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Naomi Klein’s prize-winning work of nonfiction brilliantly elucidates the new (mis)information era.
PHOEBE LUPTON, Wed 11 Dec 2024
In 2011, the Canadian writer was minding her own business in a public bathroom, when she overheard two people complaining about…her. They claimed that Klein had unjustly criticised the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street march. Except, Klein had not criticised anything. Those two people had targeted the wrong person. They should have been talking about Naomi Wolf.
Klein soon discovered that there was a whole litany of people who continually mistook her for the infamous feminist thinker-turned-anti-vaxx conspiracist, Wolf. This discovery inevitably transformed into a self-admitted ‘obsession.’ Doppelganger weaves the story of Klein’s obsession with the larger story of the people who in recent times have gotten sucked into the conspiratorial right. She tracks the development and peak of COVID-19 denialism, claims of government-initiated ‘slavery,’ Holocaust comparisons, and fundamentalist wellness culture, among other social trends. In doing so, she exposes the real root rot of our times: we don’t care enough for each other.
Perhaps the most surprising, and admirable, thing about Klein’s writing here is that it is soaked in empathy. She never sneers at Wolf, or at Wolf’s chosen ally, controversial political strategist and pundit Steve Bannon, or at anyone else she might otherwise position as her ‘enemy.’ She even suggests that Wolf is right to fear the COVID vaccine as a highly expensive, sometimes inaccessible patent, although she advocates in favour of using the vaccine as a form of medical protection. This way in which she positions herself and everybody else in the narrative allows wisdom to shine through every page.
The genre of this book is a true asset to the story Klein has chosen to tell. The memoir-cultural criticism blend has steadily grown in popularity over the past decade, with essayists such as Jia Tolentino and Cher Tan winning hearts and minds as they write through the middle path between the personal and the impersonal. This hybridised format works especially well in Doppelganger, because it means the book is not gatekept from the apolitical among us. Personally, I am wont to flinch at the phrase ‘the personal is political.’ Oftentimes, politics is far too derealising and anxiety-making for me to think about. But I can’t deny the ways in which power relations, and the people who wield them, seep into the everyday. Klein’s writing gently reminds me of this truth.
It is a truth that screams no louder than in Klein’s recounted experience of raising an autistic child and having briefly roped herself into the ‘autism mum’ (or ‘mom,’ depending on your location) community. She laments her conversations with fellow autism parents, who described themselves as ‘at “war” with the autism in their child’ and who advocated for bunk alternative wellness trend a plenty (bleach enemas, anyone?) in the hopes of ‘curing’ (my quotation marks) their child. Predictably, she references, and swiftly debunks, the theory that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism in children who are administered it, and why this theory is so compelling to some parents. This section of the book eventually morphs into the examination of what Klein calls ‘the child as double,’ explaining how difficult it can be for parents to separate their identities from those of their children, and how when the child is disabled, the parent perceives the situation as reflecting poorly on them:
Our culture lavishly credits parents for their children’s successes and judges them harshly for their challenges; I am certainly not immune…I say this because I have noticed, in my conversations with parents of autistic children, that they often undergo an intense grieving period as they mourn the fantasies that had taken deep root in their hearts. So sad are they about their child-double who wasn’t that they can’t really see the singular child who is.
As someone who herself exists on the autism spectrum, this chapter worked wonders to pull my head out of the apolitical sand.
Klein is an original thinker, that’s for sure. Doppelganger’s high sales and multiple accolades speak to the fact that readers have been starving for such originality.
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein is available in many bookshops around Australia, as well as through Booktopia.
Review: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
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