The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Narcissim Isn't the Whole Issue

Rebecca Walker may be a narcissist, but this quality alone is not what bothers me. Her mother Alice has been called the same, yet in the older Walker’s groundbreaking 1983 novel The Color Purple, she managed to forge some meaningful social commentary. The younger Rebecca has failed to muster career success beyond being a memoirist. In addition to her book Baby Love, Rebecca published a book in 2002 titled Black, White, & Jewish, in which she detailed how difficult it was to grow up the biracial girl of divorced parents, shuffled between coasts and homes.

As a child of divorce, myself, I get awfully tired of reading this stuff by people who blame a lifetime of issues on divorce. It’s a harrowing experience, sure, but does anyone else think Rebecca Walker probably had some issues outside of mom and dad splitting up?

Rebecca notes in the Daily Mail essay how difficult it was for her in 2004 when she told her mother she was pregnant. “[Alice] went very quiet. All she could say was that she was shocked. Then she asked if I could check on her garden,” Rebecca writes. Elsewhere, she whines that Alice vaguely considered her “a calamity,” just as madness was an obstacle for Virginia Woolf and poor health a problem for Zora Neale Hurston.

Instead of moping over how her mother’s feminism ruined her life, the younger Walker should be most concerned with how wholly anti-feminist she herself is. She is apparently incapable of writing outside of her own personal experiences as a woman, which has the effect of making her scope as a writer unusually narrow (as if she is stunted by her pair of X chromosomes). Best to hold off on crafting autobiographies until one has achieved something worthy of reflection. Catfights with mom and years of uncertain sexual identity do not a worthwhile memoir make.