Scratched audiobook

This was a difficult read but I'm very glad I read it. Perfectionism is toxic and Elizabeth Tallent does an exceptional job in sharing the difficulties it has caused in her life in addition to her writing. Much of this memoir is exquisitely written, although there are some sections where I found myself lost in very long, complex sentences and had to read a section over several times to get my bearings. I learned quite a bit about myself from reading this and for that I'm grateful. 4 1/2 rounding up to 5 stars.

To be honest, I did not want to read this book and I did not want to write this review. However ... it was the last book I had to read while our library was closed (due to Covid 19). I did start a few times before I buckled down and read the whole book.In Scratched, Elizabeth Tallent has exposed herself with such intimacy and candour it is difficult to read more than a few pages at a time. There is complexity in the autobiography that makes for demanding reading. Occasionally, I found myself asking, 'who was she married to then?' or, 'when did her mother allow her back into the family?' Things like that. Yes, her story advances but in a turned way - linear it is not! So, my usual (bad) habit of reading a book backwards didn't work at all. In the event, I had a clear view of Elizabeth Tallent: her physical appearance, her complete desire for perfectionism - to the detriment of her happiness for much of her life, and that she sees as 'home'. Her personal narrative of depression made me weep. Her experience of psychoanalysis, and how she bares her soul right there. I discover, on finishing the book, that, if I could write like her I would write a lot more than I do.

After an incredibly promising start, publishing 5 critically acclaimed books and nabbing a prestigious professorship at Stanford, Elizabeth Tallent published nothing for 22 years. This memoir is her reckoning with the perfectionism that has both made her and plagued her. What results is a brilliant and enriching examination of the facets and faces of perfectionism through a woman’s life from her very birth to present day.

First book in a long time that I had to go back and reread sentence after sentence—making sure I understood the structure, where the verb was hiding. It is beautiful, a triumph. A meditation on mental illness. A poem dedicated to the fleeting details of identity.

It feels mean to criticize an author who writes to explain why she couldn’t write a book for 22 years due to perfectionism. Part I had such a meandering beginning that I couldn’t get my bearings until this sentence: The summer my mother told me the story of how she had not been willing to take me I was nineteen. We learn how the author’s in utero scratches marked her as imperfect and that her mother refused to hold her at the hospital as a newborn. Later we get more on this key incident: While she [her mother] was alive there was never a moment when I could have asked why she told the story to me and what if anything she hoped would come of having told it. Even though it was never discussed between mother and daughter, it's the origin story at the center of the book.Part II has some of the best writing as Tallent describes 1950s suburban America as an incubator for replication, imitation, and suppression of individualism: The daylight absence of the men, the fathers, imbued the suburb with the suspense of desertion. Every blade of grass in every lawn was waiting. Every wife was waiting, every dog with pricked ears was waiting, and each blade of grass, each wife, each dog and child, whatever else they did, held still. This part also has a section on perfectionism as a trait that again, I thought could have gone earlier (a theme for this review): 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. ... A supposedly surefire means of pleasing a job interviewer is to answer What is your biggest flaw? with I’m a perfectionist.Part III has Tallent emerging as a writer and parent, describing her path through therapy, marriages and jobs, to her current career as a writing teacher where she’s “learned to extend a welcome to mishaps, failures, rifts, smudges, to effortfulness in general, to what I’d call, in talking with my students, process, is to conceal a thousand, ten thousand, eruptions of repudiation.” And ultimately, she's learned to “try to love this incarnation.” Ironically, my response to this book was mostly organizational: why is it ordered in such a non-linear fashion? - which maybe reveals my perfectionist streak. :-)

I find it hard to review memoirs because it feels as though I'm judging someone's life and life choices. That's doubly the case here because this is really the story of how Tallent struggled and continues to struggle with perfectionism, which is more destructive than many realize. Is she blaming her issues on her mother, who refused to hold her immediately after her birth because of a small scratch? Was she imprinted as an infant? Perfectionism took a huge toll on Tallent, who was unable to complete and publish anything for 22 years. This is at times a challenge to read but she offers interesting insight into her issues. Thanks to edelweiss for the ARC. For Tallent fans who have been waiting a long time for new work.

I felt in tune with the author's pain when the other people wouldn't act in exactly the right way.Then again, it could also be noted that my pleasure with this volume may also stem from my appreciation of the examination of human psychology.Or, or, or... could it also be that Asperger's stuff? I don't think they are connected, although she does describe stroking the couch's velvet towards the end, and I am familiar with how autistic/Aspergerians have particular sensitivities with touch...I nearly balked away from this book due to her inscribing at the end To the Lighthouse which I absolutely hated with a fiery passion and totally wouldn't have minded burning if no one saw that I was book-burning. I'm glad I didn't, though. It was worth the brief discomfort.

Painful as an exorcism.

I've read Elizabeth Tallent's previous short story collection Mendocino Fire and enjoyed it. I had found about this one in advance and pre-ordered it.This is a different and challenging approach to the memoir format, jumping around in chronology and through time. The first part is interesting, written in a somewhat experimental style about the night of the author's birth from her mother's perspective, how she couldn't hold her newborn baby for 3 days, the baby "scratched" and imperfect looking fresh from the womb instilling a sort of revulsion in the mother. Every detail is extracted and excruciated over with long, dense dense sentences that are sometimes hard to grasp. I suppose you could see how the author would pore over the details of this first portion of the memoir, writing and rewriting until she feels that it is constructed just right. After this portion of the book, we jump into more conventional, autobiographical territory, and I was more engaged here. I loved the vignettes of childhood and family life and a young romance and young adulthood. Really enjoyed the poetry of the language and writing throughout. The bits of the book that are steeped in nostalgia ring true and I could've read a lot more of that stuff. I just had one burning question throughout the memoir. It is supposedly a memoir of perfectionism and there is lots of mention of it in the book and how the author has it, but the book never presented many examples of her practicing it in her life. The book dust jacket flap states that Tallent didn't publish any writing for 22 years and it was due to this perfectionism, but we don't get to see this in the memoir. I would like to have seen how it affected the writing process. Did she attempt stories during this time? Was she throwing away page after page of work that she couldn't quite get right? Or was she paralyzed to even start? How did her perfectionism affect her earlier works and life?There also didn't seem to be any evidence presented in her day to day past life. She has a couple compulsive behaviors she shares, but that's it...So I was curious as to why this was presented as a focus of the memoir.It seemed to me that the memoir was more of a memoir about introspection, and how too much can hamper you; life and its details observed too much, a desire to capture and preserve them in language and getting stuck in your own head and thoughts. But what excellent language she comes up with to capture these details, and I was left wanting more, so that's why I give it 4 stars.

Entire swaths of Elizabeth Tallent's memoir read like prose poems. Her writing is lyrical and metaphorical, and it runs at a brisk pace--literaly. Tallent will write in a single graph for pages, strings of run-on sentences together for a tone that's lyrical and urgent. There's an irony there, relyin

Reminiscent of Nelson’s Argonauts narrative with jumbled time line snippets but mostly chronological, the no quotation dialogue in italics. I guess that’s a contemporary immediacy. Brilliance here, and imperfections, but Tallant finally makes peace with being imperfect, letting her guard down , being vulnerable, which she is, painfully so, but only in accepting her imperfections is she finally safe from the world and her self. She stops scratching herself to the bone in the end. Well, I hope. Near the beginning she writes, “How much honesty is possible about a child if one is no longer that child? Does having once been her make me an authority? Can I understand her better than I can my cat? How radically would what that child would say about her existence differ from what I have said? As I write this I feel the kind of sadness known as piercing because it feels like admitting uncertainty in regard to her experience is to lose her. In contrast, to claim absolute certainty in regard to the child’s experience feels like having her. (Not being her. Having.) But I know very well that no person whose experience can be narrated with absolute certainty exists or ever did. The paradox is that to write about her with the upmost honesty I am capable of feels continually like loss; it’s only the loss of her that convinces me I ever was her.“ I found Tallant’s existential view of herself spot on in that what she describes resonates with my own experience of remembering childhood, what it was like to be that person and was that person me? I think we all marvel at that. Well, I do.

I read this in several short bursts over an extended period of time, which isn’t the best way to deal with writing that is often so interior and abstract. What sticks with me is how the trenchancy of Tallent’s observations of perfectionism contrasts with the evasiveness and circuitousness of her prose. Her book often seems only incidentally about its purported topic, being more an examination of her warring, worried psyche and how it relates to the course of her life. But even with her elision of what a more straightforward and conventional writer would consider major life events, not to mention her love of sentences that run on at the middle, she doesn’t ramble. Rather she conveys, in a style both fluid and fragmentary, that what happens to you and how it lives in your mind are often terribly different things—something a perfectionist knows all too well.

I was gifted this book by someone who is in love with her voice and warned that “it’s chaotic and people either love it or hate it”. You really do need to give it some time to “settle in” to her prose. Within the first few pages I thought it pretentious and jarring, but once “settled in”, no not pretentious. Chaotic, certainly, but that is, I think, what grounded it back down for me. The run-on sentences taking up entire pages I dragged my feet through in the beginning, but by the end, each clause was a layer being peeled back. Like nothing I’ve read before—if for nothing else than a study in authorial voice.

This book took me a while to connect with the flow of it, but once I did I was all in. Elizabeth's language is beautiful, and challenging, in a good way, like when you crest the hill to take in the gorgeous view and feel rewarded for having done so. I am a fan of her earlier work and was anticipating the release of this book. I smile with satisfaction at having read it.

There’s always gonna be something when a writer slash savage keener, jotted down her own life affair nakedly for all to see. This genre is honesty in all its form, leaving my bare soul hanging for God knows how long.

A poignant and eloquent narrative of perfectionism's roots and buds of problematic behavior which pass on generationally. Tallent's voice is unmatched, I was obsessed with how she threw in fancy words any chance she got and didn't shy away from long flowing syntax.

A hard, incredible read. I found myself re-reading almost every page, desperately trying to keep up with Tallent's whirling mind. It's not a light, casual read, but it's achingly well-written and honest and real.

it’s what i deserve