Tag: triggering

Catch and Kill Review

Huge trigger warning concerning this book, as it deals with Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults, and the widespread misogyny and sexual assaults found in the entertainment and news media industry.

This book gets 4.5 freaky surveillance cameras out of 5. This photo technically only has 4 cameras in it, but the implication being that they are everywhere, I’m going to say there is half a camera hiding in this photo somewhere.
[This photo is stylized with bisexual lighting (that means pink, purple and blue woo I’m cool I know things) and just shows 4 cameras on a variety of walls, watching your every move.]

This crazy COVID19 pandemic means that most of Ontario, Canada is shut down right now. If you can stay at home, please do. Perks of staying at home: lots of time to blog and lots of time to read which in turn leads to more blogging. So I’m going to be grateful for this pandemic-imposed isolation and let my creative and critical juices flow. I have no time-frame for posting now, but hopefully can crank out another post before going back to work!

  • Why did I pick this book up?

I picked this book up because a lot of people I know have been buzzing about this book. After months of hearing about this book, and being steeped in the reality of the events from the book unfolding in almost real-time in our newsfeeds, I decided, enough was enough. The Harvey Weinstein trial was just beginning, and even though I already believed him to be guilty based on a myriad of factors I won’t even begin to unpack here, I wanted to see the proof for myself. I expected Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators to be a fact-filled book that laid out Farrow’s investigative research into Weinstein and the accusations around him. I definitely did not expect Catch and Kill to be this and a thrilling and sometimes scary spy novel! There were many times reading this book that I kept thinking “no one could make this shit up, because no one would think this is realistic.” And that is what is wild about this book! Because it is real! He has so much proof!

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

It’s a resounding hell yeah I would recommend this book! Farrow’s writing is riveting, insightful, and the pace of the book is wound tight, keeping you on edge. Even when he has to go into some context, explain the makeup of some organization, detail some executive’s past, it all serves to show the insidious ways in which these predators infiltrate communities and prey on vulnerable people. And they all help each other in some way. Covertly or overtly, all these predators know on some level what the other predators are doing, and they know that they all have each others’ backs. They all value the same thing in life, and that is power and how that power makes them feel.

I would not recommend this book if you are an incel I guess, because this will not jive with your overall worldview, but also why are you reading my blog then? *Casts a banishing spell*

Ok, that’s better. Anyways, even though non-fiction can sometimes be dry and boring, that is definitely not the case! Even knowing in an overall sense ‘what happens next’ in the book did not take away from how exciting and suspenseful it was. If you only know the Weinstein sexual assault aspect of this case, and not the surveillance and overall societal/industry cover-up of these and other similar crimes, then you don’t know half the story! I thought I knew a lot, and turns out I was only seeing the tip of the iceberg!

  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

The book covers so much ground that I can’t even begin to hope to summarize it fully and properly. But basically we get a bit of Farrow’s backstory, how he is working for NBC and wants to be a tv journalist. He is doing a series of stories on Hollywood, and gets a lead on sexual assaults in the business. In the meantime, we also see the parallel investigation into the investigation into these sexual assaults that is being done by some scary, vaguely Russian men. This is all stuff that Farrow has obviously uncovered after his initial investigations, and seeing how Farrow goes from slightly paranoid to full on believing he is being followed, to actually having proof that he was being followed on a scale much crazier than he could have imagined, make this book feel like a spy novel. That’s basically what it is at its core, with sexual assault as the underpinning motive, and the fact that this is not a novel, it’s real life. Which makes it crazier than spy novel out there.

Essentially, Farrow’s leads grow from one, to two, to four, and exponentially from there, and all the victims have something, or rather someone, in common: Harvey Weinstein. While reporting, Farrow also comes up against a lot of resistance, and in some cases outright hostility and manipulation, from most of his superiors. People who are supposed to have journalistic integrity.

Eventually, Farrow’s investigation comes to have the significance and potential danger of a bomb, and he is fired from NBC. He takes his reporting to the New Yorker, and also discovers Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s own investigation into Weinstein. Along the way, we discover that basically 90% of Hollywood has heard or witnessed some crazy gross behaviour from this man, but no one really ever does anything. Except for the amazing and courageous women who come forward to denounce his actions.

The great thing about reading this book when I did was that I happened to read this just as the trial was unfolding, and got to see the tangible results of these journalists’ work. More on that below.

On a typical weekday, the parking lot behind the book in this photo would be totally full. We are on lockdown. Stay healthy people!
[There are only a few cars in the parking lot. The book cover has a drawing of a hand zipping a mouth shut. The title is spread across the black cover in huge, intimidating white font.]
  • Overall brain gushings :

This book proves that not only is Ronan Farrow a brave and excellent researcher and interviewer, he is a great writer.

One of the most terrifying aspects of this book was the ways in which so many people who seemed to be allies, or seemed to believe victims, proved to be abusers and their various actors. I’d like to give Lisa Bloom a special garbage human shout-out for being the fucking most despicable example of someone who purported to be a victim advocate using their own privilege to undermine and benefit from victims’ abuse. Fuck that lady. Also all the NBC executives who tried – and failed I’d like to point out snarkily – to make it impossible for Farrow to do his job.

The second scariest thing about Catch and Kill was to see the ways in which the dystopian surveillance state apparatus we imagine in worlds like 1984 and Neuromancer are actually being deployed by wealthy and influential individuals. Spy agencies and PR agencies work in tandem to protect the powerful, and to help abusers find and suppress victims. Jesus it is scary. I could go on for a million years about this book, but basically, read it because it is interesting and covers way more than what any media surrounding the trials has covered. Also, if you know me in real life, we can talk about this for as long as you like.

  • What does it mean?

It means Harvey Weinstein is fucking guilty. In a beautiful fashion, I finished reading Catch and Kill, vindicated in my opinion of his guilt, reeling at the sheer volume of proof against him, knowing that no argument would lessen his guilt in my mind. Farrow brought receipts! Stacks of em! And then, just a few days later, a jury of his peers found him guilty! For once! Then, to further emphasize the real concrete impact this book has had, Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison.

Catch and Kill means that maybe, for some men who have been abusing their power for so long, thinking that they would get away with their behaviour forever, because they had been getting away with it forever, well… Time’s up, baby.

  • Favourite passages :

O. M. G. I almost died the first time Matt Lauer made an appearance in this book. Firstly because it is one of the first examples we have of how far-reaching and insidious this behaviour is, but secondly, because of how it ends:

As I reached the door, he said wryly, ‘Don’t let us down. I’ll be watching.’

‘You want this closed?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got it,’ he said. He pushed a button on his desk. The door swung shut.

Farrow, pg 23.

This is some spy communication that Farrow gets access to when one of the Russian spies decides to become a double agent and give him a bunch of files; I could not make this up if I tried. Also, this passage is where we see the beginning of Lisa Bloom’s fucking shady game, making me say “I don’t buy your shitty apology, bitch”.

It observed that I was ‘a fan’ of Lisa Bloom, appearing to assess her level of access to me. And it described my attempts to get in touch with Judd, Sciorra, and Arquette. The email analyzed the likelihood that each of them would talk. It flagged any public statements the women had made about sexual violence as a warning sign.

pg 85.

Here we see just how little we all really know about Weinstein. I’m telling you, this guy is the new Cosby, but without the drugs to incapacitate women. Instead, Weinstein used professional power and credibility to silence and manipulate these women. I ain’t even going to get started on anything his lawyer said during his trial, because that lady is the shittiest of all the shitty ladies.

She took out an iPhone and navigated to a sentence she’d jotted down in her Notes app a few years earlier. It was something Weinstein whispered – to himself, as far as she could tell – after one of his many shouting sprees. It so unnerved her that she pulled our her phone and tapped it into a memo, word for word: ‘There are things I’ve done that nobody knows.’

pg 110.

Here is a passage that really drove home that we as a society are missing out on the most important aspect of this whole situation; the victims’ emotional pain and trauma.

The renderings of these stories that were ultimately published in The New Yorker were precise and legalistic. They made no attempt at communicating the true, bleak ugliness of listening to a recollection of violent rape like Sciorra’s. Her voice caught. The memory erupted in ragged sobs. You heard Annabella Sciora struggle to tell her story once, and it stayed inside you forever.

pg 303.
  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

I haven’t read it yet, but I’m sure She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey is also incredibly excellent and informative on this topic, as they are the two female journalists who broke the story for the NYT mentioned by Farrow many times in this book.

If you want to read another big-deal non-fiction book about women facing sexual harassment in the workplace, then Anita Hills 1997 Speaking Truth to Power is a good read.

If instead, you are looking for fiction that deals with the topic of sexual assault and the twisted ways in which our loyalties can be pulled, then I would recommend Zoe Whittall’s The Best Kind of People. Although not set in Canada explicitly, it does feel like it could be happening in the suburbs of Toronto, and Whittall is Canadian! Always managing to squeeze in a shoutout for my compatriots! Another great recommendation in terms of books that deal with sexual assault (what a weird category to be commenting on, seriously) also happens to be my favourite book, which is the controversial Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I could and am usually expected to defend this choice, but if you can’t understand the subtleties of the book and the fact that me saying I think it is one of the best books every does not mean I am endorsing paedophilia or even agree that Lolita is a love story, then what even is the point of wasting my time. But seriously, you should real it because it is good and uncomfortable in a way that courageous art should be.

Stay tuned for my next review, Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. This book was part of Reese Witherspoon’s book club, and she raved that it ‘made her cry’. Will it make me cry? I can be a big crybaby, so read on to find out!

Wasted: A Memoir Review

This book gets 2 stars out of 5. Using anything other than stars to rate this book felt like a distasteful joke, too irreverent even for me. Plus, this picture manages to radiate warmth and comfort even though it is mostly dark, and I think this is what teenaged Marya Hornbacher would’ve needed most.
[Most of the photo is darkness. The left half of the photo has two star ornaments set up on poles, lit up with twinkly lights. Someones feet are silhouetted against the light as they recline on a couch.]

Serious trigger warning! This book is a memoir about living with eating disorders. Do not read if reading about disordered eating or body dysmorphia gives you anxiety or triggers bad eating and thinking habits in you. If you or someone you know needs help, contact the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) online or at (800) 931-2237. 

  • Why did I pick this book up?

As mentioned in my Catcher in the Rye review, I picked a few books up at my partner’s parents’ home. I picked Wasted up because I had heard of it before, as a groundbreaking text when it came to representations of eating disorders. I also knew that it was more than a little controversial, as it includes a lot of gruesome details about eating disorders, and has raised concerns about talking about eating disorders without giving “tips and tricks” to those suffering. So this is why I picked Wasted up. I am also a bit of a masochist; although I have never exactly had an eating disorder, disordered eating, and in particular intense body dysmorphia, did play a large role in my young adult life, causing me intense anxiety and pain. I thought to myself, “Well, I have never actually been anorexic or bulimic, and am intellectually interested in reading about it. I am tough enough, I love myself enough, to be unaffected by this”. Boy was I wrong.

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

Honestly, I would not recommend this book. It is very interesting, and I do not want to take away from Marya Hornbacher’s narrative and experiences. In fact, I applaud her for being so frank and sharing her painful journey with people at a time when eating disorders were intensely taboo.

However, I think that the potential it has to cause distress and influence a person’s (particularly women’s) eating habits and view of themselves. I found myself falling back into patterns of dysmorphic thinking. Thinking about society’s need for women to disappear also led me to feel at times like I was taking too much space, being too present, too overt in my self. Not a great thing for a book to do tbh.

Also, although her narrative is interesting, Hornbacher spends a huge portion of the text theorizing about the cause of her eating disorder, and it gets quite repetitious. In addition, this book was written before Hornbacher was diagnosed as bipolar, and it is evident reading this now – more than twenty years after the text was published – that this is the large missing piece to Hornbacher’s attempts to explain her disorders.

So I would not recommend this book because of the intensity of the subject matter, as well as the way in which it is written: too much exposition and psychological investigation.

I guess I would recommend this book if you specialize in disordered eating in a professional setting, and were looking for some insight.

I gave this book the star rating that I did because of its bravery in addressing eating disorders, as well as its cultural role in launching a conversation about eating disorders and Western culture’s obsession with thinness.

  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

As a memoir, this book takes us from Hornbacher’s earliest memories as a child to her third hospitalization at the age of 19 for a variety of eating disorders and behavioural issues. I won’t get into too much detail to avoid falling into my own criticisms of the text.

Hornbacher has a somewhat unhappy childhood: trapped in the battlefield of her parents’ disastrous marriage, her anxiety and need to control her fear lead to her becoming bulimic at the insanely tender and young age of 9. Hornbacher then sinks further and further into a spiral of bulimia, anorexia, drugs, anonymous sex with older men, and just generally risky and self-destructive behaviour. It is jarring, and disturbing to read how easily Hornbacher was able to hide what she was going through. It was distressing to read how many times she was hospitalized, and all the ridiculous mistakes that were made when giving her care; the most troubling anecdote being the amount of times that doctors told her “Well you don’t even look anorexic”.

Hornbacher provides a lot of different explanations for her disordered eating, none of which I can go into too much detail, but involves Western culture’s obsession with women taking up as little space as possible, and the ways in which anxious and underdeveloped people (aka vulnerable children) can sublimate and displace their fear and anxiety. Eventually, at the age of 19, Hornbacher is hospitalized for a third time, near death and in denial.

The book was written when Hornbacher was 23, and goes on to say that although her disordered eating has become more manageable and healthy, her anxiety and body dysmorphia, as well as severe psychological pain and trauma, still remain. Hornbacher has since written another memoir about the years following publication of Wasted that deals with being diagnosed bipolar and her persistent addiction issues.

I chose to take a picture in front of my partner’s tenacious plant Gerbie who has managed to live through several winters, even though she doesn’t flower anymore; she’s still gorgeous. Thought this would be a good message to go with this book.
[A hand holds a book in front of a plant that has a few leaves and two flags in it: a gay pride flag, and a bisexual pride flag. The cover of the book is white, and there is a black and white photo of a young woman in jeans and a long sweater. WASTED sprawls at an angle on the bottom half of the book.]
  • Overall brain gushings :

I’m not even going to do more brain gushings. I’ve honestly said almost everything I wanted to say about this text.

  • What does it mean?

This book means that eating disorders and society sucks. It means the mind is a crazy thing that can facilitate all sorts of self-torture and that nothing and no one is worth making yourself smaller for. Taking up space is political. Accepting the body, and a simultaneous hatred of the body, is political.

  • Favourite passages :

Favourite passages in a book about eating disorders is a toughie. However, I’ve chosen some passages that I think are particularly insightful or thought-provoking.

[This book is] the story of one woman’s travels to a darker side of reality, and her decision to make her way back. On her own terms.

My terms amount to cultural heresy. I had to say: I will eat what I want and look as I please and laugh as loud as I like and use the wrong fork and lick my knife. I had to learn strange and delicious lessons, lessons too few women learn: to love the thump of my steps, the implication of weight and presence and taking of space, to love my body’s rebellious hungers, responses to touch, to understand myself as more than a brain attached to a bundle of bones. I have to ignore the cultural cacophony that singsongs all day long, Too much, too much, too much.

Marya Hornbacher, pg 5

At a certain point, an eating disorder ceases to be ‘about’ any one thing. It stops being about your family, or your culture. Very simply, it becomes an addiction not only emotionally but also chemically. And it becomes a crusade… You are also doing it for yourself. It is a shortcut to something many women without an eating disorder have gotten: respect and power. It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny.

Hornbacher, pg 64

[About avoiding physical contact]: the night after Duane and I played cards, he caught me. He ran me down in the hall, blocked my door with his wee body, and said, staring at the floor, ‘I know you don’t usually give hugs but I was wondering maybe if I could give you a hug, you don’t have to hug back or anything, but I thought maybe since you’ve been here a while and you haven’t had any hugs at all in like weeks maybe you need a hug.’

I leaned down and stiffly hugged him. He held on to my neck so tightly, the contact was so startling, and his small self so warm, that I took a sharp breath inward and started to cry, and he said, patting my back, ‘Hugs are very good for you. I’ll give you another one tomorrow if you want.’

And I just held on for dear life… One might, in fact, over a few years, begin to avoid [physical contact] like the plague, begin to claim such absolute ownership over one’s own body that contact itself… begins to seem a threat.

Hornbacher, pg 201-202

I have not enjoyed writing this book… This project was not, as so many people have suggested, ‘therapeutic’ for me – I pay my therapist a lot of money for that… Trying to explain rather than excuse, to balance rather than blame…

You expect an ending. This is a book; it ought to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I cannot give you an end. I would very much like to. I would like to wrap up all loose ends in a bow and say, See? All better now. But the loose ends stare back at me in the mirror. The loose ends are my body, which neither forgives nor forgets: the random half-hearted kicking of my heart, wrinkled and shrunken as an apple… They are the constant trips to the mirror, the anxious fingers reading the body like Braille, as if an arrangement of bones might give words and sense to my life…

It does not hit you until later. The fact that you were essentially dead does not register until you begin to come alive. Frostbite does not hurt until it starts to thaw.

Hornbacher, pg 275-276
  • Things that made me go “ugh” :

What made me go “ugh” was every time society or someone reinforced Hornbacher’s idea that thinness equates greatness and value, and every time someone found it necessary to praise a woman’s weight loss.

  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

I haven’t read it yet (because I am too cheap to buy any more books and also this book is very recent so get ready for a hot off the presses recommendation!) but I think that Lara William’s Supper Club would be a good antidote or response to Wasted. Supper Club is described as; ‘about a secret society of hungry young women who meet after dark and feast to reclaim their appetites – and their physical spaces – that posits the question: if you feed a starving woman, what will she grow into?’

Holy hell how could you not want to read that?! I may in fact have to break my no-more-book-buying-until-you-read-what-you-own pledge to get this book as there is nothing I want to read as much (other than Heart Berries which I want to read like crazy but didn’t want to read two memoirs back to back for review purposes) as this book right now.

I would also recommend (again things I haven’t read ha) Hornbacher’s Madness: A Bipolar Life which is the sequel to Wasted. Her critically acclaimed novel The Centre of Winter, about a family dealing with a suicide, would also be a good read!

Stay tuned for my next review Harmony by Carolyn Parkhurst; a novel on raising non-normative children in the woods and the ties that bind us.