Title: Please Excuse My Daughter
Author: Julie Klam
Author’s web page: http://www.julieklam.com/
Date: 2008
Publisher: Penguin / Riverhead
ISBN: 978-1-59448-980-8
Length: 257 pages
Quote: “[T]he only argument against retiring that I could come up with was that no one would really notice.”
This is a well written book that I happened not to like, but you might like. I want to run on at some length about the reasons why.
Julie Klam was a spoiled rich girl. She married a man who didn’t make enough money to suit her. They produced a baby. It took Julie 257 pages to decide that, rather than trim her budget to fit her husband’s income, she wanted to put more energy into “pitching” her writing.
Blurbs on the jacket of this book, supplied by people to whom Klam “pitched” the book, claim that Please Excuse My Daughter is funny, poignant, original, droll, hilarious, happy, sad, touching, terrific, a must read, always endearing, exhilarating, unstintingly honest, very smart, and slyly moving.
With the kind of build-up reviewers and blurb writers are expected to give a book these days, books can hardly help being disappointing. I didn’t notice who uttered the title line, in the book, or which daughter was the embarrassment—the young Julie to her mother, because she hadn’t married a richer man sooner, or the baby whose gestation period is the subject of so many toilet jokes? When the baby learns to read, she’ll have something to be really embarrassed about. People who are old enough to have babies are supposed to have outgrown toilet jokes.
There are women who’ve written about their pregnancies and their babies’ infancies in such a way that squeamish revulsion was not my predominant reaction to their writing. Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions comes to mind, or Erma Bombeck’s I Lost Everything in the Postnatal Depression. It’s not the mention of body fluids that turns a whole book into one big gross-out; it’s the failure to mention any other thoughts but the body fluids. There are women whose ability to sustain cerebral lives amidst the baby spew makes us all proud, and there are women whose submersion in baby spew needs to be kept away from young girls because it makes them dread growing up to be women.
Which is, of course, a tragic mistake. What put me off Please Excuse My Daughter has nothing to do with gender, or even with pregnancy. At some points, like pages 127 to 222 inclusive, there is a certain obsession with icky medical details (first his diabetes, then her pregnancy), which are narrated in second-grade toilet-talk language. There’s also a throwaway line about a full month of mourning for a dog who died of old age—by humans who have human families, and you realize that the characters in this book don’t really have lives.
That’s what the story is supposed to be about…and with all those other people saying that Please Excuse My Daughter is funny and true and moving and all that, I want to explore my reaction in depth.
The characters don’t read, they don’t think, they don’t get out much. They seem to move around physically, but they don’t observe plants or animals or oceans or historic sites or different cultures in the places they visit. Sometimes they go to jobs, but their work doesn’t seem to mean much to them. They have a vague sense of ethnic background, but it’s only background. They may or may not be registered to vote, but whatever political beliefs they hold mean no more to their daily lives than whatever religious beliefs they hold do. They soak up mindless, passive entertainment from pop culture but don’t create or participate in art.
There’s a funny New York City apartment-hunting story that reveals, not just the pathetic desperation with which urban landlords market anything remotely resembling a view (“a sliver view, not a river view”), but the irrelevance of such marketing. Our characters have conditioned themselves not to look at views, and Klam says, “I hate mountains.” And then I realize what’s really the matter with all these people. They are ingrown. They don’t look at the big wide world beyond the ends of their noses. Probably most of the people they know aren’t exactly like them, but they wouldn’t notice a difference. The inevitable consequence is that they’re boring; the most exciting things that happen, to them, really do involve body fluids.
One of the occupational hazards of being a writer is getting lost in one’s own head. Some writers get lost in erotic fantasies, some in ideological rhetoric, some in vividly visual but meaningless dreamscapes. I tend to get lost in abstract cerebration about the syntheses my mind forms between information absorbed from my madly eclectic reading. Some writers, perhaps especially women from the Northern States—Judy Blume and Gwen Macsai are other egregious examples—get lost in the sensations of not perfectly healthy bodies, which is pardonable if viewed as a disease symptom; given a couple of degrees of fever I find my physical sensations fascinating too, but these writers imagine that everyone else is interested in itches, urine, and nausea as topics of conversation too, which is less pardonable.
If you no longer find yourself shrieking with mirth every time someone says “pea,” Please Excuse My Daughter is not very funny, although it does have some funny lines:
“[M]y clothing…sits in my closet, so hopeful, so disappointed. ‘I’m going to be in a jacket photo of the author!’ spouts the TSE black cashmere sweater.”
“[E]mergency rooms…aren’t happy places…Why don’t you ever see anyone from the society pages?”
“I felt like I could really get behind a good addiction…I googled ‘street drugs’…and [then] typed in ‘wedding dresses’…And very quickly, within minutes, I got hooked.”
There’s also a whole sequence (pages 76 to 100) that made me smile, not because it’s especially funny in its own right and not because I could relate to it personally, but because it’s so exactly like the stereotypes in How to Love Yankees with a Clear Conscience. Earlier in this book, we’ve read about how the Klam parents bought a big house in the country to display their wealth, but the Klam children didn’t like living in the country—“When I say we became accustomed to the wildlife, I don’t mean that I did…Matt still gets green when he recalls the morning he put a coat on to go feed the horses and put his hand in the pocket to find a living, breathing, wriggling mouse, which ran straight up his sleeve.”
Young Julie missed her four-year-old memories of New York City so much that, before marriage, her first long-term relationship was with a Mafia type. Anyone else would rather pick up and stroke the Big Apple’s favorite house pet, the cockroach, than even think about talking to this kind of guy, but Klam describes him in as much length and loving detail as she later gives to diabetes and eclampsia. I kept thinking “One shouldn’t stereotype even New Yorkers this way, this is sooo meeean,” and reminding myself, “But one of them is doing it.” Eww…ick…chortle.
Klam’s description of her rural childhood disturbs me. I always imagined that if people like these characters, the sub-species Homo denaturatus, had spent more time in the country, as children, they would have become more interesting.
Klam thinks the moral of her story is that rich parents should try to teach their daughters not to be princesses. I see nothing wrong with being a princess–it’s not as if any other field of specialized work were wide open these days–but I think Please Excuse My Daughter might be used to illustrate the need to teach daughters not to be self-absorbed denaturati. I can’t help wondering whether teachers who made Klam read more, editors who demanded more thoughtful studies of specific topics, or even a society that wouldn’t allow toilet jokes to be passed off as even conversation (much less as literature), might have molded Klam into the sort of writer who could write a factual memoir at age 40 and make it interesting.
We cannot all be Anne Lamott, Erma Bombeck, Jamaica Kincaid, Lauren Slater, Betty MacDonald, Maxine Hong Kingston, or Margaret Halsey. Perhaps most of us shouldn’t try to publish memoirs about ordinary private lives at early ages, but those of us who do want to write in this perilous genre should at least try to find things to say about the world beyond the ends of our noses.
I suspect that Please Excuse My Daughter may contain valuable clues for parents who want to make sure they don’t inadvertently rear denaturati, but I can’t tell you what they are. This bothers me. I’d been comfortable with the belief that, if parents lived in the country, made their children play outdoors, and didn’t have television, they’d be safe.
Anyway, Please Excuse My Daughter is recommended to anyone who wants to laugh about body fluids and/or about Northerners and/or about denaturati.
Posted on September 11, 2015 Categories A Fair Trade Book, Humor Tags denaturati
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