Elizabeth Tallent has savage dry spells. Until her PEN/Faulkner Award-nominated story collection Mendocino Fire appeared in 2015, 22 years had elapsed between books. But hear her out: she's hampered by perfectionism--by "the tyranny of my weird disease." (Readers may wonder: Is perfectionism any relation to writer's block, which is similarly hostile to productivity? Tallent doesn't say.) Although she has been in therapy to address her perfectionism, Tallent admits to an ambivalent relationship with it: while other afflictions can carry a stigma, "perfectionism's rep as ambition on steroids remains glossy: it can present not as delusion, but as an advantageous form of sanity."
Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism, Tallent's first autobiographical work, is a stroll through her life during which she pauses to examine episodes, most occurring in her childhood, that foreground the notion of perfection (the dream house her parents built) or its inverse (her fractured arm). When Tallent isn't quoting experts and others on the subject of perfection, she's devoting unremittingly gorgeous long sentences and multipage paragraphs to descriptions that most writers would reduce to a dozen-odd words. On the furnishings in her therapist's office she spends two and a half pages; on her marriage to this therapist she spends far fewer.
Tallent is welcome to direct her pointillism-precise observations at anything she chooses, and how lucky readers are that she has deemed the ones in Scratched worthy of publication. After all, "the truest perfectionist, the one I'm failing to be, would still be rewriting this sentence." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer