The Venus Effect
On mirrors, memoir, and navel-gazing
European artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries loved to paint the goddess of beauty staring at herself in a mirror. Especially for painters fascinated by classical myth but living in a Christian society, what else would Venus be doing but indulging her vanity? Painting her this way allowed for a more dynamic, interesting composition than a conventional portrait, and enabled more conservative artists to portray a nude female subject without showing the more scandalous parts of her anatomy.
Whenever people ask me about the book I’m working on, I feel a little trapped. I know how it looks: a 32-year-old working on a memoir, not even a goddess looking in a mirror, just another millennial mistaking her social media for a book project. I cringe and dodge the question, both embarrassed by and jealously protective of the Word Document I’ve been eking into existence.
The critique of memoir as navel-gazing is often true. I have picked up and put down many memoirs that did not arise from a strong impulse to tell a story or explore a theme, but rather to aggrandize, defend, and shore up the author’s ego. This critique is often true, but not always true, and I want to explore the line between self-indulgence and success in this art form I love.
Venus gives us a clue. Centuries of artists have portrayed her staring in absolute rapture at her own reflection.
Except she isn’t looking at herself at all.
The sleight of hand inherent in this composition relies on something psychologists call naive physics, or the assumptions that humans commonly make about the natural world around them that, while intuitive in some fundamental way, are not scientifically true. One classic example is the belief that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. It seems like it should be true. But it isn’t. Drop the armchair I’m sitting in and the cheap plastic pen behind my ear from the same height at the same time. They will hit the ground together.
Something similar is at work in these portraits of Venus. We assume she’s looking at herself because that’s what we see reflected in the glass. But the very fact that we see her face means that she doesn’t. A mirror bounces light off its surface at an angle complimentary to the angle at which it approached the glass. It’s like a bank shot in a game of pool. If I hit the cue ball toward the edge of the table at a ninety degree angle, it will bounce straight back toward me. But if I hit the ball toward the edge at a 45 degree angle, it will strike the rail and travel away from me at an angle of 135 degrees, the perfect reflection of the angle at which it approached.
When we free ourselves from naive physics and look again at these paintings, we realize that a viewer would only see what Venus does in the mirror if he were standing directly behind her. The fact that we stand slightly to one side yet see the goddess’s face means that the light from her features travels toward the mirror and bounces off toward us. If that is true, so is the reverse: the light from the viewer’s face travels toward the mirror and bounces off toward her.
She is looking at us.
I think that all good art is like a mirror held at an angle. Writers, when they work as artists, explore important ideas without looking at those ideas straight on. Moby Dick explores obsession through whaling. The Grapes of Wrath explores the human capacity for self sacrifice via the Great Depression. Dracula explores the conflict between science and religion using vampires. Memoirs take the self as their subject, but a good memoir is not merely about the self any more than these books are merely about whaling, or the dust bowl, or blood-sucking monsters. Any book that claims to be about whaling and is, in fact, only about whaling, might be a worthwhile book, but it is not art. Any memoir that begins and ends with the author’s psychology isn’t art either.
Take Lauren Slater’s great memoir Lying. On the surface, it is about the author as a young woman struggling with severe migraines and Munchausen’s syndrome. But Lying is also about epistemology. The author can’t trust her senses because the auras of her migraines cause her to smell and hear things that aren’t there. She can’t trust her mind because she has learned to use her migraine symptoms as a way out of trouble—often fooling doctors and herself. So how does she know what is real? What is reality and how is it proved? A good memoir moves beyond the self to something else. And like any artistic genre, memoir accomplishes this movement in a very specific way.
Which brings us back to Venus and her mirror. These paintings seduce us by letting us enter their world as a voyeur. We watch the goddess stare at her self, comb her hair, tilt her head. We think we’ve gone unnoticed. Then something in us quivers. We feel another set of eyes. When I realized Venus was looking at me, I felt suddenly vulnerable, the way anyone does when they notice the sustained, unreturned gaze of another. The prey instinct quickens, the intuitive knowledge that to be secretly looked at is a prelude to predation. And to field such a look from a goddess known not only for her jealousy but her wrath? She once turned a lover who spurned her into a shellfish. I squirm under her stare.
Memoirs enact a similar sleight of hand. They entice us with the promise of looking in on another’s life unobserved. When I picked up Lying almost ten years ago, I was curious about the strange synesthetic experiences of migraines, the psychological warpings of Munchausen’s. I read the first hundred pages in one day. Then I reached chapter 7:
I record my life, sifting and trying to separate what is real from what I’ve dreamed . . . Come with me reader. I am toying with you, yes, but for a real reason. I am asking you to enter the confusion with me, to give up the ground with me, because sometimes that frightening floaty place is really the truest of all.
I feel a gaze slowly turns toward me. The skin on the back of my neck stands on end.
I am so happy you are holding me in your hands. I am sitting far away from you, but when you turn the pages, I feel a flutter in me, and wings rise up.
She is watching me holding her memoir even now in my lap.
Together we will journey. We are disoriented, and all we ever really want is a hand to hold.
I am immobilized by the force of her stare. I thought I was reading about her life, but somewhere amid these pages, observing her struggles—her muddled reality, her loneliness—turned into recognizing my own. Don’t think I don’t know, she whispers from the page. I know how your dreams so often feel more real than reality, that you come from a long line of people—depressives, addicts, artists—who moved through a world different from what most people see. You crave the answers to this confusion as much as I. You feel so, so lonely. I nod mutely to the page. She leads me, obedient, to the next sentence, and the next.
Good art is a seduction game, one that conceals from the reader the danger she’s in until it’s too late. Slater promised herself to me as an object of curiosity, until there I was, naked as she before the glass.
So when I say I’m writing a memoir, I am committing the sin of hubris more than vanity. It is absurd what I’m doing, insane to imagine that putting these little words in lines on the page could ever cause another soul to tremble. But Venus caught me in her gaze long ago, and I’ve been trying for over ten years now to return it steadily.
Book recommendations!
I have to start by recommending Lauren Slater’s Lying. The book broke me in the best way in my early twenties. It feels like reading a story that is also a game of hide-and-go-seek in a hall of mirrors: the author appearing here and there only to disappear as soon as you turn around. It’s a delight, but also an incisive look at human psychology and the ways our brains can fool us.
Another book that has recently nailed me to the wall is Gregory Orr’s City of Salt. Take this individual poem “Self Portrait at Twenty” and tell me it doesn’t make you uneasy within yourself (in the best, tragic, human way). The collection explores the fact that at age 12, Orr shot and killed his brother in a hunting accident, a moment that would define his life and writing. The poems are haunting, tender, and absolutely unshrinking.
For a more companionable read, check out Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. I listened to the audiobook on a recent roadtrip and enjoyed every minute. Besides beautiful renderings of the American southwest and heartbreaking explorations of friendship, the book also offers a complex look at the life of a Catholic priest in the recently (and bloodily) acquired New Mexico Territory, populated mostly by Mexicans, Navajos, Pueblo tribes, and rough frontiersmen. What is moral action for a French priest in such a context? How do we do right by each other when history makes us uneasy neighbors in an unforgiving landscape?
I knew I should have picked up Death Comes for the Archbishop when I saw it in that used bookstore.
Reflection on reflection 🙂. Love it