And it pisses a lot of people off. How many times do we need to hear about your abusive, drug-ridden childhood? How many times to we need to hear about what a stillbirth did to your marriage? We have Jhumpa Lahiri's short-story about the miscarriage to do that. We have Hemingway's novel. And anyway, did this even happen to you? Or is it truthiness that got you the million-dollar advance?
Raeburn alternately whispers and yells the following adage: the truth matters. But it's a case-by-case issue. Sometimes, truthiness and lies are more evocative, more informative, and more important. But sometimes, truth reigns supreme. I'm not shrinking away from Bill Maher's worthy platform when I say that Raeburn may have gotten it right — this time. What I learn from Maher is not to feel sorry for people just because you think you're supposed to. Those people may not deserve it. Question political correctness because it's a blanket term, and when you're under the blanket, it's awfully hard to see.
But what harm is going to come from feeling sorry for Daniel Raeburn and his wife? Cynics, myself included, will answer that we are already such a sentimental nation, consumed by nostalgia. But how sentimental can we really be if more than fifty percent of us agreed to go to war with Iraq? So we can preserve our cheesy memories? So no one can take them away from us? They've already tried to.
The compulsion to share one's tragedy has undoubtedly been within us all for centuries; it's only that the compulsion has become more accessible, more lucrative, and thus more dastardly, in recent years. Raeburn's vapid details in some of the article may be an effort to quell the sentimental stigma associated with his plight, which he indulged elsewhere. But why get the story out there? To tell the well-educated, mostly white readers of the New Yorker who may have lost their children that they're not alone? To confront the grotesque mystery of the human body head-on?
I don't feel sorry for Daniel Raeburn. I feel sorry for myself for having the incapacity to understand his experience, even after having it so thoroughly excavated upon the pages of a magazine that reaches none of the people who really "matter." Everybody matters, but "everybody"'s off reading The Da Vinci Code, or A Million Little Pieces, and the rest of them are watching Bill O'Reilly. Those of us who want to preserve the sentimentality of this nation from the "unforgiving" radicals of Arab nations are going to church, praying for the soldiers in Iraq, and watching United 93.
Article comments
1 - Aaman
While 'you' were sleeping, the world has been getting flatter.
Interesting ramble, but remember, they also serve who stand and wait.
2 - sharon
i couldn't agree less.
3 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Elizabeth,
I don't mean to sound obtuse, but what were you writing about? The only term that seemed to have any relevance to what I was reading was the term "blogorrhea".
4 - Liz
Ever heard of constructive criticism, Ruvy?
5 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Liz,
I apologize if I seemed harsh, but I had a very hard time making heads or tails of what you had written.
Obviously you had an intent in what you wrote, but aside from a long collection of vaguely interrelated thoughts, I could not make out that intent.
6 - Liz
Ruvy, I'm sorry you feel that way, but your comments about this post are easily more negligible than the post itself. Look elsewhere if you want to needlessly criticize someone. This isn't a competition, or a venue for personal attack. You must have something better to do than rack up your Blogcritics comment score.
7 - greg from daddytypes.com
If Raeburn's essay is nothing but vapid sentimentality, then what are the murders and tragedies and moralizing speculations and pontifications that fill the cable news networks night after night? So Americans are prone to rubbernecking and relish a chance to wallow in someone else's intense emotional trauma, fine, but I just can't agree with your argument that Raeburn should fall under your blanket condemnation of sentimentality or melodrama.
Certainly the piece is shot through with emotion, but it seemed to me that he marked, evaluated, and rejected a good portion of the easy, banal, and expected cliches of grieving that are so prevalent in the personal tragedy narratives you're so weary of.
Personal experience is a commodity, by definition, but the self-awareness required to understand it, and the facility to communicate it with words are not. I thought Raeburn articulated a far greater sensitivity to the emotional landscape of parents (and expecting parents) than many/most parents whose kids are still alive.
That said, how self-absorbed and narrow to assume the function of a piece of writing is to get someone to feel sorry for the writer. Never mind that Raeburn's starkness and anti-sentimental passages seemed to reject even the possibility of such an objective. Isn't the point of writing--particularly about a personal experience--to explore and shed light on that experience, to make more sense of it for oneself, and then/also/ultimately to translate that into words in such a way that someone who HASN'T had that experience can better understand it? Or so that she can better understand herself and her own POV and how she communicates it?
Because ultimately, the cynicism and flippancy of this post--and the very idea that one writer's account, whether it's Hemingway, Lahiri, or Raeburn's, is somehow "enough" can't be serious (RIGHT??), but has to be just a provocative argumentative tool--betrays some kind of deeply unsettled sense of self. It shows a highly developed sense of self-absorption, and a classic lib.ed. obsession with self-examination, but there are still some real blind spots. So good luck with that.
8 - andrea thies
as the mother of a stillborn daughter, I would never wish my pain on anyone. However, Raeburn's article no matter how poorly conceived, written, or riddled with poor grammar to your opinion can take away from the comfort it has given to many.
Once you experience such loss and saddness you begin to not care so much about the little things.
9 - cyndi
First time reader here. I think personal stories (truthiness) are the real ones...and you may say we're sentimental (I think we're barbaric, where's the uprising & moral outrage over Guantanamo etc?) but what's the other option? To look the other way? We're good at that. Maybe you don't like truthiness, pain, or other people's pain.
It's good for people to know this is still a common problem. When I had my stillbirth I think many were shcoked, at a loss, etc. If nothing else, the story brings the commonality of the experience to light and may help friends and family to understand something their loved one has gone through.
It's also an interesting issue in terms of prolifers etc because as laws change I may have been left to die of an infection as my child died inside me.
Gross? Sure. Unsavory? Yes. Thats's life.
And lest you really piss off a female friend one day, a miscarriage is NOT a stillbirth (re: your Lahiri comment.) Lots of stories about love, life, death, so no reason there can't be a huge library of birth tragedies either.
I just don't understand what bothered you except that the story is depressing.
10 - Melissa
As the mother of a stillborn child I truly believe your thoughts will change when a stillbirth affects you or your family. For the families stillbirth affects hearing someone elses story is part of healing. Who cares if the grammer is poor? When someone else shares their darkest moment we should be careful of passing judgement on them... it could be you someday.