Oh, sweet Georgia Brown, this book was execrable. First, I have to explain why I checked it out of the library. It was just after I had finished doing all my grading for the semester and I was supposed to be home, hard at work on my own writing and research, but I had a book due back to the library so I grunged my way out the door looking not very well put together and, of course, the first person I see at the library is one of my former students. So I got so busy trying to look respectable and like the sort of person who should be assigning grades that I lost all ability to browse. I just wandered over into the Dewey Decimal 300s (Social Sciences) and picked this book up. I also checked out “The Naked Lady who Stood on Her Head” (by a psychiatrist about some of his more unusual patients) so it was clear from the beginning that things were not going to go well.
But this book. Jeez. I’m sure that the author is a perfectly fine matchmaker and that her clients are happy. I’m positive that she knows more about dating than me – although there are rudimentary life forms that haven’t figured out respiration that know more about dating than me. But by fifty pages in, it was clear to me that all of the things that she loves about herself are things that I hate about her. Which is to say, she comes across to me as a dreadful human being who is proud of all the things that make her dreadful. Her premise is that she’s only going to work with people who are “socially adept and desirable” – according to her standards, of course, which means wealthy, mainly. One of the early meetings she describes is with a client who, during their first meeting, explains that he’s an FTM. Now, understandably, this might be a challenge for a matchmaker, but she presents this story as a horrific tragedy for her: “What was I supposed to do, send around an e-mail to my conservative, mainstream crowd in New York and ask if anyone was interested in going out with a guy who used to be a girl, used to have a vagina, and now has a penis and wants to have sex with women?” Well, yes. That would kind of be the reason he went to a matchmaker.
She barrels through the book, describing the people she’s trying to set up and the mistakes they make, and how she helps. Perhaps the most maddening part is how she talks about her own relationships. She’s the queen of the complaint/brag: I’ve got the worst ex! He sends me first class tickets to Paris for the weekend because he can’t live without me, but he wasn’t ready to commit so it’s just awful! Then this ex calls to tell her he’s in therapy, and invites her to go to therapy with him. She does, for a few months, then sleeps with him and when he doesn’t call the next day she decides she’s through with him and leaves him an angry message. She calls the therapist and the therapist talks her into one last session, for closure, but when she shows up, the therapist isn’t there and the ex has filled the room with flowers and is proposing. She says no, which is fine, but the whole story is clearly a fabrication. What licensed therapist would participate in tricking a client, or even a client’s significant other, into coming down to their office for a surprise proposal? So, then, she’s decided to present this fictional story here either because that’s legitimately how she believes things happens, or because she thinks it presents her in some fabulous light. Very troubling. Of course, this is at the end of the book, at which point I already kind of hated her.
All of which leaves the question of why I read to the end of the book, to which I have no good answer other than I was procrastinating about editing my own work, and it’s much more satisfying to loathe someone else’s writing than to loathe one’s own.
