In the Land of Men, Power, Career, and Personal Relationship Run Parallel, That’s the Point

Adrienne Miller’s memory is a fabulously keen thing. Her memoir is vivid and detailed and, to the dismay of some critics, apparently, approached entirely on her own terms.

Having entered the publishing world of GQ and, later, in 1997, the imminent Esquire, Miller proceeds to carve an almost Mad Men like career. Almost. Her boss only reigns in the spending, otherwise, it appears she is able to do what she likes and does it well.

But even from the start, she feels something is amiss. As though she thought she’d acquired something else with the position… but it had yet to arrive.

Just as consumers do now, truncating the thin barrier that once gave some measure of privacy to the artist in capitalism — too many men in Miller’s lane seem to have no problem whatever dismissing Adrienne’s professional position and person.

It seems to many men in this scene, the only thing that had shifted with her position — was that now they had access to her; a desirable woman.

Adrienne recalls early on that an author’s agent tells her, face-to-face, matter-of-factly, that she “has no authority” to do her job.

This punctuated by lunches and dinners — all established as working — more men treat her as they presumably treat any other woman. Sometimes with verbal abuse. Sometimes submitting unwanted sexual advances.

As when a writer submits a piece of work and is published, Miller’s entrance and acceptance come with the unadvertised dynamics of being transformed into a commodity.

People want a piece of her; whatever they can get, apparently.

Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t to say that she doesn’t also wield some power, it is just being constantly tested in a series of raptors-attacking-an-electrified-fence-like-encounters by the men in this space.

She’s a tastemaker. She is in the “red hot” center of the literary world. She has sole control over what is published in a pretty big deal magazine.

So what is power, precisely, if it isn’t acknowledged by those in the kingdom?

Miller appears to have been let into a poker game, only no one has told her the rules and she is made to feel like she is constantly bluffing because they keep telling her she is; so she must be.

Is power afforded to women merely a seat at a table with people you’d rather not play with?

For about half the memoir Miller recounts with clarity, detail, and adroit prose, these working years. It is enticing and also proves she was probably fantastic at her job. Her contentment radiates as she talks about how hard it is to reject pieces, which pieces spoke to her, and why. Her enthusiasm is infectious. Despite the cancerous interactions that occur from time to time.

But then a shift occurs.

The latter half of the memoir contains her final years, which become somewhat arrested due to two things: Esquire slowly stops publishing pieces, and David Foster Wallace inserts himself into her life (who, by the way, deserved an actual arrest, apparently).

This shift is also quite clever and unique to any memoir I’ve yet read.

What is it like to work in this Land of Men? The first half encompasses that. What does it feel like? The relationship she has with DFW is an apt analogy as ever there was one.

Clearly, Miller is aware of how her framing of the memoir will be received by some critics today, because she telegraphs it in the critical reactions of other things in her recounting. And she’s right, as she was back then, with her finger on the pulse of the critics.

The reviews online often critique the memoir for her allowing Wallace to dominate a narrative that ought to be about her, for the most part (even as they use pictures of DFW rather than Adrienne attached to these pieces critiquing the memoir, ironically).

Why doesn’t she talk more about the business and the inside baseball? That’s what is actually interesting here, according to them. This could be more feminist, couldn’t it? It feels like it’s maybe two books.

It would be funny if it wasn’t sad.

They’ve missed the point of the memoir, foreshadowed from the start: David Foster Wallace, being the embodiment of the writing scene at the time, is synonymous with the traversal of her later career as an editor.

It is one story. It isn’t inside baseball and then also a eulogy to DFW.

What does it feel like to edit Esquire? You get who she was before Wallace, and the way she was after Wallace, and why.

It feels like being subsumed and gaslit.

Discounted; underestimated; manipulated.

Miller’s romantic relationship with DFW is foreshadowed and, retrospectively, inevitable, when considering the stories he submits to her for publication and editing.

These same pieces she edits professionally become embodiments of how he treated her (and probably others). And because the memoir is about the dynamics of power, even the structure of the memoir itself, with over 50% of it being about Wallace, is in service to that goal.

Her passion for her job and life dwindles within the omnipresence of Wallace. And he must also, therefore, dominate the page count.

Only with 20 years of perspective and reflection is Miller able to see what her story and her career and her relationship was actually like.

People are complicated. Trauma is complicated. Disentangling the two cannot really be done. Why would you ever edit out trauma or, really even the complexities of a man, when the topic and aim is to discuss the negotiation of a man’s world? His world, in particular.

Is it unfortunate that so much of it must involve Wallace?

Sure.

In the sense that it is unfortunate that these things happened to her.

To wish that Miller talked less about Wallace is a banal wish that the world was different and she never went through these things and now feels the way she does about them.

It isn’t a different world.

The memoir is Miller’s story because of and despite Wallace’s overbearing presence in it.

It’s what makes it unique and it’s what makes it good.