She Wants It Review

No One Wants It | Affidavit 11/8/18, 10:33 AM
Contributors Archive About Subscribe Follow Search
No One
Wants It
Andrea Long Chu

November 5, 2018
Submit
As a lightweight behind-
the-scenes look at a
critically acclaimed
television series, Jill
Soloway’s new memoir She
Wants It: Desire, Power, and
Toppling the Patriarchy is
just south of worth
purchasing at the airport.
As a book about desire,
Crown Archetype
power, or toppling the
patriarchy, it is
incompetent, defensive,
https://www.affidavit.art/articles/no-one-wants-it Page 1 of 23
and astonishingly clueless.
This is a story about

someone who responds to
criticisms of her TV show
by taking “a glamping
writers’ retreat” to El
Capitan: “We had a
shaman come. She did
magic incantations as we
lay on the floor of a yurt.” It
is an unwitting portrait of a
rich Los Angeles creative
type with a child’s knack
for exploiting the
sympathies of others, a
person whose deep fear of
doing the wrong thing was
regularly outmatched by an
even deeper distaste for
doing the right thing. The
nicest thing that can be
said of this oblivious, self-
absorbed, unimportant
book is that it proves, once
and for all, that trans
people are fully, regrettably
human.
The substance of She Wants
It, such as it is, concerns

the author’s time working
on the show Transparent,
whose premise—a Jewish
transgender woman comes
out late in life to her adult
children, throwing the
whole Pfefferman family
into disarray—was drawn
from Soloway’s own
experience as the child of a
late-transitioning trans
woman. In 2014, back when
the words “Amazon original
series” made as much
sense as the words “Jim
Carrey solo exhibition,”
Soloway, then a married
mother of two, could
believably protest to Rolling
Stone that the show’s
explorations of gender and
sexuality were “not really
autobiographical.”
But as this book confirms,

Soloway’s life has rapidly
imitated her art. Like Sarah
Pfefferman, she would
leave her husband for a
woman; like Josh

Pfefferman, she would
become a successful
entertainment industry
player, in douchebag
shades and trousers with
kicks; like Ali Pfefferman,
she would date a
celebrated lesbian poet
and experiment with a
nonbinary gender. Soloway
now identifies as trans and
answers to both she and
they pronouns, telling CBS
This Morning, “She is fine;
when people say she and
her, I don’t correct them,
but when people say they
and them, it’s like frosting.”
Consider this review a
muffin.
The truth is, Soloway

appears to know little more
about trans people now
than when she began
production on Transparent.
She Wants It suggests that
when she wrote the show’s
pilot, Soloway thought of
trans women like her

parent as little more than
crossdressing men, and
the lessons conducted by
writer and series
consultant Jennifer Finney
Boylan (and subsequently
trotted out by Soloway on
her book tour) are
appallingly basic:
The word “trans” is Latin for

“bridge,” she taught us next.
Then she wrote the word
“transbrella” on the
whiteboard. “Not everyone is
at one end of the spectrum or
the other,” she explained.
“People use the word trans to
refer to all kinds of people,
including drag queens, butch
lesbians, and genderqueer
folks, who metaphorically
stand on the bridge, in the
middle, rather than using it to
cross from one side to the
other.
As far as I can tell, the

hideous portmanteau
transbrella is of Soloway’s
own inventing. (Boylan
likely used the usual term
trans umbrella.) “Bridge,”
meanwhile, is a spurious
translation of the Latin
word trans, which is a
common preposition
meaning “across.”
Evidently no one at
Random House could be
bothered to crack open the
old Wheelock. Do bridges
go across things? They do.
May one go across a
bridge? Reader, this cannot
be denied. But I hope, for
Boylan’s sake at least, that
the Transparent team was
told that trans may be
thought of as being like a
bridge, for pedagogical
purposes. This would have
been a metaphor, a word
which comes from the
Greek metaphero, meaning
“I carry across”—for
instance, across a bridge.
None of this matters,
because Jill Soloway lives

in a world where the words
“radical trans” can be
followed, without a hint of
irony, by the word
“content.” Her production
company Topple, which
featured prominently in a
recent, glowing New York
Times profile, models its
core tenets after Amazon’s
corporate leadership
principles. (Number 2 is
“Be Chill.”) In Soloway’s
voice, one finds the worst
of grandiose Seventies-era
conceits about the
transformative power of
the avant-garde guiltlessly
hitched to a yogic West
Coast startup mindset that
speaks in terms of
“holding space” and
“heart-connection.” It’s like
if Peter Thiel were gay.
But self-importance alone

could never guarantee
writing this atrocious.
Narcissism can be wildly
compelling in the hands of

a professional. That this is
the prose of a celebrated
television auteur may be
explained only if one
recalls that TV writing,
unlike the art of memoir, is
a group effort. The narrator
of She Wants It is a Gen Xer
in millennial drag:
precious, out of touch, and
exceedingly prone to
The Principles of Soloway's Topple
Productions
bathos. Without a second
thought, she rattles off
lines like “I woke up with a
Zen koan in my head” and
“I decided I would have to
have an interesting life if I
ever wanted to be like Jack
Kerouac.” The following is
an actual sentence: “As we
all took over the bowling
alley, the sheer variety of
the ways to be queer and
alive in Los Angeles in 2014
exploded my mind.”
Soloway introduces deep-

sounding quotes from
other authors like a
middle-schooler phoning
in a Kate Chopin paper. She
mixes metaphors like a
bartender in a recording
studio. An urge to break up
becomes “that anxiety
snowball racing down the
mountain at my back that I
inherited from my mom.”
Can snow be bequeathed?
She lovingly refers to her
sister Faith as “actual
liquid faith,” a figure of
speech which, being
presumably analogous to
the common nickname for
alcohol, would only make
sense if her sister were in
fact a beverage. Also,
fragments.
Throughout She Wants It,

Soloway alternates,
confusingly, between
contradictory sites of
gender enunciation. One
moment, she will wax
poetic about “not having to
choose” a binary identity
(“How would it be if
everybody saw pure soul

before gender?”); the next,
she will breezily reference
“our lives,” “our bodies,”
“our interests” as women.
There exist intelligent
attempts to think through
contradictions like these
(Laurie Penny’s work
comes to mind), but this is
not one of them. Readers
would be forgiven for
thinking Soloway a fair-
weather woman: female
when it’s culturally
advantageous to be female,
and not, when it’s not.
The ethics of gender

recognition, now more than
ever, compel us to accept
without contest or
prejudice the self-
identification of all people.
They do not, however,
compel us to find those
identities likable,
interesting, or worth
writing a book about.
Soloway certainly makes it
easy to believe the

longstanding charge that
she sees trans people as
creative oil to be fracked.
“Something about my
parent coming out
immediately shattered a
wall,” Soloway writes early
on in She Wants It. “She was
being her true self, a
woman. Now I could be my
true self, a director.” If the
circumstances of her shiny
new gender are, shall we
say, suspect—the
cisgender creator of a
television show about
trans issues, long criticized
for presuming to speak for
trans people, comes out as
trans herself—all we need
remember is that being
trans because you want the
attention doesn’t make you
“not really” trans; it just
makes you annoying.
Over and over, Soloway

worries if she has made a
wrong turn, before plowing
ahead regardless. Over and

over, she anxiously seeks
the counsel of others, only
to blithely ignore it. She
has regrets, but never
remorse: the problem is
not that she has made a
poor decision, but that
someone else has gotten
offended. Before Transparent
goes to series, Jenny
Boylan warns that Soloway
will face “a fair amount of
blowback” for casting
Jeffrey Tambor as a
transgender woman. When
an audience member
raises this very objection
at a festival, Soloway cries.
“My God,” she writes, “I
hadn’t been expecting
this.” (Boylan has called
She Wants It “provocative,
generous, and inspiring.”)
When Soloway gets a Ziony

itch to film season four of
Transparent in Israel—“I
don’t have a lot of things in
common with Jared
Kushner, but low-grade

Jerusalem Syndrome
might be one”—the writer
Sarah Schulman cautions
that breaking with the
Palestinian-led boycott
movement will put the
show in hot water with
many queer activists.
“Ugh,” writes Soloway. “I
was so annoyed. How did I
get stuck in this very
narrow place of being
forced to choose?”
(Bafflingly, this is a
callback to Soloway’s
description of being
nonbinary.) Eventually, she
buckles, filming the season
on the Paramount lot—
before taking a small crew
to Israel to shoot B-roll.
Soloway will later refer to
this solution,
incomprehensibly, as “our
Israel compromise.”
(Schulman has called She
Wants It “a rollicking tale of
how an enmeshed family
sometimes brings out the
best.”)
But nothing is more

cringeworthy than
Soloway’s account of the
#MeToo movement, with
which the book (and
indeed, Transparent itself)
Transparent's Maura (Jeffrey Tambor) at
concludes. “Two years after
the Wailing Wall.
I’d yelled ‘Topple the
patriarchy!’ onstage, it all
indeed came tumbling
down,” marvels Soloway,
breathlessly equating the
firing of several famous
men with the end of a
regime as old as history
itself. Our author often
appears to believe she can
take history’s pulse by
glancing at her own Fitbit.
Here she is reeling from the

2016 election: “We thought
we had power, but no,
actually, we were this thing
—this Other Thing called
Women, and we could be
silenced, disregarded, with
a vote.” (Never mind that
for every nine women who

voted for Clinton, there
were seven who voted for
Trump.) Now here she is
attending early Time’s Up
meetings with Reese
Witherspoon, Ava
DuVernay, and other
celebrities: “I went home
overflowing. The revolution
was happening.” It seems
never to occur to Soloway
that she might be
conflating global upheaval
with a sudden influx of rich
and famous friends.
All this is damage control,

of course, for Soloway’s
own scandal. If She Wants It
has any purpose, it is to
exculpate its author in the
matter of Jeffrey Tambor,
who in November 2017 was
accused by his former
personal assistant Van
Barnes and his ex-costar
Trace Lysette—both trans
women—of on-set sexual
harassment. At this, it fails
miserably. Indeed, it comes

as no surprise that
Soloway’s leap into
Transparent was “powered
by a wild jealousy of Louis
C.K. and Lena Dunham,”
both acclaimed creators of
television shows in which
they played unlikable,
narcissistic versions of
themselves, only to be
revealed as unlikable
narcissists in real life.
Neither escaped #MeToo

unscathed. The same
month as the Tambor
allegations, the Times
reported on C.K.’s penchant
for jacking off in front of
female coworkers. Days
later, when actress Aurora
Perrineau accused Girls
writer Murray Miller of
rape, Dunham issued a
confident statement of
support—for Miller. On
Twitter, she appeared to
defend herself: “I believe in
a lot of things but the first
tenet of my politics is to
hold up the people who
have held me up, who have
filled my world with love.”
This is what omertà would
sound like if you bought it
for $79.99 on Etsy.
If a Mafia analogy seems

crude to you, hold that
thought. “I needed to find
out why she was going
straight to the press with
her story, to understand
why she hadn’t come to
us,” Soloway writes of
Lysette. “We could handle
this, I wanted to tell her,
but let us do it internally,
inside the family.” Soloway
is never so sulky as in
these pages, pouting about
her “legacy” and losing any
lingering ability to
complete sentences: “If
Trace released a statement,
it would be over for Jeffrey.
And that meant Maura. The
show. Our TV family.
Everything.” In a climactic,
chapter-ending scene,
Soloway parlays with
Lysette at a Coffee Bean
picnic table. “I can’t believe
you’re doing this,” she tells
the actress. “Well, it
happened to me,” Lysette
coolly replies. What
happens next is so
incredible that I must
quote it at length:
“I had to tell my story,” she

said. “But I said in my
statement that I wanted the
show to continue.”
“But the idea of the show will
be tarnished now in
everyone’s minds,” I said. “In
Middle America when people
think of trans people there’s
still so much suspicion, and
Maura became this beautiful
symbol of transness and now
you’re laying this imagery out
there of her being a predator.”
Suddenly, I started crying.
She was horrified.
“I’m the victim here and
YOU’RE crying?” she
demanded.
She was right. I was sitting
across from her, frozen with
fear. I tried to stop myself
from crying. Like Michael in
The Godfather, I tried to play
it stoic and cool. I didn’t say,
Fredo, after all I’ve done for
you. I said, “I wish you luck.”
And then I walked away.
An hour later the article came
out.
Set aside the fact that

Trace Lysette, a former sex
worker whose pampered
male costar gleefully told
her he wanted to “attack
[her] sexually,” is obviously
a much more accurate
symbol of transness than
wealthy professor emerita
Maura Pfefferman ever
was. What’s truly shocking
is that, presented with the
opportunity, and I’m being
completely serious here, to
lie, or at least fudge the
truth, Soloway once again
nukes herself without even
noticing, gravely
comparing a sexual
harassment victim to the
fictional character Fredo
Corleone from The Godfather
Part II, the Oscar-winning
1974 crime film at the end
of which, if you’ll recall,
Fredo was literally executed
for betraying Al Pacino.
The only conclusion to be

drawn from this very bad
book, which puts the “self”
in “self-aware,” is that Jill
Soloway has an
unstoppable, pathological
urge to tell on herself. In
fact, it’s all she’s ever done.
If autofiction like Girls,
Louie, or Transparent teaches
us anything, it’s that there
is no better disguise than
one’s own face. Midway
through She Wants It, while
prepping three different
Emmy acceptance
speeches, Soloway
wonders if she suffers from
a “delusion of grandeur,”
before dismissing the

phrase as a diagnosis for
“cis white guys.” “Is it
delusional to try to suggest
to yourself that it is okay to
believe you might be
magnificent when the
world raised you to mostly
admire men, to reserve
grandiosity or genius only
for them?” she asks.
If the question is, “Can

women and queers be
pretentious assholes?”, She
Wants It holds the answer.
Info & Credits Related Articles

Written by Andrea Long Chu
Images courtesy Crown Archetype, Topple
Productions, Amazon
Published on November 5, 2018
Girls' Room M.I.A. and the

Share this Article Defense of
Thea Ballard
Twitter Nuance
Facebook Fariha Róisín
Google+
Email
People vs. patterns. Difference within sameness. Distinctions

without a difference. Dramatizing known unknowns. Finessing
the photo-finish. The sportswriter’s cruel lament.
— Cultural Counsel
Contributors
Archive
About
Subscribe
Follow
Search
affidavit@culturalcounsel.com 15 Maiden Lane, Suite 1000, New York, NY 10038

She Wants It Review

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

She Wants It Review

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

No One Wants It | Affidavit 11/8/18, 10:33 AM

Contributors Archive About Subscribe Follow Search

Andrea Long Chu

and astonishingly clueless.

This is a story about

The substance of She Wants

It, such as it is, concerns

But as this book confirms,

woman; like Josh

The truth is, Soloway

trans women like her

The word “trans” is Latin for

As far as I can tell, the

None of this matters,

because Jill Soloway lives

But self-importance alone

compelling in the hands of

Soloway introduces deep-

Throughout She Wants It,

everybody saw pure soul

The ethics of gender

easy to believe the

Over and over, Soloway

ahead regardless. Over and

When Soloway gets a Ziony

Kushner, but low-grade

But nothing is more

Here she is reeling from the

for every nine women who

All this is damage control,

miserably. Indeed, it comes

Neither escaped #MeToo

If a Mafia analogy seems

“I had to tell my story,” she

Set aside the fact that

The only conclusion to be

before dismissing the

If the question is, “Can

Info & Credits Related Articles

Girls' Room M.I.A. and the

People vs. patterns. Difference within sameness. Distinctions

affidavit@culturalcounsel.com 15 Maiden Lane, Suite 1000, New York, NY 10038

You might also like