Book Review: Dessa - My Own Devices

Dessa's songs are often the most lyrically interesting on each Doomtree album, and the direct connections between her life and her music means that it's not really surprising that this book is so good. The way she picks big topics (what does it mean to be in love with someone? if you could get rid of that love, would you?), neatly expresses them in poetic apothegms, and then wraps them in compelling narratives is right in line with her songwriting style, so if you're a big fan of her on the stage, she won't disappoint on the page. An unhappy love affair is one of the oldest and most compelling stories in the world, and though she's very analytical and contemplative about this huge part of her life, she's never less than heartfelt, even as her mission is to extract a still-beating piece of that heart and cauterize it so that she can never be hurt by it again. She's always perceptive, cheerfully nerding out over her latest insight or discovery, and able to make even the most mundane account of meeting someone interesting by way of a sharp eye for telling detail. No Doomtree fan should miss this.

Not every piece in here is related to her primary subject either chronologically or thematically, but it's the main story that's of course the most interesting: what was it like to fall in love with the person who also recruited you into the band that's defined your identity for decades, unhappily orbit that person romantically for many years, and then be so desperate to free yourself from the moth-flame lethality of obsession that you resort to experimental brainwave feedback therapy to reprogram your neurons to make it stop? Fascinatingly, even though essentially the entire book is about P.O.S., whenever Dessa is discussing their on again/off again relationship, she always quasi-superstitiously refers to him as "X" (as in, "I moved to New York to put some distance between me and my X"), which gives the whole tale of limerance an interesting not-quite-confessional air, of honesty with a very specific limit. At one point, she discusses her attitude towards vulnerability: "In the lyrics and the essays I write, I blow most of the doors open. It's not that I have a particular interest in confessional art - it's just that true stories are boring if you skip all the embarrassing bits." She mentions that P.O.S. gave his approval to her writing about him (and throughout she is unfailingly gracious and at worst merely melancholic towards him), so her distancing from him via a pseudonym for a pseudonym! is all the more notable.

Of course, "confessional" writing is a fiercely contested genre, with part of the contest being whether it exists as a distinct classification at all. Writing in a diary isn't like writing a LiveJournal, which isn't like writing a weekly column, which isn't like writing a book, even though all are different formats in which someone can commit their intimate thoughts to a place where someone else can read them. And in all of those formats, it's perfectly possible to capture thoughts which aren't "confessional" at all, in the sense of unburdening yourself or of revealing a secret. Maybe this blurring of typology goes back to Montaigne, or maybe it's more a product of modern technologies (Jia Tolentino once wrote a good piece titled "The Personal Essay Boom Is Over" in the New Yorker about the rise and fall of the "first-personal industrial complex"), but in Dessa's hands, a piece of her life is never just a straightforward memoir or travelogue, it's an opportunity to make a philosophical connection, puzzle over a problem, or just explore a cool metaphor. In "The Mirror Test", for example, one of the side chapters, she smoothly relates lipstick application, self-recognition in animals, our resemblance to our parents, lucid dreaming, drug-induced memory loss, harmonized singing, whether makeup hides, reveals, or highlights beauty, the dissolving sense of self during psychedelic episodes, selfies, what it's like to hear her mother sing, and which characteristics of ourselves might carry over into heaven. A worse writer would make those connections feel mannered and artificial; in Dessa's hands they're just different facets of the same intuitive gem.

Maybe another aspect of the confessional writing question is whether the end result is supposed to be generalizable or broadly relevant in some way. People LOVE advice columns, or dating stories, or mindless romantic reality TV shows, not just for the gossip, or for the cultural evolutionary benefits of seeing others' mistakes in the hopes of not making them yourself, but because expressions of universal feelings are an ideal way to experience connections to someone else in a way we're all hungry for. It might be true, as Dessa said, that confessional art necessarily involves personal embarrassment; another way of looking at it might be that it's actually honesty and vulnerability that truly interest us, and as George Orwell once said, "A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats." Seen in that light, Dessa's use of Helen Fisher's writing on romantic attraction and a complicated MRI-based biofeedback sonic system to medically remove her attraction to P.O.S. presents a real question to the reader: is this whole sequence either a profound failure to cope with the pains of love, or a triumph over personal limitations? At what point do (unfortunately all-too-relatable) feelings of lovesadness shade into a liability, and is there actually anything wrong with doing whatever it takes to get them to go away? Assuming that "the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference" is actually true, shouldn't we be celebrating this science-fictional triumph over malfunctioning neurochemistry, or should we actually be expecting Dessa's future artistic output to be less resonant now that one of the main wellsprings of her material is gone? In "The Fool That Bets Against Me", she hilariously explores the idea of getting her talent for turning sadness into songs insured; should that hypothetical claim now be denied?

By the end of the book, the treatment has by Dessa's account worked splendidly, and she seemingly has the best of all worlds: moving on with her romantic life, continuing to produce art, and retaining fond feelings for P.O.S. Most people probably don't have her sanguine affection for her X with their own exes, anger or indifference being far more common, but even a singularly drastic experiment like hers is still useful to the less-obsessed or less-radical reader out there. I've been listening to Doomtree since 2012, so not nearly as long as more hardcore fans, yet I'm still intrigued by how she's made her personal journey part of her artistic evolution, and I'll keep reading and listening.