elegant and authoritative writer, as the lengthy excerpts I’ve included show.
But Malcolm is also an arrogant writer, with her confident dislike of peonies and journalists, even though she’s a journalist herself. That doesn’t mean I agree with all the criticism she faces. I’ve read The Journalist and the Murderer, and think part of the pushback she got came because her confidence sounded male. Malcolm is usurping the male role of authority figure through the declarative bluntness of her writing, and how dare she? Now Mohr recommends that other women do the same, and she’s probably right in saying that it might get them (us) more attention. It certainly worked for Malcolm.
But I also dislike it. I don’t see why women should try to sound like men. In fact, I think I’d like the world better if men tried to sound more like women, modifying their speech, being inclusive, not claiming to know everything, and leaving the door open for others to respond.
That’s all I really have to say.
I also like peonies, as you might have noticed. And I loved journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s takedown of Gwyneth Paltrow in the New York Times magazine, which Paltrow probably found morally indefensible. But then, so is goop. Which in another sense is very thoroughly capitalized.
Lesley Krueger’s latest novel is Far Creek Road, available here.