At 8:42 pm last night, I remembered that Beatrice had choir homework due by 9. I had been cleaning up the kitchen to a predictable Spotify-generated playlist of early nineties hip hop, singing and dancing for my dog, enjoying our solitude and trying not to wonder what my kids were doing upstairs. When the thing I had forgotten hit me, I predictably found Beatrice huddled up with an iPad, rushed her downstairs, and set her up with my laptop. Ah, pandemic life: one screen for another! And while she listened and sang, I sat next to her with last Sunday's Book Review. An essay by Lucinda Rosenfeld immediately caught my eye: Heroines of Self-Hate.
She was talking about the protagonists of some of my very favorite novels from the past few years, that is to say, my widowhood. Of the books I read after Mike died, those that lingered longest were cited in her essay, including both Sally Rooney novels and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I would add Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan to the list, and Fleabag, which isn't a book but is the best show I've ever seen and seems to speak to a similar experience. The women of these stories are whip smart, ambitious in varied ways, and alarmingly detached from their own feelings, unable to operate from an integrated place of core emotion. There is a sense of dangerous careening about in their interpersonal lives, though the narrative voice is often cool, deadpan. They seem completely unfazed by masculine cruelty and sometimes welcome it with unsettling detachment. Sometimes there is a flicker of the possibility of real connection in queer relationships, or more rarely, with vulnerable men.
But most striking to me, beyond their protagonists' psychological bent, was the way these authors wrote subjective experience as fully embodied. The physical, sensory world seemed more present, more important in those books.
So it was interesting that Rosenfeld focuses on the way these fictional women hurt their own bodies without recognizing that their bodies are central to these books in a way that was more aligned with the stuff of real life - especially life in a particular kind of body that is subjected to scrutiny - than nearly any book I’d ever read before I stumbled upon this genre that is maybe capturing something new and complicated, something far more interesting than simply being about Young Women Who Hurt Themselves.
Have you ever read about what the pain of undiagnosed endometriosis is like? Frances in Conversations with Friends has shocking, inexplicable period pain; how she responds (and doesn't respond) to the pain is woven into her character. It's not the point of the story that she has an emergent chronic condition, but it's important to who she is. When does that ever happen? It's not a cough that leads to pneumonia and a death scene; rather it's a monthly experience of pain that informs how she experiences the world, and that she just lives with. That's it. Like life. Connell in Normal People similarly experiences depression in a physical and incapacitating way, on the floor. Sally Rooney describes the dull headache of fatigue, the cold stone beneath your thin pants on a damp day, the tenderness of a bruise. I was so close to my own experience of trauma and loss when I read her books, not far from the horror of entrenched insomnia and its associated headaches and upset stomach. The memory of being unable to eat, of barely feeling my own body, of moving through the world anyway, was close to me then.
I encountered those characters as a reader, yes, but also as a woman, a widow, a mother, a therapist. The essayist, I suspect, didn't grow up in a world lit by social media, like the young people I spend my days listening to and the protagonists of these novels. They have always known surfaces take priority over actual flesh, alongside the quiet pressure to package and display oneself, market oneself in a marketplace of likes and followers that never goes dark. They inherited a world that denies the inevitability of pain and loss, the universality of fragility and finitude. Emotions are strangled and pushed and pinched, seen as interruptions and annoyances, even threats. Relentless misogyny sometimes goes underground but is no less trenchant. Young people have been taught to never stop; this is what they expect of themselves.
Is it so surprising then to encounter extraordinary young women who hurt themselves, or who seek out men to hurt them? Whether it's pharmaceutical-induced endless sleep, starvation or violence, a deep pain animates the gesture; unable to feel their own feelings that they must, at some level, desperately need to. So often the characters in these books have parents who have failed them, or worse, abused them; their communities and culture have fallen short too. It doesn't seem accidental that Connell is the one character who enjoys a secure attachment to his mother in Rooney's books; he had to know being loved to find his imperfect way to seeing and loving Marianne.
And Rosenfeld cites the mainstreaming of "therapy" (maybe those quotation marks are indicating the broader culture of wellness/self-care/therapy language) as something these young women have grown up with that marks their difference from previous generations of screwed up women. Yes, that psychiatrist in Rest and Relaxation was hilarious. Absurd! But those quotation marks definitely smelled snide to me. And geez, I don't know, maybe what I do all day serves a cog-in-the-machine purpose of helping people remain functional within an exploitive capitalist system whose very nature is dehumanizing. Whose very nature makes people sick inside. Maybe The Man fucking loves therapy. But I find it instead to be, at its best, inherently radical: the work I do with my clients hopefully leads to questioning those systems that have taught them they are no more valuable than their surfaces, skin, earning potential, brand. Unconditional embodied care and acceptance hopefully helps them know that they are always already incalculably valuable, simply because they are.
Take that, you big dumb Man.
So anyway, yes, the human condition can be a real bitch, as Rosenfeld concedes, and these female characters enact the pressures and pains of our particular time: not being able to feel, longing for connection, inhabiting inchoate ambition and creativity. A reluctance and fear of stepping inside one's own life and filling the space, overflowing it. Living inside a body that hurts, gets hungry and tired and drunk and horny, bruises, bleeds - within a culture that denies imperfection and rejects bodies that do not adhere to an airbrushed problem-free pale form. An awareness of the crushing injustices we live inside of. A complicated relationship to power. And within all this, every time a character risks hope, vulnerability, connection, creation, valuing her own existence, love - even in small, mundane ways - it reads like a triumph.
I loved reading these books because they were honest.
Now I'm about halfway through Deacon King Kong, by James McBride. You could say a lot of things about Sportcoat, the 70-something always-drunk deacon of Five Ends Baptist Church in the Cause projects, but he is a man that lives smack dab in the center of his own life. The other characters populating the Cause do, too. Their feelings and their bodies are their own, despite the forces aligned against them, giving shape to their experience. They know how to love one another. The contrast makes the lonely young white women of expansive Hong Kong and Dublin and New York seem all the more alien to themselves, strange silver fish in a very peculiar kind of tank, swimming along because despite it all, because of it all, it is simply good to be.
