Fernanda Eberstadt’s new non-fiction book, Bite Your Friends, Stories of the Body Militant is an unconventional memoir, if that is the right word for a book whose narrative focuses on figures she never knew yet who loom large as her heroes, such as Diogenes, the Ancient Greek philosopher, Christian martyrs Saint Perpetua and Saint Felicitas, French philosopher Michel Foucault, Italian author and filmmaker Pier Pasolini and Russian political artists such as Piotr Pavlensky and Nadya Tolokonnikova of puss* Riot. Not all of whom turn out to be saints.
Bite Your Friends is really a manifesto, a declaration of affinity for a certain aesthetic belonging to those outsiders who push back at normative society, even normative sexual identity. Eberstadt’s particular lens is, as her title states, the body militant: How these individuals’ own bodies became part of their artistic, spiritual and political practice. It is also about Eberstadt’s own reckoning in middle age, to rouse herself from complacency and to recommit to the life of the outsider.
The book’s cast of characters (and they are all characters) include the Greek philosopher Diogenes in all his filthy wildness; her mother Isabel, whose early death from kidney failure was a side effect of a mis-prescribed drug; artists Stephen Vrable, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, as well as Foucault, who all died of complications from AIDs; Pasolini, murdered in Rome’s backstreets; Pavlensky mutilating himself, and battering his wife; and Tolokonnikova of puss* Riot’s defiant performance in a Russian Orthodox Church. Eberstadt’s writing about these thinkers and artists is filled with empathy and written with a variety of strategies to bring us into their worlds – to see them anew with different eyes.
Eberstadt has made a life of taking the less expected path. Her father, Frederick, the son of a financier active in The New Deal, was a photographer who became a therapist late in life. Her mother, Isabel, was the daughter of the poet Ogden Nash, and was herself a novelist, journalist, socialite, and a star in Andy Warhol’s firmament.
As for Eberstadt, we learn that as a young girl at an elite private girls school in New York City, her best friend, met on the street in New York, was Stephen Varble, a transvestite performance artist almost twice her age. As a teenager, she circulated among the city’s demi-monde, not so much Alice though the looking glass as Heloise at the Mudd Club doing drugs. She feels betrayed when her breasts appear, changing how men look at her, and how they act towards her.
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If not wise beyond her years, she is preternaturally intelligent (although she never says so, it is obvious). Rather than the Ivy League, she attends Oxford, then returns to New York where she plunges into the highest rungs of then neocon society, studies to convert to Orthodox Judaism, while writing several well-received novels and magazine pieces for The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books among others.
I knew her then and liked her a lot. She had a fresh intelligence that could mix high and low, the sacred and the profane, what was right and what was left, with great charm.
She then escaped to Europe, and married an Englishman, with whom she raised their two children. They lived in a remote part of France where she befriended the local Roma and wrote a brilliant non-fiction work about a family of Roma musicians. More novels (five in all) and a collection of essays followed as well as a steady series of articles, profiles, essays. She then lived in London and remains rooted in Europe.
Ebserstadt has lived a self-invented life, a life of the mind and of words, a life of observing and reporting about others. Is this why she so admires those who put their bodies on the line, literally and figuratively? And now, at a moment when her children are adult, and she is just a decade younger than the age at which her mother died, she wants us to know who she is and what she admires. She describes herself in the continuum of her mother and those she profiles in the book as:
Í’ve fallen into the-lady of leisure routine that nearly killed my mother, that stopped my mother writing, that her into her blackest self-loathing, except that the version I’ve fallen into is a duller version – no Truman Capote masked balls, no Jack Smith transvestite orgies on the beach —_I don’t know how to face the world I’m not a boy a writer a mother a gladiator a Christian pagan Jew a Lower East Side drag queen in ostrich feathers chased by White gangs with broken bottles if I’m not a hermaphrodite with a heart of fire philosopher in skin tight white bell-bottoms looking out at Death Valley acid tears streaming down his cheeks saying: This is my limit-experience; this is my happy day.”
At a time when the Stoics and Marcus Aurelius crowd the bestseller lists, Eberstadt proposes a different ancient philosopher as her Virgil: Diogenes.
Diogenes, often called “the Cynic,” was the enfant terrible of the ancient world, disdaining societal norms, wealth, influence. His followers delighted in committing shameful acts in public. They were the anarchists, the sexual outlaws of their time. Diogenes is the patron saint of outsiders. He is the wild Id that Eberstadt celebrates.
Diogenes, to Eberstadt, is the teller of truth. She writes that she imagines “a female Diogenes come to ridicule and disrupt a society of cosmetic perfection, artificial youthfulness, erasure.”
In narrating Pasolini’s life, and how he accommodated his seemingly bourgeois status with his railing against capitalism, Eberstadt explains: “Pasolini’s answer to his fellow writers is, “Where are you hiding? Writers have a duty to go out in into the world and tell the truth of what they see. I’m the same as you, he says: I have a pleasant bourgeois life, surrounded by books and movies and clever like-minded friends. But because of his compulsions, he’s “Dr. Hyde”: he has this other life that takes him down into hell every night, and he can see the disaster that’s coming for them all.”
In considering how Foucault, Pasolini, as well as Saint Perpetua and Saint Felicitas’ bodies became sources of protest, resistance, courage and damnation, Eberstadt writes: “I think about the scarred body and the scarred soul in a different way now. I’ve been learning from my mad-dog heroes…. Together they form a prophetic fellowship of sisters and brothers saying, ‘If we can do this, you can do it too.”
The Clash asked: Should I stay or should I go? In Bite Your Friends, Eberstadt is mustering the call to know when “to transform a stigma into triumph” and “When it’s okay to sit and watch and when it’s time to get in the ring.”
Despite all this, probably because of all this, Bite Your Friends, is a work where Eberstadt attempts to truly see her mother, and catch her own reflection in her.
This paragraph by her mother, quoted in the book, could just as easily have been written by Eberstadt herself about one of her idols:
I had been close friends with Jack for two years at that time, and our relationship had gone through many stages, all intense. When I first saw Flaming Creatures, I felt I had found the person I had been looking for all my life. I had always been drawn to people who were intelligent misfits, breakers of rules, and disrupters of what I felt was a depressingly conventional social order. Most of these people I loved were very unhappy, despite their bravado. My deepest desire was to help them express their most outrageous fantasies and understand that they could be admired and loved just as they were. When I saw Jack’s bunch of grotesques and how he made them shine, I thought he could change the world.
From my own late age vantage point, I have observed that many of us spend the first halves of our lives doing everything we can to be as different as we can from our parents. And then at a certain point in middle age, the realization hits us: We are our parents. The effect of this is, as Eberstadt grapples with bridging the gap between her and her mother, is not resignation but rather empowerment by knowing who she is and what she believes in.
In Bite Your Friends, Eberstadt makes the case that those explorations of the extreme by outsiders are a necessary corrective to society and humanity, dragging all of us to a more vital existence.
Although in many ways her pedigree and accomplishments would make of her an insider, Eberstadt never wants to feel too comfortable – she wants, she needs it seems, to be an outsider. It is where she feels most at home.
