There are a lot of horrifying yet quotidian experiences that fiction rarely depicts. This book is full of them. But its narrator isn’t trying to shock or disgust you, or to provoke your sympathy. She is simply describing: incest, bulimia, pro beach volleyball. We sent this book to our literary hero Chris Kraus because we thought it might be up her alley. She sent this blurb: “What is shocking and most enlivening about Adrienne Eisen’s Making Scenes is not what she reveals, but her attitude towards what she reveals. The book is boundary-breaking not for any transgressive content – and I guess there’s a lot, especially if you consider the bulimia-fest – but because she is aloof from that content. Women are not supposed to do that. Eisen offers a refreshing personal nihilism in stark contrast to repentant Bad Girl sagas. Reading her I thought of Celine (the writer, not Celine Dion) and Camus.”
I would only add that I find the narrator’s voice very charming and likeable and that she has a sense of humor, which prevents things from getting too horrific to keep reading.
"Maybe it will be good to remember the feeling of being alone. I’m always running around telling everyone how important it is for people to be alone for a while, which is weird because the only thing I learned while living alone was that I hate myself."
-Adrienne Eisen, Making Scenes
