I saw Beyoncé at Wembley last weekend and, while I don’t want to overstate the issue, it would be fair to say that the experience changed my life. In two ways, anyway. The first was that I at last accepted I have no idea what to do with my body while watching live music. Has anyone sussed this? The only options, it seems, are to sing along (not an option, mating foxes have better singing voices than me); be one of those people who demands a 10-yard radius so they can express themselves through the medium of interpretive dance (again, not an option for a woman whose dance moves were once mistaken for physical pain); do what Harry in When Harry Met Sally describes as “the white man’s overbite”, which is biting your lower lip while moving vaguely from side to side. That is the most popular option, albeit not the most satisfying, and I believe this is why so many white people have to get drunk after watching live music so as to achieve a delayed sense of release. That was my explanation for returning home at 2am completely drunk – drunk mainly on the female artistry I’d just seen, of course. But also: vodka.
The second way it changed my life was that I saw a 21st-century woman using her life in her work in a way that did not make me want to punch myself in the head. Beyoncé has long been seen as a curiously discreet celebrity, which, given that she makes videos about how much sex she and her equally famous husband have, courtesy of his “surfboard”, says a lot about how much female artists are expected to reveal of themselves, so that fans feel “a connection”. For her most recent album, Lemonade, Beyoncé has made an entire pop opera about what sounds very much like her husband’s infidelity. All of this was, of course, on display at Wembley, as enraged songs about betrayal were interspersed with videos of Bey’n’Jay. I resent the modern message that tells women to use their personal lives in their work, so I should have hated it. I did not.
We are living in the era of the confessional, specifically the female confessional, from the frequently self-exploitative blogs on US website xojane.com (I’m Not Attracted To My Husband; I’m Glad My Friend Died) to the non-fiction section of your local bookshop, which has a new female memoir nigh on every week. I suspect that a large part of the interest surrounding the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard has to do with his gender, an anomaly in what is now seen as a female-centric field of writing about one’s neuroses and family life.
Some of my favourite books could be classed as fictionalised female memoirs – Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, Joan Didion’s The Year Of Magical Thinking – but with their rigorous self-control they are a long way from the self-exposure we have now, a form of writing that is defined by hysterical narcissism with diminishing returns, a form of self-prostitution.
All of my female writer friends have been encouraged to “bring some of yourself into the piece”, ideally their children or lack of, their body image or their love life. Almost none of my male writer friends have experienced this. And I get it: personal stories attract more readers (and, crucially, internet hits) than dry argument. People enjoy few things more than vilifying a woman’s private life; once someone opens a window into hers, the cathartic bloodletting can commence.
Defenders see it as a feminist act rather than an anxious self-sacrifice. “There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman,” Lena Dunham writes in her memoir, Not That Kind Of Girl. And sure, you can look at the female memoir that way. Alternatively, you can say that this emphasis on the confessional is telling women that their stories are the only thing they have the authority to write about. Thus, it becomes part of the current mood of anti-intellectualism, in which educated analysis is dismissed as elitist and inferior to personal conviction; knowledge is nothing, feeling is all.
And yet, Beyoncé. Like Plath, Ephron and Didion, Beyoncé’s credentials were well established before she turned to the personal, and so she looks like a woman who is controlling her story and at the top of her game, as opposed to giving it away right at the beginning. After all, if you start by showing us everything, where do you go from there? Contrary to the message of one of Beyoncé’s earliest songs, which she sang last weekend, women have more to offer than just Me, Myself and I.
