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Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil
This book focuses on six brilliant women who are often seen as particularly Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus, and Joan Didion. Aligned with no single tradition, they escape straightforward categories. Yet their work evinces an affinity of style and philosophical viewpoint that derives from a shared attitude toward suffering. What Mary McCarthy called a “cold eye” was not merely a personal aversion to displays of it was an unsentimental mode of attention that dictated both ethical positions and aesthetic approaches.
Tough Enough traces the careers of these women and their challenges to the pre-eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain. Their writing and art reveal an adamant belief that the hurts of the world must be treated concretely, directly, and realistically, without recourse to either melodrama or callousness. As Deborah Nelson shows, this stance offers an important counter-tradition to the familiar postwar poles of emotional expressivity on the one hand and cool irony on the other. Ultimately, in its insistence on facing reality without consolation or compensation, this austere “school of the unsentimental” offers new ways to approach suffering in both its spectacular forms and all of its ordinariness.
Tough Enough traces the careers of these women and their challenges to the pre-eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain. Their writing and art reveal an adamant belief that the hurts of the world must be treated concretely, directly, and realistically, without recourse to either melodrama or callousness. As Deborah Nelson shows, this stance offers an important counter-tradition to the familiar postwar poles of emotional expressivity on the one hand and cool irony on the other. Ultimately, in its insistence on facing reality without consolation or compensation, this austere “school of the unsentimental” offers new ways to approach suffering in both its spectacular forms and all of its ordinariness.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2017
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About the author
Deborah Nelson
3 books5 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Deborah Nelson is a professor in the English Dept. at the University of Chicago. From her faculty page on the UofC website:
My field is late twentieth-century U.S. culture and politics, what is known in shorthand as Post45 or Post War (to the confusion of many: which war?). I also am a founding member of the Post45 collective, which publishes an online journalPost45and a book series atStanford University Press. My interests in the field include American poetry, novels, essays, and plays; gender and sexuality studies; photography; autobiography and confessional writing; American ethnic literature; poetry and poetics; and Cold War history. I have been working recently on the immediate postwar moment, @1948, on which topic I and three colleagues ran a year-long, interdisciplinary Sawyer Seminar sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. My colleague Leela Gandhi and I co-edited a selection of papers presented in the seminar in a special issue of Critical Inquiry. In the fall of 2018, James Sparrow in the Department of History and I will curate an exhibit from the holdings of the Smart Museum on the @1948 moment.
This past spring my book, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil, was published by the University of Chicago Press. Tough Enough focuses on these six women who are aligned with no single tradition but whose work coheres in a style and philosophical viewpoint that derives from a shared attitude toward suffering. What Mary McCarthy called a “cold eye” was not merely a personal aversion to displays of emotion: it was an unsentimental mode of attention that dictated both ethical positions and aesthetic approaches. Tough Enough challenges the pre-eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain. My first book, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, examined the discourse of privacy beginning with its emergence asa topic of intense anxiety in the late 1950s. Pairing landmark Supreme Court decisions on the right to privacy with the investigation of privacy and private life in the work of the confessional poets, the book takes up these two discourses for their particularly subtle investigation of the language of privacy as the concept evolved over the next decades.
Deborah Nelson is a professor in the English Dept. at the University of Chicago. From her faculty page on the UofC website:
My field is late twentieth-century U.S. culture and politics, what is known in shorthand as Post45 or Post War (to the confusion of many: which war?). I also am a founding member of the Post45 collective, which publishes an online journalPost45and a book series atStanford University Press. My interests in the field include American poetry, novels, essays, and plays; gender and sexuality studies; photography; autobiography and confessional writing; American ethnic literature; poetry and poetics; and Cold War history. I have been working recently on the immediate postwar moment, @1948, on which topic I and three colleagues ran a year-long, interdisciplinary Sawyer Seminar sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. My colleague Leela Gandhi and I co-edited a selection of papers presented in the seminar in a special issue of Critical Inquiry. In the fall of 2018, James Sparrow in the Department of History and I will curate an exhibit from the holdings of the Smart Museum on the @1948 moment.
This past spring my book, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil, was published by the University of Chicago Press. Tough Enough focuses on these six women who are aligned with no single tradition but whose work coheres in a style and philosophical viewpoint that derives from a shared attitude toward suffering. What Mary McCarthy called a “cold eye” was not merely a personal aversion to displays of emotion: it was an unsentimental mode of attention that dictated both ethical positions and aesthetic approaches. Tough Enough challenges the pre-eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain. My first book, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, examined the discourse of privacy beginning with its emergence asa topic of intense anxiety in the late 1950s. Pairing landmark Supreme Court decisions on the right to privacy with the investigation of privacy and private life in the work of the confessional poets, the book takes up these two discourses for their particularly subtle investigation of the language of privacy as the concept evolved over the next decades.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
September 13, 2021
Disfruté y sufrí a la vez. Deborah Nelson se centra en el hecho de que las mujeres sobre las que escribe en este ensayo tienen algo en común: Se alejan del sentimentalismo para enfocarse y entender las realidad. En todos los capítulos vuelve a ese mismo lugar, cada uno dedicado a una de ellas: Primero Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag y la fotógrafa Diane Arbus. En el caso de Mary McCarthy se centra mucho en la amistad con Arendt, y lo que ellas compartían en común (es una amistad que tiene un librazo, las cartas que se escribieron durante 30 años, que recomiendo mucho, a pesar de su título en español, "Entre Amigas") Con Arendt se centra en su libro Eichmann en Jerusalén, su libro más famoso y controvertido. Me gustó mucho porque aunque a algunas las he leído más que a otras, el hecho de que resalte cómo en su opinión, todas estas escritoras se alejan de caer en una empatía sobrada, que les impediría reflejar los hechos mismos. Resalta la ironía de algunas de ellas, (Joan Didion, y Arendt), me soprendió saber que Weil estaba un poco peleada con la idea de los mártires, o de martirizarse ella, (aunque murió super joven, de tuberculosis y tenía anorexia). No sé si su teoría es correcta o no, pero me sentí muy identificada con la idea de que si no miras a la realidad de frente, se puede perder algo en tu manera de leer el mundo. Y también esto de ser asentimental para crear o producir es interesante, porque justo por lo que más han sido criticadas estas mujeres en algún momento fue por la opinión de que no pudieran ser empáticas, lo cual me parece buenísimo enfoque, es un gran punto de partida para conocer más el trabajo de cada una de ellas. Lo leí en la edición de Monte Hermoso, una editorial argentina de ensayo. Muy recomendado.
June 29, 2023
Incredible and very readable lit crit book analysing Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion’s writing—plus Diane Arbus’s photography and oblique reflections on her craft. Learned of it through Merve Emre’s ‘Two Paths for the Personal Essay’ in the Boston Review:
‘Nelson’s study of the ethics and aesthetics of unsentimentality celebrates those icy, unsparing, and acid-tongued female artists who were committed to “looking at painful reality with directness and clarity and without consolation or compensation.” Many of these women depicted their own lives in uncomfortable detail…Yet none believed that the representation of human experience, no matter how complex or agonizing or imponderable, demanded emotional expressivity. Indeed, for them, compassion for the human condition required the opposite: the evacuation of emotion from art.
Their unsentimentality was not a personal failing, Nelson claims, but a carefully constructed aesthetic and ethical strategy; a “lifelong project” that perceived, with great and terrible urgency, the limits of empathy after World War II…dwelling on the emotional effects of an experience often occluded painful reality, shrouding one’s objects of criticism behind the cheap veil of sentiment and self-regard. Bringing an audience to tears was a parlor trick that preyed on people’s perverse attraction to suffering—their ability to take any awful situation, no matter how remote, and make it about their uniquely hurt feelings…I found myself moved by Nelson’s simple, yet powerful, insistence that we disentangle ethics from empathy so that we might see anew the obligations we have to each other and to the world we share.’
It’s a really great introduction to Weil, Arendt, McCarthy (who I haven’t really read); a really nice way to deepen my understanding of Sontag, Arbus, and Didion; and it feels like a provocative but compelling counterpoint to the (currently prevailing) assumption that more affective intensity signals a greater ethical or political commitment. Some really beautiful close readings of text and images. Have been telling everyone I’ve talked to in the last 2 weeks about this book…
‘Nelson’s study of the ethics and aesthetics of unsentimentality celebrates those icy, unsparing, and acid-tongued female artists who were committed to “looking at painful reality with directness and clarity and without consolation or compensation.” Many of these women depicted their own lives in uncomfortable detail…Yet none believed that the representation of human experience, no matter how complex or agonizing or imponderable, demanded emotional expressivity. Indeed, for them, compassion for the human condition required the opposite: the evacuation of emotion from art.
Their unsentimentality was not a personal failing, Nelson claims, but a carefully constructed aesthetic and ethical strategy; a “lifelong project” that perceived, with great and terrible urgency, the limits of empathy after World War II…dwelling on the emotional effects of an experience often occluded painful reality, shrouding one’s objects of criticism behind the cheap veil of sentiment and self-regard. Bringing an audience to tears was a parlor trick that preyed on people’s perverse attraction to suffering—their ability to take any awful situation, no matter how remote, and make it about their uniquely hurt feelings…I found myself moved by Nelson’s simple, yet powerful, insistence that we disentangle ethics from empathy so that we might see anew the obligations we have to each other and to the world we share.’
It’s a really great introduction to Weil, Arendt, McCarthy (who I haven’t really read); a really nice way to deepen my understanding of Sontag, Arbus, and Didion; and it feels like a provocative but compelling counterpoint to the (currently prevailing) assumption that more affective intensity signals a greater ethical or political commitment. Some really beautiful close readings of text and images. Have been telling everyone I’ve talked to in the last 2 weeks about this book…
June 8, 2019
I found this alternately brilliant and unfinished, with the root pieces from which the whole was grown jutting out awkwardly, and the first chapters much more worked out and sophisticated than the final chapters. It would also be fascinating to see Rachel Carson included in this matrix! The chapters on Weil, Arendt, and McCarthy were my favourites - the former two especially! - but I found Sontag's chapter relatively unconvincing and arcane.
In any event, despite the organization, there is much here to learn from and very much indeed to think about.
In any event, despite the organization, there is much here to learn from and very much indeed to think about.
August 19, 2020
The book is a disjointed study of six women in the 20th-century. Looking at six women from different fields, Nelson wants to create a connection between them based on their style and approach to the world in their work. While interesting her approach is not really successful. However, in the course of the book she raises much more interesting questions about how these women understood larger issues that became part of the zeitgeist of the twentieth-century; including questions of representation, pain, suffering and perception.
"More specifically, the sentimental tradition crafted the eighteenth-century "man of feeling" (who disappeared from public life when sympathy and sentiment were assigned to the domestic sphere in the nineteenth century) in a stoic mode." 3
"Arbus confesses that it hurts to be photographed but believes that empathy masks human reality. One of the late twentieth century's greatest dilemmas has been how to confront the scale of painful reality or "to regard the pain of too many others," to paraphrase Susan Sontag. World War II unleashed an enormity of suffering that defied everyone's attempts, then and now, to describe or comprehend its totality." 6
"If the twentieth century is a century of dramas and a century of theories of trauma, as Shoshana Felman put it, it is also a century of traumatic representation, which encompasses the attempts to do justice to suffering as well as to capitalize on its eager consumption." 7
"As Lauren Berlin and Wendy Brown have argued, intimacy, empathy, and solidarity derived their conceptual and social power from their imagined capacity to heal a deep and often traumatic psychic wound. This relief from pain through empathy resonated widely with other discourses of recovery in late twentieth-century America. It is essential, however, to cast the dilemma of pain more broadly still by remembering that it is not peculiar to areas that we identity with woundedness-identity politics, therapy and confessional culture, and trauma studies-to take pain as self-evident and in a very complicated sense, satisfying. On the one hand, as Mark Seltzer has explained, late twentieth-century America is a "wound culture" marked by "The public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound." 8
"As Tall Asad's Formation of the Secular explains, pain is a peculiarly modern problem and one conceived in terms of scale. Excess became the marker by which cruelty was identified, though where the baseline of acceptability lies is always historically contingent. As cruelty in punishment was outlawed, pain become incompatible with what it meant to be human. To inflict it and to experience it were both dehumanizing. Of course, that did not render cruelty obsolete, he argues, it merely made it secret and subject to denial. But the remaking of the penal code and the notion of rights changed the place of pain in modern societies and rendered it unitary-that is, one thing rather than many...That pain was merely an ordinary part of human life, that its had spiritual and other uses, began to seem inhuman, uncivilized, barbaric. To consider its value or use seemed reactionary." 9
"Their paths cross, sometimes run parallel and they are connected by degrees of personal relationship. For my purposes, they are affiliated more closely by style and shared sensibility than they are by biography, though biography is nonetheless part of it." 12
"Postwar American culture is thought by some historians to exhibit something like post-traumatic stress disorder. As one version of this story goes, Americans turned inward toward domesticity in its most conventional form, in what Elaine Tyler May persuasively described as a bomb shelter mentality. The embrace of normalcy-often under coercively normalizing terms-was a post-traumatic effect, the outcome of decades of dislocation, deprivation, and loss during the depression of the 1930s and the mobilization of World War II." 18
"In the opening of The Need for Roots, Weil discarded the very term that would come to symbolize justice and social progress by the end of the 1940s: human rights. Instead, she insisted on the "obligations" of human beings, and of their social and political institutions, to other human beings. Rights, she argued much in the way Arendt later would, always required someone to recognize them; obligations in contrast, were nonnegotiable and therefore applied universal (to fail in one's obligation was to commit a crime)." 29
"In Weil's "Human Personality," which similarly attacks rights, she turns to Antigone to make her case. The afflicted need language to make their oppression visible and knowable, and their best models are Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, the Shakespeare of King Lear, and the Racine of Phedre. In other words, the afflicted need the tradition of tragic literature (for her, Homer its a tragedian) to formulate a response to their condition in a political world, not so their listeners can sympathize or enjoy the catharsis of theatricalize pain. Weil had come to believe that suffering was extremely difficult to see and to communicate in something of the terms Elaine Scarry has made familiar." 30
"Eichmann's trial did not alone cause but rather coincided with and accelerated the insertion of the Holocaust into the collective memory of the twentieth century." 46
"Since people find it difficult, and righty so, to live with something that takes their breath away and renders them speechless, they have all too frequently yielded to the obvious temptation to translate their speechlessness into whatever expressions for emotions were close at hand, all of them inadequate. As a result, today the whole story is usually told in terms of sentiments which need not even be cheap in themselves to cheap and sentimentalize the story." 67
"Suffering and desire, as forms of emotional intensity that compromise agency, get mapped onto one another, and aesthetics becomes the tool by which to regulate their intrinsic excess." 100
"...where Sontag acknowledges that illness changes one's citizenship, deporting the sick to their own kingdom and granting their return only when well." 110
"Overproduction and overconsumption make demand, or desire, unreadable, produced as much from the outside as from within. Sontag worries that we can no longer enjoy our own desire because we have lost control over it. Our agency has been compromised." 112
"With those subjects as well as with more ordinary folk-young couples, socialites, suburban families, babies-she liked to capture what she called "the gap," which is the distance between a person's intended and actual self-presentation." 127
"Perhaps Arbus was attracted to pain that has no agency and no meaning in order to demystify or desacralize it. In this view, pain is not supplementary to the human experience but integral to it." 142
"More specifically, the sentimental tradition crafted the eighteenth-century "man of feeling" (who disappeared from public life when sympathy and sentiment were assigned to the domestic sphere in the nineteenth century) in a stoic mode." 3
"Arbus confesses that it hurts to be photographed but believes that empathy masks human reality. One of the late twentieth century's greatest dilemmas has been how to confront the scale of painful reality or "to regard the pain of too many others," to paraphrase Susan Sontag. World War II unleashed an enormity of suffering that defied everyone's attempts, then and now, to describe or comprehend its totality." 6
"If the twentieth century is a century of dramas and a century of theories of trauma, as Shoshana Felman put it, it is also a century of traumatic representation, which encompasses the attempts to do justice to suffering as well as to capitalize on its eager consumption." 7
"As Lauren Berlin and Wendy Brown have argued, intimacy, empathy, and solidarity derived their conceptual and social power from their imagined capacity to heal a deep and often traumatic psychic wound. This relief from pain through empathy resonated widely with other discourses of recovery in late twentieth-century America. It is essential, however, to cast the dilemma of pain more broadly still by remembering that it is not peculiar to areas that we identity with woundedness-identity politics, therapy and confessional culture, and trauma studies-to take pain as self-evident and in a very complicated sense, satisfying. On the one hand, as Mark Seltzer has explained, late twentieth-century America is a "wound culture" marked by "The public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound." 8
"As Tall Asad's Formation of the Secular explains, pain is a peculiarly modern problem and one conceived in terms of scale. Excess became the marker by which cruelty was identified, though where the baseline of acceptability lies is always historically contingent. As cruelty in punishment was outlawed, pain become incompatible with what it meant to be human. To inflict it and to experience it were both dehumanizing. Of course, that did not render cruelty obsolete, he argues, it merely made it secret and subject to denial. But the remaking of the penal code and the notion of rights changed the place of pain in modern societies and rendered it unitary-that is, one thing rather than many...That pain was merely an ordinary part of human life, that its had spiritual and other uses, began to seem inhuman, uncivilized, barbaric. To consider its value or use seemed reactionary." 9
"Their paths cross, sometimes run parallel and they are connected by degrees of personal relationship. For my purposes, they are affiliated more closely by style and shared sensibility than they are by biography, though biography is nonetheless part of it." 12
"Postwar American culture is thought by some historians to exhibit something like post-traumatic stress disorder. As one version of this story goes, Americans turned inward toward domesticity in its most conventional form, in what Elaine Tyler May persuasively described as a bomb shelter mentality. The embrace of normalcy-often under coercively normalizing terms-was a post-traumatic effect, the outcome of decades of dislocation, deprivation, and loss during the depression of the 1930s and the mobilization of World War II." 18
"In the opening of The Need for Roots, Weil discarded the very term that would come to symbolize justice and social progress by the end of the 1940s: human rights. Instead, she insisted on the "obligations" of human beings, and of their social and political institutions, to other human beings. Rights, she argued much in the way Arendt later would, always required someone to recognize them; obligations in contrast, were nonnegotiable and therefore applied universal (to fail in one's obligation was to commit a crime)." 29
"In Weil's "Human Personality," which similarly attacks rights, she turns to Antigone to make her case. The afflicted need language to make their oppression visible and knowable, and their best models are Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, the Shakespeare of King Lear, and the Racine of Phedre. In other words, the afflicted need the tradition of tragic literature (for her, Homer its a tragedian) to formulate a response to their condition in a political world, not so their listeners can sympathize or enjoy the catharsis of theatricalize pain. Weil had come to believe that suffering was extremely difficult to see and to communicate in something of the terms Elaine Scarry has made familiar." 30
"Eichmann's trial did not alone cause but rather coincided with and accelerated the insertion of the Holocaust into the collective memory of the twentieth century." 46
"Since people find it difficult, and righty so, to live with something that takes their breath away and renders them speechless, they have all too frequently yielded to the obvious temptation to translate their speechlessness into whatever expressions for emotions were close at hand, all of them inadequate. As a result, today the whole story is usually told in terms of sentiments which need not even be cheap in themselves to cheap and sentimentalize the story." 67
"Suffering and desire, as forms of emotional intensity that compromise agency, get mapped onto one another, and aesthetics becomes the tool by which to regulate their intrinsic excess." 100
"...where Sontag acknowledges that illness changes one's citizenship, deporting the sick to their own kingdom and granting their return only when well." 110
"Overproduction and overconsumption make demand, or desire, unreadable, produced as much from the outside as from within. Sontag worries that we can no longer enjoy our own desire because we have lost control over it. Our agency has been compromised." 112
"With those subjects as well as with more ordinary folk-young couples, socialites, suburban families, babies-she liked to capture what she called "the gap," which is the distance between a person's intended and actual self-presentation." 127
"Perhaps Arbus was attracted to pain that has no agency and no meaning in order to demystify or desacralize it. In this view, pain is not supplementary to the human experience but integral to it." 142
September 19, 2024
okay so before i get into anything i will say i did really enjoy this book! i took loads of notes, and there was a lot of stuff that answered questions i had - in relation to my own academic research (lol rip, mark seltzer mention in the intro!!) and things i wanted to take into my own style of writing
that being said. and really im sorry to be this guy again, because i get this wasn't necessarily in the scope of the book but like. it's very strange to write about the affective structure/style that allows for 'hardness' and not mention race like. at all. though i guess that lack of discussion and mention is in itself indicative of whiteness (article i read about shirley jackson a couple years ago made this same argument) but yeah idk i was just very struck by the fact that there's very much a racial (white?) element which allows your prose to be called icy or cold or whatever. VS the texts analysed in xine yao's disaffected (<- lifechanging btw) and also just the general trend of disaffected white woman fiction that's really proliferated the last 5 years like idk guys i just think that there's a reason all of this exists the way it does! anyway enough from me. this really was helpful it just there was this giant crater in the centre of it
that being said. and really im sorry to be this guy again, because i get this wasn't necessarily in the scope of the book but like. it's very strange to write about the affective structure/style that allows for 'hardness' and not mention race like. at all. though i guess that lack of discussion and mention is in itself indicative of whiteness (article i read about shirley jackson a couple years ago made this same argument) but yeah idk i was just very struck by the fact that there's very much a racial (white?) element which allows your prose to be called icy or cold or whatever. VS the texts analysed in xine yao's disaffected (<- lifechanging btw) and also just the general trend of disaffected white woman fiction that's really proliferated the last 5 years like idk guys i just think that there's a reason all of this exists the way it does! anyway enough from me. this really was helpful it just there was this giant crater in the centre of it
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May 20, 2020This is a difficult read about five women who, at first, seem to have little in common. Nelson ties them together in their relation to suffering, to tragedy and to their "tough" insistence that we look at it straight and factually, and see it for what it is, without allowing emotion and pity get us off the hook.
I was most impressed with the chapters on Weil, Arendt and Didion, three very different writers. I had always like Weil, largely for her political/social views and had always been a little puzzled by her religious views which seemed to border on masochism. However, Nelson considers the religious view integral to the political, that people react to the contingency of life, to the suffering and inevitable death by creating self-illusions and self-delusions that ultimately cause them to hurt other people.
The chapter on Didion is really enlightening, focusing on her hard core early essays (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album and Salvador) and how her aesthetic and morality was based on hard non-emotional, non-ideological recitation of facts, often presented ironically, to the point where the reader was overwhelmed with the self-evident truth of the situation. Again, the focus was on the real, not on the emotion of the story. Then, of course, her husband dies unexpectedly and she is left to wrestle with the emotion and illusion (magic) in The Year of Magical Thinking. When I read YMT, I was struck by what appeared to be the breakdown Didion went through-which was to simple a reading. Nelson's chapter gave me a whole new perspective on how Didion faced the loss and overcame any fate of self-pity.
The chapter on Arendt was terrific on dealing with her ability to look at situations and not be swayed by the emotion and the spectacle. It focuses on her dissecting totalitarianism, her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, and her view of American culture. If you have read and disliked Eichmann in Jerusalem, you will want to read this chapter.
My only regret is not knowing enough photograph to fully comprehend the points about Arbus and to some degree Sontag.
I was most impressed with the chapters on Weil, Arendt and Didion, three very different writers. I had always like Weil, largely for her political/social views and had always been a little puzzled by her religious views which seemed to border on masochism. However, Nelson considers the religious view integral to the political, that people react to the contingency of life, to the suffering and inevitable death by creating self-illusions and self-delusions that ultimately cause them to hurt other people.
The chapter on Didion is really enlightening, focusing on her hard core early essays (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album and Salvador) and how her aesthetic and morality was based on hard non-emotional, non-ideological recitation of facts, often presented ironically, to the point where the reader was overwhelmed with the self-evident truth of the situation. Again, the focus was on the real, not on the emotion of the story. Then, of course, her husband dies unexpectedly and she is left to wrestle with the emotion and illusion (magic) in The Year of Magical Thinking. When I read YMT, I was struck by what appeared to be the breakdown Didion went through-which was to simple a reading. Nelson's chapter gave me a whole new perspective on how Didion faced the loss and overcame any fate of self-pity.
The chapter on Arendt was terrific on dealing with her ability to look at situations and not be swayed by the emotion and the spectacle. It focuses on her dissecting totalitarianism, her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, and her view of American culture. If you have read and disliked Eichmann in Jerusalem, you will want to read this chapter.
My only regret is not knowing enough photograph to fully comprehend the points about Arbus and to some degree Sontag.
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August 13, 2019My hackles raise whenever I feel like women are being told that they are too emotional and should be colder. You know, for patriarchy reasons. At first, I was skeptical about a book in praise of tough women. I was worried that it would be too “you go girl, be tough, #TeamArya.” But Tough Enough has been a great surprise so far. Deborah Nelson uses cultural figures including Joan Didion and Mary McCarthy to talk about the difference between sentimentality, unsentimentality, and nonsentimentality, and the ways that women are expected to perform emotional warmth. Tough Enough talks about how we as a society think about responses to pain, the inevitability of pain, and the mind-boggling scale of global pain post-WWII. And because it’s a library book, I’m taking notes on in it in my journal because I can’t annotate! —Nina (excerpted from Bookish's Staff Reads)
August 9, 2020
This was an interesting read. The author does a good job showing the aspects of "toughness" that each woman embodied. She also shows the interconnections and differences between them.
The author gives the reader a quick introduction to the life and work of each women she is discussing, but often writes assuming one has read or seen all of the works she is referencing. That is fine if you know them, but this is not an introduction to the works of Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, or Weil.
I also found the author's writing to be convoluted and unclear in several places. But I am an old school reader, not a fan of postmodernist circling the subject.
The overall point she is trying to make is demonstrated. Each woman has her own unsentimental approach to reality. They all confront the issue: "The problem is not that we do not know what is happening but that we cannot bear to be changed by that knowledge." And she points out that "The women I discuss ... all insist that we should be changed, however much we give up in the process."
The author gives the reader a quick introduction to the life and work of each women she is discussing, but often writes assuming one has read or seen all of the works she is referencing. That is fine if you know them, but this is not an introduction to the works of Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, or Weil.
I also found the author's writing to be convoluted and unclear in several places. But I am an old school reader, not a fan of postmodernist circling the subject.
The overall point she is trying to make is demonstrated. Each woman has her own unsentimental approach to reality. They all confront the issue: "The problem is not that we do not know what is happening but that we cannot bear to be changed by that knowledge." And she points out that "The women I discuss ... all insist that we should be changed, however much we give up in the process."
October 3, 2017
This one was tough to get through, and sometimes the author got a little unnecessarily technical with her philosophy-jargon. But a lot of the background information was interesting; there's enough here to give you a jumping-off point for your next book.
December 6, 2023
I came to this book knowing one of its subjects quite well (Arendt); another somewhat (Didion); Weil a bit because of reading the Eilenberger book (THE VISIONARIES) before this one; two others mostly by reputation (McCarthy and Sontag); and the sole artist (photographer) Arbus by name only. Upon completing the book, I came away with a new and important understanding of Arendt; a deeper appreciation of Weil (and eagerness to start reading some of her work), an increased appreciation of McCarthy and curiosity about Sontag, and some sense of Arbus. In short, this work proved worthwhile and informative.
The chapter on Arendt was most useful to me because as much of Arendt as I’ve read (and re-read) and read about her, I’d never received as keen an analysis of the Eichmann controversy and the resulting turn in Arendt’s career. Per the title, Nelson categorizes Arendt as a “tough” writer, which is to say that in Arendt’s case, she was unwilling to sacrifice thinking to gain sympathy; thinking is the key ethical motive for Arendt, not sympathy. And while this may prove simpatico with the other writers considered in this book, it’s not so with the wider public and many intellectuals. Arendt’s priority on thinking, along with a Joe Friday “just the facts, ma’m” reporting on the Holocaust, led to many harsh criticisms of her work. I’d never gained a clear picture of why her accounts of Eichmann and Jewish leaders caused so much consternation, perhaps because of my own personality and outlook on the world reinforced by my career as a trial lawyer. In any event, after having read Nelson’s chapter on Arendt, I believe I’ve gained a much more accurate understanding of the controversy and how this controversy affected Arendt’s later work. (Nelson also ties on Arendt’s thoughts from ON REVOLUTION, written around the same time as the Eichmann book, which criticizes the use of sympathy as a factor in political life.)
Nelson’s consideration of Weil’s work was also helpful, although I came to it still as a newbie about Weil. Weil is the only non-American considered (Weil was French), and Weil died during the war. Her work only gained attention in the U.S. in the early 1950s. Nelson’s exposition of Weil’s work proved most useful, which is to say, it made me want to read more of this challenging writer and person. Weil’s suggestion that “obligation” rather than “rights” should be the basis of political relations intrigues me. Also, much of her thought and writing is anchored in the ancient Greeks as well as Christianity, which she came to, hesitantly, as an adult. (Unlike Weil, Arendt never flirted with conversion to Christianity, but she was deeply knowledgeable about the Christian tradition, and she, too, held a deep appreciation of the ancient Greek traditions.)
I could say the same about McCarthy and Sontag. Both were prominent in their time, but I’d not done any series reading of either of them. Both seem, however, to fit Nelson’s criteria as “tough writers.” Both seemed exhibited a tell-it-like it is attitude that didn’t attempt to avoid stepping on sacred toes.
Finally, Didion, of whom I’ve read some. For each of these writers, Nelson looks at their writing “style” as much as their content, and reading Didion again (I’ve embarked on THE WHITE ALBUM), I can see Nelson’s point. Didion exhibits a cold, almost you-are-there, point of view. Also, consistent with her New Journalism peers, she doesn’t shy away from herself as a character in her writing and in her observations and conclusions.
In judging a book about writers, two criteria seem appropriate. First, would I want to read more by this author? Check. She brought fresh insights to me about those I both knew beforehand and those I didn’t. Second, would I want to read (or see) more by her subjects. Check. In my grading scheme, two checks earn an “A.” That Nelson provided me with some new insights, earns her a “plus.” Thus, my five-star rating.
The chapter on Arendt was most useful to me because as much of Arendt as I’ve read (and re-read) and read about her, I’d never received as keen an analysis of the Eichmann controversy and the resulting turn in Arendt’s career. Per the title, Nelson categorizes Arendt as a “tough” writer, which is to say that in Arendt’s case, she was unwilling to sacrifice thinking to gain sympathy; thinking is the key ethical motive for Arendt, not sympathy. And while this may prove simpatico with the other writers considered in this book, it’s not so with the wider public and many intellectuals. Arendt’s priority on thinking, along with a Joe Friday “just the facts, ma’m” reporting on the Holocaust, led to many harsh criticisms of her work. I’d never gained a clear picture of why her accounts of Eichmann and Jewish leaders caused so much consternation, perhaps because of my own personality and outlook on the world reinforced by my career as a trial lawyer. In any event, after having read Nelson’s chapter on Arendt, I believe I’ve gained a much more accurate understanding of the controversy and how this controversy affected Arendt’s later work. (Nelson also ties on Arendt’s thoughts from ON REVOLUTION, written around the same time as the Eichmann book, which criticizes the use of sympathy as a factor in political life.)
Nelson’s consideration of Weil’s work was also helpful, although I came to it still as a newbie about Weil. Weil is the only non-American considered (Weil was French), and Weil died during the war. Her work only gained attention in the U.S. in the early 1950s. Nelson’s exposition of Weil’s work proved most useful, which is to say, it made me want to read more of this challenging writer and person. Weil’s suggestion that “obligation” rather than “rights” should be the basis of political relations intrigues me. Also, much of her thought and writing is anchored in the ancient Greeks as well as Christianity, which she came to, hesitantly, as an adult. (Unlike Weil, Arendt never flirted with conversion to Christianity, but she was deeply knowledgeable about the Christian tradition, and she, too, held a deep appreciation of the ancient Greek traditions.)
I could say the same about McCarthy and Sontag. Both were prominent in their time, but I’d not done any series reading of either of them. Both seem, however, to fit Nelson’s criteria as “tough writers.” Both seemed exhibited a tell-it-like it is attitude that didn’t attempt to avoid stepping on sacred toes.
Finally, Didion, of whom I’ve read some. For each of these writers, Nelson looks at their writing “style” as much as their content, and reading Didion again (I’ve embarked on THE WHITE ALBUM), I can see Nelson’s point. Didion exhibits a cold, almost you-are-there, point of view. Also, consistent with her New Journalism peers, she doesn’t shy away from herself as a character in her writing and in her observations and conclusions.
In judging a book about writers, two criteria seem appropriate. First, would I want to read more by this author? Check. She brought fresh insights to me about those I both knew beforehand and those I didn’t. Second, would I want to read (or see) more by her subjects. Check. In my grading scheme, two checks earn an “A.” That Nelson provided me with some new insights, earns her a “plus.” Thus, my five-star rating.
July 17, 2021
I'm still savoring Nelson's premise. Familiar with the work of all these women, I also found myself digging deeper in McCarthy and Arbus, which is what I thrive on: connecting via our connections. I found the chapter on Weil the most interesting and on Sontag the least. The profiles somehow peter out as you move through them. Nevertheless, lots of food for thought and a noble foray into a theme so relevant to our times.
November 30, 2025
I was so disappointed by this- I was excited to read about this collection of writers/artists I really like. I was hoping to find a through-line between them and learn more about the role of “toughness” in their personal lives but this book wasn’t about that, it was about getting into the weeds about the syntax of their writing and styles. much more academic than i expected, feels like a book written only for writers to read. :/ :(
January 3, 2020
Subpar writing
Good enough writing but not impressive. Read like an essay from a try-hard college girl in her third year. Dangling, incoherent information but still very much biased.
Good enough writing but not impressive. Read like an essay from a try-hard college girl in her third year. Dangling, incoherent information but still very much biased.
March 24, 2022
This is a very well written book that led me to read more of Hannah Arendt (so far). So much food for thought. I'm a very sensitive person and I get emotional about current events, so to get a perspective that's so different ("unsentimentality") is bracing and worth considering.
July 29, 2024
genuinely such a brilliant concept and so well-executed. women who have been described as “hard” and “unfeeling,” their different approaches to their art and lives, the way their work was interpreted through the context of their womanhood, the influence they had on each other…
December 5, 2019
Learned a lot. Feelings are information, but the rhythm, sensations and reflection of them provide a way to show what's important.
January 24, 2023
a good read but would have enjoyed more of the chapters if i was more familiar w arendt / mccarthy
July 23, 2023
I have to say I'm only really familiar with some of the women that this book looks at, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of most of it.
All the same - I got quite a lot out of reading it.
All the same - I got quite a lot out of reading it.
April 17, 2024
love the theme & there were some good bits but found the analysis uneven and the writing a bit of a slog
February 11, 2021
Tough, rigorous analyses of the ways these women approach suffering through their work. Provides insight into their ideas and intellectual personalities. Far more interesting than, say, Moser's biography of Sontag which focuses on who she slept with and when she was rude.
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March 2, 2018810.99287 N4256t 2017
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