“If you’ve ever spent any time around seriously ambitious people,” writes Elisa Albert, “you know that they are very often some of the unhappiest crazies alive, forever rooting around for more, having a hard time with basics like breathing and eating and sleeping, forever trying to cover some hysterical imagined nakedness.”
The Snarling Girl, Albert’s latest collection of essays, is a hodgepodge of collected work. But if the book has one loosely defined throughline, it’s ambition. Or, more specifically, learning to let go of it. By offering a glimpse into Albert’s inner life through a decade’s worth of magazine assignments, the book narrates a once-spunky writer’s transition to middle age.
By the time the book begins Albert, mainly known for her novels and short stories, is using the occasion of commissioned nonfiction to look backward and offer advice to younger readers and writers. Mainly, that it’s better to learn to temper one’s ego than to miss out on a functional life in pursuit of some always-distant ideal. In the collection’s titular essay, Albert concedes that writers often fulfill a stereotype: neurotic, self-defeating, and relentlessly competitive. The “imagined nakedness” that drives them is a double-edged sword, she explains: it’s a fire that can propel writers through grueling rounds of drafts and revisions, yet left unchecked, can also leave them bitter, and stuck with a permanent chip on their shoulder about the often random successes enjoyed by contemporaries. Albert positions herself as one of the lucky ones—a middle-aged writer who ran through the gauntlet of youth-related insecurities and survived. Someone whose expertise should be heeded.
What Albert offers next is a laundry list of writing-related anecdotes not-quite hedged by self-deprecating humor. There’s the story about losing sleep over all the critical buzz (good and bad) when her first book came out. She recalls offering an “abridged CV” to half-interested acquaintances at dinner parties, only to finally pique their interest when name-dropping her publishing house. Later, she groans about the superficial and transactional relationships that were oh-so-common in Los Angeles, where she grew up, and recalls being horrified when she realized—gasp!—that there are shitty, status-obsessed people in New York, too. This sort of mythos-making, writerly origin story tends to be grating even in the hands of the surest essayists. Here, given Albert’s tone—which comes off less “love yours” than holier-than-thou—it’s full-on irritating. By the last section, Albert describes showing an early draft of these very ideas to a “trusted advisor.” The advisor’s feedback? That the essay sounds arrogant. “‘Try and be more vulnerable,’ he said. ‘You’ll come across better.”
Albert doesn’t take the advisor’s advice. Though, considering the way her nonfiction weaponizes being candid only as far as it props up the “cool aunt” writerly persona she’s going for, maybe she should have. The disconnect at the core of this essay—that Albert thinks she’s delivering girl-bossy anecdotes about believing in herself when really she’s just navel-gazing—is the problem with The Snarling Girl as a whole. Throughout the collection, Albert criticizes a certain type of status-obsessed writer. And yet, the book reveals her own inability to turn that sharp eye toward herself in any meaningful way. The Snarling Girl offers little more than the sort of superficial criticism and life writing that falsely equates getting angry about something with coming to understand it. The result is a collection of supposedly-personal essays with the unfortunate blindspot of the person right at its center.
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Nowhere is this failure of imagination more clear than in how Albert depicts Albany, New York, the geographic backdrop to most of her writing life.
At the book’s core is a cycle of essays about a year of living in the city. “Albanality,” Albert and her friends call it, meaning dreadfully boring, a place practically outside of time. Originally published in Longreads, these essays are each linked to a specific—volatile, upstate New York—season. They’re also superficial and self-righteous. And more striking than any point she makes is that Albert can have lived in a city for fifteen years and still write with the patronizing tone-deafness of a transplant.
“Spring, Albany” is the first and clearest example of this. The essayopens with a description of a poisoned lake. People-watching in her neighborhood park because her phone is dead, Albert reflects on how the hell she ended up in this city in the first place. (The answer she uses when “urbane acquaintances” ask is “Academic Bribe,” a.k.a. Creative Writing Department professorship). The poisoned lake turns out to be Albany itself: An ecosystem ruined from human pollution and an abundance of literal shit because people feed junk food to ducks who are too stupid to do anything but eat what’s tossed to them. The city’s solution? Poison. Albert’s? Formal complaints filed with local officials; informal complaints relegated to fodder for her next magazine assignment.
Despite a page describing her love/hate relationship with Albany’s small town feel, the people Albert encounters in the park are just that—”people,” not neighbors. In that same essay, she passes two guys smoking weed on a bench who she considers bumming a hit from, but decides against it because she doesn’t want to owe them a favor. There’s a “petite brown woman,” who Albert nicknames “Athleisure,” pushing a baby in “not a status stroller.” This is supposed to come off as quaint and vaguely ironic—like, wow, look at these “normal Americans” the writer lives among. How real. But it just reads as patronizing. With misguided pride, she notes how most “Brooklyn lefties full of self-righteous social media activism wouldn’t set foot north of Hudson,” then brags about her neighborhood’s “new, beautiful coffee shop with avocado toast,” a few pages later. She describes one of Albany’s unofficial mottos— “a drinking town with a politics problem”—as if it were a bad thing.
Hudson—the northernmost city in the Hudson Valley, about 30 miles south of Albany, which over the past decade has become synonymous with a familiar sort of elder-millennial flight out of New York City–looms large over all four of the Albany essays. Albert calls the people who live there “Brooklyn hipster refugees.” But then, who is she? There’s a two-pronged resentment in Albert’s conceptualization of Hudson hipsters: On the one hand, they’re posers, leeches on small cities’ cultures, and generally lame— the too purported problem with transplant culture. On the other hand, she resents herself for living out in “the sticks”—45 minutes north, in a metro area with over a million people—instead of in Hudson along with them, sipping “fifteen dollar cocktails” and paying rent that won’t stop rising. An essay later, describing how Troy (another ex-industrial, now gentrifiying city ten miles north of Albany) is “so cool” that it’s almost “too late,” but she never quite connects the dots about how it might be the same group of people causing the changes in both.
Albert sees the fifteen-odd years she’s lived in Albany as a swirl of urban stagnation and misguided attempts at beautification. But she never clocks her role in the ecosystem as anything but an observer, someone who was dropped in the neighborhood for circumstances outside of her control. Reading the four Albany essays in sequence, it’s hard to identify any clear takeaways except “it sucks here, especially in the wintertime!” and that people drive like assholes.
Without getting bogged down in the black hole of discourse around gentrification in ex-industrial upstate cities like Hudson, and Troy, there’s a sense that despite having built a life in Albany, Albert doesn’t like the city at all. That, in her mind, arty expats from California and New York City are doing it a favor. She writes about the difficulty of building a writing community somewhere so provincial, completely glossing over the local universities (many of which she’s taught at), reading series, bookstores, and cafes that are trying to foster community where they can. This includes Clash Books, the Troy-based indie press that published The Snarling Girl (presumably because of the Albany connection) in the first place.
The Albany essays aren’t all bad. When operating as straightforward storytelling—writing about a family dog that got hit by a car, or misadventures volunteering at the local food coop—we see a more literary and therefore empathetic side of her work. But these moments are few and far between, wedged in as “evidence” for her not-particularly-compelling cultural criticism.
Elsewhere in the book, Albert makes a pithy joke, remembering that, “asked for writing advice, Grace Paley once offered this: ‘Keep a low overhead.’” How Albert interprets this is clear: move upstate, even if it sometimes sucks, because financial security and a lack of distractions will pay off in your work. Which, admittedly, isn’t the worst advice for a budding writer. But the quip also illuminates something Albert herself never articulates about her own relationship with Albany: That maybe she valued it, once, as somewhere cheap and out of the way to make art, and maybe start even a family. This is not an altogether ignoble goal. But now, with an established career and prices for everything soaring upstate, too, she might as well be in Brooklyn.
In Albert’s world, Albany seems to exist as a liminal space where literary ambitions are both fostered and quietly squashed. Which, again, isn’t in of itself an incorrect observation. In fact, in another writer’s hands, it might’ve made fascinating grounds for a memoir. Any artistic types who have decamped from (or never even made it to) a major city for work–, family–, or mental health-related reasons would certainly relate. But the book that The Snarling Girl could have been—mining Albert’s experience in Albany to grapple with bigger questions about what it means (financially, politically, socially) to live an artist’s life in the twenty-first century—makes the limp essay collection feel more contradictory and frustrating. In many ways, The Snarling Girl is indicative of a certain strain of contemporary essay writing—in which the writer uses the occasion of getting commissioned to write nonfiction as an opportunity to reconsider her and her works’ place in the world. But there’s a difference between soul-searching and navel-gazing, and the essays here (full of unsolicited advice and humblebraggy anecdotes) feel more like the latter. Firing off lists of problems without searching for solutions, ignoring one’s own place within a system, with a sense of humor that’s more mean than prescriptive, isn’t just a recipe for bad criticism—it’s also a bad way to live. That’s the reason there’s ultimately no truth gleaned from The Snarling Girl. For an essay collection that’s supposed to be an ode to an adoptive city, the book mostly leaves us wondering if Albert even enjoys the roundabout path her writing life has taken. And if she resents Albany (and what it represents) so much, aren’t there many more concrete steps she can take to remedy that than simply writing about it? After all, Hudson is just a few miles down the road.
Martin Dolan
Martin Dolan is a writer from Upstate New York. His writing has appeared in The Baffler, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Full Stop, and more. He’s online at dolanmartin.github.io/portfolio.