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S1E3 - S1.E3: What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons
Hey hey hey, it's Ada. how are you doing? I hope you're taking good care of yourself and doing well.
In this episode of The Misty Bloom book club I am going to be reviewing What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons. You ready? Let's go into the clubhouse.
Before I launch into my review of what we lose by Zinzi Clemmons, I want to talk a little bit about honesty. So grab your coffee, water, wine, whatever your drink of choice is, sit back and relax. Because it's about to get real. So there's this great advice that I’ve seen floating around the internet. I’ve seen two versions of the same advice and I don’t know who to originally attribute the quotes to but if you do know, let me know. Okay, so the first quote is truth without love is brutality. And the second quote is honesty without compassion is cruelty. So both of these quotes are essentially saying the same thing. And it's stuck with me because honesty is a virtue. And that is unquestioned. We are taught from a young age not to lie, to always speak truth to power, we are taught honesty is the best policy. There's no negotiating honesty. We should all strive for honesty as one of the greatest virtues to pursue and practice. However, honesty is not an excuse for us to hurt people. You know in the exercise of being blunt there's no need for us to administer blunt force trauma. There has to be a way, and I'm learning this as well, to be honest without inflicting harm on someone. So finding a balance between being honest and truthful but also couching the honesty and truth in the way that minimizes harm.
So why am I bringing this up? No, I'm not taking a detour from talking and being about books to becoming a virtue guru. Although if that pays more I might reconsider. I still want everyone, including myself, to be kind. It makes for a better world and a gentler existence when we're all kind to each other. But the reason I was bringing up the whole honesty and truth cruelty brutality thing is because I thought about perhaps not doing reviews for books that I didn't enjoy reading but I also think that's completely unrealistic. You know, sort of pandering to the whole if you have nothing nice to say don't say anything at all. Which to me can sometimes be a cowardly piece of advice in my opinion because it is taking the path of least resistance. If you're willing to do the work you can always find something nice to say. It's a little bit passive and kinda wack to just absolve yourself of the responsibility of saying nothing at all. Rather than plumbing the depths to finding the good about someone or a situation. Also the podcast would start to come across as fake because after a while you'd notice that I love absolutely everything that I read. Which is impossible. Life is not just a pond of lilies. It would not give The Misty Bloom Book Club any sort of dimension, I would not be a reliable source of literary commentary, critique, or appreciation. You guys are smart. You would pick up on the artifice that I'd be putting out. And even as a published author, I'm still growing and always learning to be a better writer and seeing the work of others, where their novels shine and where they fail, helps to sharpen my own craft. And the bottom line is that it is immature to avoid conversations that are difficult or uncomfortable. And, like you, I also want to challenge myself to be honest without being brutal.
So now that I've given you my whole spiel on honesty and brutality, let me start my review of What We Lose with a quick and dirty overview. See what I did there?
What We Lose is written in the first-person, the I, and follows Thandi who's born and raised in Pennsylvania to a South African mother and an American father. Partway through the novel, Thandi’s mother is diagnosed with cancer and very unfortunately passes away. And the novel transforms into a meditation on dealing with terminal illness, grief, and loss. So going into what we lose by Zinzi Clemmons, I had high hopes for the book. And the reason I had such high hopes is because the writer Zinzi Clemmons. Ok, hold on let's talk about her name for a second. I love her name, Zinzi, by the way. It just sounds glorious and she has the coolest initials. Zee Cee baby. Zee Cee in da building!!!. Anyway Zinzi Clemmons is part South African and part African-American so I was looking forward to getting her extremely unique and distinctive perspective on race and race relations. You know with her coming from this dual heritage that's very loaded on both sides with very different but both extremely intense race histories and that's putting it mildly. And no I'm not putting this burden on Zinzi Clemmons to talk about race. You guys know exactly how I feel about black and minority writers being forced to take on social issues. If not, go listen to Episode 1 of The Misty Bloom Book Club where I talk about this in a little bit more detail. I had this expectation for Zinzi Clemmons to address race issues not because of her heritage. But because the actual book jacket describes the protagonist of What We Lose, Thandie, as being caught between being black and white. So there you go.
The first thing I thought about What We Lose is that this novel, for me read like a memoir or maybe even more accurately a non chronological diary. Or maybe a fusion of all these things together. Like part novel part memoir part diary. Which I thought of as an unconventional approach to creative writing. I totally saw what the author was trying to do here. Zinzi Clemmons took what we know of as the conventional novel, you know the traditional approach to crafting a novel and turned it on its head. It had like untitled mini chapters under chapters, there are graphs included in the book, it is wildly non-chronological, there is some philosophy thrown in, there are expositions on South Africa. With What We Lose, the author attempted to do something inventive. But not just trying to be inventive for its own sake. I saw very clearly that the unorthodox structure Zinzi Clemmons adopted for this novel is meant to reflect that grief is not linear or a tidy emotion. The emotions of grief are all over the place. Grief is disorganized. Your feelings are a jumbled mess. Your memories of the person you lost switch back and forth between the recent past and way way back. And the non-chronological narrative choice of What We Lose reflects this. And I always respect when anyone is truthfully and doggedly pushing the boundaries of what we think is possible. It was certainly brave of Zinzi Clemmons to attempt to do something innovative here. Like I said earlier taking what we know of as the orthodox approach to novel writing and turning it on its head. And I respect Zinzi Clemmons for writing What We Lose in the manner that she felt was best suited to this story. I'm gonna speculate that Zinzi Clemmons would have come up against some resistance so it must have taken guts to push forward with and fight for a novel structured in this manner.
Aside from that, What We Lose had some profound moments. And I'll give you some examples. I really liked the part of the book where Thandi's father is moving on and finding a new relationship after the death of his wife. And Thandie is understandably resistant to her father moving on from her mother. And I'll read the scene to you from page 164. "I want to be happy again" he says, his voice breaking. "Don't you think I deserve happiness?" "of course, I say." you deserve much more than that. I only wish I could be okay with what form of happiness you've chosen." That right there is a pearl of wisdom that I want you to think about in your life. For example I think many of us are not really resistant to other people finding happiness. We only question their methods for doing so. Whether or not is our business to do so but it's something to definitely think about.
There was one line I really liked on page 145 and it reads "I realized that that was how heartbreak occurred. Your heart wants something but reality resists it." So true, you guys! So true.
I also like this paragraph from page 182. It reads “Love and marriage are completely unrelated enterprises. Marriage bears little resemblance to love as competing in the Olympics does to your afternoon jog. Sometimes I think with regret of how our love might have grown if we hadn't driven a pregnancy, then a marriage, like two speeding 18-wheelers straight into it.” I mean that right there is a lot of food for thought.
I also liked this line on page 185, “Peter sighs, reaches for the pacifier, and pops it nervously into M's mouth, as if our child is a bottle of champagne threatening to explode.” I thought that was a fun sentence.
Here’s another great line page 206. It reads, “sometimes I sniff the bottle of perfume of hers that I saved, but it doesn't come close to the robustness of her smell. It is her, flattened.” It is a heavy sentence and it made me sad. I think the sentence was so effective because we associate smell with memories and nostalgia so I think that's what was so profound about this particular sentence.
So those are the things that I appreciated about What We Lose. Now, I'm gonna flip the script and talk about what I didn't like quite as much about What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons. But before I do that here is a quick message from my sponsor. Don't go anywhere.
Welcome back to the Misty Bloom book club thanks for staying with me. So now I'm going to talk about what frustrated me about What We Lose
So, overall, I'm going to admit that I struggled with What We Lose. Sadly, it didn't hit the spot for me. And I hate that it didn't because like I said earlier, I had such high hopes for this book.
However, I wouldn't call what I didn't like about the book as weaknesses per se. But I see this more as a cataloging of my frustrations with the What We Lose.
What We Lose totally was a worthy and admirable attempt at being experimental and innovative with fiction However and ultimately for me. I’m sorry. it just didn't work. While I wholeheartedly understood that the author was making a deliberate eclectic artistic choice, I struggled with the way the book was structured. I mentioned that it had like untitled mini chapters under chapters, there are graphs, it is wildly non-chronological making it difficult to follow, the philosophy felt like it was thrown in, there are what I found to be problematic expositions on South Africa that I'll talk about a little bit later . The inconsistency of the novel's structure crippled my enjoyment of it. It interrupted the flow of the novel and gave it a distinctly jerky quality that felt like whiplash. I appreciate the author’s experimentation. But to me, it just read as disjointed and came off as gimmicky. Or maybe I just simply have boring, stock, archetypal tastes in literature. You tell me, I don’t know. But my advice here for any new and aspiring writers who are listening, my advice for whatever it's worth is to be aware of the line between avant garde and gimmicks. You should always, always aim to express your own originality or uniqueness like Zinzi Clemmons did here. However, please remember that your originality or uniqueness is like a fingerprint, it’s innate in you. And you don't need the gimmicks, bells and whistles, or whatever the writing version of auto-tune is. Trust yourself that your work will reflect your individuality. Period.
Apart from the stylistic and structural choices that Zinzi Clemmons made in What We Lose, I also found that unfortunately there was nothing special about the writing itself. And that was another problem for me. The writing overall was pretty basic. But it did have some very strong, thoughtful moments which I shared with you earlier in the episode. And those were the shining moments. I didn’t like that beyond those examples that I shared earlier, most of the rest of the prose was pretty basic. Like describing winter as a “long dark and cold period”. Or saying “The sun is shining with full strength.” I don’t expect descriptions like this from someone with an MFA in Creative Writing. And for those who don’t know, an MFA is a Masters in Fine Arts. Which is an advanced degree for fiction writing. So, when I get descriptions like winter is long dark and cold period or the sun is shining with full strength I get genuinely confused and frustrated.These are some of the ways in which I found What We Lose to be frustrating.
I mentioned before that What We Lose contains expositions on South Africa. These expositions on South Africa did not resonate with me at all. I wasn't feeling them because the protagonist’s story would suddenly stop, and then the author would randomly veer off into unrelated discussions sprinkled through the book on South Africans and South Africa. Like talking about Oscar Pistorius, talking about the Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist, Kevin Carter, the author inserted a blog post about crime in Durban, there were sections on Winne Mandela. And then we'd return to the novel’s main plot, Thandie's story. It was totally disruptive to the story’s narrative arc. And the hard part about reading these expositions on South Africa was it didn't feel like I was reading it from an insider, it wasn't a knowing, intimate, and heartfelt perspective of a South African but felt like it was coming from a foreign, touristy gaze. These South African sidebars had the quality of reading as academic, like something copied and pasted from Wikipedia or a newspaper article. They were all things that anyone who even has a tiny micro familiarity with events in South Africa already knows. It wasn’t new information or like you know a new take on these people or events. And there was no emotional connection or narrative links between these events and Thandie. And this matters because Thandie is supposed to be half South African. It really really frustrated me because all it did was to say "hey I'm Thandie, I'm half South African and I'll prove this to you by talking about some South African things. " It just felt like a cheap shot, like these South African events and people were used as filler, to fill in pages in the book. And it made me honestly feel defensive and protective of South Africa being used this way.
Something else I had mixed feelings about was that this book is very unapologetically upper-middle-class. I felt like Thandie kept trying to emphasize the fact that in South Africa she is a colored and therefore higher up the social ladder than a black person. And in America, she comes from an upper middle class black pedigree. The issue is not in having these social advantages. The issue here is that they're not stated merely as fact but stated as a sort of point being made about social separation. And I'm not sure who that point is being made to because this book is written in the first-person. Hmmmm.
I honestly cannot see it appealing to a diverse array of literary tastes. I mentioned that this book is a meditation on Grief. And grief is a universal emotion and feeling that everyone across every social category will go through. We will all experience loss. We will all experience bereavement. We will all mourn people that we love. That's bound to happen to all of us unfortunately. So I feel like this book should have read as universal but it didn't. It's very specific in its target audience, very specific in who it would appeal to. And it would appeal to firmly upper middle class readers. But maybe ultimately there's nothing wrong with that. You know there's an old saying - know your audience.
Something else I wanna discuss and this is not just specific to what we lose or Zinzi Clemmons but broadly across the literary world. Literature has a lot of jobs. You know? To inform. To help us empathize. To reveal who we are as a people. To introduce us to new worlds. Blah Blah Blah. But there's another function of literature which I feel is often minimized or not seen as important as the other functions of literature. And I'm just going to say it. Literature also has a duty to entertain. It's like other forms of art whether it's film or music or paintings or fashion. I don't care how high brow or indie or niche or upscale your sensibilities are. Art should also be aesthetically pleasing and part of being aesthetically pleasing is the duty to entertain, to please my senses you know. It's kind of like those super, super indie movies that only like two people that get what the filmmaker is trying to do . Or those haute couture outfits that only 10 people in the world will ever wear not because of the price tag but because there's no normal everyday event to wear them to. In those cases, you're ultimately producing art for yourself and not to please an audience. And this is how I felt reading What We Lose entertaining. My opinion is that yes make art for you. But, if you expect to have an audience participate in your art, then you have to think beyond yourself. Look, I get it this book is not a $100 bill so it's not going to appeal to every single person that reads it. Including me. But I would have at least liked to have been able to relate to a tiny aspect of it. And speaking of being unable to relate to this novel I think I figured out what the crux of the issue was for me. What We Lose reads like the diary of a moody, conflicted teenager. Even though Thandie is not a teenager. So you're immersed in this conflicted, jumbled reality of a person who doesn't even know who they are, who has no sense of direction, who's simply aimless. And there was no inner growth or progression as Thandie got older. I was disappointed. Very disappointed. I found Thandie to be very tiresome. And the reason I found her to be tiresome is because she is one of those people that's very feelings based who is so severely inward looking. You know those people who never really look outward, who don’t seem to be concerned about how other people are feeling or how they're doing. They're just so into the supposed complexity of their own super important feelings. You know those kinds of people who define themselves by their feelings and think that somehow the complexity of their feelings makes them cool. But all it does for the rest of us is it make them appear selfish because they don’t care about how other people feel. They come across to us as insufferable because they don't have the capacity to realize that other people besides them also experience very complex emotions.I said earlier that What We Lose is a novel about handling grief. It also deals with the depression that accompanies grief which I think is a really powerful subject to always address in fiction. But the problem with Thandie as a fictional character is that she was always inward looking and feeling sorry for herself even before tragedy hit so we never saw her degradation from normalcy into grief. Thandie was mourning life waaay before death came along.
Another aspect to this was that I didn't feel like I could latch onto the secondary characters even if I wanted to ignore Thandie. Thandie was so me me me, that I never got the chance to really get to know the secondary characters in a tangible way.
So guys, that's the main gist of my catalog of frustrations of What We Lose. Next up, I'll do the fun personality profile of Zinzi Clemmons and guess what I think she is like as a person. And then I'll end with some final thoughts. But before I do that, here's a quick message from my sponsor. Per usual, don't go anywhere.
Okay I'm going to do a personality profile of Zinzi Clemmons. Of course this is purely fun guesswork from reading What We Lose.
Soooo, I'm gonna guess that Zinzi Clemmons is probably a spontaneous, adventurous type person, who wears her heart on her sleeve. If you know Zinzi Clemmons, let me know if I hit the bullseye with this or if I'm completely way off base.
Finally I'll close with saying that i admire the unconventional eclectic style and structure of what we lose. Even though i think would have been incredibly successful if it was written as a straightforward memoir. But I also realize it's a selfish thing for me to say because by saying that, I'm wanting the author to adapt her art to suit my own particular preference. And I suspect, and of course this is pure but respectful speculation, that it was a deliberate choice for Zinzi Clemmons not to write this book as a memoir to intentionally put some distance between herself and the grief, and shield herself from direct pain. And I completely understand this.
So, if you've read What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons or if you do plan to read it, let me know what you think. I'd love to have a conversation with you on social media.
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By Ada Ihenachor
5
11 ratings
Hey hey hey, it's Ada. how are you doing? I hope you're taking good care of yourself and doing well.
In this episode of The Misty Bloom book club I am going to be reviewing What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons. You ready? Let's go into the clubhouse.
Before I launch into my review of what we lose by Zinzi Clemmons, I want to talk a little bit about honesty. So grab your coffee, water, wine, whatever your drink of choice is, sit back and relax. Because it's about to get real. So there's this great advice that I’ve seen floating around the internet. I’ve seen two versions of the same advice and I don’t know who to originally attribute the quotes to but if you do know, let me know. Okay, so the first quote is truth without love is brutality. And the second quote is honesty without compassion is cruelty. So both of these quotes are essentially saying the same thing. And it's stuck with me because honesty is a virtue. And that is unquestioned. We are taught from a young age not to lie, to always speak truth to power, we are taught honesty is the best policy. There's no negotiating honesty. We should all strive for honesty as one of the greatest virtues to pursue and practice. However, honesty is not an excuse for us to hurt people. You know in the exercise of being blunt there's no need for us to administer blunt force trauma. There has to be a way, and I'm learning this as well, to be honest without inflicting harm on someone. So finding a balance between being honest and truthful but also couching the honesty and truth in the way that minimizes harm.
So why am I bringing this up? No, I'm not taking a detour from talking and being about books to becoming a virtue guru. Although if that pays more I might reconsider. I still want everyone, including myself, to be kind. It makes for a better world and a gentler existence when we're all kind to each other. But the reason I was bringing up the whole honesty and truth cruelty brutality thing is because I thought about perhaps not doing reviews for books that I didn't enjoy reading but I also think that's completely unrealistic. You know, sort of pandering to the whole if you have nothing nice to say don't say anything at all. Which to me can sometimes be a cowardly piece of advice in my opinion because it is taking the path of least resistance. If you're willing to do the work you can always find something nice to say. It's a little bit passive and kinda wack to just absolve yourself of the responsibility of saying nothing at all. Rather than plumbing the depths to finding the good about someone or a situation. Also the podcast would start to come across as fake because after a while you'd notice that I love absolutely everything that I read. Which is impossible. Life is not just a pond of lilies. It would not give The Misty Bloom Book Club any sort of dimension, I would not be a reliable source of literary commentary, critique, or appreciation. You guys are smart. You would pick up on the artifice that I'd be putting out. And even as a published author, I'm still growing and always learning to be a better writer and seeing the work of others, where their novels shine and where they fail, helps to sharpen my own craft. And the bottom line is that it is immature to avoid conversations that are difficult or uncomfortable. And, like you, I also want to challenge myself to be honest without being brutal.
So now that I've given you my whole spiel on honesty and brutality, let me start my review of What We Lose with a quick and dirty overview. See what I did there?
What We Lose is written in the first-person, the I, and follows Thandi who's born and raised in Pennsylvania to a South African mother and an American father. Partway through the novel, Thandi’s mother is diagnosed with cancer and very unfortunately passes away. And the novel transforms into a meditation on dealing with terminal illness, grief, and loss. So going into what we lose by Zinzi Clemmons, I had high hopes for the book. And the reason I had such high hopes is because the writer Zinzi Clemmons. Ok, hold on let's talk about her name for a second. I love her name, Zinzi, by the way. It just sounds glorious and she has the coolest initials. Zee Cee baby. Zee Cee in da building!!!. Anyway Zinzi Clemmons is part South African and part African-American so I was looking forward to getting her extremely unique and distinctive perspective on race and race relations. You know with her coming from this dual heritage that's very loaded on both sides with very different but both extremely intense race histories and that's putting it mildly. And no I'm not putting this burden on Zinzi Clemmons to talk about race. You guys know exactly how I feel about black and minority writers being forced to take on social issues. If not, go listen to Episode 1 of The Misty Bloom Book Club where I talk about this in a little bit more detail. I had this expectation for Zinzi Clemmons to address race issues not because of her heritage. But because the actual book jacket describes the protagonist of What We Lose, Thandie, as being caught between being black and white. So there you go.
The first thing I thought about What We Lose is that this novel, for me read like a memoir or maybe even more accurately a non chronological diary. Or maybe a fusion of all these things together. Like part novel part memoir part diary. Which I thought of as an unconventional approach to creative writing. I totally saw what the author was trying to do here. Zinzi Clemmons took what we know of as the conventional novel, you know the traditional approach to crafting a novel and turned it on its head. It had like untitled mini chapters under chapters, there are graphs included in the book, it is wildly non-chronological, there is some philosophy thrown in, there are expositions on South Africa. With What We Lose, the author attempted to do something inventive. But not just trying to be inventive for its own sake. I saw very clearly that the unorthodox structure Zinzi Clemmons adopted for this novel is meant to reflect that grief is not linear or a tidy emotion. The emotions of grief are all over the place. Grief is disorganized. Your feelings are a jumbled mess. Your memories of the person you lost switch back and forth between the recent past and way way back. And the non-chronological narrative choice of What We Lose reflects this. And I always respect when anyone is truthfully and doggedly pushing the boundaries of what we think is possible. It was certainly brave of Zinzi Clemmons to attempt to do something innovative here. Like I said earlier taking what we know of as the orthodox approach to novel writing and turning it on its head. And I respect Zinzi Clemmons for writing What We Lose in the manner that she felt was best suited to this story. I'm gonna speculate that Zinzi Clemmons would have come up against some resistance so it must have taken guts to push forward with and fight for a novel structured in this manner.
Aside from that, What We Lose had some profound moments. And I'll give you some examples. I really liked the part of the book where Thandi's father is moving on and finding a new relationship after the death of his wife. And Thandie is understandably resistant to her father moving on from her mother. And I'll read the scene to you from page 164. "I want to be happy again" he says, his voice breaking. "Don't you think I deserve happiness?" "of course, I say." you deserve much more than that. I only wish I could be okay with what form of happiness you've chosen." That right there is a pearl of wisdom that I want you to think about in your life. For example I think many of us are not really resistant to other people finding happiness. We only question their methods for doing so. Whether or not is our business to do so but it's something to definitely think about.
There was one line I really liked on page 145 and it reads "I realized that that was how heartbreak occurred. Your heart wants something but reality resists it." So true, you guys! So true.
I also like this paragraph from page 182. It reads “Love and marriage are completely unrelated enterprises. Marriage bears little resemblance to love as competing in the Olympics does to your afternoon jog. Sometimes I think with regret of how our love might have grown if we hadn't driven a pregnancy, then a marriage, like two speeding 18-wheelers straight into it.” I mean that right there is a lot of food for thought.
I also liked this line on page 185, “Peter sighs, reaches for the pacifier, and pops it nervously into M's mouth, as if our child is a bottle of champagne threatening to explode.” I thought that was a fun sentence.
Here’s another great line page 206. It reads, “sometimes I sniff the bottle of perfume of hers that I saved, but it doesn't come close to the robustness of her smell. It is her, flattened.” It is a heavy sentence and it made me sad. I think the sentence was so effective because we associate smell with memories and nostalgia so I think that's what was so profound about this particular sentence.
So those are the things that I appreciated about What We Lose. Now, I'm gonna flip the script and talk about what I didn't like quite as much about What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons. But before I do that here is a quick message from my sponsor. Don't go anywhere.
Welcome back to the Misty Bloom book club thanks for staying with me. So now I'm going to talk about what frustrated me about What We Lose
So, overall, I'm going to admit that I struggled with What We Lose. Sadly, it didn't hit the spot for me. And I hate that it didn't because like I said earlier, I had such high hopes for this book.
However, I wouldn't call what I didn't like about the book as weaknesses per se. But I see this more as a cataloging of my frustrations with the What We Lose.
What We Lose totally was a worthy and admirable attempt at being experimental and innovative with fiction However and ultimately for me. I’m sorry. it just didn't work. While I wholeheartedly understood that the author was making a deliberate eclectic artistic choice, I struggled with the way the book was structured. I mentioned that it had like untitled mini chapters under chapters, there are graphs, it is wildly non-chronological making it difficult to follow, the philosophy felt like it was thrown in, there are what I found to be problematic expositions on South Africa that I'll talk about a little bit later . The inconsistency of the novel's structure crippled my enjoyment of it. It interrupted the flow of the novel and gave it a distinctly jerky quality that felt like whiplash. I appreciate the author’s experimentation. But to me, it just read as disjointed and came off as gimmicky. Or maybe I just simply have boring, stock, archetypal tastes in literature. You tell me, I don’t know. But my advice here for any new and aspiring writers who are listening, my advice for whatever it's worth is to be aware of the line between avant garde and gimmicks. You should always, always aim to express your own originality or uniqueness like Zinzi Clemmons did here. However, please remember that your originality or uniqueness is like a fingerprint, it’s innate in you. And you don't need the gimmicks, bells and whistles, or whatever the writing version of auto-tune is. Trust yourself that your work will reflect your individuality. Period.
Apart from the stylistic and structural choices that Zinzi Clemmons made in What We Lose, I also found that unfortunately there was nothing special about the writing itself. And that was another problem for me. The writing overall was pretty basic. But it did have some very strong, thoughtful moments which I shared with you earlier in the episode. And those were the shining moments. I didn’t like that beyond those examples that I shared earlier, most of the rest of the prose was pretty basic. Like describing winter as a “long dark and cold period”. Or saying “The sun is shining with full strength.” I don’t expect descriptions like this from someone with an MFA in Creative Writing. And for those who don’t know, an MFA is a Masters in Fine Arts. Which is an advanced degree for fiction writing. So, when I get descriptions like winter is long dark and cold period or the sun is shining with full strength I get genuinely confused and frustrated.These are some of the ways in which I found What We Lose to be frustrating.
I mentioned before that What We Lose contains expositions on South Africa. These expositions on South Africa did not resonate with me at all. I wasn't feeling them because the protagonist’s story would suddenly stop, and then the author would randomly veer off into unrelated discussions sprinkled through the book on South Africans and South Africa. Like talking about Oscar Pistorius, talking about the Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist, Kevin Carter, the author inserted a blog post about crime in Durban, there were sections on Winne Mandela. And then we'd return to the novel’s main plot, Thandie's story. It was totally disruptive to the story’s narrative arc. And the hard part about reading these expositions on South Africa was it didn't feel like I was reading it from an insider, it wasn't a knowing, intimate, and heartfelt perspective of a South African but felt like it was coming from a foreign, touristy gaze. These South African sidebars had the quality of reading as academic, like something copied and pasted from Wikipedia or a newspaper article. They were all things that anyone who even has a tiny micro familiarity with events in South Africa already knows. It wasn’t new information or like you know a new take on these people or events. And there was no emotional connection or narrative links between these events and Thandie. And this matters because Thandie is supposed to be half South African. It really really frustrated me because all it did was to say "hey I'm Thandie, I'm half South African and I'll prove this to you by talking about some South African things. " It just felt like a cheap shot, like these South African events and people were used as filler, to fill in pages in the book. And it made me honestly feel defensive and protective of South Africa being used this way.
Something else I had mixed feelings about was that this book is very unapologetically upper-middle-class. I felt like Thandie kept trying to emphasize the fact that in South Africa she is a colored and therefore higher up the social ladder than a black person. And in America, she comes from an upper middle class black pedigree. The issue is not in having these social advantages. The issue here is that they're not stated merely as fact but stated as a sort of point being made about social separation. And I'm not sure who that point is being made to because this book is written in the first-person. Hmmmm.
I honestly cannot see it appealing to a diverse array of literary tastes. I mentioned that this book is a meditation on Grief. And grief is a universal emotion and feeling that everyone across every social category will go through. We will all experience loss. We will all experience bereavement. We will all mourn people that we love. That's bound to happen to all of us unfortunately. So I feel like this book should have read as universal but it didn't. It's very specific in its target audience, very specific in who it would appeal to. And it would appeal to firmly upper middle class readers. But maybe ultimately there's nothing wrong with that. You know there's an old saying - know your audience.
Something else I wanna discuss and this is not just specific to what we lose or Zinzi Clemmons but broadly across the literary world. Literature has a lot of jobs. You know? To inform. To help us empathize. To reveal who we are as a people. To introduce us to new worlds. Blah Blah Blah. But there's another function of literature which I feel is often minimized or not seen as important as the other functions of literature. And I'm just going to say it. Literature also has a duty to entertain. It's like other forms of art whether it's film or music or paintings or fashion. I don't care how high brow or indie or niche or upscale your sensibilities are. Art should also be aesthetically pleasing and part of being aesthetically pleasing is the duty to entertain, to please my senses you know. It's kind of like those super, super indie movies that only like two people that get what the filmmaker is trying to do . Or those haute couture outfits that only 10 people in the world will ever wear not because of the price tag but because there's no normal everyday event to wear them to. In those cases, you're ultimately producing art for yourself and not to please an audience. And this is how I felt reading What We Lose entertaining. My opinion is that yes make art for you. But, if you expect to have an audience participate in your art, then you have to think beyond yourself. Look, I get it this book is not a $100 bill so it's not going to appeal to every single person that reads it. Including me. But I would have at least liked to have been able to relate to a tiny aspect of it. And speaking of being unable to relate to this novel I think I figured out what the crux of the issue was for me. What We Lose reads like the diary of a moody, conflicted teenager. Even though Thandie is not a teenager. So you're immersed in this conflicted, jumbled reality of a person who doesn't even know who they are, who has no sense of direction, who's simply aimless. And there was no inner growth or progression as Thandie got older. I was disappointed. Very disappointed. I found Thandie to be very tiresome. And the reason I found her to be tiresome is because she is one of those people that's very feelings based who is so severely inward looking. You know those people who never really look outward, who don’t seem to be concerned about how other people are feeling or how they're doing. They're just so into the supposed complexity of their own super important feelings. You know those kinds of people who define themselves by their feelings and think that somehow the complexity of their feelings makes them cool. But all it does for the rest of us is it make them appear selfish because they don’t care about how other people feel. They come across to us as insufferable because they don't have the capacity to realize that other people besides them also experience very complex emotions.I said earlier that What We Lose is a novel about handling grief. It also deals with the depression that accompanies grief which I think is a really powerful subject to always address in fiction. But the problem with Thandie as a fictional character is that she was always inward looking and feeling sorry for herself even before tragedy hit so we never saw her degradation from normalcy into grief. Thandie was mourning life waaay before death came along.
Another aspect to this was that I didn't feel like I could latch onto the secondary characters even if I wanted to ignore Thandie. Thandie was so me me me, that I never got the chance to really get to know the secondary characters in a tangible way.
So guys, that's the main gist of my catalog of frustrations of What We Lose. Next up, I'll do the fun personality profile of Zinzi Clemmons and guess what I think she is like as a person. And then I'll end with some final thoughts. But before I do that, here's a quick message from my sponsor. Per usual, don't go anywhere.
Okay I'm going to do a personality profile of Zinzi Clemmons. Of course this is purely fun guesswork from reading What We Lose.
Soooo, I'm gonna guess that Zinzi Clemmons is probably a spontaneous, adventurous type person, who wears her heart on her sleeve. If you know Zinzi Clemmons, let me know if I hit the bullseye with this or if I'm completely way off base.
Finally I'll close with saying that i admire the unconventional eclectic style and structure of what we lose. Even though i think would have been incredibly successful if it was written as a straightforward memoir. But I also realize it's a selfish thing for me to say because by saying that, I'm wanting the author to adapt her art to suit my own particular preference. And I suspect, and of course this is pure but respectful speculation, that it was a deliberate choice for Zinzi Clemmons not to write this book as a memoir to intentionally put some distance between herself and the grief, and shield herself from direct pain. And I completely understand this.
So, if you've read What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons or if you do plan to read it, let me know what you think. I'd love to have a conversation with you on social media.
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