On Being Butthurt
Writers' notebooks, "privilege," lugubriousness, and more
This started as a post about keeping a writing notebook, but at some point it ended up being about the concept of “butthurt,” which my instinct says to spell “butt-hurt,” but the OED says it’s one word.
The post originally started like this:
As I have mentioned elsewhere, one of my favorite parts of teaching is getting to go back to various aspects of writing pedagogy that made me demoralized when I was a student, and trying to find ways to make them re-moralizing for myself and others.
For example, I have a memory from my youth that involves being depressed by multiple famous US-American essays about the necessity, for any writer, of “keeping a notebook.” They always made me feel bad. Although, in those days, I almost always had a journal or a diary going, it was more of a space for working through my feelings about things that happened, after the fact—in private, at some length—rather than for jotting down aspects of the human comedy that impressed me on the subway.
Even now, I find myself feeling annoyed and thinking thoughts like: “When was I ever anywhere near a subway, growing up?” A bus, then. But if I was ever on a bus, it was usually a school bus, and I was in terror that someone would notice me and start throwing stuff at me, so the last thing I was going to do was to whip out a notebook.
At that point I resolved that my next post would be titled “On Being Butthurt,” and would explore my growing awareness of my own tendency to be butthurt, and my resolution to be less so in the future—though I quickly realized that another, equally strong motivation for this post was to vent my exasperation at other people being butthurt. This cyclical property, I realized, is exactly what makes butthurtness, or perhaps butthurt,1 so pernicious.
In the future post, I further resolved, I would return to the particular example of butthurt that I found still lingering in my heart (if that is indeed where butthurt is stored) about the idea of “keeping a notebook”—even though I am now a respected writer and it has been at least 30 years since anyone threw anything at me on a bus.
I then remembered how, at some point in or after college, I did start fantasizing about “never being without” an elegant notebook where I would take down observations “directly from life.” I did periodically acquire and carry around appropriately sized notebooks, but rarely managed to write more than a page. Then the other pages would get folded or torn or greasy or somehow full of sunflower seeds or Advil, and the notebook itself would become a symbol of defeat, and of my defensive way of rushing through the world late for everything, in terror of being hungry.
For the past 10 years or so, I’d say I’ve carried a notebook in my bag about 50% of the time—for things that people mention, or to-do lists, or sometimes things that I want to say while other people are talking (so I don’t interrupt so much). Very rarely, there’s a note about something I want to write about later, but this is so unusual that I tend to remember it and don’t need to look at it later, and the physical notebook doesn’t retain any kind of aspirational or exciting aura.
During this time, nothing happened to make me revisit my notebook policy—until a few weeks ago, when a student asked me a question about how to use humor in writing. This is not an unusual question. But we had already been chatting for a few minutes, during which it had become clear that the student herself was funny, and so what came up for me was another question: “What’s preventing you from being funny in writing?”
I had read only one short piece by this student, and it was related to mourning. Of course, it’s possible to write seriously about mourning and still be funny… but there are questions a person could easily get stuck on, like what if being funny is trivializing; if writing is about “doing justice” to the world, or “bearing witness,” aren’t those things that have to be done with a certain sobriety, etc.
So I started gearing up to explain the role of humor in metabolizing painful subjects, but it turned out the student already understood and agreed; her issue was that, when she was younger, she tried to be funny in writing, trying to set up jokes and create funny situations, and her friends didn’t laugh, so she was scared to try again and risk not being funny.
My thought was: “What if you carry around a notebook and write down every time you find anything funny, just in normal life?” That way there is at least a list of things that made her laugh—and later she can go back and unpack them and see if they still feel funny. We both felt excited about this idea, and she said, “You could do that in your class!” I thought, “Maybe I should make it an assignment for everyone, including me: we all carry a notebook for at least one full day, and make a note of anything that seems funny, delightful, or surprising.”
Then I was like, “Whoa, am I actually going to tell them to ‘keep a notebook’? Am I telling myself to ‘keep a notebook’?” I decided to look up the essays I remembered from school, to see what had made me so demoralized, and to think about whether and how the humor notebook assignment would be different. Then I had a w-i-l-d experience on Google where, even though I found a lot of literature about “keeping a writing notebook,” most of it very recent, none of the depressing essays I remembered from 30+ years ago seemed to actually exist—except the one super-famous one by Joan Didion, which must have expanded in my mind to occupy the space of several famous essays. So I decided to reread “On Keeping a Notebook.”
I won’t lie, I usually feel a little bummed out when I read Joan Didion—there’s something about the aestheticized image of herself as an unhappy girl/ woman who still looks thin and graceful (“the girl in the plaid silk dress from Peck & Peck”). In general, there are more store names than I’m into… and with this particular essay, I felt some visceral annoyance / despair at the opening scene, which I’m sure is 100% a very old/ outdated feeling from youth—of being given examples of writing to aspire to, and finding that it described a life of unknown dignity and autonomy and literariness, because how was I ever going to get to a hotel bar in Delaware to hear a woman in a dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper say anything so colorful and borderline-Dickensian as “That woman Estelle is partly the reason George Sharp and I are separated today”?
Then comes the background on Didion herself—the girl in the plaid silk dress, with the unraveling hem: she’s “been on the Eastern Shore, and now she is going back to the city, leaving the man beside her, and all she can see ahead are the viscous summer sidewalks and the 3 a.m. long-distance calls that will make her lie awake and then sleep drugged through all the steaming mornings left in August.” So basically… she is not happy, she is not in an enviable situation. But my inner fourteen-year-old is still like: (a) “Why is she complaining?”, and (b) “How am I supposed to keep a notebook when I never go to bars, leave men, or take drugs?”
Here we are back at butthurt—its circularity. One person talks about how their lack of a safety pin is menacing their lunch in New York, and another person is like, “You’re having lunch in New York?” There’s a generational dimension, too. As a young person, it is indeed infuriating to be expected to admire “cool” things that are made by people who seem to be part of a huge adult conspiracy to prevent you yourself from doing or making anything. Then maybe you grow up and start making things… and if you’re lucky, your stuff becomes part of the adult conspiracy, and is foisted on young people, who sometimes utter a murmur of complaint—which you naturally protest for several hours in your heart—and so it goes.
Another thing with butthurt: it separates people from their natural allies. It is a plague of the left! When I keep reading the Didion essay, I see that, despite a few surface annoyances, I strongly agree with like 99.99% of what she’s saying. Take this part, about the relationship between self and others.
I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hatcheck counter in Pavillon… Nor is my concern with a woman in a dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper in a Wilmington bar. My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point. It is difficult to admit. [etc.]
The minute she says “It is difficult to admit,” I’m annoyed again… and when she busts out Jessica Mitford’s governess and Liberty lawn dresses, I’m basically hyperventilating. Needlessly! Didion is my ally; she, too stands against Jessica Mitford’s governess. And the whole reason she’s going on in a way that I now find alienating is that the whole idea of “Remember what it was to be me” is way more mainstream now than it was in 1968—thanks largely to Didion herself—so she had to defend it more laboriously, before she herself existed.
Then comes the amazing passage about having written, in her notebook, “He was born the night the Titanic went down,” and remembering the woman who said it, and when, and where:
We were on her terrace by the sea, and we were finishing the wine left from lunch, trying to get what sun there was, a California winter sun. [I register a twinge of butthurt here, but let’s keep going—EB] The woman whose husband was born the night the Titanic went down wanted to rent her house, wanted to go back to her children in Paris. I remember wishing that I could afford the house, which cost $1,000 a month. “Someday you will,” she said lazily. “Someday it all comes.” There in the sun on her terrace it seemed easy to believe in someday, but later I had a low-grade afternoon hangover and ran over a black snake on the way to the supermarket and was flooded with inexplicable fear when I heard the checkout clerk explaining to the man ahead of me why she was finally divorcing her husband. “He left me no choice,” she said over and over as she punched the register. “He has a little seven-month old baby by her, he left me no choice.” I would like to believe that my dread then was for the human condition, but of course it was for me, because I wanted a baby and did not then have one and because I wanted to own the house that cost $1,000 a month to rent and because I had a hangover.
That’s what she recovers, from the notebook: that complex of forgotten feelings. I love that paragraph, especially the dread that’s for the human condition, but is also for herself. (Internal monologue: “It’s also for herself, not exclusively for herself, as she herself cynically and outdatedly maintains”—eccolo il butthurt.) Now she’s in such a different place—“it all comes”—that it’s like sci-fi to even remember feeling that way. The wording in the next sentence reminds me of my least favorite elementary-school teachers—“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not”—but I LOVE this part:
Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
This is the point that I find so valuable in Shklovsky (“habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war… and art exists that one may recover the sensation of life”), and in Proust, where the trick in writing/ life—the trick with the madeleine, or the paving stones—is to figure out how to import a chunk of the past into the present, so your present self can feel all the things you’ve forgotten.
[Quick sidebar: is it just pettiness that makes me annoyed again here at Didion’s tone/ diction (“we forget all too soon,” “what we whispered and what we screamed,” etc.)— even though Proust is clearly at least equally annoying? I do find this fascinating: why do some annoying things make us feel butthurt, and others don’t. Probably part of it, in this case, is that, when I first read Proust as a teenager, I was so annoyed that I stopped reading, and didn’t come back until many years later, when I was more patient (and would have been less annoyed at Didion, too, if I had encountered her then). But I also think part of it is that, when I was reading Didion, she was still alive, and didn’t get the immunity from butthurt that is conferred upon the dead (and that makes it so much easier to read books by dead people. I think Nicholson Baker gets at this a bit in U and I.)]
Petty annoyances aside, I’m truly moved by the past selves demanding “who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.” (It’s moving to me in the same way as when Proust talks about the forgotten self whose sobs he hears at night.) And then there comes a point where I feel the urge to hug Didion and shout “Ma semblable, ma soeur!” like an asshole, because it turns out that the main issue she has with her twenty-three-year-old self is that she’s “always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again”—viz. the very essence of butthurt. The grievances, the “little hurts and stories,” are so tedious—not just because they’re boring, but because they inflame one’s own sense of injury and start one’s own soundtrack of hurts and stories.
This brings me to a question I’ve been thinking over for a couple of weeks, now—since the BBC call-in show, when a 14-year-old reader in Brazil asked whether Selin in The Idiot ever thinks about “privilege.” I somehow identified with this reader—I imagined that she felt about me much the way I felt about Joan Didion when I was her age. And the question I’ve been thinking about since then is about the relationship between butthurt and “privilege.”
A few readers have told me that they were initially unable to read The Idiot because their background was “so different”; they didn’t think they could relate to someone who wrote about studying at Harvard. One very honest non-US reader told me that, at the time The Idiot came out, he was doing a semester abroad at Harvard, and would have loved to stay for four whole years, but couldn’t afford it; so the existence of this book made him feel envious, and he didn’t read it until years later (but he did and we were able to talk about it 🙏🙏🙏).
This helps me understand that “Saks Fifth Avenue” probably plays a similar role in Joan Didion’s imagination that “Harvard” plays in mine: it’s a huge all-powerful signifier of quality and excellence, exercising a deforming magnetism on her from childhood (when she sees adults being impressed by it). She can’t ignore it, or not feel drawn to it; yet she experiences it as profoundly “other,” something she doesn’t identify with herself—how could it “be” her when it has enchanted/ oppressed her all her life.
Nonetheless, today, this is where you end up if you Google “Joan Didion” and “Saks Fifth Avenue.”
And even though part of me wants to protest that The Idiot is largely about how crushed I felt by Harvard (and by the overwhelming consciousness of my own privilege)… it’s a staff pick at the Harvard bookstore (thanks, Jeff M.!), so literally what am I talking about?
It’s weird—or rather, not weird at all—how often some form of the butthurt / privilege conversation comes up in the writing world. Obviously, it’s a huge privilege to have the time and money to write anything at all. The majority of writers I know come (like me) from middle- or upper-middle-class backgrounds. Yet it’s not rare to overhear, or get involved in, contests where different writers are comparing their disadvantages, and the butthurt gets triggered.
This happens to me sometimes in the EU, where visiting US writers encounter some amount of (understandable) butthurt from colleagues who are like “Dude, you guys’s book advances are orders of magnitude larger than ours,” and who thus view their situations as existentially incomensurate. Indeed, it’s way easier to make a living as a writer in the US than in most of Europe; and it’s unfairly way, way easier to make a living writing in English than in many other languages. It’s also way easier for US writers to spend time in Europe, taking advantage of all the amazing cultural wealth, than for EU writers to visit the US and take advantage of the amazing things that exist here. Nonetheless, when the thing with advances comes up, a tiny part of me is screaming: “In the US, medical care and rent and food and childcare also cost orders of magnitude more, and if you get sick and don’t have savings you die on the street, and NOBODY HAS A TERRACE OR TAKES SUMMER VACATIONS AT THE BEACH!”
This is not the part of myself that I like the most; it is not what Didion would call “attractive company.” It is what butthurt brings out.
Of course, butthurt comes up all the time within the US; it even feels, to me, somehow essentially or originally American. “If I had all your unearned advantages, I would never complain.” “If I had all your unearned advantages, I would be just as successful as you.” (Tautological: anyone who had all my unearned advantages would be exactly where I am on the ladder of human worth—and no higher, either, because did I mention my disadvantages?)
A working definition of butthurt: annoyance/ resentment/ distress/ terror that results from everyone being on a hierarchical ladder of privilege, where what’s at stake is self-worth or even survival (is that why dead people get a pass?), and everyone is over-identifying everyone else with their place on the ladder, and feels affronted by other people’s privileges, and can’t stop rehashing their own privations.
In “On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion clearly portrays herself as, to some extent, poor—without a pin for her hem, unable to rent the house she wants, sweating through August in New York, only to be alienated, in the winter, by the “Greek shipping heiress” who asks, when Didion arrives “in her orchid-filled sitting room on the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it was snowing outside.” (“Perhaps,” Didion remarks, “we all must meet the very rich for ourselves.”)
Look, here’s another thing many writers share: both enough “privilege” to even form the necessary relationship with books at an early enough age… and also certain deprivations (“little hurts and stories”) that make us feel at least a little bit like an outsider. Because if you didn’t grow up feeling that way, at least a little bit—at least a little bit butthurt—when and why would you write anything? You would just enjoy existing within the milieu into which you were seamlessly integrated. Meanwhile, the feeling of not being socially/ emotionally integrated gets translated into a lack of socioeconomic integration, a.k.a. “privilege.”
Didion ends up, somewhat radically, characterizing notebook-keeping itself as form of butthurt: “a peculiarly compulsive” tendency that “begins or does not begin in the cradle,” such that, although she herself has “felt compelled to write things down” since age five, she doubts that her daughter will follow suit:
… for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her… Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse my self by writing down my thoughts.
Is it me or does Joan Didion’s mom sound… kind of butthurt? Perhaps writing, for five-year-old Joan, was a way of rationalizing (making logical, “sensible,” etc.) her mom’s injunction to stop whining—which is how adult Didion now feels about her 23-year-old self?
But the place I want to land is definitely not that writing is just a way of passing down the butthurt. Writing is also—I believe this strongly, and I think Didion does, too—a way to transcend butthurt. That’s what’s behind the “euphoria” moment in “Remember what it was to be me”—the same as in the “involuntary memory” moments in Proust. It’s the soaring feeling of transcending the present/ habituated/ static view of the self. “Butthurt” is, among other things, a denial of diachronicity, change, time—a kind of existential bad faith, an essentialization of the contingent (which is why it’s natural/ unavoidable in youth; for all you know at age fourteen, none of the things you are will ever change… or, rather, even if you “know” they will, you don’t feel it yet).
This is now SO FAR afield from what I was going to write about—which I feel like I have to return to at least a little bit now, just because it’s related to sort of a time-sensitive announcement. So… what I was going to talk about was, how amazing the students’ notebooks were. (We all kept the notebooks for a day and shared 2 items in class.) And one thing that came up, way more vividly than it had up to that point, was the political mood on the Barnard/ Columbia campus, which one could call fraught, and which nobody had really talked about—just because everyone is so aware now of the swirling maelstrom of butthurt. This time, one student mentioned that she felt some resistance, at first, to thinking of funny or delightful things, given the level of sadness/ violence in the world—and there was a moment when I felt a reflexive alarm, like “Uh-oh, do I need to feel called out,” and I could sort of feel the butthurt flapping in the wings—but it quieted down almost immediately, because that wasn’t where she went; instead she talked about her journey to notice funny things within the world as it is. One of them ended up being a mordant observation about “public safety” that was both funny and conducive to insight.
I will add also that several of the “funny” moments also involved people weeping. Which is to say that violence, injustice, and mourning definitely made it in—to the extent that they could reach us, in our privileged position at an elite college in New York City—and that this was something it was possible, if not to accept, then at least to be in the room with, without freaking out or accusing anyone.
There was only one thing in the notebooks that left me with kind of a bad feeling, which is that a couple of “funny” observations involved teachers saying things like, “What a fitting [text, artwork, whatever] to consider as our republic falls apart [in the dying embers of democracy, etc.].” To be clear, my problem wasn’t that these remarks were being recorded as funny—the “humor,” as I understood it, was more along the lines of “LOL this mopey man,” rather than “Ha ha, it IS ironic to read Milton after the latest Pennsylvania polls!”)—but, rather, that they were being made at all. I do understand my fellow middle-aged people blowing off steam with the occasional lugubrious “end-of-democracy” remark over a glass of wine (as long as it’s NOT at lunch! (jk, go ahead, saluti)). But what’s the point of saying such things to young people, especially to students? Our role should be to support them—to model non-lugubrious attitudes, to express at least some baseline confidence in their generation’s ability to improve the world, and confidence also in our generations’ ability to help.
With this in mind, I wanted to shout out an inspirational Zoomer, Victor Shi, who does youth engagement for the Harris-Walz campaign (there is a nice interview here with
), who has put together a big online event tomorrow (Tuesday Oct 21) at 7 ET, with many many writers speaking for Harris-Walz. RSVP here. I will be on an extremely brief panel with at around 8.
But OK that was the time-sensitive part and now I have to go do ALL MY WORK. Thanks, everyone! Stay strong, be observant, resist deadness!
Bonus content for paid subscribers:
Two short items from my “humor notebook”
Multimedia content from a dog costume parade I went to yesterday.
The full text of my 400-word opinion about Eric Adams’s indictment, as mentioned last time—this for the small but not, I find, nonexistent group of media consumers who hold a paid subscription to The Elif Life, but not the Washington Post.
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