Book Review of "Live Through This"

Bitch Magazine, Fall 2008

Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction
Sabrina Chapadjiev, ed. {seven stories press}
From Virginia Woolf to Frida Kahlo to Sylvia Plath to Courtney Love, the popular imagination has long been captivated by the figure of the creative but tortured female. In the preface of the new anthology Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction, editor Sabrina Chapadjiev admits to her own propensity to connect creativity with self-destruction, writing, “It got to the point where it became logical: If a woman was fiercely intelligent, outspoken, and passionate, I’d look towards her arms for the
scars. They were almost always there.”
The 16 essays and visuals that make up Live Through This plumb the depths of out-of- control lives, examining how self-destruction functions as both a hindrance and a productive challenge. Unlike what Hollywood would have us believe about them, the contributors—artists, writers, and musicians—are neither weak nor one-dimensional. Live Through This explores the experiences and results of mental illness, drug addiction, and self-mutilation, but also digs into their root causes. Through prose and rhyme, Toni Blackman ties her childhood fatherlessness to an abusive adult relationship; elsewhere, Stephanie Howell recounts her teenage attempts to lose weight through a combination of starvation and excessive exercise, succumbing to societal ideals of how a young woman should look.
Several of the essays touch on the idea of solidarity, offering examples of the support systems that seem so lacking in popular representations of destructive, creative women. In one, a playwright mentors a girl struggling with anorexia; in another, a dance teacher and former cutter tries to help a self-mutilating student without breaking the student-teacher
code of conduct. In “Double Trouble in the Love Art Lab: Our Breast Cancer Experiments,” Annie Sprinkle and her partner, Elizabeth Stephens, document the physical destruction imposed by the former’s battle with breast cancer. When Sprinkle’s hair begins to fall out, they both shave their heads, symbolically fighting the cancer together.
The anthology’s contributors work in a variety of media, including portraiture and comics. Cristy C. Road illustrates her tale about cocaine addiction and artistic release with black-ink drawings in which she is shown partying, snorting, making art, and literally sewing her heart back together. Diane DiMassa contributes a comic story about anger—ostensibly an assignment from her therapist—that features tempestuous interpersonal exchanges. (“Listen you! I’ve been a junkie for the past ten years! Can you please use smaller words?” her cartoon manifestation yells at someone evaluating her comic.) And photographer Nan Goldin’s set of four self-portraits includes one that pictures the artist circa 1984, a “month after being battered,” and another that is simply described as “at the bottom.”
If Live Through This has one drawback, it’s a lack of analysis of why so many creative women take refuge in harming themselves. Many of the essayists point to societal issues—rigid beauty standards, a pathological focus on suc-cess, sexual abuse—as fuel for their own self-directed harm, but these remain loose, unconnected threads. In a society where madmen are called geniuses and creative women are considered crazy, it seems crucial to examine our romance with female self-destruction.

—dea goblirsch