“Perfectionism [is] a love letter the psyche sends to an unresponsive Other, swearing I’ll change everything if you will only come back.”
Elizabeth Tallent is a “successful writer.” She has published a novel and four short story collections, as well as essays in a myriad of notable outlets, and also teaches at Stanford. However, there’s a twenty-two-year hiatus in her career. This memoir reveals the crippling case of perfectionism that has hobbled Tallent’s writing, how she has leaned on it to cope with many challenges in her life, from an insecure childhood to rocky marriages and eventually raising her son. It is an exploration in understanding the oddities of her condition as she seeks out a prognosis.
Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism. By Elizabeth Tallent. Harper. 2020. Hardcover.
How did I get the book?
I walked past the book donation pile at work one day and had a moment to go through the stack. Pulling this one out, the title drew me in, given that I have been accused of using perfectionism as a defense mechanism against vulnerability. I thought reading this might make me feel a little more understood, so I discretely slipped it into my bag.
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What did I think?
Tallent's perfectionist tendencies are rooted in her relationship with her family, particularly her mother, who had trouble showing affection to Tallent as a baby. After her mother shares this, Tallent wonders, “Could she have intended the story as background, context that could inform my understanding of my later troubles?” The lack of affection in the house is afforded much space in the memoir. “In a perfect household no child would suffer from revulsion at what the mirror held, no child would need to stand staring for hours, seeking to dispel disbelief, to achieve the psychic equivalent of holding her arms out to what was there,” Tallent writes of developing her perfectionist tendencies. “My heartbeat might as well have been translated can’t-CAN’T, can’t-CAN’T,” a response to her feeling unable to do anything right. As Tallent enters adulthood and better understands her parents' wrongness, they still have an indirect influence on Tallent's adult relationships, arguably more so than her perfectionism. She gravitates toward her first husband because of his “steady incandescence” in loving her, though she wonders as he tells her this repeatedly on a cross country drive, “Will his next answer be You’re wearing me out, will he mutter This is a waste of breath, proving his love finite is the calamity I’m after.” Tallent confronts the influence of her family mostly when she becomes a parent. “By the odd means of rushes of anger I regained the young mother I had loved—I was sunk in her, made to recognize that whatever harm she had been capable of, I was capable of as well,” she writes of her mother. “It was as if my true work was to extend the charged atmosphere of my childhood into the entire rest of my life.”
Tallent attempts different articulations of the perfectionist condition across the memoir’s pages. “For me perfectionism is set apart from other forms of trouble by the inflamed genius of its self-abuse, and its pleasurableness,” she writes. “As a personality disorder perfectionism is spookily stable...so satisfying a state.” She goes on to describe it: “the claustrophobic drudgery of ad nauseam repetition”; “a joyless, manageable minim”; “my reality neutralizing opiate, promising my inadequate nausea-prone self could be easily discarded and replaced by a creature of red-gloved stylishness and health and readiness to take on the world.” Tallent masochistically takes pleasure in the pain. It offers an acceptance she has always craved. She goes many years trying to use her perfectionism to her advantage, embracing a sense of endless desire in her state of leaving a lot to be desired, never accepting being good enough as adequate, and a lack of consideration for scaling mistakes. She admits she’s addicted. “Perfectionism in action feels more real than ordinary thinking,” she writes. “Perfectionism feels unerring. Like you shouldn’t distrust it or you’ll die.” Eventually, though, Tallent acknowledges living in the state of “being terrified of” that perfectionism requires twists her voice of its life. But pointing at the problem does not solve it. “If you don’t have the clarity to disavow the perfectionism deforming your life,” she writes, “where do you start?”
This is where the exploration for truer understanding and treatment begins. Tallent admits to the negative elements of her perfectionism finally, that the romance of it worries her, that sometimes she becomes so tired of trying to get everything right and never being able to that she doesn't want to go on, that “the absence of a distinct threshold means a place will forever feel unmeant.” In a sobering moment she confesses it is killing her, even if she also believes it suits her, that “psychically, perfectionism is home.” At first, Tallent tries to eradicate her perfectionism by forming interests—she views this as the antithesis to what the condition demands, that “the mortal loneliness of perfectionism originates in its blindness to what is right before one’s eyes”—but it’s a false solution. “I didn’t want the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t illegitimacy of a malady all in my head, I wanted to be handed a map of recovery,” Tallent writes. She wants to no longer be so aware of the condition, to no longer rely on it to create comforting narratives. The more unsuccessful therapy she does, the more she wonders if “maybe perfectionism is its own universe in which energy can be neither created nor destroyed, only differently manifested.” She also back peddles and questions if it is a problem at all. “How bad off are you if your disorder can be preeningly confessed? When other afflictions overwrite reality with fantasy—alcoholism, or addictions to gambling or sex—their self-destructiveness is bleakly acknowledged, but perfectionism’s rep as ambition on steroids remains glossy; it can present not as delusion, but as an advantageous form of sanity…Perfectionism offers self-sufficiency within affliction.” Ultimately, Tallent cannot tie up an understanding, much to her dissatisfaction. “The deceptiveness of perfectionism may partly account for its being famously difficult to eradicate,” she writes. Still, she notes, “Perfectionist interiors, perfectionist planning are not supposed to have a lot of loose ends.” In a way, though, the messiness of it all actually falls in line with how Tallent has always lived her life. “A paradox of perfectionism is its nurturance of haphazardness, disarray, and negligence,” she explains. "In perfectionism a task can be done two ways: flawlessly, or not at all…since blamelessness is your preferred psychic state, you don’t mind generating a fair amount of chaos to sustain it.”
Final Verdict?
🌟 2.5/5 — So-so
Tallent is a talented writer, no doubt. Her Henry James-level attention to detail is attractive, coming out most astutely in her numerous renderings of perfectionism on the page. Her ability to in one sentence craft a complex, visual metaphor (“I regard my diminished perfectionism with the cold eye of a firefighter discovering a wildfire’s last embers sparkling in tinder-dry grass. I don’t know where it will rise up again, but I know it’s going to”) and in another simply state an observation (“At bottom perfectionism is petrified panic”) show the range of her deftness. The moments where she chooses to express vulnerability are also among the strongest bits, such as when she asks rhetorical questions. “What kind of wound is obsession if its object deserves every ounce of effort expended in its pursuit, what damage is done?” she writes at one point. “Does the very act of telling—by a secretive person, a perfectionist disinclined to confide her deviations from the norm—count as love? As bravery?” Her inventive compulsion to understand the perfectionist puzzle of her mind twists readers deep inside her thoughts.
However, it is in this twisting that the book also makes a mess. Tallent divides her story into three, long, winding parts, the first of which includes a lengthy description of her as a newborn, a faux-memory that left me uneased/confused. The moments she shares of her childhood could have been tighter in their delivery, too, doing less heavy lifting than the material from her adult life in subsequent sections. “Some parallel exemption from chronological order held true within perfectionism," Tallent writes, which sounds poetic, but in terms of the book's ability to create a lucid dream, the moments where she slips from time and forgoes important information (separations, births, moves) are incredibly disorienting and break the connection to her world. Tallent also notes more than once how little she knows about perfectionism from a medical standpoint, a knowledge gap I believe she should have filled in researching/writing. “To write that perfectionism has taught me something is to obscure the messiness of my backsliding transit," Tallent writes somewhat vaguely as she concludes, "to conceal a thousand, ten thousand, eruptions of repudiation. I worry that to present myself as having made even small gains is an affront to the pain that can animate the question How do you deal with perfectionism?” An answer to this particular hypothetical would probably have been too clean of a finale, but the general shoulder shrug decision left me with too much of a diary taste in my mouth.
Beyond the book.
Tallent was on a panel with Carmen Maria Machado at the National Book Festival where they discussed writing their memoirs and how writing them was an effort in understanding themselves better. Their books are incredibly different, so the blanket concept that connected their work was curious to me. Nevertheless, the talk is an interesting listen.
Ironically, Daphne Merkin also reviewed this one for the New York Times, just as she did for Private Means that failed to excite me as I had hoped. Still, if you’re even the slightest bit intrigued, you can get a taste by reading a segment on Lithub.
See you again soon!
Rachel x