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The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries
When Jessa Crispin was thirty, she burned her settled Chicago life to the ground and took off for Berlin with a pair of suitcases and no plan beyond leaving. Half a decade later, she’s still on the road, in search not so much of a home as of understanding, a way of being in the world that demands neither constant struggle nor complete surrender.
The Dead Ladies Project is an account of that journey—but it’s also much, much more. Fascinated by exile, Crispin travels an itinerary of key locations in its literary map, of places that have drawn writers who needed to break free from their origins and start afresh. As she reflects on William James struggling through despair in Berlin, Nora Barnacle dependant on and dependable for James Joyce in Trieste, Maud Gonne fomenting revolution and fostering myth in Dublin, or Igor Stravinsky starting over from nothing in Switzerland, Crispin interweaves biography, incisive literary analysis, and personal experience into a rich meditation on the complicated interactions of place, personality, and society that can make escape and reinvention such an attractive, even intoxicating proposition.
Personal and profane, funny and fervent, The Dead Ladies Project ranges from the nineteenth century to the present, from historical figures to brand-new hangovers, in search, ultimately, of an answer to a bedrock question: How does a person decide how to live their life?
The Dead Ladies Project is an account of that journey—but it’s also much, much more. Fascinated by exile, Crispin travels an itinerary of key locations in its literary map, of places that have drawn writers who needed to break free from their origins and start afresh. As she reflects on William James struggling through despair in Berlin, Nora Barnacle dependant on and dependable for James Joyce in Trieste, Maud Gonne fomenting revolution and fostering myth in Dublin, or Igor Stravinsky starting over from nothing in Switzerland, Crispin interweaves biography, incisive literary analysis, and personal experience into a rich meditation on the complicated interactions of place, personality, and society that can make escape and reinvention such an attractive, even intoxicating proposition.
Personal and profane, funny and fervent, The Dead Ladies Project ranges from the nineteenth century to the present, from historical figures to brand-new hangovers, in search, ultimately, of an answer to a bedrock question: How does a person decide how to live their life?
240 pages, Paperback
First published September 22, 2015
About the author
Jessa Crispin
10 books220 followersJessa Crispin is the editor and founder of Bookslut.com. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Guardian and The Toronto Globe and Mail, among other publications.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 137 reviews
February 10, 2017
I picked this up in a newly opened independent bookstore in my area, and when the owner of the store saw it in my hands, she expressed her enthusiastic appreciation for Jessa Crispin. "She's a smartie," she said. But honestly, I wasn't so sure. I had never warmed to Crispin's website, Bookslut, even though it should have been exactly the kind of thing I loved. I always had a sense that Crispin's work was hobbled by her trying too hard to be the smartest person in the room. I hate saying that about any writer, and especially a female writer, but it was a feeling I just couldn't shake. But I bought The Dead Ladies Project anyway, and after a few stops and starts unrelated to the book's quality, I am thrilled to be able to tell you that I was totally and completely wrong about Jessa Crispin.
The Dead Ladies Project is misleadingly titled. While it's ostensibly a memoir about Crispin, at loose ends in her own life, traveling to the hometowns of various writers and artists she admires, not all of these writers and artists are women. More significantly, this frame is just a jumping-off point for Crispin's real topic, which is all the ways human beings allow themselves to become unfree. Sometimes this refers to all of humanity, as in her discussions of the politics and history of the various regions she visits; sometimes it does indeed refer to the writers and artists she admires; and sometimes it refers to herself.
All of this is fascinating and extremely relevant to what's happening in the world today, and eventually I stopped even setting my pen down while reading, so often did I need to stop and underline some important point extremely well made. There's a lot here to admire, but what I most admired was Crispin's own intense vulnerability, gutting but somehow conveyed without a hint of sentimentality. How did she do that? I don't know. But I do know that after years of resisting what Crispin had to offer, I am now on the hook for anything else she comes up with. She really is the smartest person in the room. The Dead Ladies Project, the last book I read in 2016, is easily one of my favorite books of the last ten years.
The Dead Ladies Project is misleadingly titled. While it's ostensibly a memoir about Crispin, at loose ends in her own life, traveling to the hometowns of various writers and artists she admires, not all of these writers and artists are women. More significantly, this frame is just a jumping-off point for Crispin's real topic, which is all the ways human beings allow themselves to become unfree. Sometimes this refers to all of humanity, as in her discussions of the politics and history of the various regions she visits; sometimes it does indeed refer to the writers and artists she admires; and sometimes it refers to herself.
All of this is fascinating and extremely relevant to what's happening in the world today, and eventually I stopped even setting my pen down while reading, so often did I need to stop and underline some important point extremely well made. There's a lot here to admire, but what I most admired was Crispin's own intense vulnerability, gutting but somehow conveyed without a hint of sentimentality. How did she do that? I don't know. But I do know that after years of resisting what Crispin had to offer, I am now on the hook for anything else she comes up with. She really is the smartest person in the room. The Dead Ladies Project, the last book I read in 2016, is easily one of my favorite books of the last ten years.
December 18, 2016
I've been a Crispin fan girl since discovering her blog, Bookslut, several years ago. She has unearthed many treasures for me from the back catalogues of the 20th century, probably most significantly Rebecca West's Black Lamb, Grey Falcon (which features in this book), but numerous other books as well. Her recommendation of Baba Yaga Laid an Egg led me to Ugresic's fascinating work. It's no exaggeration to say that without Crispin my reading list would be far more mainstream and less rich - her recommendations, which I learned to trust would always be provocative if not always easy going, have consistently pushed me outside of my comfort zone of up to the minute British and American literary fiction.
Like many fans of the website, I was disappointed when she turned the website over to others and went traveling. (The website is still interesting - but I never had the instinctive trust in the other writers, nor felt that imaginary personal bond with them).
This book is the product of those travels. It is almost exactly the book I would have expected her to write, and that is actually high praise. She combines travelogue (managing to convey a lot about a lot of places, despite spending zero time on sightseeing or stagesetting), literary investigation (each chapter is tied to both a place and to a cultural figure tied to that place), and memoir (she lays bare her cuckoo's nest childhood, suicidal moments, and, perhaps most interestingly, her ambivalence about both her "spinsterhood" (in the reclaimed sense of the word) and her adventurous sexuality (the slut in Bookslut)).
Only a few of the places visited were intimately familiar to me, and many of the featured cultural figures were completely unknown to me before reading this book. But I was never bored, and if anything, wanted more - more places, more clues about what to read next (yes, there's a recommended reading list at the end of the book!).
The book is not perfect. Crispin's style jumps around a lot, and some of her passages sound a false note. But there are many wow! moments - whether it's when she's laying her middle of the night soul bare (and somehow managing not to be clichéd about it), or expressing her enchantment at a field of spring cows, or conveying her admiration for and frustration with the literary figures who become (apart from Jessa and her elusive lover) the most vivid "characters" in this book. She's grappling, no holds barred, with being a woman, and a reader, in the wider world - and so it was foreordained that I would love this particular book.
There are a lot of insights here, and while not all will work for everyone (they don't all work for me - perhaps because, while Crispin and I have a lot in common, we don't have everything in common, and there are aspects of her struggle that read a little adolescent to me (I am a decade older after all)), there are enough to make this a very exciting read.
Like many fans of the website, I was disappointed when she turned the website over to others and went traveling. (The website is still interesting - but I never had the instinctive trust in the other writers, nor felt that imaginary personal bond with them).
This book is the product of those travels. It is almost exactly the book I would have expected her to write, and that is actually high praise. She combines travelogue (managing to convey a lot about a lot of places, despite spending zero time on sightseeing or stagesetting), literary investigation (each chapter is tied to both a place and to a cultural figure tied to that place), and memoir (she lays bare her cuckoo's nest childhood, suicidal moments, and, perhaps most interestingly, her ambivalence about both her "spinsterhood" (in the reclaimed sense of the word) and her adventurous sexuality (the slut in Bookslut)).
Only a few of the places visited were intimately familiar to me, and many of the featured cultural figures were completely unknown to me before reading this book. But I was never bored, and if anything, wanted more - more places, more clues about what to read next (yes, there's a recommended reading list at the end of the book!).
The book is not perfect. Crispin's style jumps around a lot, and some of her passages sound a false note. But there are many wow! moments - whether it's when she's laying her middle of the night soul bare (and somehow managing not to be clichéd about it), or expressing her enchantment at a field of spring cows, or conveying her admiration for and frustration with the literary figures who become (apart from Jessa and her elusive lover) the most vivid "characters" in this book. She's grappling, no holds barred, with being a woman, and a reader, in the wider world - and so it was foreordained that I would love this particular book.
There are a lot of insights here, and while not all will work for everyone (they don't all work for me - perhaps because, while Crispin and I have a lot in common, we don't have everything in common, and there are aspects of her struggle that read a little adolescent to me (I am a decade older after all)), there are enough to make this a very exciting read.
July 26, 2018
This book makes old dead white European literary elites sound like fun. Contrary to what the name might seem to suggest, Dead Ladies Project is not so much about dead ladies as it is about one particular lady who would really like not to be dead, and who turns to several dead writers and their various European locales for inspiration to live (and as part of a sweet book deal, it’s fair to assume). On its travel writing credentials alone, Dead Ladies Project is gorgeous. Crispin blends literary criticism, social history and urban/ rural landscapes into wonderfully rendered portraits of place, hitching her own journey onto those of the likes of Margaret Anderson, Maud Gonne, Claud Cahune, Jean Rhys & company. Her style is intoxicating. Take, for instance, this passage, written about Crispin’s last morning in Switzerland, an experience she already misses knowing it will never come again, not like this:
“But I linger. With the pastry and the very good coffee and the conversation and the camaraderie. Most likely this is a fleeting moment that will not repeat itself, and I feel the ache in my chest as we sit together, missing it already. Missing Paula already, missing Switzerland. I know too that I will someday pad out my life again and I will miss this skeletal reduction. The pain is beautiful.”
Yes, yes, yes! Who has not experienced this moment of conscious loss, of missing even before the thing you miss is gone? It’s profound. And this is far from the only place Crispin captures complex feelings in such a rapturous way.
Yet, for me anyway, there was a reluctance to change throughout this work—I didn't really feel like the Crispin that came out on the end of it all was so very different from the one who started the journey. At time she spills her guts out, yet at other very critical moments she turns away from the reader, or reverts to poetic euphemisms. Whenever she goes to the store to buy vodka and a watermelon, we know something’s up emotionally. Otherwise her omissions weigh heavily, and we are left to feel a bit out of sorts, like our heroine has taken us to her room to show us something important only to flick off the lights and walk out the door.
Where emotional interiority is absent, frustrated outbursts flood in to fill the void. The annoying thing when reading these is not only Crispin’s words, which drip with contempt and condescension, but the fact that she always makes herself the exception. She disdains identity politics, except when she is partaking it. She hates women who use men to their advantage, except for when she is doing something imperceptibly similar. She’s down to talk about colonization, except for when it comes time to select her writers for this book, which come pretty much exclusively from the realm of white European Modernist-era-ish. She hates straightness and monogamy, except she keeps coming back to it, again and again. Except, except, except. Reading her frustrations was like re-living those rants you rehearse obsessively in your head after awful so-and-so calls you such-and-such and if only you’d said blah-blah-blah, but you didn’t, you just sat around like a pin cushion getting pricked and now you’re pissed. But, hey, it’s been two days and you’ve reflected and cooled off and wow, aren’t you so glad you didn’t say anything you would regret?
There was so much unrecognized internalized misogyny on display here, I am amazed it made it through Crispin’s editors. What a missed opportunity. I kept hoping that she would turn this rage away from women doing what they can to survive in a patriarchal society and toward the white supremacist paternalistic systems they are operating in response to. Unpack that whiteness! Unpack that self-hatred, all those ill-founded roots! Unpack your own internalized systems! But, alas, she just kept skimming the surface of queerness/race/colonization/etc. in passing, smugly collecting brownie points and gold stars. This is a beautifully written book, make no mistake. But it is troubled, too, and haunted by ghosts Crispin is both aware of and not.
P.S. This is already too long, but the total lack of conjunctions made me want to peel my own eyes out.
“But I linger. With the pastry and the very good coffee and the conversation and the camaraderie. Most likely this is a fleeting moment that will not repeat itself, and I feel the ache in my chest as we sit together, missing it already. Missing Paula already, missing Switzerland. I know too that I will someday pad out my life again and I will miss this skeletal reduction. The pain is beautiful.”
Yes, yes, yes! Who has not experienced this moment of conscious loss, of missing even before the thing you miss is gone? It’s profound. And this is far from the only place Crispin captures complex feelings in such a rapturous way.
Yet, for me anyway, there was a reluctance to change throughout this work—I didn't really feel like the Crispin that came out on the end of it all was so very different from the one who started the journey. At time she spills her guts out, yet at other very critical moments she turns away from the reader, or reverts to poetic euphemisms. Whenever she goes to the store to buy vodka and a watermelon, we know something’s up emotionally. Otherwise her omissions weigh heavily, and we are left to feel a bit out of sorts, like our heroine has taken us to her room to show us something important only to flick off the lights and walk out the door.
Where emotional interiority is absent, frustrated outbursts flood in to fill the void. The annoying thing when reading these is not only Crispin’s words, which drip with contempt and condescension, but the fact that she always makes herself the exception. She disdains identity politics, except when she is partaking it. She hates women who use men to their advantage, except for when she is doing something imperceptibly similar. She’s down to talk about colonization, except for when it comes time to select her writers for this book, which come pretty much exclusively from the realm of white European Modernist-era-ish. She hates straightness and monogamy, except she keeps coming back to it, again and again. Except, except, except. Reading her frustrations was like re-living those rants you rehearse obsessively in your head after awful so-and-so calls you such-and-such and if only you’d said blah-blah-blah, but you didn’t, you just sat around like a pin cushion getting pricked and now you’re pissed. But, hey, it’s been two days and you’ve reflected and cooled off and wow, aren’t you so glad you didn’t say anything you would regret?
There was so much unrecognized internalized misogyny on display here, I am amazed it made it through Crispin’s editors. What a missed opportunity. I kept hoping that she would turn this rage away from women doing what they can to survive in a patriarchal society and toward the white supremacist paternalistic systems they are operating in response to. Unpack that whiteness! Unpack that self-hatred, all those ill-founded roots! Unpack your own internalized systems! But, alas, she just kept skimming the surface of queerness/race/colonization/etc. in passing, smugly collecting brownie points and gold stars. This is a beautifully written book, make no mistake. But it is troubled, too, and haunted by ghosts Crispin is both aware of and not.
P.S. This is already too long, but the total lack of conjunctions made me want to peel my own eyes out.
July 6, 2018
Picked this up in a used bookstore and it really is shockingly bad. In the chapter on Sarajevo/Rebecca West she complains about the colonial mindset that led West in the 30s and recent commentators post-war to obnoxiously pontificate about the violent nature of the Balkan soul and "ancient hatreds"; then in the chapter on Ireland she herself turns around and confidently does her own diagnoses of What is Wrong With Those Feckless Irish - learned helplessness! it all goes back to the Famine, you see. She talks to a historian and cites psychological experiments involving dogs and electric shocks - and then feels confident enough to flippantly throw out that the problem of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church - it's JUST like that. I have a bunch of other obnoxious examples of the sort of shallow half-baked narcissistic philosophizing masquerading as deep truths (love the part where after SHE contacts the wife of the married man she's fucking and sets up a correspondence she refers to the emails from the wife as "territorial pissings")(or the part where she has no money! as she stays in a charming Swiss farmhouse for free, with free run of their pantry! But the tarot readings she does on Skype are all that is holding body and soul together, as she can turn that cash "into steak and mushroom pie with a bit of effort" - the noble struggle of the free woman artist!) I was going to go on about but this one wore me out. Life is too short, much like it's too short to read this book.
Oh wait no I have to mention the part where she claims that she, a white Kansan, when in Kansas frequently gets the "No, but but where are you REALLY from" treatment - because her face is just. SO. ANGULAR. This is why she feels at home in Europe, land of angular faces (???) that even when she speaks English without an accent, the Swiss think she's Swiss!
Oh wait no I have to mention the part where she claims that she, a white Kansan, when in Kansas frequently gets the "No, but but where are you REALLY from" treatment - because her face is just. SO. ANGULAR. This is why she feels at home in Europe, land of angular faces (???) that even when she speaks English without an accent, the Swiss think she's Swiss!
May 28, 2016
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did.
But that's unfair: I did like it, most of the way through. For most of the book it was one of those "I'll have to get my own copy after I return it to the library" books. And then it wasn't.
Crispin writes very well and has read widely and with great consideration (though as another reviewer notes, her choices tend to the dead white canon). She obviously thinks deeply about what she reads, the lives of the authors, and her surroundings. Those thoughts are often incredibly insightful and written in language that is lively and new. I read the first 2/3-3/4 of the book with little but pleasure.
But the little bits of displeasure got bigger and eventually took over the good.
This book could be viewed as the literary exemplar of the saying "wherever you go, there you are."
Jessa was sick of herself and her life in Chicago. So she sold almost everything she owned and began a tour of Europe, living from what she could carry in two suitcases, taking them from city to city and writing essays about her own experiences there, compared with the experiences there of some of her literary idols. It's an interesting idea and provides a solid framework for the book. The problem is that she just ends up being sick of herself and her life in every country in Europe, too.
Eventually, this reader wanted to see some kind of narrative arc, or at least a narrative progression: she hated herself at the beginning of the book, she hated herself all through the middle, and at the end, she still hated herself. She helplessly pursued relationships with unavailable jerks who built their courtship on lies, and could never find the self-confidence to see them for what they were; she simultaneously pursued sex-only relationships that left her feeling empty and awful; in both cases, despite the misery she was in, she declared it all preferable to the awfulness of monogamous domesticity (apparently the only alternative she could conceive of for herself) and portrayed the affair(s) as being "sexually adventurous," not deceitful.
All of it defended on the terribly adolescent idea that Art is built on Suffering, so she'd better pursue Suffering as hard as she can; as if Suffering doesn't find us all wherever we live, no matter how settled our lives are. It found the Bronte sisters, it found Emily Dickinson, Jessa Crispin, it will find you. You don't need to run after it. If you need to suffer, if you're determined to suffer, why not suffer in more comfortable surroundings? Why does that Suffering lose its integrity and validity if you suffer in a decent two-bedroom apartment with a closet that holds more than one pair of shoes?
You get the idea.
For most of the book, I read with pleasure and the occasional twinge of sympathy and compassion. Poor girl; how terrible to be locked into such an unforgiving and unhappy perspective. By the end the pity, compassion and impatience outweighed the pleasure. Then I got to the London chapter, in which she complains--without reflection, without insight, without irony--about how awful beautiful women are because they can pretend to be weak and manipulate men into getting them everything they want. This is just straight-up misogyny. If it had come from the pen of a male author, there would have been protests and boycotts.
Even at the end there were passages and reflections I found genuinely beautiful, original, insightful and profound. Just not enough to overcome the impression I had that Jessa believes a happy person is a shallow, stupid, terrible creature she's determined not to be. Which is her choice, and no one suffers from it more than she does.
But that's unfair: I did like it, most of the way through. For most of the book it was one of those "I'll have to get my own copy after I return it to the library" books. And then it wasn't.
Crispin writes very well and has read widely and with great consideration (though as another reviewer notes, her choices tend to the dead white canon). She obviously thinks deeply about what she reads, the lives of the authors, and her surroundings. Those thoughts are often incredibly insightful and written in language that is lively and new. I read the first 2/3-3/4 of the book with little but pleasure.
But the little bits of displeasure got bigger and eventually took over the good.
This book could be viewed as the literary exemplar of the saying "wherever you go, there you are."
Jessa was sick of herself and her life in Chicago. So she sold almost everything she owned and began a tour of Europe, living from what she could carry in two suitcases, taking them from city to city and writing essays about her own experiences there, compared with the experiences there of some of her literary idols. It's an interesting idea and provides a solid framework for the book. The problem is that she just ends up being sick of herself and her life in every country in Europe, too.
Eventually, this reader wanted to see some kind of narrative arc, or at least a narrative progression: she hated herself at the beginning of the book, she hated herself all through the middle, and at the end, she still hated herself. She helplessly pursued relationships with unavailable jerks who built their courtship on lies, and could never find the self-confidence to see them for what they were; she simultaneously pursued sex-only relationships that left her feeling empty and awful; in both cases, despite the misery she was in, she declared it all preferable to the awfulness of monogamous domesticity (apparently the only alternative she could conceive of for herself) and portrayed the affair(s) as being "sexually adventurous," not deceitful.
All of it defended on the terribly adolescent idea that Art is built on Suffering, so she'd better pursue Suffering as hard as she can; as if Suffering doesn't find us all wherever we live, no matter how settled our lives are. It found the Bronte sisters, it found Emily Dickinson, Jessa Crispin, it will find you. You don't need to run after it. If you need to suffer, if you're determined to suffer, why not suffer in more comfortable surroundings? Why does that Suffering lose its integrity and validity if you suffer in a decent two-bedroom apartment with a closet that holds more than one pair of shoes?
You get the idea.
For most of the book, I read with pleasure and the occasional twinge of sympathy and compassion. Poor girl; how terrible to be locked into such an unforgiving and unhappy perspective. By the end the pity, compassion and impatience outweighed the pleasure. Then I got to the London chapter, in which she complains--without reflection, without insight, without irony--about how awful beautiful women are because they can pretend to be weak and manipulate men into getting them everything they want. This is just straight-up misogyny. If it had come from the pen of a male author, there would have been protests and boycotts.
Even at the end there were passages and reflections I found genuinely beautiful, original, insightful and profound. Just not enough to overcome the impression I had that Jessa believes a happy person is a shallow, stupid, terrible creature she's determined not to be. Which is her choice, and no one suffers from it more than she does.
November 7, 2015
Suicidal impulses were starting to get the better of Crispin, so she knew it was time to get out of town. Because that's what you do when you're a writer: you design a project you can publish and get paid for, and at the same time try to save your own damn life. Thus begins a story about travel, famous dead creatives, and getting your shit together. Oddly enough, it works.
Not that isn't rough going, especially at first. Crispin is not very likable, but she doesn't give two shits whether you like her or not. Also, she tells a damn compelling story. Keep in mind that this is a woman looking to the dead for reasons to live and you'll find reason enough to stick with it. Plus, you'll learn some cool stuff about people you thought you knew (Nora Barnacle, Maud Gonne) and some you might not have heard of (Claude Cahun, Margaret Anderson). As the scenery shifts and the miles roll by, Crispin slowly, torturously figures out a way to keep living on her own terms and maybe even go home....if she ever figures out what and where home is. Brutally honest and capped off with an excellent "further reading list," Crispin's memoir is totally Zoo Story, in that she goes a long way out of her way in order to come back a short distance correctly. Not a complaint.
Not that isn't rough going, especially at first. Crispin is not very likable, but she doesn't give two shits whether you like her or not. Also, she tells a damn compelling story. Keep in mind that this is a woman looking to the dead for reasons to live and you'll find reason enough to stick with it. Plus, you'll learn some cool stuff about people you thought you knew (Nora Barnacle, Maud Gonne) and some you might not have heard of (Claude Cahun, Margaret Anderson). As the scenery shifts and the miles roll by, Crispin slowly, torturously figures out a way to keep living on her own terms and maybe even go home....if she ever figures out what and where home is. Brutally honest and capped off with an excellent "further reading list," Crispin's memoir is totally Zoo Story, in that she goes a long way out of her way in order to come back a short distance correctly. Not a complaint.
December 26, 2015
http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/1359898...
Feeling displaced and shaken from birth I am not surprised this author has never exactly seemed to fit in. Being the weirdo in the room is what she says she is used to. But she defiantly prefers to reject them before they rejected you. But this sophisticated and crazy spinster outsider manages to make me want to be led on a walk with her like a cat on a leash.
Jessa Crispin, in just one published book, has surpassed Geoff Dyer on my favorite memoir/travelogue/litcrit list. Her fabulous courage to attack and gallantly face her fears head-on far exceeds anything my previous hero Dyer ever managed so far, himself, to do. Crispin may even be funnier than Dyer; she is at least as clever. The prose in this book is steady and clear, a comfortable stream, relaxed with no pretentious outbursts meant to impress us into believing how brilliant a writer she truly is. She adroitly presents appropriate examples of literary icons she chose to follow to their deaths and why. Except Crispin isn’t really following anybody. She is leading her pack of one, which by my guess has to now number at least hundreds. But I wouldn’t follow her just anywhere, as I have already suffered enough throughout my own many journeys. However, I would be more than interested in reading about hers. Anytime. And if Crispin is a feminist, as some have already classified her, then I am one too. She takes no prisoners in her every criticism, and that includes the women as much as any man she used to find these interesting dead ladies.
Crispin claims she is herself not beautiful, but I take umbrage in her assessment. And perhaps that is too strong a word for what I mean. But I know that to be afforded the opportunity to casually sit across from her, even in a lousy cafe, would be a pleasure few of us can say we ever had. I found her writing, her conversation, remarkable for several reasons, but most of all because she is so damn interesting. And honest. Sometimes brutally, which is refreshing to me. And she is not mean-spirited in her assessments of others, but she is not reserved at all in her commentary. Her studies and experiments in travel support a life now-deemed worth living, and even in its precarious difficulties is better than her killing herself in Chicago. And that is not to say she won’t at some future time. As imperfect as she and her life might be at times, she is undoubtedly brave and willing to take the necessary risks in order to live. She follows her heart, or is at least determined to learn how to. But picture this: She resorts to carrying her own unwieldy bags simply because she can, and thus appears in my mind, and is perceived, far sexier than she affirms as homely. She is a beautiful person, and made obvious in this important book.
Feeling displaced and shaken from birth I am not surprised this author has never exactly seemed to fit in. Being the weirdo in the room is what she says she is used to. But she defiantly prefers to reject them before they rejected you. But this sophisticated and crazy spinster outsider manages to make me want to be led on a walk with her like a cat on a leash.
Jessa Crispin, in just one published book, has surpassed Geoff Dyer on my favorite memoir/travelogue/litcrit list. Her fabulous courage to attack and gallantly face her fears head-on far exceeds anything my previous hero Dyer ever managed so far, himself, to do. Crispin may even be funnier than Dyer; she is at least as clever. The prose in this book is steady and clear, a comfortable stream, relaxed with no pretentious outbursts meant to impress us into believing how brilliant a writer she truly is. She adroitly presents appropriate examples of literary icons she chose to follow to their deaths and why. Except Crispin isn’t really following anybody. She is leading her pack of one, which by my guess has to now number at least hundreds. But I wouldn’t follow her just anywhere, as I have already suffered enough throughout my own many journeys. However, I would be more than interested in reading about hers. Anytime. And if Crispin is a feminist, as some have already classified her, then I am one too. She takes no prisoners in her every criticism, and that includes the women as much as any man she used to find these interesting dead ladies.
Crispin claims she is herself not beautiful, but I take umbrage in her assessment. And perhaps that is too strong a word for what I mean. But I know that to be afforded the opportunity to casually sit across from her, even in a lousy cafe, would be a pleasure few of us can say we ever had. I found her writing, her conversation, remarkable for several reasons, but most of all because she is so damn interesting. And honest. Sometimes brutally, which is refreshing to me. And she is not mean-spirited in her assessments of others, but she is not reserved at all in her commentary. Her studies and experiments in travel support a life now-deemed worth living, and even in its precarious difficulties is better than her killing herself in Chicago. And that is not to say she won’t at some future time. As imperfect as she and her life might be at times, she is undoubtedly brave and willing to take the necessary risks in order to live. She follows her heart, or is at least determined to learn how to. But picture this: She resorts to carrying her own unwieldy bags simply because she can, and thus appears in my mind, and is perceived, far sexier than she affirms as homely. She is a beautiful person, and made obvious in this important book.
April 4, 2016
Jessa Crispin's writing style is bland, slow, and mundane at best. At worst is is painfully dull and laced with failed attempts at insight and clever remarks. This book is a story of a woman who likes to read and name drop but doesn't add insight or humor, a story of someone who romanticizes emotions but cannot convey them convincingly; all under the guise of a bourgeoise adventure that seeks to unveil exciting new stories but fails miserably at every turn.
October 31, 2022
Finally read this. Every observation in this journey across Europe and into the lives of the dead ladies (and gents) that haunt and obsess Jessa Crispin interested me. Sometimes it was a challenge to feel sorry for Jessa (circa 2015) as she travels Europe and complains, and I finished wondering if her rootless traveling for a year and a half contributed to her unhappiness. Still, she's so original. Her sensibility, vulnerabilities, and prickliness attract me, and sometimes provoke me.
January 4, 2016
Okay, let's come right out and say that there were a few parts where I had to mentally separate the author as the author from the author as my sister, to sort of ignore that this is my childhood she's alluding to here, my hometown, me. But those parts were mercifully small. (I will go back and process those parts later, though I'm not sure Jessa would want me to.)
Anyway, biased or not, I thought it was marvelous. Especially the Berlin chapter, which (despite there being an actual introduction) introduces the theme, the concept, the purpose of the rest of the book. At a loss in Berlin, Jessa turns to her old friend William James, who also fled to Berlin for a good part of his life, also at a time when he was struggling to find a purpose, a calling, a standard for success. James, like all the dead ladies in this book, fled his home country, choosing a new land and new culture to call his own (to varying degrees of permanence). As Jessa travels from place to place, she communes with someone who has gone before her, someone who has also shucked off the standards, the expectations, the bindings of home, and built a new life of their own choosing some place new.
As she does so, she draws lines, both obvious and unexpected, between her own struggles for meaning, the personal struggles of her dead ladies, and more universal struggles, like the artist vs. the censor, adult children struggling with the expectations of their parents, women choosing whether to exploit, struggle with, or subvert the roles made available to them in a patriarchal society.
A marvelous book that should be more widely read.
Anyway, biased or not, I thought it was marvelous. Especially the Berlin chapter, which (despite there being an actual introduction) introduces the theme, the concept, the purpose of the rest of the book. At a loss in Berlin, Jessa turns to her old friend William James, who also fled to Berlin for a good part of his life, also at a time when he was struggling to find a purpose, a calling, a standard for success. James, like all the dead ladies in this book, fled his home country, choosing a new land and new culture to call his own (to varying degrees of permanence). As Jessa travels from place to place, she communes with someone who has gone before her, someone who has also shucked off the standards, the expectations, the bindings of home, and built a new life of their own choosing some place new.
As she does so, she draws lines, both obvious and unexpected, between her own struggles for meaning, the personal struggles of her dead ladies, and more universal struggles, like the artist vs. the censor, adult children struggling with the expectations of their parents, women choosing whether to exploit, struggle with, or subvert the roles made available to them in a patriarchal society.
A marvelous book that should be more widely read.
August 11, 2020
I couldn't bring myself to finish it. About halfway through I asked myself what was the point of reading this book. It isn't insightful or well-written or particularly intelligent. The author comes across as a thoroughly unlikeable person who clearly dislikes women (despite the title, you quickly start suspecting that she is much more interested in talking about men than women) and mistakes bleak self-absorbed ramblings about the men she slept with for literary talent. She is far from alone in this; it seems to be a widespread belief among 21st-century anglo writers that oversharing about your traumas, your joyless sex life and your (often self-inflicted) misery in an affectedly flippant manner is a shortcut to giving your writing depth and poignancy. It's not.
April 22, 2017
A really insightful exploration of art, self, love, and Europe. Engaging, relatively well-written, melancholic, and an ode to the artists who influenced the author and the places that influenced them.
September 20, 2015
I'm not certain when exactly I discovered Jessa Crispin's online literary magazine, Bookslut, but I know it was early days. She was still in Texas, still finding the shape of the blog and the articles. I just remember being delighted by it, not just because she was tapping into a woefully underserved cross section of the publishing world by reviewing titles out of small presses and in lesser known genres, but because she herself had a distinctive voice that just clicked for me. In all the years I've followed her work, that voice is what kept me coming back. Reading this book is like taking a long and winding trip with Jessa. It's an invitation into her thoughts about various cities, authors, history, love and relationships, but also into the messier corners of her own life and experiences. And as much as I enjoyed her bird's-eye view of Berlin, Sarajevo, Trieste, and the other cities she visited, and appreciated her thoughtful look into the time various authors spent in those cities, I found her personal revelations the most thought-provoking and memorable. A beautiful melding of literary biography, travelogue, and memoir.
March 4, 2018
I didn't like the politics of Jessa Crispin as she wrote them (a lot, insistently) into this book. Her bitterness, about the world at large and her own life, irritated me, particularly in her chapter about Jean Rhys. Structurally the book was often a mess, not really holding as a whole. And yet… This writer is truly gifted with this particular strangeness of her voice, this enchanting metaphysical worldview she has, where she sees dragons flying in a city she dislikes, and has wonderful conversations with the dead ladies, and gentlemen as well. Crispin’s mind is a wayward one in a way that surprised me in many delightful ways. I never knew what to expect from her in the next paragraph and often it wasn’t just because I think the book wasn’t sufficiently thought-through, but also because her associations are so fresh. I know she’s quite young, and her youth shows in the angry, somewhat superficial way in which she examines history and current affairs, and in her adolescent attempts in philosophising. But the voice… This voice soars above everything else in the book, leaving me charmed against my will.
May 8, 2018
Jessa Crispin y su huida hacia delante.
Este libro es una mezcla de análisis literario, memorias y cuaderno de viajes. «Intentando encontrar razones para mantenerse viva» la autora viaja durante menos de una década por diferentes ciudades de Europa. Me gusta muchísimo la propuesta. Cada capítulo sucede en una ciudad distinta y se centra en la trayectoria vital de un personaje relacionado con algún ámbito cultural en esa misma ciudad: Berlín / William James, Trieste / Nora Barnacle, Lausanne / Igor Stravinsky. Las vivencias de Crispin se mezclan con las de estos personajes y las reflexiones brillantes que ofrece son constantes a lo largo del libro. Aunque en general me ha gustado mucho, reconozco que no todos los capítulos me han interesado por igual. Quizá en algún momento he sentido cierta desconexión con el texto. Pero sí que os recomiendo que le echéis un vistazo si tenéis la oportunidad. Merece la pena, porque además de descubrir personajes fascinantes (en concreto me ha encantado conocer a Margaret Anderson, editora de la revista The little review) se quedan en el cuerpo unas ganas locas de viajar.
Este libro es una mezcla de análisis literario, memorias y cuaderno de viajes. «Intentando encontrar razones para mantenerse viva» la autora viaja durante menos de una década por diferentes ciudades de Europa. Me gusta muchísimo la propuesta. Cada capítulo sucede en una ciudad distinta y se centra en la trayectoria vital de un personaje relacionado con algún ámbito cultural en esa misma ciudad: Berlín / William James, Trieste / Nora Barnacle, Lausanne / Igor Stravinsky. Las vivencias de Crispin se mezclan con las de estos personajes y las reflexiones brillantes que ofrece son constantes a lo largo del libro. Aunque en general me ha gustado mucho, reconozco que no todos los capítulos me han interesado por igual. Quizá en algún momento he sentido cierta desconexión con el texto. Pero sí que os recomiendo que le echéis un vistazo si tenéis la oportunidad. Merece la pena, porque además de descubrir personajes fascinantes (en concreto me ha encantado conocer a Margaret Anderson, editora de la revista The little review) se quedan en el cuerpo unas ganas locas de viajar.
December 23, 2017
Brilliant!
May 13, 2024
Deeply disappointing. Most of the dead people referenced in this book are men, and several of the dead women are described in reference to the men in their lives. So many absurd and pretentious generalizations, many of which are hypocritical, and lots of shitting on other women, again and again.
December 5, 2015
I sctually couldn't finish this. I was a longtime reader of Bookslut, Crispin's book blog. It was great; she dropped it abruptly-ish (to readers), and part of what followed is this book. The upshot is that each chapter (barring Igor Stravinskty?) imagines the life of a female expat in tandem with musings and confidences about Crispin herself. Let me say, I think there is a place for the memoirs of neurotic white ladies. God knows Joan Didion has a place in my heart, and on my shelf. But in 2015, it is so odd it is almost willful to read an entire book about sympathies for no one but white women--and, Igor Stravinsky. And William James--wait, wasn't the title about "ladies"? I am confused...A whole Europe out there, a whole swath of modernism. There are some good meditations on being the eternal woman on the sly. I wish she had dug a bit deeper into that one--there is a genre waiting to be told out there. But someone with such talents and sensitivities, to dig so deep into the fixed canon, and not burrow some new names in there, or at least kick the idea of it around...I was disappointed. And hope I didn't write off the whole baby with the bathwater of the first half of the book.
March 16, 2016
Jessa Crispin travelled the world in the footsteps of artists she has loved who include men, women, writers and composers. Each city is dedicated to a person who inspired her.
I wanted to love this book. I heard an interview with Jessa and immediately wanted to read this book. But I don't think I got it. It is unclear what it is - it isn't a biography of her chosen people as she appears to know very little about some of them. It definitely isn't a travel guide to the amazing cities she visits as she rarely mentions where she actually went in the city. For the most part, it also isn't a step by step guide to what the artists did in each city. It also isn't a biography about Jessa and her relationship with a married man which appears to be making her miserable wherever she goes. Instead it is a mixture of all these things that make some of the chapters hard to get through as there is no logic or flow. I still don't know how I feel about this book!
I wanted to love this book. I heard an interview with Jessa and immediately wanted to read this book. But I don't think I got it. It is unclear what it is - it isn't a biography of her chosen people as she appears to know very little about some of them. It definitely isn't a travel guide to the amazing cities she visits as she rarely mentions where she actually went in the city. For the most part, it also isn't a step by step guide to what the artists did in each city. It also isn't a biography about Jessa and her relationship with a married man which appears to be making her miserable wherever she goes. Instead it is a mixture of all these things that make some of the chapters hard to get through as there is no logic or flow. I still don't know how I feel about this book!
January 22, 2016
I'm a fan of Jessa Crispin and Bookslut (although I haven't followed Bookslut much lately), and this was exactly the book I wanted but hadn't really dared to hope for. Set against the backdrop of about half a dozen cities, Crispin's story of self-imposed exile mingles with the tales of other writers, artists, and creatives who needed to flee. From Nora Barnacle to Claude Cahun, Crispin travels in good company.
By the time I finished The Dead Ladies Project, I had stuck a little Post-It flag on at least every third page. (That's just an estimate; see the photographic evidence here.)
By the time I finished The Dead Ladies Project, I had stuck a little Post-It flag on at least every third page. (That's just an estimate; see the photographic evidence here.)
May 4, 2016
A fine memoir and geo-biographical exploration. Crispin goes on a year and a half wander though statelessness to understand herself, to understand other actors upon her thinking and existence.
particularly intriguing to me were the sections on Wm James/Berlin, Nora Barnacle Joyce/Trieste, and Cahun/Jersey, but each segment was interesting and thought provoking.
particularly intriguing to me were the sections on Wm James/Berlin, Nora Barnacle Joyce/Trieste, and Cahun/Jersey, but each segment was interesting and thought provoking.
October 30, 2015
What a beautiful book. This is a genre I love - biography/memoir/spilling of guts. One of the few books I have read that I would say affected me deeply, even when I didn't agree with the author. Five out of five, two thumbs up, would read again.
March 1, 2016
I need a bundle of plane tickets, stat!
April 26, 2017
I’ve got this silly little rule – not reading two books by the same author in a row. Boy, am I glad I broke it after reading Why I Am Not a Feminist. This is part memoir and part travelogue - since I haven’t been able to travel for a few years this was perfect to satisfy my travel bug (for now). Also, Crispin is in that neverending group of authors that makes me say “damn, they say what I want to say, only better!” while I read them. I suspect I'd find her writings interesting even if she talked about NASCAR, her voice is that engaging.
Read this if you've ever felt like a changeling, if you are the perpetual Ugly Girl of Note without the Good Decent Man (or no man at all) by your side, if you live in a constant liminal state, if you feel displaced everywhere, especially home. Read it if you are thinking of setting up a pantheon of forefathers and foremothers consisting of dead artists. And then do it.
Read this if you've ever felt like a changeling, if you are the perpetual Ugly Girl of Note without the Good Decent Man (or no man at all) by your side, if you live in a constant liminal state, if you feel displaced everywhere, especially home. Read it if you are thinking of setting up a pantheon of forefathers and foremothers consisting of dead artists. And then do it.
March 29, 2019
This was a great book! I struggled to get into it for the first chapter or two, as I didn't relate to the author at all. But after that the book got steadily more engrossing as I traveled with the author from place to place. I spent quite a bit of time googling the different names that pop up in the book, but I appreciated that she trusts the reader to go do their own research, rather than spoon feeding the information about each individual mentioned.
Ill have to remember to come back and re-read it in a couple years, I suspect it's one of those books that changes depending on the age you read it
Ill have to remember to come back and re-read it in a couple years, I suspect it's one of those books that changes depending on the age you read it
April 8, 2017
Personal, sad, witty, wise, and occasionally off-the-wall, Jessa Crispin's account of her odyssey through Europe in search of dead literary ladies (and a reason for living) is a delight. Her writing is never less than entertaining, whether she is dealing with matters of the heart (often her own), philosophical puzzles, literary ephemera, or the problems of luggage and tampons. One of the most original and entertaining reads I have encountered in some time. I will seek out more of her work, and possibly try to track her down and offer her my undying love. Brilliantly executed stuff.
August 4, 2018
My main criticism of this book was that it was almost painfully heterosexual at times and I found it difficult to really care about Crispin’s torturous affair with a married man (another author no less!). But, when she was writing about the various people and places, I found it really interesting. Also, James Joyce remains the only modernist male author who hasn’t kind of been ruined for me by reading about his wife and daughter.
July 10, 2019
This book sounded too good to be true. I was fully prepared to be disappointed. Instead, I enjoyed virtually every aspect. A woman packs up her life in America, provides insight into her hometown/childhood contrasted with life in foreign cities, tales of travelling alone, stories of literary folks and their fascinating lives, some history tidbits thrown in, and I’m one satisfied customer!
October 12, 2019
Jessa Crispin can really write. It makes one wonder why she never wrote fiction herself, but instead has focused her life around being a critic and public intellectual. This book is filled with interesting insights about writing and art, as well as politics and history, while still being an interesting memoir in its own right.
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