accountability. And I don’t buy into the idea that women, specifically, need to be gentle when criticizing the politics of other women, a patronizing view that sometimes poses as feminist solidarity. Am I being too hard on Klein for being too hard on Wolf? As the folks of Reddit ask, AITA: Am I the A**hole? “ I’ve been pleased,” Klein tells me, “that a lot of the people who have read the book have remarked that it is not just a pile- on, and it does attempt to give her credit where credit is due, and also look at the ways in which she has been a spectacle for online bullying and mockery, and to actually question that.” These other readers are correct that Doppelganger “is not just a pile-on.” This is still different from it not being, in part, a pile- on. As for “credit where credit is due,” I know the parts of the book she means: Wolf was once critical of Zionism in ways Klein found admirable. A milquetoast liberal is, Klein allows, better than a fascist, a proto-girlboss feminist superior to an anti-feminist. In the book, Klein recalls that she looked up to Wolf’s persona, if not her actual work, as a young author herself, leading to a formative if awkward (due to Wolf’s strange behaviour, even then) in-person interview. Even in her what-if-I’m-the-doppelganger coda, Klein cannot resist sharing an anec- dote showcasing Wolf’s inadequacies. Klein writes that when she was 20 and listening to Wolf speak about The Beauty Myth , a university friend “gently challenged Wolf on why she had so little to say about the par- ticular pressures on Black and Asian women to bleach their skin and surgically lift their eyelids in order to conform to Eurocentric beauty ideals.” This is a justified criticism of the book, as indicated by the fact that people thought to make it at the time. But Klein does not leave it there. The point cannot just be that The Beauty Myth was flawed even by the standards of its mo- ment, but that she, Naomi Klein, knew this immediately. Of her own feminism and that of her university friends, she writes, “We were already way ahead of her.” Klein writes that she thinks the rational, progressive side needs to do less infighting and focus instead on solidarity and collab- oration, working towards a better world. A worthy goal—but, ultimately, I’m not con- vinced that the doppelganger framing helps the cause. She warns her readers against feeling “smug and superior” to the Wolfs of the world, but Doppelganger invites the reader to join its author in doing exactly that. n
just how much people confused her with Wolf (in the UK, “It’s absolutely ubiquitous,”) and I only realize after our half-hour conversation that I should have pressed her on this. It’s not that I don’t see why Operation Shylock would resonate, but that I’m iffy on the fair- ness of the comparison. “As empathetic as they are with one an- other,” writes Klein, about her undergradu- ate students, “they have little but cynicism when it comes to the professed pain of wealthy influencers.” Klein isn’t convinced, and decides to “gently push back,” asking them, “Why should surpassing a certain follower count preclude the possibility of feeling real pain?” It’s not just acceptable but necessary for public figures to call one another out. I’m sure even heads of state are capable of having big feelings when criticized, but this is no reason to hold back from demanding
In the book, Klein refers to Wolf as “my doppelganger,” or as “Other Naomi”; the conspiratorial world she inhabits is the “Mir- ror World”—all as though Wolf is a distorted, perhaps malicious reflection of Klein. The part I found most troubling on this front was Klein’s analysis of Philip Roth’s 1993 novel Operation Shylock , a novel about an impostor, which, she writes, speaks to her own experiences with Wolf—an analysis that suggests a blurring of lines between doppel- gangers and impostors, and also between imagined and real people. Naomi Wolf is not a fictional character whose purpose is to tell the story of a protagonist, Naomi Klein. And for all her faults, she’s no impostor. I ask Klein about this, and she tells me that she sees fact as different from fiction, and that, as far as Wolf’s resemblance to her goes, “I’ve no reason to believe that there’s any intent there.” Klein goes on to tell me
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