“To have a whole interview on Cazzie David’s anxiety over her privilege while mentioning times she’s taken opportunities because of her privilege, and then THIS is the essay chosen to prove she actually deserves her blessings. Incred. The machine keeps churning white mediocrity.” -Alex Zaragoza via Twit
I think I wanted to like Cazzie David’s debut book, an anthology of essays titled “No One Asked For This.” Seeing women my age publish books lights fires in my chest that shoo me towards the hundred page Google doc of a hopeful future novel that I’ve half-abandoned because finishing things is hard.
When twenty-something women write books, they remind me that I’m not too young to publish something, too — that, in fact, I’m wasting time every day I don’t get my book out into the world, because the bar for quality is much lower when you’re still thought of as “emerging.” I am not yet emerging.
I am also willing to admit that hating Cazzie’s writing is easier than liking it, because if she writes something good, then that forces me to more readily face the fact that I have not yet written anything good. In fact, I haven’t really written anything at all. I get that. I am flawed.
“No One Asked For This” starts with an excerpt from a psychological assessment the author had at age 12, which claims (among other things) that she is “sometimes out of touch with reality.” I know my takeaway from the rest of the report is supposed to be shock: a twelve year old who is depressed? A twelve year old without passion?! A twelve year old who constantly loses things?!?! But I read the clinical assessment instead as CliffsNotes for the rest of the book: Cazzie, at 12, was miserable and hormonal. She still is. We all were. We all still are. Her parents had the money and resources for her misery to be chronicled with words like “sensitive information” and “informed consent” and “psychological history.” Cazzie seems to think this legitimization makes her suffering more interesting than anyone else’s. She goes on to carry this sentiment throughout her life, showcasing over and over again that she’s lazy and self-absorbed, and that because she knows it and hates herself for it already, it’s excusable. Oh, and her dad is famous. And she dated Pete Davidson. Ok, converse at prom quirky girl alert!!
She goes to great lengths in her book to deny that she thinks her privilege makes her worthy of writing a series of essays (“Reader rolls eyes. We get it, Cazzie, you’re aware of your privilege,” she writes). She denies it so, so many times, in fact, that it’s hard to trust she actually believes it beyond knowing it’s the thing she’s supposed to say. It’s kind of like how she dives deep into the ways social media and inauthenticity and girls who vlog are ruining the world — and she makes some really good points, in a few sparing moments even writing sentences I wish I’d written — and then you go to follow her on Instagram because, hey, she must have a cool or nonexistent social media presence or something, or at least an interesting bio — and there she is wearing some cute tweed dress/overalls thing in an article in Vogue, pouting in a display of arrogance she seems to think will come across as authentic because, hey, existential dread!
I rubberneck-binged “No One Asked For This” with the urgency and outrage with which I consumed Love is Blind and Emily in Paris. Both had good production value and plotlines that were engaging enough to not require the patience I’d need to watch literally anything that was neither Love is Blind nor Emily in Paris. Both gave me great excuses to call my friends who were also binging these shows, so we could interrupt each other in impassioned outcries about how absurd the characters were. I mean, seriously: can Jessica shut up about how old she is?
There is a perverse satisfaction in watching people whose lives are outwardly easy create obstacles for themselves, only to suffer through them in ungraceful and embarrassing ways. We watch the Bachelor because the absurdity of beautiful (well, some of them) people signing up for a competition dating show, then crying about being on a competition dating show, is so bizarre and heinous and ridiculous that we can feel better about ourselves. In comparison to Cazzie and Emily and that girl who kept talking about how old she was even though no one cared, I can almost feel like I am authentic, interesting, and like I have my shit together — regardless of if any of that is true. And I know that says more about me than it does about Cazzie and Emily and even Jessica.
Some of Cazzie’s stories, which read more like ghost written anecdotes than essay — prick at my sense of empathy. When her dad (Larry David? Not sure if you got that?) tosses a hundred dollar bill into a raffle, and Cazzie asks her coworker if he can give her the thirty tickets that money would buy, only for her dad and her coworker to balk at her insensitivity and idiocy (the money was a donation, which is customary for stars of the show), and her dad yells at her on set, there’s a little tiny part of me that feels bad for her. And impressed that she could put this incredibly mortifying behavior on paper. But then I remember her dad got her a job on his production, and she didn’t pull her weight, and she TRICKED HER BOSS INTO THINKING HER DAD HAD EXCUSED HER FROM WAKING UP EARLY TO SHOW UP TO WORK ON TIME LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, and my empathy evaporates.
Cazzie writes:
Everyone there hated me, no longer just because I was their boss’s daughter but because they had now witnessed firsthand how bad a person I really was. And not only that, but they also had the satisfaction of knowing that even my dad hated me. But no one hated me more than I did.
But it’s not like she learns from this, or changes, or becomes any less self-absorbed or displays even an iota of personal growth.
Hating yourself as defense against making any kind of changes is exactly the kind of laziness I’d expect from Cazzie.
Her entitlement — kind of like Emily’s when she waltzes into a workplace without knowing a single word of the language, or hooks up with her friend’s boyfriend but it’s fine because he makes good omelettes, or takes a vapid selfie only to become a world-renowned influencer (???) — is absurdly unrealistic and clearly a factor of her privilege and makes me want to talk about it with my friends on the phone for hours because this kind of outrage is way, way more palatable than feeling outraged about things that actually matter, and things that I feel I have no control over. Bitching about Cazzie is a lot easier than fighting against global warming or for immigration right or doing something about the global pandemic.
So: it’s not exactly that I didn’t like her book. It would be impossible to claim that when I stayed up until well past midnight, binging her words under the covers with a clip on reading lamp so as not to disturb my sleeping boyfriend, but also because I wanted to hide that I was reading something shameful, which — let’s be honest — I wouldn’t be doing if I had been reading Infinite Jest or literally anything by Taffy Brodesser-Akner.
And honestly, if Cazzie straight up about the plot of her book being: “I dated a famous guy, you probably don’t know him because I’m so embarrassing, he dated Ariana grande after me haha I love my dad,” then I could get on board in the same way I genuinely enjoyed the romance of Lauren and Cameron, which was authentic in that it didn’t claim to be anything it wasn’t.
But she ruined it all for me when she wrote a whole book about hating everything about her generation, vapidness, social media, and self absorption, only to post thirst traps on her Instagram as soon as she had enough followers to seem hot in way that might make people forget her dad looks like a watered down Steve Buscemi (side note: I love you, Steve Buscemi!).
Being vapid and self-absorbed has its place, and I am in no way above it. But a manifesto against it, laced with details of anxiety and embarrassment that I guess are supposed to lead the reader towards empathy, only to turn around and be exactly the the person your book seems to disparage?
I’ll quote Cazzie’s mother on page 281:
“CAZZIE, STOP!”
