What Was Daphne Merkin Thinking?

by Laura Sillerman | bio

Even in an issue devoted entirely to money, there is something troubling when a contributing writer for the The New Times Magazine confesses: "I am thrust, that is, into a Duchess of Windsor frame of reference the minute I step anywhere near the very rich: I instantly trade up on the ladder of entitlement and the acceptable cost of my desires — or are they needs?" 

The Lives essay by Daphne Merkin, published in the Oct. 14 issue, is titled "Money always Talks." The subtitle reads, "The richest among us have a way of making even the comfortable covetous." Read it and you’ll see that it goes from green with envy to wishes for gold in just seven paragraphs.

Nominally, "Money Always Talks" is about what happens when Merkin and her daughter take a walk to the beach while staying at the rented house of friends in Southampton, usually termed a "playground" of the rich and super rich. What it turns into is an exercise in Jewish self-loathing, superficial rumination and shameless display of affluence.

The walk progresses from Merkin’s purchase of two cashmere sweaters at nearly $500 each into a battle between mom and teenager over why Merkin’s family sold the family beach house and why she hadn’t acquired one herself. Her lament over the squabble concludes that being around money had made them feel like "dispossessed refugees from another, grime-coated country."

Need you ask why I almost titled this entry "What Was Daphne Merkin On?"

Who, in 2007, with front-page coverage of refugees who own nothing fleeing war-torn countries, thinks to write that after laying out a thousand bucks for two sweaters she felt like a refugee from someplace grime-coated (read: every place but the Hamptons or the Bubble of the Upper East Side, as far as Merkin is concerned).

I confess I’d heard of Merkin and knew I’d read things by her, but I had to Google her to remember why and where. Two entries seem relevant. Susie Bright’s Huffington Post piece, "Daphne Merkin Needs to Get Spanked Again," talks about another essay by Merkin, "Our Vaginas Ourselves," which previuosly appeared in the NYT Magazine.

Not for the faint of heart, this piece points out that Merkin longs for her sexuality to be a "dark continent" and distains the movement that gave her any say in her sexuality at all.

In July, Gawker.com wondered if Merkin was appreciating her former New Yorker boss, Tina Brown, or trashing her when she wrote about Brown’s Lady Di bio in Elle. I remember reading that article and thinking the same thing.

These two examples may not be a fair summation of Merkin’s body of work, but her money essay is emblematic of something — and that is a shockingly misguided approach to walking to a beach, encountering "baronial" houses and dealing with a line in a film that uses the term "Hawaiians" as "code for people of the Jewish persuasion."

Merkin touches all the bases of unenlightenment (I know it’s not a word, but for her it should be). The Lives essays are for me a place where people share their humanity. Daphne Merkin used this feature to advertise her lack thereof. It made me sad indeed.

A published author and poet, Laura Baudo Sillerman is president of a New York City-based charitable foundation and an active board and committee member for many educational and literary organizations, including the American Museum of Natural History, The 92nd Street Y Poetry Center and Poet's House.

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