Fernanda Eberstadt celebrates the lives of outsider saints

Fernanda Eberstadt’s new non-fiction book, Bite your friends, Tales of the Militant Body is an unconventional memoir, if that is the right word for a book whose narrative focuses on figures she has never met before who are as great as her heroes, such as Diogenes, the ancient Greek philosopher, the Christian martyrs St. Perpetua and Saint Felicitas, the French philosopher Michel. Foucault, Italian author and director Pier Pasolini, and Russian political artists such as Piotr Pavlensky and Nadya Tolokonnikova from Pussy Riot. Not everyone turns out to be a saint.

Bite your friends it is indeed a manifesto, a declaration of affinity for a particular aesthetic belonging to those outsiders who push back against normative society, even normative sexual identity. Eberstadt’s particular focus is, as her title suggests, corporeal militancy: how these individuals’ own bodies became part of their artistic, spiritual, and political practice. It’s also about Eberstadt’s own reckoning in middle age, waking up from complacency and re-engaging in the life of the outsider.

The book’s cast of characters (and they are all characters) includes the Greek philosopher Diogenes in all his filthy savagery; her mother Isabel, whose early death from kidney failure was a side effect of a wrongly prescribed medication; artists Stephen Vrable, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, as well as Foucault, who all died of complications from AIDS; Pasolini, killed on the streets of Rome; Pavlensky mutilating and beating his wife; and Tolokonnikova from Pussy Riot’s defiant performance in a Russian Orthodox Church. Eberstadt’s writings about these thinkers and artists are empathetic and written with a variety of strategies to bring us into their worlds—to see them anew through different eyes.

Eberstadt has made a living by taking the less expected path. Her father, Frederick, the son of a financier active in The New Deal, was a photographer who became a therapist late in life. Her mother, Isabel, was the daughter of the poet Ogden Nash and was herself a novelist, journalist, socialite and star in the Andy Warhol firmament.

As for Eberstadt, we learn that when she was young at an elite private girls’ school in New York, her best friend, known on the streets of New York, was Stephen Varble, a cross-dressing performance artist almost twice her age. bigger than her. As a teenager, she circulated among the city’s demi-worlds, not so much Alice in the Looking Glass as Heloise at the drug-addled Mudd Club. She feels betrayed when her breasts appear, changing the way men look at her and how they treat her.

If she’s not wise beyond her years, she’s preternaturally intelligent (though she never says so, it’s obvious). Rather than the Ivy League, she attends Oxford, then returns to New York, where she immerses herself in the highest echelons of then-neocon society, studies to convert to Orthodox Judaism, while writing several novels and magazine articles well received for The New Yorker and New York Review of Books among others.

I met her then and I really liked her. He had a fresh intelligence that could mix high and low, sacred and profane, what was right and what was left, with great charm.

She then escaped to Europe and married an Englishman, with whom she raised her two children. They lived in a remote part of France, where she befriended the local Roma and wrote a brilliant non-fiction work about a family of Roma musicians. Several novels (five in all) and a collection of essays followed, as well as a steady stream of articles, profiles, essays. She then lived in London and remains rooted in Europe.

Ebserstadt lived a self-invented life, a life of mind and words, a life of observing and reporting on others. Is that why they admire so much those who put their bodies on the line, literally and figuratively? And now, at a time when her children are grown and she’s only a decade younger than the age her mother died, she wants us to know who she is and what she admires. She describes herself in the continuum of her mother and those she profiles in the book as:

I fell into the lady-of-leisure rut that almost killed my mother, that stopped my mother from writing, that she in the blackest self-loathing, except that the version I fell into is a duller version – unmasked Truman Capote. proms without Jack Smith transvestite orgies on the beach —_I don’t know how to face the world I’m not a boy a writer a mother a gladiator a pagan Jew a Christian a Lower East Side drag queen in ostrich feathers chased by white gangs with broken bottles, if I am not a hermaphrodite, with a heart of fire, a philosopher in skin with a tight white bell-bottom, staring at Death Valley, sour tears running down his cheeks saying, This is my experience-limit; this is my happy day.”

At a time when the Stoics and Marcus Aurelius crowd the bestseller lists, Eberstadt suggests another ancient philosopher like Virgil: Diogenes.

Diogenes, often called the “Cynic”, was the terrible child of the ancient world, disdaining societal norms, wealth, influence. His followers delighted in committing shameful acts in public. They were the anarchists, the sex outlaws of their time. Diogenes is the patron saint of outsiders. He is the wild one Id which Eberstadt celebrates.

Diogenes, for Eberstadt, is the one who tells the truth. She writes that she envisions “a female Diogenes who comes to ridicule and disrupt a society of cosmetic perfection, of artificial youth, of erasure.”

Recounting Pasolini’s life and how he reconciled his apparent bourgeois status with the railing against capitalism, Eberstadt explains, “Pasolini’s response to his fellow writers is, ‘Where are you hiding?’ Writers have a duty to go out into the world and tell the truth of what they see. I’m just like you, he says: I have a pleasant bourgeois life, surrounded by books and movies and smart like-minded friends. But because of his compulsions, he is “Dr. Hyde’: he has this other life that takes him down to hell every night and he can see the disaster coming for everyone.”

Considering how Foucault, Pasolini, and the bodies of St. Perpetua and St. Felicitas have become sources of protest, resistance, courage, and condemnation, Eberstadt writes, “I now think of the scarred body and the scarred soul in a different way. I learned from my Mad Dog heroes… Together they form a prophetic fellowship of sisters and brothers who say, “If we can do it, you can do it.”

The Clash asked: Should I stay or should I go? In Bite your friendsEberstadt sums up the call to knowing when to “turn a stigma into triumph” and “When it’s good to sit and watch and when it’s time to get in the ring.”

Despite all this, probably because of all this, Bite your friendsit is a work in which Eberstadt tries to truly see her mother and catch her own reflection in her.

This paragraph from her mother, quoted in the book, could just as easily have been written by Eberstadt herself about one of her idols:

I had been close friends with Jack for two years at the time, and our relationship had gone through many phases, all intense. When I first saw Creatures on Fire, I felt like I had found the person I had been looking for all my life. I was always drawn to people who were intelligent misfits, rule breakers, and disruptors of what I felt was a depressingly conventional social order. Most of these people I loved were very unhappy despite their bravado. My deepest desire was to help them express their most outrageous fantasies and understand that they could be admired and loved just as they were. When I saw Jack’s pile of grotesques and how he made them shine, I thought he could change the world.

From my late-life vantage point, I’ve noticed that many of us spend the first half of our lives doing everything we can to be as different as possible from our parents. And then, at some point in middle age, the realization hits us: we are our parents. The effect of this is, as Eberstadt struggles with closing the gap between herself and her mother, it is not resignation, but rather empowerment through knowing who she is and what she believes.

In Bite your friendsEberstadt argues that those explorations of extremes by outsiders are a necessary corrective to society and humanity, pulling us all toward a more vital existence.

Although in many ways her pedigree and accomplishments would make her an insider, Eberstadt never wants to get too comfortable—she wants, it seems she needs, to be an outsider. It is the place where he feels most at home.