{"id":103579,"date":"2016-10-11T17:02:53","date_gmt":"2016-10-11T21:02:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=103579"},"modified":"2016-10-11T18:39:45","modified_gmt":"2016-10-11T22:39:45","slug":"uncanny-interview-kristin-dombek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/11\/uncanny-interview-kristin-dombek\/","title":{"rendered":"The Uncanny I<\/i>: An Interview with Kristin Dombek"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Photo: Amy Touchett.<\/p><\/div>\n

Readers of<\/em>\u00a0The Paris Review\u00a0will remember Kristin Dombek\u2019s essay \u201cLetter from Williamsburg<\/a>,\u201d one of our perennial favorites.<\/em>\u00a0In August, Dombek published her first book,\u00a0<\/em>The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism<\/a>, a diagnosis of our attention-starved culture and its\u00a0fixation on self-absorption. The book covers everything from\u00a0Bram Stoker\u00a0to<\/em>\u00a0My Super Sweet 16;<\/em>\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0New York Times\u00a0calls it \u201csharply argued, knottily intelligent, darkly funny cultural criticism<\/a><\/em>.\u201d Dombek spoke to Robert Polito, the poet, biographer, and critic, about \u201cthe mysteries of ethos, when and why we trust and distrust who we do, in life and in writing.\u201d\u00a0<\/em>\u2014The Editors<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

When I talk to fellow nonfiction writers, I\u2019m always interested in how they locate themselves along the prose or argument continuum. When you sit down to write an essay, are you primarily thinking prose\u2014sentences, words, tone\u2014or are you thinking argument, what you might wish to say about a subject? And are you the sort of nonfiction writer who plans, or even outlines, or is the writing more improvisatory and about discovery for you ?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

DOMBEK<\/p>\n

Usually an essay begins with\u00a0an argument, for me. Not a linear argument, in the sense of a line of reasoning, but an argument as in two people or groups shouting at each other, but in my head. The dumber the disagreement, the more I want to kind of explode it and discover what it covers up, find better language for what life is really like. In this case, the disagreement was narcissism is the opposite of human\u2014i.e., a total lack of warmth, empathy, \u201chuman\u201d feeling\u2014versus narcissism is everybody. Usually, what\u2019s next is scene, where the language of the essay gets discovered, and the idea. Often an editor helps to lay bare the structure that will let the idea happen, rather than being told to the reader.<\/p>\n

But in this book, at least in its final version, I wasn\u2019t working in scenes but rather channeling kinds of Internet and academic language that aren\u2019t really my own, and kind of sculpting that language like material. So there is so much telling, summary, which is painful for me to read. There wasn\u2019t a reasonable progression of ideas, but on one axis, a progression of kinds of language, and then on the other, a slow panning out from the trapped, limited perspective of fearful, solitary, listicle-fueled diagnosis to a broader view, and poetry.\u00a0<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I really love the book. I think The Selfishness of Others<\/em> is an important book, as much for what you are doing formally with the notion of an essay as for the materials you are exploring. I\u2019m eager to ask you about the shaping and writing of the book, but maybe we should start elsewhere. How did The Selfishness of Others<\/em> originate for you?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

DOMBEK<\/p>\n

I\u2019m glad it\u2019s out of my hands and in yours, then, because you are kinder to it. But it did begin for me with a question about essays, so I\u2019m grateful for what you say. A few years ago, Mitzi Angel invited me to write a long essay for a new series of little books she was launching. The word narcissism<\/em> was everywhere\u2014this diagnosis of everyone\u2019s ex, condemnation of the personal-essay trend, fear of the coming selfie apocalypse. I was feeling afraid of the Internet and unprepared for this meeting with Mitzi, and she was also asking if I had a memoir to write. So it occurred to me to propose an essay on narcissism. I had been wondering why people who seem evil to us, or who break up with us or just disagree with us entirely, can begin to seem \u201cempty\u201d and \u201cfake\u201d and uncanny, even inhuman. And as a nonfiction writer, and a reader, I\u2019m always puzzling over the mysteries of ethos, when and why we trust and distrust whom we do, in life and in writing. Do you remember the beginning of Janet Malcolm\u2019s The Journalist and the Murderer<\/em>? I was thinking about that book a lot at the time.<\/p>\n

\"9780374712549\"<\/a><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You mean Malcolm\u2019s account of Stanley Milgram\u2019s Yale experiment where someone believed he was involved in a study of the effects of punishment but what actually was being surveyed was his own cruelty under pressures of authority? Malcolm\u2019s perfect as a ghost text hovering behind your book, I think.<\/p>\n

DOMBEK<\/p>\n

That, yes. I suspect some of the things we condemn as narcissistic in others might be more accurately defined as how everyone has to perform\u2014in capitalism, or online\u2014doing things formerly considered vain, things we feel guilty or anxious about. But also Malcolm\u2019s thinking about writing\u2014the quote from Leviathan <\/em>she uses as an epigraph, about how\u00a0when we believe an argument, we\u2019re really trusting the person who speaks or writes it, and then her famous opener about what frauds writers are, when they tell others\u2019 stories\u2014\u201cEvery journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to know what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.\u201d Like the journalist she writes about, and the murderer, too, the narcissist is bad because he fakes an \u201cI,\u201d rather than being<\/em> an \u201cI,\u201d he charms <\/em>you rather than being genuinely interested in you. Arguably, nonfiction writers always fake an \u201cI,\u201d even if we don\u2019t use the word, creating ethos, so the reader trusts the text. Maybe anyone who writes does, any Facebook poster does. But an \u201cI\u201d can feel generous or self-absorbed, to the reader, and so can a more \u201cobjective\u201d voice. Maybe the ease with which we dismiss one another as narcissists these days is partly a symptom of how much it\u2019s changed, and speeded up, the way that we determine how and when to trust writers, now that almost everyone\u2019s writing publicly all day long online.<\/p>\n

This question of when we trust texts is related, in my mind at least, to this everyday problem of when and why we judge others as so self-absorbed as to be beyond empathy, and to write them off or turn away from them. Of course, sometimes we have to separate from people. Sometimes maybe even judge others as selfish. But if we believe that, on the whole, others are becoming more selfish and self-absorbed than ever before, how willing would we be to trust each other enough to work on the great injustices, the inequality and environmental catastrophes of our time? Is the well-being of future humans even worth fighting for, if all millennials are assholes?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Your various chapters, as I read them, follow a surprising, slyly circular design\u2014you often start with an observation that looks true, even self-evident, and then complicate it, such that the opposite of that initial observation is ultimately just as compelling, maybe even more true. How did you arrive at that shape? Did you see that circular design as echoing the way narcissism operates, or perhaps is said to operate?<\/p>\n

DOMBEK<\/p>\n

Yes, I guess so. And fear of narcissism. \u201cHe didn\u2019t ask me a single question about myself. What a narcissist.\u201d This is Ren\u00e9 Girard\u2019s idea, that narcissism and fear of narcissism mirror each other.<\/p>\n

I started reading passages aloud early on, in 2013, when I started writing. At the first event, I started with \u201cThe narcissist is, according to the Internet, empty,\u201d which I thought was a funny line, the Internet calling people empty, and two people started crying. People lined up afterward to tell me about narcissists they knew, or joke that they were one, or tell me that the guy who read before me probably was<\/em> one. People started dropping the word casually into conversation when they were around me, as if they were worried I thought they were one, and so they wanted to show me they knew what the word meant. I started wanting to exorcise this fear, so I think, I hope, the circular design lets the reader alternately suspect others and herself and me of the disorder until she\u2019s just exhausted and stops worrying so much. Anyone who would pick up a book with this title is probably worrying too much.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Another way for me to imagine the intricate, unpredictable way your book moves is via E. M. Cioran\u2019s great phrase\u2014\u201cthinking against oneself.\u201d The Selfishness of Others<\/em> is always thinking against, or away from, something you just wrote. I\u2019m remembering a complex sequence early on that at once recognizes and deflects what you call your \u201cpersonal stake\u201d in the topic. As you remark\u2014\u201cI\u2019m an essayist; I write the word I<\/em> all day long, and I\u2019m nervous when I do. More than anything, I don\u2019t want you to think me self-absorbed. So I will try to take up the topic of the narcissism epidemic objectively. If using the word I<\/em> turns out to be a symptom of narcissism, you won\u2019t hear from me again.\u201d Here you are not only \u201cthinking against\u201d some of the conundrums embedded inside your subject, but also the entire history of the so-called personal essay. That\u2019s a lot to grapple with, isn\u2019t it? How did you deal with that nagging matter of your I<\/em> along the way? That classic I<\/em> of the essay? Did you ever think of including more about yourself?<\/p>\n

DOMBEK<\/p>\n

I was joking! But yeah, the experiment was initially to outlaw use of the \u201cI\u201d for most of the book, and then have it turn into memoir, to kind of investigate why we read memoir, what we want from writing about the \u201cI.\u201d The last third was memoir, in the original draft. Anyway, yes, to take on this topic is probably grandiose, if that\u2019s what you\u2019re saying. It was supposed to be an even smaller book than it is, and my editors persuaded me this was too much. Mitzi got me to see the problem and then left the country for England, in time to miss Trump but in time for Brexit, and the series was canceled and the little book was to come out by itself. And Lorin Stein got me to finish it, and did what he does\u2014he just points at a phrase and gently tilts his head, and you see what\u2019s wrong. He pointed at the last part of the book, the memoir, like that, and I cut almost all of it out. I tried to keep a sense of an uncanny \u201cI\u201d moving under the text, without ever using the word, but it\u2019s not really \u201cme,\u201d it\u2019s fraudulent. At least until the last few pages. For example I\u2019ve never had a boyfriend who I feared was a narcissist.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Perhaps my favorite chapter is \u201cThe Bad Boyfriend.\u201d There you rapidly dispense with the expected anecdotal horrors, though you invoke Tucker Max (I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell<\/em>) and Neil Strauss (The Game<\/em>). Instead, suddenly we\u2019re reading about Freud, Fliess, Ferenczi, Kohut, and Kernberg. Not only what they might have speculated about narcissism but also their fascinating, almost secret backstories\u2014Freud\u2019s letters to Fliess and his travels with Ferenczi; or the revelation that Kohut\u2019s famous \u201cMr. Z.\u201d was a self-portrait. I\u2019m interested in these stories specifically, but also your overall research. How did you decide what to include, and where to place your research?<\/p>\n

DOMBEK<\/p>\n

There is so much scholarship on the history of psychology and narcissism, and even in my reading I only skimmed the surface. The story of Fliess and Ferenczi comes mostly from Elizabeth Lunbeck\u2019s wonderfully deep history of Freud\u2019s life during his writing about narcissism, in The Americanization of Narcissism<\/em>, and the story of Kohut, from Charles Strozier\u2019s biography. I tried to choose historical moments that show how definitions of narcissism change over time, and how each subfield\u2019s portrait of \u201cnarcissism\u201d reflects its methods and beliefs by thwarting them. Just as our own personal villains sometimes are not objectively speaking evil, but represent some challenge to the way we know things.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Your book so insistently pushes against the sort of reductive question I find myself wanting to ask now, but what do you think is our most dangerous misconception when we talk about narcissism?<\/p>\n

DOMBEK<\/p>\n

One way to view narcissism is that the diagnosis is a symptom of a privileged portion of civilization\u2014those of us who have time to go to therapy and sit online reading how to diagnose others\u2014turning on itself, \u201cthinking against itself,\u201d maybe, but kind of blaming the problem always on someone else. We\u2019re called upon to curate our lives, share them, focus on ourselves and self-brand and compete for money and stay mentally healthy and say positive affirmations to raise our self-esteem, and then narcissism<\/em> is the word we use to condemn others who do exactly these things. And because the word names a lack of empathy, using it can create a certain narcissism of decency, I think, where we fetishize our own empathy. It feels new, but it\u2019s also the oldest problem of the self. It\u2019s tragic or it\u2019s comic. Shakespeare was obsessed with it and David Foster Wallace exhausted it, to the extent that there was probably no need to write about it. Except maybe to celebrate the extraordinary surge of great nonfiction we see these days\u2014what you\u2019ve talked about as the \u201cpoetry of fact<\/a>\u201d\u2014that gives us the \u201cI\u201d back in these slower, wiser ways, and sometimes, by dramatizing a mind thinking, gives us these dazzling opportunities for a slower and more complex empathy.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Lastly, might you comment on the flow of the book\u2014the ascent across your chapters, if ascent is the trajectory, from incidentals like the weather (\u201cThe Cold\u201d) and familiar intimations of personal and cultural illness (\u201cThe Epidemic\u201d) early on, ultimately to arrive at \u201cThe Artist\u201d and \u201cThe World,\u201d with strategic stops along the way for \u201cThe Bad Boyfriend,\u201d \u201cThe Millennial,\u201d and \u201cThe Murderer\u201d? How did you that reach that particular flow, that arrangement?<\/p>\n

DOMBEK<\/p>\n

I arranged it as a movement backward in time, from the language of listicles and Internet self-help to social psychology and psychoanalysis, and then to philosophy, storytelling, and poetry, to Ovid. Retrograde motion, arriving at poetry and the present at the same time. And for me, the trajectory comes from my secret question, which was about why we want books, what books can do with the encounter with others\u2019 selfishness, and our own, that diagnosis at the speed of the Internet can\u2019t. Even and sometimes especially books written in the first person.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Readers of\u00a0The Paris Review\u00a0will remember Kristin Dombek\u2019s essay \u201cLetter from Williamsburg,\u201d one of our perennial favorites.\u00a0In August, Dombek published her first book,\u00a0The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism, a diagnosis of our attention-starved culture and its\u00a0fixation on self-absorption. The book covers everything from\u00a0Bram Stoker\u00a0to\u00a0My Super Sweet 16;\u00a0the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0calls it \u201csharply […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1076,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[25089,17,154,25090,13467,364,8032,1132,42,11476,531,15127,2165,3612,21280,25087,25088,492,25091,25093,25086,25092,541],"class_list":["post-103579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-argument","tag-books","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-diagnosis","tag-empathy","tag-essays","tag-first-person-2","tag-interviews","tag-janet-malcolm","tag-kristin-dombek","tag-mitzi-angel","tag-narcissism","tag-nonfiction","tag-psychology","tag-rene-girard","tag-robert-polito","tag-self-obsession","tag-sigmund-freud","tag-stanley-milgram","tag-the-poetry-of-fact","tag-the-selfishness-of-others","tag-tucker-max","tag-yale"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Uncanny \u201cI\u201d: An Interview with Kristin Dombek<\/title>\n<meta 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