The memoir is a tricky genre. You always run the risk of being overly sincere to the point of insincerity and of embellishing the truth to overcompensate for the mundanity of your life. I am a firm believer that while everyone’s truth will always be colored by our emotions and experiences, this doesn’t make them any less authentic for us. However, in the case of Everyone’s Seen My Tits, Keeley Hazell’s authenticity isn’t questionable because of what her memoir describes. It’s because Hazell’s almost hostile prose leaves little trace of who she genuinely is.
Everyone’s Seen My Tits is a poor attempt at feminism through the eyes of sexploitation. As a former Page 3 Girl, Hazell is more preoccupied with positioning herself as a victim of circumstance than considering the multitude of factors that made her a victim. That’s not to say her experiences aren’t relevant or significant; I would argue the opposite. What detracts from Hazell’s story is her disinterest in engaging with her reader. Her intentions are noble, but more often than not get lost in the meandering, pointless, and overly ambitious anecdotes that represent her life: Hazell is overcompensating for insecurities she likewise doesn’t bother to explore throughout her many essays.
The result leaves out lot of humanity, replacing it instead with aggressive sarcasm. Hazell writes like someone who craves the recognition of being a writer without really homing in on the craft. She’s not the sort of writer who can blend wit and sarcasm with the type of sincerity that rounds off the edges of the very real lived experiences of someone who’s dealt with domestic violence, sex exploitation, and misogyny. It takes more finesse than Hazell possesses to use the phrase “mentally raped,” then drop a couple of quirky quips about one’s life.
The most frustrating thing about her writing is the way women filter in and out of the pages. For someone who claims to have had a grand awakening of male/female disparity, Hazell doesn’t treat the women in her stories with the same grace and fortitude she begs the world for herself. She describes other women almost the same way she’s been described by the men in her life. One chapter features a rather uncomfortable description of a trip to a Spanish strip club where the dancers, just like most of the other women in this book, are reduced to caricatures and props. Instead of hinting at the same complexity she’s granted herself, Hazell adds to these women’s one-dimensionality – much like her father, boyfriends, and male colleagues did to her. The decision makes Hazell the unintentional anti-hero in her own story.
Hazell also wastes a great deal of her and our time on one-note stories that drag her writing in circles. She spends more time on the men in her life – who destroy it – rather than giving life to the women, who she mentions sporadically but never develops. As a result, the memoir is more about how “feminism” shapes Hazell’s success and only hers (or, really, the lack thereof) into fame rather than opening herself up to the larger context of a hyper-capitalist patriarchy (which, to be fair, Hazell does bother to mention). Even when things go her way, she manages to blame someone for her good fortune.
Everyone’s Seen My Tits is as shallow as the title suggests. Everything is surface-level, self-serving, exhausting, and boring. What could’ve been a genuine self-study of class struggles and their effect on femininity and exploitation turns out to be nothing more than the ramblings of a privileged white woman who refuses to turn the harsh light of honesty inward, whose entire view extends only as far as her own front door – behind which Hazell remains trapped.
