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Why must everything be so important—so dour and solemn, so grim and austere? How about a feather boa, some frilly lace, and a bright splash of pink? In Frivolity, Jehanne Dubrow stands up for the seemingly shallow and trifling, calling for a reconsideration of what we find worthy and what we dismiss.
This book is a provocation. It offers a defense of the pursuits, objects, and people denigrated as frivolous, asking why we so readily scorn them and why, in particular, the label is so often tied to femininity and queerness. Its 101 sections move lightly across literature, art, and popular culture, from Susan Sontag, Sei Shōnagon, Jane Austen, and Mozart to Barbie, Nora Ephron rom-coms, exclamation points, and Dubrow’s own “Year of Perfect Skin.” Written in a lyrical style, this book takes both an intimate and a rigorous approach to thinking about the frivolous, blending personal essay with scholarship.
For Dubrow, frivolity is a way of affirming the importance of joy and silliness. And don’t we need a little more of both these things in an era made all too serious by autocracy and terror?
One of the pleasures of reading Dubrow is in witnessing Frivolity’s accruing momentum, its intellectual and aesthetic velocity. I found myself lured into rereading passages, even as the current of her prose pulled me along with the volition of a page-turning novel…Succinctly stating a takeaway feels like a fool’s errand with this book, but the reading of it is not. In Frivolity, there are insights, large and small, and that is part of thedelight.
Frivolity: A Defense is impressive and persuasive. If you are looking for serious thoughts about frivolity, it will provide them, decked out in appealing frills.
— Noah Berlatsky
In 101 associative leaps, Jehanne Dubrow flits from one frivolity to another, wondering what her love of them might signify. From the pursuit of flawless skin to lists, punctuation marks, the color pink, perfume, and romance, Dubrow explodes the opposition between silly and serious, revealing the necessity of lightness. A whip-smart pleasure.
— Margot Singer, author of Underground Fugue
'The frivolous is a splendid excuse,' says Jehanne Dubrow, and I agree: a splendid excuse for a wild and rangy essayistic exploration that constellates as it progresses, creating not a path but a map for readers to explore. What better topic for an essay? And what better mind to explore it than Jehanne Dubrow’s?
— Patrick Madden, author of Recenses/Recencies: Essays
The sheer scope of knowledge in Jehanne Dubrow's Frivolity is dizzying: Literary excursions meet film criticism and color theory; painting's palette mixes with journalism; psychology and linguistics take on medicine and communication theory; pop culture shakes theology's hand while looking askance at history and economics. The range of time is also impressive: This is a book that time-and-space travels and bends minds as it goes. Frivolity is anything but frivolous in its defense of pleasure.
— James Allen Hall, author of Romantic Comedy
Frivolity is an impassioned defense and dazzling survey, both erudite and nimble on its feet. In playful and candid prose, Jehanne Dubrow assembles a rich archive of frivolous scenes, from Jane Austen to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie via Susan Sontag. To speak of frivolity, as this brilliant book shows, is to speak of beauty, pleasure, and power. To take it seriously is, in fact, great fun.
— Jack Parlett, author of Flamboyance: The Power of Living Boldly
Frivolity: A Defense
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index