Is writing a book about feeling guilty for how much privilege you have arguably the most privileged thing a “writer” can do? Probably. And right down to the title, Cazzie David has a “please don’t hate me” aura that drips off the pages like saccharine ooze disguised as sarcasm and malcontentedness. Considering David’s claims that she’s already thought the worst possible things about herself over and over again (she apologizes for that, knowing that having so much time on one’s hands is the mark of privilege), there’s nothing, then, that could possibly be said about her “book” that she wouldn’t have anticipated already. So, here goes. 

It was once uttered by Bob Dylan, “I’m helpless, like a rich man’s child” in the song (fittingly titled) “Temporary Like Achilles.” Luck is ever-changing, therefore capitalistic success is ever-temporary. But not so much when one is born to a rich man. Like Larry David. Perhaps this circumstance of birth is what has rendered Cazzie so helpless (and yet, so utterly helped along the way, effortlessly given a book deal and all). At least one of the things. The many, many things, as Cazzie points out by wielding excerpts from her 2007 neuropsychological evaluation. Already, from page one, it’s like, okay, way to try to one-up Sylvia Plath (and also Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking), but this just looks like a pompous puta move. “Oh, I’m so damaged from all the wealth, I needed to further capitulate to the trappings of wealth by getting a psych evaluation at twelve.” And The Bell Jar this “book” is not. That would imply actually putting forth a level of effort that Cazzie herself admits being incapable of. After all, this is the woman who donned a hoodie and pointed her camera phone in selfie mode for the cover. Granted, she seems to “try” by rendering it into a painting form and adding an arrow thrust into her lightly bleeding heart. Indeed, “lightly bleeding” is the extent to which one can describe her so-called “bleeding heart” tendencies. As she likes to inform, “A nightmare would be feeling the pain everyone else is in, which is what I do have… And I’m definitely not saying my hypersensitivity makes me some kind of superhero. In fact, what’s the exact opposite of a superhero? An incompetent, cowardly loser. Yeah. That’s me. That’s exactly me.” Again, we, in turn, are meant to feel empathy for her self-loathing.

Self-loathing in the cush setup of an L.A. abode. And how apropos that David lives in Los Angeles, considering the Woody Guthrie song, “Do Re Mi”: “California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see/But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot/If you ain’t got the do re mi.” David has it, but says, repeatedly, she does not want it. It’s nothing but a source of pain. At the same time, she also notes how useful it’s been to her, in matters such as, oh, not really working and then getting a job when the creative fancy struck her. 

Yet still, she is upset. Aware that being dissatisfied and dysfunctional is the mark of her generation. It’s what “sells” (unless, that is, you do not have celebrity parents). Just as fellow privileged “spokesperson” Lena Dunham has emphasized over the years. It would be different if anything either of these women were saying was not such an overt ripoff of authorless internet culture. For example, thinking herself endlessly brilliant for repurposing what’s long been said in a Lisa Simpson meme, Cazzie laments, “I wish that as a fetus, you were given the choice. You’d be shown an introductory video to life on Earth, like a commercial for a medication that lists all the side effects.” For Cazzie, evidently, one of those unpleasant side effects is being born into privilege. She spends a large portion of the “book” “reconciling” with it via such ponderings as, “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I’m just as afraid of living as I am lucky to lead the life that I do. It’s a privilege to be able to think about the human condition so much, to be able to be scared because you have nothing real to pay attention to other than your own guilt for thinking about all of the things you know are happening to other people every day. My mom will yell at me, ‘Just be grateful, Cazzie!’ And I’ll yell back, ‘Of course I’m grateful! If anything, I’m so grateful, it makes me miserable!” Forgive the reader if they proceed to stab their eye out before turning to the next page. 

David isn’t only contrite about her privilege, but also her “writing career.” Here, too, it’s difficult to search for empathy being that if a person is so damned apologetic about writing, and about having written this “book”–notably apologizing in the middle of it if you’re still actually foolish enough to have fallen for the con–then maybe, well, they shouldn’t. Maybe they should just sit back and enjoy their privilege. Volunteer for some “cause” upon occasion to make themselves feel useful. Everyone just wants to feel useful, after all. And it seems that’s what writing is supposed to do for David. In addition, obviously, to making her feel closer to dear old Dad. Yes there are plenty of palpable Daddy issues in here, rife for the examination, if you give enough of a damn. But it’s already so challenging to care about David’s “problems” as it is. 

She traces her root issues with being human to four years old, when she choked on kale. Again, what a bougie bitch feigning martyrdom. Further compounded by her faux grudging assessment that her “brush with death” was “likely God’s messy attempt to return me back to being only a soul. So I was ‘saved,’ I guess…” Of course, she attributes the majority of her psychological issues to the horrid DNA cocktail of her hyper-Jewish parents. The tradeoff for her phobias and unwarranted fears as a result of this Semitic bloodline is monetary security for life. And, even though her parents are the very source of this boon, she finds plenty of fault with them–in addition to the “curse” they bestowed upon her for being a rich girl. It’s rather apparent, as is the case in most mother-daughter relationships, that she seems to vilify her mother more than her father. “Borrowing” (again) from a concept already explored in What We Do in the Shadows with the energy vampire, David likens her mother to “an alien monster in an action movie who sucks up other people’s energy for more power, except that instead of energy, she sucks up information and then uses it solely to make me more fearful.” 

While David (and the enablers of celebrity child culture that gave her “book” a blurb, ahem, Amy Schumer and Diablo Cody–who one is somewhat disappointed in for her sudden dispensation with taste) might find her fraught psyche “scintillating,” all it makes for is one yawn after the next. Okay, okay. Both your dad and Woody Allen have done this whole neurotic, anxiety-ridden Jew thing much better. And, miraculously, somehow, less annoyingly. Not saying it was because both were born into a middling existence in non-hipster Brooklyn and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, but… maybe that’s the reason. In any case, it’s as though every sentence needs to be a confirmation of her “put upon” existence, likely manufactured, again, to make up for her “guilt” about being privileged. So “guilty” [insert eye roll here], in fact, that she freely admits, “Not to say that if I had the choice, I wouldn’t still choose… privilege.” Haha, hoho.

The luxury of marinating in one’s own mental muck (another “writerly” trait that likely made David think, “Yes! This is the profession for me”) is an additional running theme. Stressing over made up situations, David writes things like, “I don’t sit for too long, so I don’t have a high risk of dying of cardiovascular disease… I sometimes wear a magnet in my pocket to deflect rays from technology. Anytime I enter the room or building, the first thing I do is clock the exits and figure out an escape plan for multiple scenarios. My first thought when I hear a plane overhead is that it’s about to fall on top of me.” And so on. With such an “elevated” state of neurosis so early on in her youth, Cazzie is sent to a psychologist that she deliberately seeks to undermine by being open to absolutely nothing she suggests. Do you feel sorry for her yet? Use of a sort of A Clockwork Orange method of imagery and sound (though Cazzie references another Kubrick movie, The Shining, for its soundtrack) to determine how playing one type of music versus another affects her patient as Cazzie reflects on her fears is a key scene. Along with David balking, “Who cares about being happy? I find that insane.” The psychologist asks, “What is a priority for you?” David replies, in a whiny lilt you can hear, “Not aging. Not ever going to a hospital. Not being a person. Stuff like that.” 

And so, “One full hour a day was spent brain-spotting. This involved me staring at a blank wall and thinking about one of my worst fears while Joanne alternated between playing classical/calming music and what I can only assume was the soundtrack to The Shining.” It did nothing because being embittered and “plagued by guilt” is not something David has wanted to part with. It’s what gives her an edge, fleshes out a doughy life of privilege. 

In the chapter entitled, “Why God Is Definitely Real,” David knows she doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on with regard to pulling a chapter name like this, what with her whole “Everything is meaningless” brand. So it is that she wields the “I’m just, like, really complex and contradictory” card with the opening line, “I’m composed of contradictions, and so I am constantly at war with myself.” Thus, she sets up the sudden “credibility” of being able to say cutesy bullshit like, “I believe in God because there is confirmation of Their… existence everywhere we go, and I’ll prove it to you–you know beyond having you watch anything narrated by David Attenborough.” She then makes little subdivisions of reasons, including “puppies and kittens” (wow, shockingly original), fruit, alcohol/weed, mint, sun and snow, coffee and flowers. One section deliberately left out in that list is “Because Everything Gets Old.” That deserves its own special mention. Mainly because of how grotesquely ageist it is (it’s all making sense how no one gave a fuck about the elderly dying during COVID–particularly when everyone initially thought that the virus only affected this demographic). David actually writes, with the intention of sounding humorous, “…God intended everything to get old before death so it would be easier for us! When our parents and grandparents get old, we almost start to want them to die because they can barely talk or hear and that’s no fun at all! Why is it so much sadder when someone young dies than when someone old dies? Because no one wants old people to keep living, since they are such a drag! God makes people age so we don’t care as much when they die.” One assumes the exception to the rule on this is her prized patriarch, who has been old for quite some time now. In other words, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

Which leads us to the chapter where she ends up working for Daddy-o on the set of Curb (the vexing abbreviation for Curb Your Enthusiasm). Being “so self-aware” in calling this little vignette “Privileged Assistant,” Cazzie proceeds to “wittily” and “winkingly” talk to us about how in the know she is with regard to being a privileged white bitch (she says “girl”). She insists, “…if there were a downside, it would be that people inherently, but justifiably, hate you for it… In any case, it’s technically not my fault. I didn’t ask for it.” It basically sounds like Gretchen Wieners’ Mean Girls “speech” during which she states, “I’m sorry that people are so jealous of me… but I can’t help it that I’m popular.” In both broads’ cases, add rich. She then proceeds to talk about some phony baloney circle of privileged guilt for the sake of the shtick of being a neurotic before admitting, “A terrible truth about society is that it has always been nearly impossible for anyone to succeed (especially in the arts) without privilege.” Knowing this, and claiming throughout the book to feel so guilty about the misfortunes of others, why not actually use one’s power to seek out talent that is not privileged? Using your privilege instead to insert them into the arts where they rightfully belong? It feels like a patent no-brainer based on everything being reiterated in this little foray into (Cazzie) David Sedaris-type writing. And then one’s heart stops anew, as she finds a way to drop Martha’s Vineyard as the first place her parents “made sure” she got a real job to learn something about the real world. Thing is, you can’t really learn something like that anywhere on Martha’s Vineyard. Any who, she was fired so what does it matter? 

Another chapter, entirely about how everything is so embarrassing (pretty sure Sky Ferreira already covered this ground in “Everything Is Embarrassing”) to her, yet apparently not embarrassing enough to refrain from writing a whole “book,” essentially, about embarrassment is possibly among the most hypocritical of all the “musings” contained herein. Still, she advocates for her right to write by reminding that she can’t realistically engage in the embarrassment of being a comedian (which she already kind of did anyway by starring in a web series called Eighty-Sixed, which is actually much better than this book). But no, it’s specifically stand-up she’s trying to avoid, you know, the very thing that serves as the introduction to the iconic show her father was responsible for co-creating. Which is why she illuminates, “…instead of doing stand-up, I write. That way I won’t ever have to know in real time how unfunny you think I am. I’m not one who is capable of continuing on with life after a moment where no one laughed when I wanted them to. Writing is still embarrassing, though.” Then bitch, don’t fucking do it. Click out of the expensive Word document software your privilege bought you and step aside for someone else who will not beg people to like them or pity them on every goddamn page. This is not what a writer is for. The writer’s job is to piss people off, to make them question.

Or at least, it used to be. Sadly, this whole “please like me even though I’m so average and potato-like in my existence” slant really has become a more and more viable “genre” in the realm of personal essay collections. Perhaps sensing some of her shortcomings, David at one point invokes the help of renowned essayist Joan Didion to quote, “It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag.” Maybe she should have gone with a paper bag over the head “book” cover for the full effect. 

Filling up as much page space as possible to lend girth to the “book” (which does not render us, at least intellectually, too full to fuck), David also incorporates three chapters consisting of tweets she would tweet if she wasn’t “morally opposed” to Twitter. In it, she and her many defenders would likely opt to reuse one of those would-be tweets to tell this reviewer, “If you respond to a troll on the internet you are not stable no matter how stable your response sounds.”

At any rate, the essay everyone has been most “intrigued” by (solely for its celebrity gossip cachet) is one that David saves for the end. “Erase Me” is also among the longer efforts, as it is undeniably the most epic and anomalous event that has ever happened to David: being broken up with in a text only to find out that it’s because the person she loved fell for a major pop star. It’s the stuff of Hollywood lore (the new Greek lore), the sort of incident that makes people say reality is stranger than fiction. Alas, in her bid to sound cleverly self-aware, David here, too, botches her one chance at true sympathy by bringing the Anne Frank House into it. Followed by a trip to South Africa where it’s safari after safari (white people activity after white people activity), at which time Cazzie has her inevitable revelation that it took getting so far away from it all (because the U.S. and its denizens still believe themselves to be the center of the world) to really get some perspective. Meanwhile before the South Africa leg of the trip, her dad is there (because clearly Larry David would never go to South Africa) to douchily remind her, “Life is a long, rough slog. Even if you have means! Think about how many people have to live without means.” All those little people who don’t even orbit in the world of SNL cast members or pop stars in order to be granted the privilege of being betrayed by them. 

Alas, rather than anyone speaking candidly about the utter insipidity of this book, it has been met with comments like “blisteringly honest” and a “delicious antidote to the poison of basic influencer culture.” Seems no one got the memo that “weird and anxiety-ridden” is the new basic. And Cazzie is happy to oblige when it comes to capitalizing on a “zeitgeist” that’s been ongoing pretty much ever since Daria hit the airwaves. Except Daria Morgendorffer was tolerable despite herself growing up in the middle class iteration of privilege.  

And when Daria’s magazine internship with Val Magazine came along, she was not quick to get on board, even if she did get it on her own merits. Instead, Graydon Carter, the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, was the “family friend” who secured David her first writing internship, at which time she wrote a review for 2013’s Lovelace. This review was a trainwreck and one that she relished calling out as such, with the concluding statement, “It seems I failed miserably in my first outing as a film critic. I apologize to Vanity Fair and to you, the reader [there she goes, spending more time apologizing for writing than actually writing]. It could be that film criticism is not my calling. Unfortunately, like Linda Lovelace, I’m learning the hard way.” What’s more, David was happy to admit to having no idea what or who Lovelace was without reading a summary, declaring, “…being nineteen years old and from a sheltered family that has never discussed pornography at the dinner table, I had no idea who Linda Lovelace was until I read a synopsis of the movie.” She then proceeds to use her usual yarn about being so anxious re: the torment of others that she stressed over the screening the entire time leading up to it, only to end up in the bathroom texting and checking Instagram because she just couldn’t take the sight of Amanda Seyfried being abused (side bar: Lindsay Lohan actually would have made a lot more sense in the role until she fucked it up by partying in Cannes and not showing up to a court date). The seeds of what would end up comprising 328 pages of a “book” are evident in the second paragraph of the review, with David curating her persona as follows: “My reality, in particular, needs escaping. I find the world extremely upsetting, not in the way an average person does but more in the way a crazy person might. As soon as I walk outside, I get depressed. If I see a dog, I’ll get upset about how much it must suck to be on a leash. I’ll get on a bus and tear up at the thought of how the driver has to go back and forth on the same street for eight hours in mind-numbing traffic.”

In spite of the backlash about the flagrant nepotism (as further iterated by David’s shitty review) of hiring Larry David’s daughter to write for a renowned magazine, unflinchingly, Graydon Carter commented, “We saw Cazzie as a Nora [Ephron] [please, do not lower Ephron to that level] for a new generation… Right off the bat I thought Cazzie was going to be a star. She’s got her father’s DNA…” This seems to be what agents both literary and filmic tend to be salivating over. The idea that they’ve somehow frozen the brain of Larry inside of his spawn. And that means more continued percentages off the top. The summary on the back of the book alone is another trumpet of hypocrisy in terms of her claim of wanting to carve out her own path, at odds with the description, “With pitch-black humor resonant of her father, comedy legend Larry David…” Does he really need to be name-checked any further? To boot, if Cazzie is so concerned about the privilege accusation, at least go the Nicolas Cage route, who famously changed his last name from Coppola.

At the same time, privilege is the only thing to cling to for her sense of being “persecuted” in this cruel world. Little does she know, we all feel kicked in the crack on a daily basis–without the benefit of free-flowing cash payments for our trouble. “You feel kind of like, you know, you ran outside naked with a Kick Me sign on your face,” David remarked of her release. Well, no one will kick her harder than this, one imagines. Because everyone else is busy branding it as “so raw,” “so funny” or “so witty.” What a “real” celebrity daughter she is. And therefore the floodgates for mediocre writing masquerading as “hilarious” and “vulnerable” continue to remain wide open. Pete Davidson and Ariana Grande fan fiction based on all of Cazzie’s worst imaginings about what they were doing together would have undeniably been a worthier contribution to the so-called literary scene.  

P.S. DON’T TRUST LITERATURE THAT PUTS SENTENCES IN ALL CAPS TO EXPRESS ANGER OR EMPHATICNESS. IT ISN’T LITERARY.