Ex and I got into it the other day (well, not true -- rather, I voice an opinion and she got pissed off and rather strident in her tone). It was one of those subtext-laden kind of things, where you're talking about something but I guess the behind-the-scenes stuff bubbles up.
I'd mentioned how amused I was that Gawker blogger and NYT darling Emily Gould's memoir had been received rather half-heartedly (typically saying that she wrote a memoir without having much to say). I've found Gould to be annoying as hell -- seriously narcissistic, and not nearly the writer we're supposed to believe she is (and she was given a very gushy treatment by the NYT a few years ago that set my teeth on edge).
Anyway, Exene was also not happy about that, which led to a discussion about memoirs in general, and we both agreed that only doing something noteworthy should be memoir-worthy. Simple enough, obvious point, right? I remember being on the commuter train in Indiana, and Hoosiers asking me "What're you writing? Your memoirs?" and I said "Memoirs? I haven't DONE anything, yet."
Then Exene made the mistake of referencing scaling Mount Everest as something memoir-worthy. She was under the (mistaken) impression that only 300 people have done it. I said "More like 2,000." And off we flew -- she got pissy about it, vehemently saying that a memoir about scaling Everest was a much worthier topic than a memoir by some narcissistic New York brat.
And I said "Well, they're BOTH lame, in my view." And I pointed out that maybe the first ten people to climb Everest might have something worth sharing, or perhaps a scaling that was in some way unique (up there, uniquely bad is likelier to be the outcome), and that, in my view, scaling Everest was as narcissistic as being a blogger in New York, only that in doing so, a person was spending far more money and actually risking people's lives for their vainglorious effort to summit Everest -- something nearly 2000 people have already done before you, and over 100 people have died attempting to do.
That really set her off, and she said how it was still more significant than the writings of a whiny, slutty New York chick. And I said "What's going to be said in an Everest memoir? It was cold. It was hard to breathe. It was dangerous. It was deadly. It was high up." I said maybe if a climber was abducted by aliens or saw a dragon, it might be interesting, but, by and large, it was the same story -- see mountain, climb mountain.
She went on a diatribe about the personal discovery a person scaling Everest might feel, contrasted with the navel-gazing of a former blogger-turned-writer (she didn't put it that way, but that was the key point), and I stuck to my contention that both efforts were lame, both were reflective of a deep narcissism -- whether "I live in New York." or "I scaled Mount Everest." -- both were lame, in my view. I said "Let me see the memoir of the first person to land on Mars -- that's something nobody's done before. But when you're the 2001st person to summit Everest? Yawn."
Now, either she's got it in her head to scale Everest, or she's perhaps conflating her marathon-running hobby as somehow deeply significant in the same vein that scaling Everest would be. That's the only reason I can figure on why she might get so up in arms about that. I mean, she was pissed! Like angrier than I've seen her in, well, the past two years (seriously, even angrier than when I told her I wanted to divorce her -- heh, if anybody should be writing a memoir, it should be ME -- "My Life with Maleficent"). I think maybe she thought my pointing out the ersatz and hubristic (and pointless) accomplishment of scaling Everest was, perhaps, a dig at her marathonning (which it wasn't, to be honest -- I wasn't even thinking of that at the time -- because it's not even in the same ballpark -- coming in 20,000th in a 40,000-runner marathon isn't even in same neighborhood as scaling Everest -- and only the delusionally hubristic would even think it is, which might be begging the question, yes?).
I don't know. I always look at those "extreme sport" things with a gimlet eye. The first, second, and third person who does something like that, sure, they're trailblazers. But after 2000 times? C'mon. Mountainous masturbation! Barring something extraordinary happening, it's not extraordinary -- personally meaningful, sure, but really, what moral lesson are you going to bring down from Mount Everest that already hasn't been learned? What, that it's HARD? That it's dangerous? That life is GOOD? That death is BAD? And sure, in a world of 5 billion people, you're one of the 0.00000004% to have scaled Everest, but I still think "Whoopity doo, goody for you. You're willing to risk those poor sherpa's lives, willing to pay out the nose for your little micro-sliver of personal accomplishment? What does that say about you?"
I remember reading that real climbers kind of look at Everest with a jaundiced view -- that the true lovers of climbing think it's kind of a circle jerk -- it's the mountains the "tourists" always want to climb. I didn't bring that up in my discussion with Exene, but I did think that.
Climb Every Mountain (had to be done). You know, at some point, I'm going to write a story exploring that impulse -- something darkly comic, to be sure.
