Back in March, on a rainy Friday night in San Francisco, I saw critic Lauren Oyler on her book tour. She was in conversation with Terry Castle at The Booksmith in the Haight. My girlfriend and I rushed over, running late, worried that there would be no more room for walk-ins. Instead, all we had to do was whisper our names to the bookseller at the register before sliding into two of several empty chairs.
Oyler and Castle were in the middle of discussing Oyler’s West Virginia roots. The fairly sparse crowd included Mark Greif (who would be Oyler’s interlocutor the following night, in Berkeley), several young, eager-seeming readers attending the event solo, and middle-aged lesbians. At first, I tensed up at how few people were there. Lauren Oyler is by no means a celebrity but is very much a figure in contemporary media and criticism; it depressed me to see such a thin turnout.1 To say I was rooting for Oyler would be disingenuous, though. I’ve harbored an irrational grudge against her for six years because of what I decided was a rude attitude when she was a member of The Wing in NYC and I was her barista there two or three times. I also interpreted her career as one that included incisive, smart critique but ultimately came down to a self-indulgent need to be right while refusing to dig past her initial impressions and a confusing turn as the co-writer of Obama’s Deputy Chief of Staff’s political memoirs. I didn’t go to the reading as a fan. I went because I wanted some drama.
A small crowd was unlikely to produce any meaningful drama, I thought. I was looking for a bustling and scene-y ambiance—i.e., I was looking for Brooklyn. My worst moments in the Bay Area are when I go somewhere with memories of New York or LA too strong in my mind; the inability to convincingly superimpose those worlds onto the Bay often makes my brain short-circuit (this is an embarrassing trait).2 What I underestimated, though, was the potential in the Bay’s native drama: dyke drama. Terry Castle interpolated Lauren Oyler into Gen-X and Baby Boomer lesbian discourse, and Oyler choked.
The subject of concern for Castle was a section of Oyler’s book where she takes a several-page interlude to discuss Todd Field’s 2022 movie, Tár. The analysis of the movie is part of her broader essay on vulnerability and cynical “feminine values." Oyler uses it to posit that the film’s narrative ambition is one of a fantasy of women getting to act like men, rather than a critique of/commentary on/farce of power negotiations and “cancel culture.” I hadn’t read the book yet, but my gut instinct was that I disagreed with this interpretation (after reading the book, I realized my instinct was correct). Castle began the conversation about the section by asking, basically, “Have you heard of lesbians?”
Considering Lydia Tár is a lesbian, you’d think Oyler would have been able to engage at all with the question. Instead, she doubled down with her initial argument. Castle brought up Susan Sontag; Oyler responded by deeming Sontag exceptional and rendering her irrelevant to the point. Castle described the phenomenon of embodying masculinity without an explicit desire to be a man, and how much that quality has permeated lesbian history and life. My skin got prickly — I couldn’t tell if Castle was dancing around a transphobic point, about to say something like lesbians only act like men, they never want to be them. If Oyler knew the discursive universe she was circling with her essay, she could have identified negotiated further with Castle around this point. Instead, Oyler came across as clueless and avoidant, and Castle came across as the interlocutor with the political edge. Nothing in Castle’s oeuvre (as far as I’m aware) points to her holding any brazen second wave lesbian reactionary gender politics, but since Oyler couldn’t get in the ring, we didn’t have the opportunity to find out. Oyler had the potential to inject the conversation with some real argument, and potentially her own reactionary gender ideals, if that’s her thing, but to do so she would’ve needed to wake up to the conversation in front of her.
Of course, Oyler is straight, which she joked about in reference to participating in a throuple. She said everyone now assumes she’s queer because she’s dating two men; she countered that assumption, with us, by asserting that nothing could be straighter than wanting to have sex with more than one man, even if one of those men is gay. It was a relief — a straight person who doesn’t identify as queer. But it also meant the limits to her argumentative horizons were not inevitable, they were lazy. And they squandered the potential for some real conversational stakes.
Oyler’s essays often have a humorous, cool, refreshing, and kind of transgressive air, even though they meander barely below surface level from an initial observation. But her power deflates in conversation when it becomes clear that she’s not choosing to communicate a narrow framework from within a deeper well, but rather that said framework is all there is.
One of the Bay’s least appealing traits is its self-righteousness. But that night, its stuck-in-time and insular community quality reanimated a glimmer of its historic role as the American societal edge. I left feeling proud of Castle and what she represents and disappointed in Oyler, even though, if the conversation had actually gotten anywhere, Castle would have maybe triggered shame and anger via stubborn gender attachments. At least she knew the terrain; Oyler couldn’t even identify the map.
Her reading in Berkeley the following night had a much bigger crowd. She has a stronger pull in the UC ecosystem than the SF literary scene, I guess!!
Do I mean New York or LA or do I mean “life before Covid?”