In trying to think of more positive portrayals, only one immediately comes to mind for me: the 80s sitcom The Golden Girls, about four older single women—Blanche, Rose, Dorothy and her mother Sophia—who live together in Miami following their husbands’ deaths, or, in Dorothy’s case, after her divorce. Ever since it first aired in 1985, The Golden Girls has been telling aging single women what the rest of the world never has: that our lives are just as interesting and worthwhile without a man in the picture, that as women we’re capable of providing as much if not  more comfort and assistance to each other in our golden years than a partner ever could. When the first episode aired, Estelle Getty, who played Sophia, told the New York Times she hoped the show would kill “the notion [that] the world is Noah’s Ark and no woman is worth the powder to blow her to hell with unless she’s attached to a man.”

My friend Janis would allay her fears of being alone with the argument that it would all be fine because she and another good friend of hers would “just live in The Golden Girls house together.” The concept of a house filled with one’s closest friends who live together and take care of each other in their senior years is an enduring source of comfort for her—as it has been for many women who worry they will end up spending this time in solitude. There is something inherently soothing about the show, particularly when confronted with a stressful, uncertain future; a friend recently told  of The Onion’s famous front page after 9-11, showing a TV schedule with The Golden Girls on endless loop.

In a Huffington Post article last year entitled “My Friends And I Are Going To Live In A ‘Golden Girls’-Style Situation After We Retire,” the millennial writer Ashley Brooks talked of setting out initial plans for a Golden Girls-style house with her female friends later in life. “Why couldn’t we use Blanche, Rose, Dorothy and Sophia as a model to plot our own post-midlife sorority setup?,” the author asked. Among her friends, she had already picked out who would be the Blanche and who would be the Dorothy.

The idea of a Golden Girls house is not just appealing to longtime single women or divorcés, but anybody who fears not being able to meet this unrealistic expectation of lifetime partnership or afford living on their own in their last years. Given the average life expectancy today and the rising cost of nursing homes and long-term healthcare, living alone in our last years is a luxury few of us will be able to afford; financial magazines from Forbes to Kiplinger’s have billed Golden Girls-style houses as a more affordable, less lonely option into retirement.

While I do have several issues with the show itself—namely its reliance on racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic humor that cannot be dismissed with the old “it’s a product of its times” excuse—I admit that as a single and childless woman in my mid 40’s, I have considered a Golden Girls house as a viable solution to my own questions about who will care for me and keep me company in my final years, in the absence of a child or partner.

I discussed the concept of a Golden Girls house the other day with an older friend of mine. “I mean, it sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? Who doesn’t want to hang out with their friends and eat cheesecake for the rest of their lives?”

“You know,” she said, “the only thing about The Golden Girls…”

“—is that they were all white wealthy women?” I finished.

“… is that they were all healthy.”

In the last months of my father’s life, my mother converted the basement floor of our house into a mini hospice, hiring round the clock, in-home care to assist her and ensure there would always be someone by his side at all times. The one who stayed with us up until the end was a no-nonsense older nurse who interfered with our lives upstairs as little as possible, took direction without complaint, and worked tirelessly. At the time she was taking care of my father I would have offered her anything, and now I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember what country she was from or what her name was—I had to ask my mother later. Agnes watched over my father night and day, changing his diapers and feeding him until he drew his last breath. I was in the living room when she ordered me downstairs that day, the one and only time she ever raised her voice.

“What? What is it?” I asked.

“Just go down,” she commanded.

On the basement floor where we had set my father’s bed up, my mother was already there, with her arms around my father. He had died just moments before. I began screaming as I clutched at my mother. My knees collapsed a little. My mother’s arms left my father’s body to wrap themselves around me.

“What is this? What is this?” the nurse asked. I sensed that she wanted me to be stronger for my mother, pull it together—after all, she was the one who cared for him day in and day out, who had fed him for weeks on end. She was the one who watched him take his last breath while I was upstairs. All I had to do was drop by once a day to visit with him for an hour or so before escaping upstairs to watch TV.

We had to dress and change my father before he could be picked up by the funeral parlor, and as the nurse heaved my father’s body to the right and the left, rubbing him down with a warm, damp cloth, I tried to assist as much as I could. Mostly I just stood there, afraid to touch my father’s body, to know what it was like now. I had attended funerals before, but never experienced the death of someone so close to me. Onscreen, people just trickle out of hospital rooms after their loved one passes, and it’s assumed some faceless hospital staff or hospice care worker takes care of the rest, whatever “the rest” entails. Agnes set about it as if she had done it a million times before, lifting up my father’s legs gently but firmly to wash him, removing his shorts and putting on new ones. I am no longer convinced there is any dignity in death; the horror lies in the witnessing of this loss. And yet, Agnes had enough dignity to make up for what I lacked, and for what my father’s death had erased.

As I lifted my father’s arm to help Agnes dress my father, I couldn’t believe that it was his anymore; it was flesh hanging off bones, light as a bird’s wing. Were these the arms that once held me back from running into the street? I was surprised by how strong he was back then, wrapping his arms around me, a vise from which I couldn’t escape. I put on his socks now, lifting each cold foot to stretch fresh cotton knit over his heels.

The story of The Golden Girls, to paraphrase Joan Didion, is a story I tell myself in order to live. It works until I think of my father’s last days, the anguish of his death and the days that led up to his passing.

There was a reason the Girls were all relatively healthy until the last season when Rose goes into cardiac arrest: They weren’t that old. I always assumed that they were in their 60s, except for Sophia, who I pegged for early 80s, but when the show began, Blanche, Dorothy and Rose were only in their 50s, tiptoeing toward but not quite having reached their golden years. In Season 2, Episode 8, “The End of the Curse,” Blanche experiences menopause for the first time.

What is never shown and only hinted at in The Golden Girls are the later years, when the women become fully bed-ridden and incapacitated, when they can’t feed or bathe themselves or go to the bathroom without assistance. Rose goes into cardiac arrest near the end of the last season and undergoes triple bypass, but she makes a lightning fast recovery in time for Dorothy’s wedding. It wouldn’t make for much of a sitcom if the characters were gravely ill—although death is still present enough, roaming their lanai like the unnamed fifth roommate. The Girls discuss their fear of death and aging, donate kidneys to siblings, mourn ex-husbands and friends who passed, and encounter terminally-ill friends who wish to end their lives early.

It’s interesting that in all the articles I have read pushing Golden Girls retirement homes, no one ever talks about the “Sophia’s Choice” episode from Season 4. I had forgotten about it, until a recent rewatching. After Sophia rescues her friend Lillian, who suffers from dementia, from a poorly equipped nursing home, she takes her back to the house to live with her and Blanche, Rose and Dorothy. The Girls don’t make it two days with Lillian.

“I just cannot believe Lillian has only been here for 24 hours,” says an exhausted Rose, as they all slump over the kitchen table.

“I cannot believe Mom thought she could handle her alone,” adds Dorothy. “I mean, it’s almost too much for the four of us.”

Agreeing that they can no longer take care of Lillian, Rose finds Lillian a nicer nursing home and Blanche pays for the next few years of Lillian’s bills with a bonus check from work that she had set aside for a breast enhancement. Prompted by the experience with Lillian and fears of their own experiences to come, they decide to make a pact to “always take care of each other, no matter what.”

If you could fast-forward to the next decade or two of The Golden Girls, I wonder if it would show these women diligently taking care of each other in their incontinent years, when some of them may as well need 24-hour care like Lillian—or if it would show the at-home nurse in the corner, wiping cheesecake crumbs off their faces or on hands and knees, cleaning the toilet? Imagine the curtain pulling back to reveal the immigrant caregiver at the nursing home, doing what some of us can’t or don’t want to do round-the-clock, lest it disrupt the responsibilities and lives we already have.

Which brings us to another aspect of the show: I am far from the first person to watch The Golden Girls and wonder where all the brown people evaporated to, considering this show is supposed to take place in Miami, a city that even back in 1980 boasted well over twice as many Hispanic people as white folk. What are the implications when we write the immigrant worker out of the storyline, both on screen and in our own lives? I loved the 2022 movie Triangle of Sadness not just for the easy schadenfreude of watching spoiled rich people come undone, but for that shot of the hull of the cruise ship, where they housed the Filipino cruise workers in a modern-day version of Downtown Abbey. As a Filipino-American, I always thought I was more sensitive to the unseen immigrant labor from poorer countries like the Philippines that keeps Western countries afloat. However, in my own life, I had failed with Agnes.

In the end, it was really she and my mother who did most of the caring; we were fortunate enough to be able to afford long-term health care insurance for my father, so my mother could get someone in to help. Otherwise, I would have needed to step in far more than I did. Would I be able to care for good friends better than I had my own father? And is this something that one gets better at with age and more death?

I want to believe that my girlfriends and I would take care of each other until we died, but I have also seen the distancing of friends when they have partners and children—this is their new unit, their main focus, and time with friends must be fit in between their child and household duties. I have seen it in myself when I get a boyfriend and see my friends less than I did before, clearing the weekend for days with my new love, prioritizing my time with him. I have started to question if a Golden Girls house is the ultimate goal or just a backup plan for when our partners fall short or die off first—and if it’s the latter, how strong this ideal is when so many of us have spent the bulk of our lives prioritizing traditional family units or “significant others” above all else.

Over twenty years ago, I suffered from a severe depression that rendered me unable to care for or watch over myself. My father didn’t drag me home, where he knew I feared I would backtrack. Instead, he closed up his practice and flew to New York, where I was living, to care for me. My greatest shame is that I do not think I did a tenth as much for him when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s seven years later, or in the ten years of suffering he would endure following this diagnosis, as his mind and body slowly shut down from dementia and then cancer. I think about this now when I call my mother from London, where I currently live, and she asks me how long I plan on staying there and when am I coming home, and I tell her that this is where I live now, this is my home. I have wanted to live abroad since I was a kid and have spent the last thirteen years taking on a variety of jobs that would lead to a long-term visa, and yet when I say to my mother “London is my home now”, it sounds trivial and silly, like I’m an 18-year-old college kid extending their study abroad too long instead of a 47-year-old woman who has been planning this for over a decade. 

I wonder if it would sound more acceptable if I had a husband with a job and children who were in school here, all of whom could never possibly be as easily uprooted as a single, childless middle-aged woman. To my mother, it probably wouldn’t; she would then just wonder why her grandchildren had to live all the way in London instead of closer to her. And yet sometimes I can’t help but think that it does—if not to her, then to others, to society, to me, even. I think of my trips to the Philippines, a country which is still very much a collectivist vs individualist society, and where cousins of mine grew up in multi-generational family compounds in Quezon City with kids, grandparents and parents looking in on each other every day. I think of all the nuclear-family Filipino homes I’ve been to in America, with room for Mom, Dad, a few kids, and always an extra room for Lola. I think of all this as my mom and I talk to each other on our iPhones from our single-occupancy homes, over 4,000 miles and an ocean apart.  

How much of our lives and our independence are we willing to sacrifice to care and comfort those closest to us? Where do we draw the line, and what does that say about us?

If I needed to fly back and give immediate care to my mother or sisters I would, and yet how quickly, sometimes without realizing it at first, one can slide into thinking of oneself in the role assigned: the selfish single woman who chose not to have children and who clearly hasn’t put anyone but herself first, versus a selfless mother who already has shown how giving she is with her children and just needs to extend this innate generosity to others in the family. (This scenario is also untrue: statistically, unmarried adults are more likely than married to provide most of the care to a parent.)

For most of us, it will not be merely a question of how selfless we are but how much money we make and how much care we can afford. Our country may be one of the richest in the world, but we have not set ourselves up to provide nearly enough public funds to help care for the number of aging baby boomers that will require nursing or in-home care—a 75% increase from previous generations.

There is no talk of what to do when the Golden Girls can no longer fund Lillian’s nursing home, but you can squeeze the entire long-term care crisis into that gap. The beauty of a 30-minute sitcom like The Golden Girls is that topics like these can be touched upon and eased with humor, just in time for commercials. We are not given such reprieve in real life. The show did its strongest work not in proffering the concept of a Golden Girls house but in providing a brief window into questions about the human limitations that we cannot always answer but must ask ourselves anyway. It was far from a perfect show, but in some of its grossest omissions is where some of the most important questions lie. 

At the end of the Sophia’s Choice episode, the Girls decide to assuage their fears that they’ll end up like Lillian, with nobody they can rely on to take care of them or keep them company in their final years. They decide they will all go together to the nursing home if they have to.  It’s a reassuring thought—until Rose asks, “But what happens when only one of us is left?”

For a few seconds, there is nothing but silence. The silence will eventually be disrupted by a snappy one liner from Sophia, but for just a brief moment, the human fear of death and dying is allowed to assume the frame. It crowds out the set’s pastel couches and wigs, extinguishes the comebacks about menopause and ensuing laugh tracks. There is no cut to commercial.

I am back in my parent’s house, walking downstairs to see my father one last time. The house is still. Light filters up from the room below, guiding my way down.

I do not feel comforted. I am not supposed to be. 

The post We All Want to Live in the Golden Girls House—Don’t We? appeared first on Electric Literature.

This advice came from other mom writers. I paid close attention, weighed these warnings in my hands. Was I being given sacred protection? Or was I a wayward mother being gently policed, shepherded back into the claustrophobic box of “good mother”? I understood I’d strayed. A “good mother” doesn’t write about the way her palms sting from slamming them on the kitchen countertop. This is not a story mothers publicly claim. It’s a story we whisper. I’ve never been good at being quiet, or subtle, so, of course I wrote the book. I used my name. And despite the high probability of it blowing up in my face, I took my two elementary-aged kids across the country for an 8-day book tour. 

I knew my kids would be tired from the time-zone change, disregulated from the dissolution of routine, and that they’d likely rip loud farts at my events then cackle with delight. Even with my husband doing most of the parenting, the week would be exhausting at best. Still. This book is a career highlight! I wanted to celebrate it with my family. I fantasized that the tour would be a key experience my 6- and 10-year-old would remember. Totally worth missing school for, I said to myself as I sat in the principal’s office filling out the extensive number of forms for kids missing more than five consecutive days. 

I’ve wanted to be an author for as long as I’ve wanted to be a mother, which is to say, forever. I didn’t anticipate that the two identities would end up in competition with each other. I stopped writing for years because the creative labor of mothering took every piece of me. Once I was able to write again, I found I did my best work away from the children. I tried writing in my bedroom, but their presence permeated the locked door. I left the house and wrote at coffee shops, but only ever had a couple of hours before mom-life beckoned. I crossed bridges and counties to attend artist residencies, needing to transform out of my mother-self to be my best author-self. For years I mothered and wrote like this—separately.

It’s been a decade since I began splitting myself into parts. Writing a book about mothering was a way to put myself back together. I thought bringing my kids on tour could be the next level of integration. I was ready—eager—for my children to see me as other than mother, as more than the Maker of Meals, the Bedtime Routine Warden, the Afterschool Pick-up Driver. I know I will always be a big somebody to my children, the way that all parents loom large and take up space in their children’s psyches (for better or worse), but I wanted my children to see me as a big somebody in the world. I wanted them to see how someone so ordinary—the person who smears peanut butter and honey just right on their rice cakes (only Quaker brand, plain, and lightly salted!)—can also be the person on the stage in front of a roomful of strangers. I wanted to be a model, so that they might see that their own ideas are worth cultivating and amplifying. That they too deserve an audience and a microphone. That they don’t need anybody else’s permission to step outside the box of social acceptability, to choose a wayward path, to take up space, to be humongous.

As our family book tour approached and I prepared for my readings, I came up against a new challenge—the content of my book. My children know what my book is about. We’d had age-appropriate conversations about mom rage. My son, the 10-year-old, once ticked off a list that went, “Racism, sexism, mom rage,” which told me he had a general understanding that mom rage is a societal issue steeped in oppression and power dynamics. But it’s one thing for my kids to experience me losing my temper. It’s another for them to listen to me describe my fury and to hear themselves referred to as “rage recipient,” and then to do it again the next night, all in front of an audience. How could I be true to my craft—a good author—reading and discussing honestly the terrifying rage I write about, and also be a good mother, protecting my children from unnecessary harm?

On the plane, my children happily inhabited screenland while I scoured my book for sections that ticked all the boxes: appropriate to read in front of the kids, 7 minutes or less, engaging for an audience. By the time we landed, I’d dog-eared every engaging, child-friendly page in that book. There weren’t many. But there were enough.

The morning of my first reading, I sit with my kids at breakfast and tell them what they can expect that night. I explain that I’ll have a “conversation partner.” We’ll talk about the book itself and also about my experience of writing the book, and at some point I’ll read a section or two, and then take questions from the audience. 

“I want to ask a question,” my son pipes up. 

“Sure,” I smile, hiding the heat of my flaring anxiety. I have a flash fantasy of him standing up in the crowd and asking, Why do you yell at us? (a legitimate question, but a tender conversation I’d prefer to have with him privately—not in front of an audience). “Do you want to tell me your question now so I can be prepared and do a very good job answering it?” 

He thinks then says, “I want to ask, ‘Have you always wanted to be a writer?’” 

I nod and look away, blinking back impending tears. This child. He disarms me. He isn’t concerned with the content of my book. He is curious about his mother—the author. I may feel fragmented, but he sees the whole of me. 

“Yeah, okay, great. You can just raise your hand when it’s audience question time. I’ll call on you,” I say with a grin.

That night at the bookstore, I do one of my “child-safe” readings about my complexities slipping away once I became a mother. I read that even my name disappears with everyone everywhere (at the gym, the playground, the pediatrician’s office) suddenly calling me “Mom.” My son is in the front row. When I finish reading, his hand is first in the air, arm straight, eyes set. I gesture towards him, ready for his rehearsed question. 

“Why do you think everyone was calling you Mom?” he asks. 

Surprised, I pause. The answer is complicated, and the section I just read basically answered it. Seventy people hold their breath waiting for my response. I buy time. “That’s a really good question,” I say slowly. The audience lets out a collective exhale with a small, knowing laugh. Then I answer his question as best I can. He nods. Energetically the audience nods too. 

A few nights later, I sit in front of a crowd of mostly strangers. Someone asks about the different trends in mothering that have occurred over time. I explain that when I was a child in the early 1980s, the reigning trend was “custodial mothering,” which was a more low-key, hands-off kind of parenting than today’s “intensive mothering” era. I share, “My parents were involved in my life, but my mother wasn’t cutting my peanut and jelly sandwiches into heart shapes with a cookie cutter.” My 6-year-old daughter, who’s been drawing in a coloring book on the floor at her dad’s feet until this moment, shoots up with a whoosh and pierces the air with her slender arm. 

“Yeah?” I say smiling at her.

“You cut my sandwiches into heart shapes with a cookie cutter!” The whole room laughs. My daughter recognized the way I mother her, and she unwittingly called me out! 

“Yes, I do cut your sandwiches into hearts,” I say to her, then turn to the audience as my daughter returns to the floor with a proud plop. “As mothers, we don’t necessarily agree with the ideas behind intensive mothering, yet we’ve internalized the expectations as ideal, then find ourselves pureeing baby food from scratch, freezing it into ice cube trays, laundering and air-drying every cloth diaper, and cutting our kids’ sandwiches into hearts with a cookie cutter!” I laugh and look at my daughter. She beams. I look out at the audience, which is 98% mothers. They beam too.

In Mom Rage I write, “Motherhood is so public, and everyone has an opinion.” Yet somehow, I hadn’t considered that bringing my kids on tour would result in the public display of my mothering. My children’s presence ended up transforming my events into live enactments of some of the main arguments of my book. By interacting with my kids in loving ways I was embodying the idea that a person can have mom rage and still be a good mom, a message that everyone in those audiences and every mother who rages needs to hear, especially in a culture that views angry mothers as moral failures. And by reading from my book and discussing mom rage in front of an audience that included in my children, I was demonstrating how we can drag mom rage out of its shame corner by talking about it with our friends, our partners, and even—with care and nuance—our children.

I suppose by bringing my family on tour, I set us up to be…judged, yes, but also witnessed—by the audiences but also by each other. I witnessed my husband laden with bags of books, art supplies, candy, and other child-appeasing items, doing everything he had to do to keep the kids happy so I could completely inhabit my author self. As a mother, it was the exact support I needed. In those moments when my children refused their social mandate to sit quietly, when my daughter jumped up with excitement and my son ditched his rehearsed question for the one that bubbled up inside his good heart, they were celebrating with me, showing me that they wanted to be part of the conversation with their author mother. They raised their hands to be witnessed for their own brilliant, bold selves. They too want to be humongous. They were telling me they already are. 

The post I Brought My Kids On Tour For A Book About Motherhood appeared first on Electric Literature.

But this is not the case with writer Anthony Veasna So, who died in December of 2020, from an accidental drug overdose when he was only 28 years old. Here, the sting is never far off. 

So passed nine months before his first book, Afterparties, would be published. That book would go on to win the NBCC John Leonard Prize for a debut novel and the Ferro Grumley Award for LGBTQ fiction and receive wide acclaim from critics and readers around the world. While some of the stories inside Afterparties had been published previously, such as “Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts” and “Superking Son Scores Again,” most readers were already encountering So’s incredible voice for the first time after he was already gone.

This is especially jarring because So’s writing is so particularly alive, so boisterously funny, so sparklingly real, and so sharply contemporaneous—there’s nothing that feels posthumous about his work. It insists that So is very much here, and very much alive. Only when you come to the end of the last story in Afterparties is it crushing to realize there will be no more.

Except, there is more—at least a little. 

This month, Ecco Books is publishing a second book of So’s, Songs on Endless Repeat, a collection of his essays and “outtakes.” 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t begin by saying that the essays are their own delight: So’s pop cultural criticism of Crazy Rich Asians and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy come together with deeper, personal memoir pieces about his father’s life as a landlord and the loss of a dear friend to suicide. According to editor Helen Atsma at Ecco books, it had always been So’s goal to publish a book of essays, and his eye had been on doing so after he finished his novel.

His novel, you say?

Indeed, the “outtakes” mentioned earlier are not fragments or drafts of other short stories, but actually eight linked pieces of So’s unfinished novel, Straight Thru Cambotown. 

In the foreword, author Jonathan Dee, who served as So’s advisor at Syracuse University’s MFA program, writes beautifully about what it was like to work with So on some of these pieces of Cambotown, which formed the writer’s graduate thesis, submitted only about nine months before his death. 

In emails to Dee, So described the book he envisioned as being stylistically and structurally inspired by “Helen Dewitt’s The Last Samurai, Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.” He wrote that these three were the books he kept coming back to for inspiration as he wrote. 

As Dee explains, this high bar that he “cheerfully set for himself” was typical of So. He wonders if, at the time So emailed with this ambitious plan, a single word of the novel had even been written.

But then So wrote—with all the “deceptively casual, humor-cloaked command” that Dee and others at Syracuse had come to admire. As Dee notes, the pieces of the novel that we have are incomplete but never rough. So was a “perfectionist about his writing—not in the self-paralyzing way some writers can be, but just made restless by the idea that something good could almost always be made better.” Knowing that the pieces in Songs on Endless Repeat would have likely undergone extensive revisions still, it is only more remarkable how strong they are.

Dee mentioned that it contains parts of the novel there that he’d never seen before, seemingly newly penned since their work on his thesis had concluded.

In the eight pieces of Straight Thru Cambotown that are included in the collection, readers will get some sense of how So intended to triangulate between DeWitt, Márquez, and Toole, and how the novel would continue the project he began in his short stories, to as one reviewer put it in the LA Times, “immortalize Cambodian California.” 

This is a worthy goal, a “hole” that So intended to fill, according to Dee. But So’s work, and Cambotown in particular, doesn’t feel like an act of preservation so much as an invitation (at times a demand) to immerse yourself in the world he loved. If that immortalizes it, in the process, then so much the better.

In an opening section, “We Are All the Same Here, Us Cambos” So writes in a lush first-person plural, present tense. “Just look around and listen to the talk. Him, her, them. Those fools over there blasting Tupac like they actually get it, because in a way, beneath the yellow-brown-light-dark surface of their skin, they do.” 

Verbally, So soars around Cambotown, hovering over the Mings and Bas and Mais and Pous and Gongs, “Heineken for the humble; Hennesey for the ballers.” He wants to distinguish them from other Asian cultures “two thousand miles away from Cambodia” (look at a map, he urges) even as he outlines what lumps all “Cambos” together: “In Cambotown, we are all the same—same stories, same history. Or lack thereof.” The awful bonds of displacement, and of having descended from the survivors of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, are for his generation, badly tangled up with the false promises of the American Dream. He concludes, “That’s why we’ll never leave this place—not truly. […] We’re with you, have always been so. Let’s be messed up Cambos together.”

So addresses the audience in other places in the other fragments of Cambotown, but more rarely, making way for highly specific third-person portraiture of his characters. We settle into the year 2014, a decade after a financial crisis that lingers on in this corner of the world. So introduces a central cast of characters, described in So’s obituary as “three Khmer-American cousins—a pansexual rapper, a comedian philosopher and a hotheaded illustrator.” 

These cousins are bound together in their grief over the death of their aunt, Peou. In a fragment named “Peou and her Kmouys,” So describes the legendary Peou, a mathematical prodigy whose skills, others imagined, would have made her a great businesswoman, or possibly a winning contestant on The Price is Right. Her sudden death in a fatal car crash rocks the community and brings her “kmouys” together. 

The “comedian-philosopher” is a nephew named Darren, who picks up the next section, set three days after Peou’s crash. At Peou’s funeral he shrewdly observes the art on the walls, the silly minutiae of the ceremony. “There’s a joke in this,” he thinks to himself, as he takes it all in. 

Darren’s brother Vinny is “the first Cambo rapper to break into the hip-hop scene.” (One of Vinny’s songs, “Sachkrok Thom” is a rap ballad to Asian dicks, capable of curing all the world’s ills—if only the world would stop marginalizing them.) He is irreverent and headstrong, a fine contrast to the cerebral Danny, and the two read like twin sides of the same coin, perhaps of So himself, whose work never stops ricocheting between those qualities. 

The third kmouy is niece Molly, who writes Peou’s eulogy while lamenting her own ongoing forced sabbatical back in Cambotown. After having once escaped to NYU and a Gallatin School bachelor’s degree in “Illustrating the Political Self” that “totally kicked her ass,” she got laid off from the non-profit where she’d worked and sent home saddled with $200k in student loans. Molly is wearier, angrier (justifiably) and sees things a bit more clearly than Darren or Vinny do—a third side of So’s personality that readers will find underlying the essays in the same collection.

Later sections, like “The Roses” take us back into Peou’s life, and others go forward to Peou’s funeral and the weeks beyond. Between the eight sections we only get about 130 pages of Cambotown, but it feels like much more. (When I compare it to something like Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon, which was cut off around a similar length, Cambotown feels both technically stronger and far fuller.)

So’s characters crackle with life, humor, pathos, fury, and desperate dreams. Their struggles are generational, historical, local—epic and personal. What we get in 130 pages is so much more than simply track being laid for what never was written. These chapters are full and satisfying, a whole world unto themselves rather than any kind of mere roadmap. 

Still, it cannot be denied that it comes to an end that is painfully premature, with incredible potential energy that is still not yet kineticized. 

Because So guides our imagination so skillfully towards the future, when the past catches up to us at the end of the final fragment, that loss crashes over us like a tidal wave—maybe not so unlike the way it crashes onto his characters, and onto everyone in Cambotown. It resonates deeply that Peou’s own funeral, and absence, is at the center of this novel, and that the incompleteness it brings cuts through the lives of Daniel, Vincent, and Molly. 

You want there to be more, because you want to know that they’ll be OK—what else can you say about the experience of reading a truly great novel but that?

So’s literary agent, Rob McQuilkin recalled how Mark Krotov described the day he first met Anthony at the offices of n+1, where he “came in off the street” and immediately projected the warmth and irreverence found in his fiction. Krotov placed his story “Superking Son Scores Again” at the magazine, a bombastic tale of tough Cambo boys who work out their aggressions through harrowing games of badminton. With an intensely sincere absurdity, the story charmed McQuilkin as much as Anthony himself, and they began working together on the collection of stories that would soon become Afterparties. 

It sold to Ecco Books as part of a two-book deal, “heavily tilted” towards the still emerging Straight Thru Cambotown. “At that point Anthony had maybe fifty pages of it written,” McQuilkin recalled. “A couple of chapters and a memo with his intentions for the rest.” The story collection came together rapidly and was, he recalled, a very “light lift” editorially speaking, meaning that the work was already very polished as it went to Ecco. 

So’s editor, Helen Atsma, confirmed that very little work had to be done on Afterparties beyond settling on the best ordering of the pieces in it. And yet, So’s instincts as a “hefty reviser” were not settled. Even the story “Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts,” which had already been through extensive editing before publication in the New Yorker, seemed to So in need of another look. Dee recalled how hard So had worked on the piece even before that. “I can’t tell you how many versions of ‘Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts’ I read,” but also that So was never “the type of student who would email something and then email again six hours later with a different version of it.” If So was feeling anxious, Dee said, it was only because of his correct perception “that the stakes were now higher.”

Atsma remembers him as “one of those writers for whom the finished line is hard to accept,” but feels that So’s perfectionism was evidence of how deeply he “loved tinkering at the word level.”

But as the publication process went on, McQuilkin said, Anthony had frantic periods, driven by his own perfectionism, trying to make big changes even as the book headed into production. Anthony was having a hard time during the early months of COVID. Even as his own star was rising rapidly, he was mourning the recent suicide of a dear friend and classmate at Syracuse. The essay So wrote about his friend, originally titled “Songs on Endless Repeat” was later published at n+1 again as “Baby, Yeah” (the name of the Pavement song that he and his friend listened to over and over) and that piece now concludes the collection.

So’s plan, McQuilkin explained, was to get back to work on Cambotown in the new year, once Afterparties was finally set. After So’s overdose that December, McQuilkin said that it took him a long time to finally sit down and go through the work that So had left behind before he passed. There was, understandably, the obstacle of his own grief over the loss of So, but also the significant challenge of dealing with these partial materials all alone. 

“Usually there’s this dialogue with the writer,” McQuilkin explained, “instead of me just talking to myself.” 

He found significant, new pieces of Cambotown in the papers, along with So’s notes and other writings, enough to begin working on a sampling of the parts that felt the most polished. He estimates that he and Atsma were able to use about two-thirds of what So left behind to form the eight sections now in Songs On Endless Repeat. These were “not remotely ready, in a finished sense,” he felt, but set amongst the essays So had written, there was new “value in the refractions between them” that came out. 

“We wanted to touch as little as we could,” Atsma said. Though it was a “minimal edit” she said that she “never felt the weight more,” in knowing the importance of sharing his final work with readers. “It didn’t feel lesser than to me,” she recalled, “If they had, we would never have published them.” 

In the end, McQuilkin thinks that the 130 pages of Cambotown might represent about a quarter to a third of the ambitious plans So had for the novel, and, of course, there’s no telling how much of these sections would have endured to the final manuscript, especially as So’s keen, perfectionist eye went through them in future drafts.

How do we face trauma with humor? This is one of the subjects that kmouy Darren says he wants to write his philosophical treatise on. Cambodians love to laugh, he points out to Vinny, as they mill about at Peou’s funeral. Sometimes that’s a reaction to the absurd horrors of the world and of history, but sometimes it’s just for the love of laughing. Vinny, characteristically, cracks a joke back, accusing his brother of selling out, his over-academic analysis is just about “following the money.”

There are themes, in So’s work, McQuilkin said, of reincarnation, and of all the repetitions in all the minutiae of every human life. Storytelling persists because our time alive is always too short, whether it ends after twenty-eight years or a hundred. What we make, and leave behind, at least can always be started over, read again, played on loop.

In the foreword to Songs on Endless Repeat, Jonathan Dee encourages us not to think of So as just another “promising young writer” as these, to be honest, are “never in short supply.” 

If So saw a hole in the world that he intended to fill with his words, then his death inarguably leaves too much of that hole still open. But through the writing collected in this second book, So inched his Californian Cambodian characters not just closer to some kind of immortality, but into the world itself. All of this, carried along in So’s unforgettable voice, leaves us all much fuller than we were before.

The post How Anthony Veasna So’s Unfinished Novel “Straight Thru Cambotown” Became a Collection appeared first on Electric Literature.

Cover your ears.

My entire life, I’ve prided myself on never being an angry person. My parents rarely yelled at me, and I rarely yell at anyone. I’ve never been in a physical fight. In my dreams, I sometimes try to scream at someone, but I can’t. I try to hit someone, and my arm hits soft like a child’s, or my fist dissolves into smoke. In these dreams, I’m angry about my weakness. When I’m awake, I’m not. The symbolism is, of course, obvious.

But six months after my daughter was born, something changed. I’d been up all night, every night, Googling every terrifying thing that could happen to our precious, perfect baby. I’d fallen in love, and was obsessed with the many possible ways I could lose her. If I read enough, fixed everything, controlled it all, she would be okay. A false, impossible hope, I knew—but I didn’t care that my worry was beyond logic. Sometimes, in the middle of an article on the Mayo Clinic’s website, I’d realize I’d read it before—many times before. None of it helped, and yet I kept on. Was the swaddle too tight, was her room too cold, was she wearing too many layers? Was her cough okay? Was this rash ok? Was that other weird sound okay? Was she eating enough? Was I playing enough? Was I playing too much?? COVID anxiety multiplied my new-parent anxiety. At the start of the pandemic, the rhetoric for parents of young children was that they could and maybe would die from COVID. Public spaces (which I avoided as much as I could) were almost intolerable. Someone coughing made my adrenaline jump like I’d seen a bear. Even on walks with my daughter in the stroller, anytime another person passed, I worried about the air we breathed. I suffocated. Later, that rhetoric about COVID changed, but my body has never quite forgotten it.

One night, changing the laundry over for the hundredth time, my fist connected to a basket of laundry. I found myself throwing it across the room. I write “Found myself” because my body felt like the time I’d accidentally grabbed an electric fence—my chest pained and buzzed and my arms became locked and tough, tingling all the way down into my fingertips. I wanted to make a loud sound, wanted to keep myself from disappearing, fury without a target (the laundry, sure, but not just the laundry). Another night I went to my car and screamed. The sound was so loud it pierced my own ears like a needle; the bear was back and it was me. I couldn’t remember ever screaming like that. And once, after putting my daughter down for bed, she was asleep, but my ankle cracked and she woke. I got her back to sleep, and then I closed the door a little too loud and she woke. I tried to get her back to sleep again and failed. I couldn’t shut my brain off until she was asleep and I needed her to sleep and she needed to sleep and I set her down in bed just a little too hard and left the room. Over and over, I slapped my face.

My anger had at last forced me to look at it. I wasn’t even sure what I was raging about. It was never rage at my daughter. I loved her so deeply even something as small as the precise sound of her tiny teeth crunching an apple made me ecstatic. I try, every so often, to write about my love for my daughter, but I always fail. Instead I build a garden around it; I cannot get to the heart of it with language. I worried I could not stop the world from taking the best person I knew, that they would never know her either. I don’t even like writing those sentences. We’d planned for and wanted this child. I had a supportive and devoted spouse who loved being a father. We had every privilege imaginable—whiteness, steady money, family support, maternity and paternity leave, health care, a safe home. I had no right to feel rage. It was me, I thought. My fears were wrong and had broken me somehow. I was determined to figure out why. I was determined to fix myself. Didn’t my daughter deserve a happy mom who didn’t need to go scream in her car? I watched the way my daughter felt my moods, the way I felt sunshine, wind, rain. I watched her begin to imitate my walk, the inflection in my voice. If I was a mirror, I didn’t want her seeing her reflection in such a broken one.

I went to therapy, of course, and I turned to books. I don’t know if there are actually more books about mothering being published now, or if, like playgrounds, I am simply more aware of them because I am one. I thought my rage was new, that I was a violent monster, but the books I read taught me that monsters are everywhere. Even if the rage was new to me, it was not new to parenting. Talking about it, publicly, is new.

I read Rachel Yoder’s 2021 excellent, darkly funny novel Nightbitch first. In the novel, a new mother’s rage becomes so great she turns into a kind of werewolf. And, eventually, she likes it. The sentences are long, looping, delicious. The main character does not have a name. She is just “the mother,” or later, “Nightbitch.” I felt like I was reading the inside of my own mind—if I allowed it to truly do what it wanted, pure instinct, feral. (Of course, what mother can allow this? Even now, here I am hiding in a parenthetical.) I devoured the book, read pages without realizing I had read pages, the way I hadn’t read since I was a child reading Harry Potter. Yoder captures the precise monotony of having a young child, but more than that, helped me discover something about my anger: it was not new for me. Here, Yoder’s narrator describes her first real rage:

“Her child’s screams fanned a flame of rage that flickered in her chest.

“That single, white-hot light at the center of the darkness of herself—that was the point of origin from which she birthed something new, from which all women do.

“You light a fire early in your girlhood. You stoke it and tend it. You protect it at all costs. You don’t let it rage into a mountain of light, because that’s not becoming of a girl. You keep it secret. You let it burn…

“Her anger, her bitterness, her coldness in that darkest part of the night surprised even her. She wanted to think she had become another person altogether the night before, but she knew the horrible truth, that Nightbitch had always been there, not even that far below the surface.”

I recognized the flame. I thought about when my younger sister sat in my room pushing every button the way only siblings know how to do. I picked her up and threw her bodily from my room.  And later, the many touches from men I didn’t want. I knew I couldn’t get angry, or lose control. Before I ever nurtured a child, I nurtured anger. Now, I am the thing to be feared. Yes, I thought, reading Nightbitch: I am an animal. I am only now failing to hide it.

I turned to Minna Dubin’s 2023 nonfiction Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood to think about why. Mom Rage is a vulnerable, deeply researched work that locates mom rage by describing a “basement” of systemic issues that can underpin moments of rage, wearing on mothers long before an angry outburst. Dubin describes many of these issues as different versions of a lack of “mothercare”—a capitalist system that punishes women for leaving the workforce to do care work; a racist and ableist healthcare system that does only the barest of medical minimums for mothers; a governmental uninvestment in providing universal, quality childcare; the dominance of the nuclear family that erodes the “village”; a pervasive, social-media influenced belief in what mothers “should” do and look like, which demands mothers subdue their anger. At the same time, there is little incentive to fix these problems—why would we? The entire system is balanced upon mothers providing free childcare at home. As Dubin writes, if mothers blame themselves for their anger, and society blames them too, then the larger society needs to take no responsibility. The problem of mom rage is mothers’ own problem to fix. 

After that, rage is physical: the nervous system responding to constant stimuli of small children, lowered coping ability from sleep deprivation, and the high stakes, for giving a shit about what you’re doing. In her book Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, Amanda Montei locates motherhood’s trajectory through a lifetime in the body, and through touch. Dubin also writes, “Mom rage lives in the body.”

Rage seems inevitable—the standards are high, the hours are long, the demands immense. Of course we rage. Dubin also shares her own moments of rage, and the subsequent shame. I saw myself there, too—the electric limbs, the Nightbitch—but I knew how other mothers would react. I saw them on Goodreads, on Instagram, in the New Yorker’s review of the book: how could a mother act this way? It makes sense—mothering and caregiving are burdened by many of the same difficulties no matter who you are, but the web of experience is so unique it’s impossible to fully see yourself in other mothers. There were many other mothers who saw their rage in the book, too, many still who felt this rage unfathomable. They did not think Of course we rage. They thought, as I feared my daughter did: How could you?

Even with all these books, we are still circling the question of what to do with this rage. In the New Yorker’s review of Mom Rage, Merve Emre writes about Dubin, “She sensed that her reactions were excessive, but she made no real effort to understand. Understanding was not the point of her essay. The point was to unleash the primal scream of a mother who had regressed—spectacularly, obscenely—into a tantrumming child, not unlike the three-year-old who had spurred her rage in the first place.” When I raged, I threw things. I screamed. But inside, I felt older than ever. I did not feel like a child. The review is steeped in the kind of misogyny, infantilizing, and judgment that mothers and caregivers rage against. The review was clear: even in 2023, this is bad, monstrous, not allowed.

When I told a male friend about my anger—peripherally, for I chose not to share the whole truth—I told him how hard I worked to not yell at my daughter. He laughed. “I yell at my kids all the time,” he said, shrugging. I didn’t ask him if he feels shame about it. He doesn’t seem to, and I’m pretty sure I know the answer: no shame in yelling for many fathers.

Mom Rage was a candle held out—yes, thank god, it isn’t just me. But there was still too much of myself in the dark. I still didn’t yell at my daughter, or at my husband. After reading Mom Rage and the New Yorker review, I understood—there was no appropriate place for me to feel rage. Like Nightbitch, I feared I was bad at the core. I was not able to let myself be feral. I was not allowed to be angry. I was a bad mother if I was angry. With nowhere else to go, I turned my rage inward. I raged at myself.

In my post-rage, post self-harm shame, when my husband tried to help and understand me, I would often tell him I was a bad mom, a terrible mom. “Please get her a better mom,” I told him. “Send me away.” I said it as a way to punish myself further. The next two books I read played on that ultimate fear—that your child would be taken away from you. One of the mothers sharing their rage stories with Dubin for her Mom Rage interviews hesitated after Dubin’s question. She wanted to make sure Dubin was not going to take her child away. Early in my pregnancy, I’d listened to a story about a woman experiencing postpartum psychosis who was separated from her child in the earliest, most tender days. I didn’t think this was me, maybe, probably not, but the thought was there—what if?

Next I read Jessamine Chan’s 2022 The School for Good Mothers, a novel about a dystopian system for the punishment and “retraining” of mothers who have been, subjectively, bad. If they do not pass the tests at the end of their retraining, the mother (and a few fathers) have their custody revoked. I read it like it was true crime. When Frida, the main character, sees a therapist who makes her list her fears, the list is so large and random that it reveals nothing useful. Yes, I thought. And despite those fears, Frida makes the mistake of leaving her daughter alone for a few hours anyway. Agents from the school then install cameras in Frida’s home to monitor her behavior. She wonders how a mother separated from her child should behave, sit, eat. How often she should cry, rage. Social workers interview her, asking her a barrage of questions: 

“Frida’s motives. Her mental health. Whether she understands a parent’s fundamental responsibilities. Her concept of safety. Her standards of cleanliness. The social worker asked about Harriet’s diet. Frida’s refrigerator contained takeout boxes, some sweet potatoes, one package of celery, two apples, some peanut butter, some string cheese, some condiments. Only a day’s worth of milk. The cupboards were nearly empty. Why wasn’t she paying attention to Harriet’s nutrition?”

I recognized this voice, this surveillance over the thousands of decisions I made every day, how every decision seemed poised to shape my child forever, and mold me in the shape of “good mother” or “bad mother.” Yes, I heard the other mothers on Instagram, in the moms group, what Dubin calls a “cultural mandate to be hypervigilant” (39). But for me, that surveillance was internal. That questioner was myself. My fear and anxiety came from constantly surveilling myself against a standard built from a lifetime of absorbing the mothers around me, the mothers in pop culture, all of it. My own mother tells me, “You’ve always been a mommy, always taking care of other kids.” But I don’t remember this. I wonder if this is fiction, made to make me feel better. 

On some days, I thought the way Frida thinks about herself: that she’s not as bad as “those bad mothers” in the news, the ones who set their houses on fire, or leave their children on subway platforms, or strap their children into car seats then drive into a lake. While I read the scene where Frida’s daughter Harriet is taken from her arms, separated, likely forever, I cried enough for strangers to glance at me. My heart was in the story, but I was reading The School for Good Mothers on a beach in Mexico, celebrating my sister’s bachelorette party, thousands of miles away from my own daughter. I ordered another mimosa. I dried my tears. On my worst days, I thought: Maybe I am just as bad. If there was a real School, I belonged there. Not for retraining, but for punishment.

But there is no School. The world, as it is, trains and punishes mothers.

This is a love story—if you can believe it. After all that obsessive reading, all that punishment—I fell in love. I read Yael Goldstein-Love’s 2023 novel The Possibilities. In this novel, Hannah has an eight-month-old son, and she remembers two births: one, where he survived because she insisted on a C-section, and one where he did not. The intrusive thought of his tiny, lifeless arm stays in her mind, sticky in a way that makes her feel like she did actually see it happen, even with her living, breathing son right in front of her. She describes these moments as a “car-swerve feeling”: 

“Like when you have a near-miss on the road and seconds, minutes, maybe even hours later you’re still waiting to feel relieved not to have died in a fiery crash…Not because you aren’t grateful to have escaped. And not because you aren’t certain that you did, in fact, avoid becoming roadkill—you haven’t lost your mind. But, rather, because you feel in a deep, primal, hard-to-describe way that the crash came too close to occurring. Because it didn’t seem a simple yes or no in those car-swerve moments, did it? A simple it didn’t happen or it did? Instead it seemed, in those moments, that the way things could have gone had some lingering reality, some awful stickiness that clung now to the moments carrying you away from when you might have crashed but didn’t.”

Goldstein-Love captures the exact way my anxiety felt—the idea of a near miss. That even if something hadn’t actually happened to my daughter, that something else was bound to. And then, I understood my rage as a response to my powerlessness. My rage was a response to the avalanche of worry that you cannot help but absorb as a parent. As Goldstein-Love writes, after a while, I cannot take “The agonizing need to keep this someone safe, a need as bodily and insistent as hunger, thirst. But impossible to satisfy because, deep down, you knew that you were powerless: against accidents, disease, an active shooter. Against your baby disappearing from his crib without a trace. Surely every parent felt this. It was too much, the hugeness of what we’d opened ourselves up to. A child was too much to have at stake” (131). No matter how perfectly I loved my daughter, I could not protect her. This infuriated me. 

Because she saved him once, by insisting on a C-section, she wants to trust her fears, rather than push them away as irrational. Hannah feels like the only thing separating them from a different reality, a worse reality where her son died, is her. Her instincts had saved him; how could she ignore that twinge of worry? Many, many times I’d thought about bringing my daughter to the hospital, then thought irrational. Until the moment she had an allergic reaction severe enough to prescribe an epi-pen. That time, I knew to go to the hospital without hesitation. How could I talk myself out of fear, when it had protected my daughter when she needed it?

And then the character Hannah’s son starts disappearing. At first, just from Hannah’s view, and then from the world at large—Hannah’s therapist and her ex-husband also start to forget her son. Soon, Hannah discovers that her visions of her son’s death are not “just” hormonal, are not postpartum anxiety, but instead are real, happening to their child in a parallel reality. Both she and her estranged mother have the ability to see “the possibilities.” They have the ability to jump between them and protect their children in multiple realities. Hannah ultimately chooses to stay in her own reality, and to protect her child in the reality she knows, but that doesn’t make the other possibilities less real, or less powerful. 

So much of my life and my mothering has been denying my anxiety, denying my anger. Irrational; you worry too much; you can’t control it, so don’t worry about it; overactive imagination; mommy brain; just the hormones. Like Frida in The School for Good Mothers, my fears are boundless, but unlike Frida, they are not random. My fears aren’t of kidnappers, really, or Red Dye #40. They are of the things that can happen to children no matter what, even inside my own care. I fell in love with The Possibilities because, instead of telling myself my rage and anxiety were worthless, I now felt my worries did have power. My worry could bend time, reshape reality; my love could traverse a universe. My fears still arrive, urgent like Hannah’s, a feeling that there is something that I can fix, and that I must do it, “[l]ike a muscle memory of the mind” (101). But instead of shoving them away as irrational, I honor them. As if there is a reality in which they really could happen. That reality is this reality. Then, the rage goes away.

This doesn’t erase the very real dangers for women, caregivers, and children. This doesn’t erase the lack of mothercare in the United States. This doesn’t erase the paradox of having children: you spend your life trying to keep them safe and alive, and you will always fail. It’s telling that I found the most solace in a work of fiction, in a world that doesn’t exist. I always felt like I was missing a mother’s instinct. But perhaps this is my version of it. While I hope for and work toward the possibility for a world with fewer fears, and better care of children and caregivers, right now I honor my worries. For now, I will feel powerful in imagining all the possibilities. 

The post My Mom Rage Is a Response to the Avalanche of Worry That Comes With Parenting appeared first on Electric Literature.

This proves challenging, however, when I consider that I have very few memories from before I turned twelve. There’s a deep blackness in that part of my hippocampus, where the brain stores memory. I often imagine that place within my mind like a never-ending storage unit filled with innumerable servers or cabinets, each accounting for various moments in my life. In the way way back, if you can reach that place, you’ll find just a single floppy disc where those first twelve years should be.

I don’t remember the first concert I attended, which was part of Britney Spears’ “Dream Within A Dream” tour. I was ten.

The little I know is based on an amalgamation of Britney’s tour schedule, a few disposable camera pictures my parents took that night, and bits and pieces of memory my mom and dad have passed on over the years. I was entirely in love with Britney, and I emulated her in my style and artistic choices, so my dad took me to the concert as a birthday gift. My mom thought Britney was “trashy” and not the best role model. She didn’t like that Britney made me want to get a belly button ring so badly that I began wearing my magnetized earrings from Claire’s on my abdomen. (I wasn’t allowed to get my ears pierced until I was fifteen, so a navel piercing was absolutely out of the question.) 

But even though she made her stance clear—rolling her eyes at the way I covered the floral wallpaper she’d selected for my bedroom with posters of Britney, The Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls, and N’SYNC—she took me shopping at dELiA*s ahead of the concert. I chose silver pleather bell bottoms, which hugged at my non-existent child hips, and paired them with a pink crop top with a sweetheart cut around my non-existent breasts. I can tell from a pre-concert photo that I’d stuffed my training bra with toilet paper. My top reveals a stretch of skin I smeared with silky, scented body glitter before adding a magnetic butterfly “belly ring.” A recent Disney Cruise had left my hair cornrowed in pink and white beads, a style I chose because I wanted to look like Lizzie McGuire. I kept them for over a month, carefully wrapping my head in a silk scarf each night so they’d last for the concert. I completed my outfit with a pair of metallic light-up Heelys, a choice that left me clutching the railing as I descended our stairs for the concert. Years later, when recounting this scene, my dad will say, ““you lit up like a strip club on Bourbon Street.” But on that day, they didn’t make me change, even after my dad snickered to my mom, “She looks like a baby hooker.” I wonder, Do I remember this or have I been told this story? Memory and memoir writing is tricky in this way. 

Once, while digging around the internet, I uncovered research about childhood amnesia that determined the average age of earliest childhood memories is between three and four. It’s a funny fact to consider as a writer, a memoirist even, that I don’t remember what currently amounts to a third of my life. My parents found it strange and frustrating when I would tell them I didn’t remember major trips we took, ones I’d begged to go on, trips to Egypt, Italy, and Spain. I also don’t remember standing on the stadium folding chair next to my dad and screaming along to “…Baby One More Time,” but he does. I don’t remember his shock at Britney’s costume during “Toxic,” a nude rhinestone bodysuit intended to make it look like she was naked and covered in diamonds. I don’t remember the headlines of my teens, decrying Britney as “crazy” and an “unfit mother” after she shaved her head and began partying with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. I don’t remember her numerous public trips to various rehab and mental health institutions. I don’t remember when I first learned about her conservatorship. I was in the midst of my own inner and external turmoils and too close, unbeknownst to me at the time, to what Britney was going through to find any type of comfort in our shared existence. 

I didn’t fully realize the impact Britney Spears’s life and career has had on my life until I began reading The Woman in Me, her debut memoir. The front flap recounts Britney’s June 2021 court testimony and notes that the “impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others.” 

The writer Anne Lamott, whose first book was written for her father, who coincidentally had the same type of brain cancer my father survived, says in Bird by Bird, her love letter to the writing process, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

My father and his little sister grew up in Hammond, Louisiana, just thirty minutes south of Britney’s hometown, Kentwood, which sits on the border of Mississippi and Louisiana. My dad’s mother, Theresa, lived in the same house my dad was raised in until I was in my teens. I grew up playing in my granny’s rose garden and running wild in the same woods Britney recounts in the first few pages of her book. Our fathers were raised by abusive alcoholic men who hurt their wives and pushed their sons to measure up to their expectation of what a “man” should be. Britney’s paternal grandfather, June, was a local basketball star. My grandfather, Archie, was the quarterback and captain of LSU’s football team. They weren’t far apart in age, my grandfather slightly older than Britney’s. I wonder if they might have known each other. Those parts of Louisiana and the sporting community were small back then, and in many ways, still are.

I was nine when Britney Spears released her debut single “…Baby One More Time” at sixteen. The accompanying music video portrays bored school-girl Britney, and her classmates dancing in the halls, outside, and in the gymnasium after the bell rings. I began ballet when I was three and added tap and modern to my list of after-school activities when I was eight. All I wanted was to sing and dance and to be seen as perfect, a feeling Britney also describes in The Woman in Me. 

One of the many ways I found calm in the chaos of my childhood, alongside reading and writing in my diary, was through putting on performances for my parents and their friends. It wasn’t uncommon for my mom and dad, who had me in their forties, to bring me out to dinner as a source of entertainment and, to keep me from sleeping on or under the table, ask me to sing. Everything felt frosted over in those moments, as if I’d been transported to a different and more deliciously colorful world like Clara in The Nutcracker. I’d belt out songs that were wiser than my years, like “Summertime” by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, or “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac. My thirst for stardom—or a path that would take me far beyond Louisiana—led me to compete and win the Miss Pre-Teen Baton Rouge and Miss Pre-Teen Louisiana beauty pageants. I auditioned for American Idol, preparing two songs—Mariah Carey’s “Hero” and Roberta Flack’s version of “Killing Me Softly”—for the Idol open call auditions at the New Orleans Superdome, just a year before it filled with Hurricane Katrina refugees. My mom came with me and let me miss a whole day of school. I was definitely one of the younger people in the crowd of hopefuls, and while I didn’t get as far as Britney did when she competed on Star Search, a similar televised competition, I did make the first four cuts at only ten years old. I continued spending all my free time in voice lessons and dance classes, auditioning for local and regional theater productions, and immersing myself in the fantasy of a life in Hollywood or on Broadway. It was this thirst for creative expression that would later translate into a need to detail everything on the page.

The writer Dani Shapiro, a favorite of mine, opines in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life that our stories “choose” us. For memoirists who are grappling with what to share or omit, Shapiro—who has also struggled with these details—says, “If we don’t tell them in order to spare others, we are somehow diminished.”

I think of a woman like Britney Spears, who has been supporting her family since she was a teenager and, in doing so, has lived to “spare” others. And I think of myself and the childhood I lost on a soccer field somewhere in uptown New Orleans when I was eleven—just a few months after I saw Britney in concert—as my dad fell down in the bleachers and began shaking so hard that we could hear him clanging against the metal out on the grassy pitch. Doctors swiftly identified the cause of his seizures as an incurable brain tumor, a glioblastoma, and gave him three to six months to live. One of the few memories I know is mine is my mom grabbing me by my small, bony shoulders in the hospital, tears transforming her face, and telling me I needed to be strong for her. Sometimes, I think of how I spared her by doing just that and, in turn, allowed myself and my mental health to be diminished.

Shapiro goes on about how the memoirist is perceived as “exposing” themselves. But writing in this way would be akin to leaving your diary open for all to read—very different from memoir. She recalls an exchange between Frank McCourt, the author of Angela’s Ashes, and a woman he’d just met. The woman told McCourt she felt as if she knew everything about him. “Oh, darlin’,” he said, “it’s just a book.” 

The Woman in Me is just a book, a mechanism that, unlike an open diary, allows the reader to connect with Britney, and as Shapiro would say, “With others. With the world around you. With yourself.”

I felt this connection in myriad ways while reading The Woman in Me, especially as a child who was also subject to generational trauma. While my father doesn’t struggle with alcoholism like Jamie Spears, his father did, and that disease left its marks on the whole family. My grandfather’s drunken rages—physical and verbal abuse predominantly directed at my dad and grandmother—trained his son to be emotionally closed off. It was often impossible, still is, for anyone to penetrate my father’s porcupine-thick skin. When I experienced significant bullying as a kid, he couldn’t understand or empathize with my pains because his were always greater. As an adult, I know it’s an exercise in futility to tell him if I’m sad because, for him, it doesn’t compute. He tells me to “turn on” my happiness, as he was forced to do. 

More than anything, The Woman in Me encompasses Britney’s palpable loneliness throughout her entire life. It’s an isolation I recognize. I feel it when I recall the long trips my parents took without me. In our kitchen, we had a calendar with velcro stretched across each day of the week. As days passed, I would take the small photo of me and move it one place closer to the date they’d return, affixed with a photo of my parents. There were years where my letters to Santa asked for them to stay home more.

I felt a bleaker loneliness when I was twenty-four and my mother died, which caused my only-child existence to deepen and bleed into the experience of feeling partially orphaned. The gap widened between my father and me, and his need for me to be more of a wife or parent to him than a daughter grew when he was diagnosed with vascular dementia. My mother had hoped and so did I, even, that her death would create a bridge for us to meet on. Instead it left a crater that sunk everything we might have shared. Two weeks after she died, a few days after her funeral, he left me in our home, the place she died in—her personal effects everywhere as if she would pull in the driveway at any moment—and he went on a vacation with friends – ones I’d grown up knowing – to Taos, New Mexico. These plans materialized a day before he left and I was told I was not invited. That weekend Hurricane Harvey blew through the city. When I later told him how his leaving at the precipice of my grief had hurt, he reminded me I was an adult and free to do as I pleased, as was he. These are the scenes I replay when reading Britney’s experience of her conservatorship. How impossible it was for her to get her family to treat her as their equal, with compassion, especially at the heartache she felt at being separated from her sons. My dad has never controlled me in that way, but he made it clear that we were not a team, that I was alone in my grief and should seek support elsewhere.

From early ages, Britney and I turned inward, focusing on fantasies of fame and escaping our families. It was an attempt to control things that felt more within our grasp than our dads and moms. We threw ourselves into dancing, singing, and various auditions that would get us as far away from Louisiana as talent would take us. But there was another pull, the suburbia and church groups of my teenage years creating a fork within me, a divide of disparate dreams that Britney also describes experiencing. Part of me wanted desperately to leave, to eschew all that I was raised around, which my mother—as a fifth-generation New Orleanian—boldly encouraged. The other half of me wanted to fit in with my peers, to go to LSU—my grandfather and several family member’s alma mater—and marry my college sweetheart. We’d have a car filled with kids before I turned thirty. I felt I could be happy in this version of my life and that things could, in many ways, be easier, softer, gentler, and more simple.

I was diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder as a child. This mostly manifested in fears that my parents wouldn’t come home from whatever dinner party or event they might be at that night, that something bad would happen when they went to the opera—as it happens to Bruce Wayne’s parents. I was afraid of plane crashes that could take them from me. Panicked to the point of being unable to sleep until we were all under the same roof, and even then, each creak in the floorboards of our old house–all caused by the expansion of moisture in the swampy ground our foundation sat on–kept me up with Home Alone style fears of home invasions. 

I overthought most situations and experienced a lot of social anxiety, which I’m told is common among only children. Where my parents were gregarious individuals who loved large social gatherings, I felt more comfortable alone in my room with a book or in the staid routine of daily dance classes and voice lessons. Britney expresses a lot of this, which surprised me because it’s hard to picture your favorite pop star as awkward or socially anxious. We both rarely knew how to articulate these anxieties and instead stayed silent or would isolate ourselves to cope. Few close to us, especially our family, seemed to understand these “quirks” in our personalities. But unlike Britney, I was somewhat lucky that sometimes my mom did. When she was in her late teens until her mid-thirties, she struggled, quite openly, with anxiety and depression. Similarly to Britney’s paternal grandmother, Jean Spears, my mother was briefly hospitalized and placed on lithium. While I’ve never been told whether my mom attempted suicide, I know she often thought about it because she told me she did. I know that when she lived in Paris, from her early twenties until she was thirty-eight, she would wait for the metro, look down on the tracks, and meditate on how fast and easy it would be to throw herself onto them and leave her body. 

In my early twenties, I began experiencing panic attacks. I wasn’t sure what was causing them other than stress. I was studying creative writing at The New School, while juggling several internships. Finances were tight. From time to time, my mom would tell me they might not be able to pay for the next semester, and then my dad would spend what amounted to my tuition on a piece of art, and my mother would threaten to leave him. Rinse and repeat, so I started seeing a therapist and taking anti-anxiety medication. Everything seemed to level out when I was twenty-three. I stopped taking medication, I stopped seeing my therapist, and I moved to London, England, for my first love—a British boy—work and to get my Masters in English literature. But then my mom was diagnosed with cancer, the same type of ovarian cancer Britney’s beloved Aunt Sandra died from, only six months after I moved. Unlike my father, my mother was not a medical miracle. She lost her life quickly over the course of a short and brutal year. Moving home to New Orleans when she died was my attempt to make sense of it all. In The Woman In Me Britney tells of a wild and creative period of her life, shortly following her divorce from Kevin Federline (and before the conservatorship). During this time, she released Blackout, which she feels is her best and most artistically diverse album. She was twenty-five, which is the same age I was when I left New Orleans to spend the year traveling, visiting France, Italy, Monaco, China, South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Mongolia. Attempting to heal, I wrote about loss and scattered my mother’s ashes. When I moved back to New York, I threw myself into work at a small publishing house and tried to let my nine-to-five job, friends, turbulent relationship, and life itself cover the pain and grief I felt for the home and family I lost when my mom died. 

But that’s not possible, Britney shows the reader, when her family diminishes the pain she feels during her divorce from Federline. Kevin refuses to let her see their young children, and the paparazzi’s relentless attacks and constant presence in her life bring her to a breaking point–which results in her infamously shaving her head, entering rehab and, eventually, the conservatorship. 

I know that breaking point well. 

I reached it at thirty years old, only five years after my mom died. What I didn’t shed in hair, I shed in weight, losing over thirty pounds in three months. The relationship I’d been in for over a year ended suddenly, and I was heartbroken, but had recently begun a new job with a sizable role and salary increase, and moved out of the house I shared with friends and into my own space. All within the same month. I was trying to stay above the muck of it all, but my sadness suffocated me in my two-hundred-and-fifty square foot Brooklyn apartment. I had moments where I looked at pills that were supposed to ease my depression and anxiety and wondered if taking all of them at once would give me a more permanent sense of relief. After I quit my job, I would lie in my shower for hours, sometimes fully clothed in pajamas I’d worn for days, and I’d put my dad on speakerphone. I tried to get him to comfort me like I hoped a father would. I’d tell him I was scared by how hopeless I felt, and he would tell me to “decide to be happy.” 

Like it was that easy. 

I was placed under a psychiatric hold after I collapsed on my way to work and couldn’t tell the doctors the last meal I remembered eating. My friends and family were shocked at how swiftlyI plummeted from my place of relative stability. Some didn’t know how to respond and distanced themselves from me, others told me I wasn’t present enough to be their friend, my godmother—my mom’s best friend—stopped responding to the texts I sent asking for advice and blocked me on Facebook. Eventually, my mother’s sisters intervened, presenting me with a host of websites for rehab programs, refusing to let me come home for Christmas until I got “help”, and so I spent almost ninety days at a mental health institute designed to treat my developing Xanax addiction, continuing depressive episode, and the malnourishment it caused.

While I’m able to acknowledge, a year later, how this time in my life shaped me for the better, and feel grateful for the remarkable people I met along the way by seeking residential treatment, there are many ways I felt hurt and infantilized. I felt like a criminal when I’d come back inside the house I lived in with five other young women and men, and was forced to do a “contraband dance,” which consisted of jumping around and shaking our shoes out to prove we weren’t smuggling anything unapproved back inside. Or how I had to count aloud or hum when I went to the bathroom or showered, the door cracked wide open, to confirm I wasn’t hurting myself. I still pause before I open a drawer in my kitchen and remember a time when all drawers and doors were locked to me. I know this was designed for safety, but the damage caused from being woken with a flashlight in my face every thirty minutes while I slept left its mark. I rarely sleep more than an hour through the night without waking, expecting to hear whispers and shoes coming into my room and approaching my bed. When Britney recounts her own stay at a similar inpatient program, she articulated a feeling I often share: “I’m probably the least fearful woman alive at this point, but it doesn’t make me feel strong; it makes me feel sad. I shouldn’t be this strong. These months made me too tough.”

As a graduate student, the subject of my final project, a narrative essay, was my mother. It was the first piece of writing of mine that wasn’t about twenty-something romantic love and the hopeless pursuit of it. When I began writing, she’d recently been diagnosed with cancer, and I decided not to tell her about the subject of my essay until it was finished. The piece explored the etymology and history of tulips, her favorite flower, while weaving in the story—as I knew it—of my mother’s life. Comparing her to the flower and the flower to her. It was a love letter and a testament to the beautiful, hearty, colorful woman I knew her to be. I dedicated the project to both of my parents, and mailed them a copy once I’d submitted it for my professors to review. 

A few weeks later I received a short text from my mom. 

“Very nice what you wrote about me, but hurt your dad’s feelings by leaving him out. Write something kind about him, too?”

I was furious at and hurt by her response. I remember feeling like she’d taken something I’d done purely out of love and admiration and turned it into a weapon for them both to use against me. Both my mom and dad told our family about the essay, but not that I’d graduated at the top of my class or received glowing remarks on this project from my professors, that I’d been cruel to my father in omitting him from a story about my mother’s life – a time in her life before she knew him. After that, I decided not to write about my parents – my family – while they were living. When my mother died and I began writing about her, the loss and the way it changed the structure of our family, it was hard to omit my father but I wasn’t sure how to write about him without fearing his response. That fear of repercussions that could – likely, in my mind, would – stem from my words about my inner world was so strong that after I completed my masters degree, I left the dome of literature and my pursuit of a life somewhere in those margins and began working at tech startups. It would be almost six years before I would write outside of my diary again. 

Much has been said about the backlash experienced by both Britney and the public figures she lived her private life with, namely Justin Timberlake and the entire Spears family. On Justin, she’s both matter-of-fact and generous in her retelling of that time of her life and first significant—and wildly public—romantic relationship. They were very young, and while she would have had Justin’s child because she was so deeply in love with him and craved a quieter existence where she could create the family she hadn’t grown up with, he wasn’t in the wrong for feeling like he wasn’t ready to become a father. From Britney’s adult vantage point, it’s easy to spot the perpetrators of wrongdoing—their managers, who were more concerned about damaging her reputation as a virginal pop idol than they were about getting her access to safe healthcare when they decided to terminate the pregnancy in a hotel room. Reading this, I felt less anger for Timberlake—who tried to comfort Britney the only way his immature and self-absorbed pop-star brain knew how to, through song and strumming his guitar—than I did for her management, who had the power and greater maturity to know they should have gotten Britney to a doctor. I don’t think that Britney should have omitted these details from her memoir to spare others.

From my pre-teen years until I became a woman approaching thirty, I felt safest when I hid myself and disassociated deep within a book from the uncomfortable realities of my life. My thoughts and feelings were rarely shared outside of the confines of one of my journals or the Notes app in my phone.  

Britney echoes a similar reluctance to be fully present with those closest to her. She describes how frequently she’d take to the woods surrounding her house and hide.

“For years that was my thing — to hide.” 

We learn as children playing hide-and-seek that staying hidden is one of the ways we remain safe.

Following her breakup with Justin, Britney briefly lives in Cher’s old NoHo four-story apartment, which she rarely leaves. “I fell off the face of the earth.” She writes. “I ate takeout for every meal. And this will probably sound strange, but I was content staying home. I felt safe.”

Towards the end of the book, Britney describes the process of writing all she’s shared with us, laying out the truth of her life on the page for the very first time, as an incredibly freeing and emotional experience—but one that took a long time and a lot of work to feel ready to tell. 

I write because, as a friend once told me after I shared an anecdote from my youth, I had “no choice but to become a writer.” But I do wonder, as Britney does in the second-to-last page of her book, if my family and those who closed themselves to me during the hardest moments of my life, will find and read this essay of mine, and what they’ll think. 

As Joan Didion notes in “Why I Write,” included in her 2021 essay collection, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, “Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions, I would never have needed to write a novel.” 

When I told my cousin I was working on a piece about Britney’s memoir, I joked that it was also about how Britney Spears and I are the same person. “You have a lot in common with each other,” he said with a straight face. I laughed, and he doubled down, telling me that the only thing that separated me from Britney Spears was, “y’know, her being a multi-millionaire pop star” and the fact that she’s been institutionalized by her family several times. And I’ve only had that happen to me once. I feel lucky that my worries over who reads this essay and feels hurt or angry with me is small, pales in comparison to the reach of The Woman in Me — which sold 1.1 million copies in its first week. I feel lucky that I don’t need to worry much over whether or not what I’ve written will further alienate me from my father, who, even if he does read this, would likely forget the next day. I feel lucky that the private anecdotes I’ve shared won’t jeopardize someone’s career. I feel lucky that I probably don’t need to worry that thousands of people will have opinions about what I have and haven’t already shared here or in my future memoirs. And for this reason, among others, I feel lucky that while I am, as of this year, a “Hollywood girl” living in Los Angeles, this isn’t a song or a story about a girl named Lucky or Britney Spears. This is my story, a writer in my early thirties who, unlike my pre-teen self, feels lucky, fortunate, and grateful to have not gotten further on American Idol, lucky to have parents who wouldn’t move to New York or L.A. so I could be a child star, lucky to be rhythmically challenged in jazz and tap dance – lucky to have traveled a similar yet very different road than that of Britney Jean Spears.

The post It’s Just My Memoir, B*tch appeared first on Electric Literature.

Soon, Bethenny upped the ante: She was suing The Real Housewives’s network, Bravo, and parent company, NBC, in a class-action suit alleging “depraved mistreatment” of reality TV participants. “[T]he sordid and dark underbelly of NBC’s widely consumed reality TV universe has remained under wraps for far too long,” Bethenny’s attorneys wrote. “Please be advised that the day of reckoning has arrived.”

The news grabbed my attention immediately. Regardless of Bethenny’s motives—which were quickly questioned in my social media feeds—if somebody wants to start a union and blast the executives who messed with my WGA friends, I’m here for it. But I was also interested for selfish reasons. I was working on a reality TV project myself, one centering Bethenny’s television alma mater, The Real Housewives.

I’ve been re-watching old seasons of the franchise, trying to understand what this show—often treated as a trashy guilty pleasure—means for the more feminist, equitable society I want to live in. This undertaking involves dissecting women in 11 different cities over 17 years because, yes, that’s how big Bravo’s franchise is. Put another way, I’m 34 years old, which means The Real Housewives has been on television for half my life.

Re-watching old episodes, the overlap in our lifespans couldn’t be more obvious. It didn’t feel like viewing a show; it felt like reliving my life, remembering the world that raised us both.

Over the last 17 years, The Real Housewives and I made ourselves small, viciously slut shamed, and un-ironically Girlbossed; we mourned past pains and wore pussy hats so we could be #WomenSupportingWomen, but we also lost sight of what support should look like and who deserved supporting. We made paltry attempts at intersectional feminism that ended in backlash, costing us allies—and rights. Throughout all this, society’s expectations and definitions of women kept changing—continue changing—but one truth remains: We might often categorize The Real Housewives as frivolous pop culture, but it has always reflected how the world exists for real women. Two things can be true.

Then came Bethenny with her call for a union, safer workplaces, and management accountability, all things I want for women everywhere in that more equitable world I dream of. When Bethenny introduced those ideas as Real Housewives demands, I wanted her to succeed because I want women to succeed, and I see The Real Housewives and regular women’s fates linked.

So yes, I’m paying attention to Bethenny Frankel. I don’t want her call for change to go the way of our dream for a female president, of a lasting MeToo movement, of a woman’s right to define themselves and control their bodies—all things we thought we’d achieve in the last 17 years, only to come up short.

Speaking of those years, how did everything go so wrong? If my Real Housewives re-watch has taught me anything, it’s that the answer was always there. We just needed to pay more attention to what we were watching.

The Real Housewives debuted following five Orange County women in 2006 when I was 16 years old. It was a time when fashionable meant wearing skin-tight, low-rise jeans, pants so traumatically unflattering, we invented an insult for how they deformed our bodies—the muffin top—and everyone publicly counted the days until the Olsen twins, Lindsay Lohan, and other starlets turned 18 and could all be legally slept with. 

Our ideas about what it meant to be a woman were so small that when Bravo announced its new show following five “glamorous… sexy, sophisticated” housewives, viewers knew exactly what that meant: Straight, skinny, white, cis women. It didn’t yet mean screaming, partying, or throwing wine, stereotypes with which the show would later become synonymous. It meant wearing suggestive clothes and a don’t-take-me-too-seriously demeanor, all while performing the labor of the homemaker archetype with an easy, agreeable smile. Those first season Orange County housewives nailed this formula—except Jo.

Jo is a 24-year-old engaged to an older, wealthy man named Slade. And Jo, it should be said, is not white; she’s Peruvian-American, though we can likely thank ABC’s fictional Desperate Housewives for The Real Housewives’s decision to cast one token Latinx woman.

When we meet Jo, she’s acing the acceptable type of womanhood. Low-rise jeans look great on her. She’s recently quit her job, intending to stay home, to be Slade’s perfect housewife. The problem? She hates cleaning! She’s bored! In the 1960s, women were prescribed valium for this. In 2006, we put them on TV and watched their relationships implode.

Slade wants Jo to be happy caring for his house, picking up his dry cleaning, and parenting the kids from his first marriage. But Jo wants to go out! Jo wants to work! Jo does not want to clean! So, they fight. Slade laments Jo’s disinterest in becoming that housewife he’s always wanted, and she cries because she loves this creep. She wishes she was more like the woman he dreams of, too.

Enter Kimberly, Jo’s housewife fairy godmother. Kimberly, like Jo, used to work, until it was time to quit her job to raise babies. Kimberly, also like Jo, struggled with this identity shift at first. But then, Kimberly found new hobbies: Day drinking at country clubs, getting a boob job, buying lingerie. 

The worst part of this regressive Cinderella story is realizing Kimberly seems genuinely happy. She’s not only accepted the narrow parameters of womanhood in 2006—she’s embraced them, just like my friends and I embraced low-rise jeans. We never considered changing our pants or the roles society thrust upon us. We shrunk our bodies to fit the jeans, and we shrunk the women to make them ideal wives.      

The Real Housewives scored one of its first water-cooler moments in 2009, courtesy of the first season of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. This cast had no token Latinx woman—only skinny white ladies with dark skin via spray tan. Needless to say, our ideas about how to be a woman were still very straight, very white, and very small. And maybe it was because I was getting older, but it felt like the punishments for acting out had gotten steeper. Which brings me to a popular late-aughts punishment: Slut shaming.

Exhibit A: Laurel. My senior year of high school, my class voted Laurel “biggest mouth,” because once in English class she made a list of all the guys she’d hooked up with, and “class whore” wasn’t allowed. When an oblivious teacher announced, “This year’s biggest mouth is… Laurel,”  during Senior Awards Night, Laurel’s face crumpled as she realized what everyone really thought of her. I thought she was going to cry. Girls who were her friends—some of whom had voted for her—tried to comfort her, while boys who’d gladly accepted blowjobs before also voting for her snickered.

Exhibit B: Danielle. Danielle is New Jersey’s single wife who likes wearing skimpy clothes and sharing that she’s been engaged 19 times. She does not fit the mold of what a proper housewife, née woman, should be.

The rumors begin: most involve her sex life—specifically that she sleeps with married men, something the other housewives frequently repeat without much proof. During the season, the women also find a book and police records that seem to very much prove Danielle was arrested in the ’80s for kidnapping and extortion, and for troubling involvement with the Columbian drug cartel. But why shame a woman in 2009 for her cartel-kidnapper connections when you could nail her for a real crime, like enjoying sex? In the season finale, Danielle and married housewife Teresa have a fight that ends with Teresa flipping a table and calling Danielle  “prostitution whore,” a moment still seen as one of series’s most iconic of all time. 

No one chastises Teresa for making a scene at dinner—never mind for weaponizing sexuality, shaming sex workers, or confusing cheating rumors with sex work. Those latter infractions were the era’s social norms. But calling attention to oneself, making a scene, that could get a woman in trouble. At 18, when the show first aired, I attributed Teresa’s lack of punishment to the fact that she, unlike Danielle (and Laurel) had a husband—a man—who vouched for her behavior. In fact, he called it “sexy.” I thought loud female behavior didn’t matter if guys still wanted to sleep with you and support you. 

But that teenage explanation was a shallow understanding of a deeper truth: Teresa didn’t flip the table because she was angry about how the world controlled or shamed women. She flipped it to put a woman who didn’t conform to traditional expectations in her place. (Which was also why Laurel’s friends voted for her, even if they didn’t know that themselves.) Any woman who stands up for a world that holds women down always will find allies to protect her. It’s the ones making moves against that world who end up out of luck. 

With the 2010s came changes for women. Not systemic changes. But we did make several superficial changes. And we certainly called it progress. Actually, we called the changes Leaning In, and from leaning in, a new female archetype was born: The Girlboss. 

The Real Housewives’s viewers Leaned In by embracing louder, Teresa-esque wives who weren’t afraid to start fights, throw drinks, or even launch a prosthetic leg. We didn’t care if these women had a man’s permission—as long as they were mostly still white, conventionally attractive, and managing the houses and kids (labor that continuously went unacknowledged). And these new, louder housewives Leaned In, too: They capitalized on fame from the show and started businesses. The women sold everything from clothing to cannoli, sex toys to hair care, butt workouts to booze. They were women; hear them roar—then buy one of their products.

Outside of Real Housewives-land, I was a college student, then a recently graduated twentysomething who embraced this Lean In-Girlboss mantle in full. It’s embarrassing now to admit, but I did. After years of being told to stay small and quiet, of understanding men should dictate when loud female behavior was OK, this new attitude felt good—or, as my friends and I suddenly loved to say: Empowering. And since we couldn’t put our names on products like the housewives, we Girlbossed by focusing on different things, like pants. First, we killed muffin tops by moving our jeans’ waistlines higher. Then we ditched jeans altogether for something infinitely more comfortable: Leggings. When the world told us leggings aren’t pants, we insisted they were. We channeled Orange County housewife Tamra, who in 2014 became a GIF after screaming, “THAT’S MY OPINION!” perfectly encapsulating the regrettable Girlboss attitude that having an opinion is the only requirement necessary to share it.

Plenty of people at the time knew these Lean In-Girlboss ideas were garbage, particularly queer and trans writers and writers of color. They called it faux feminism. Rich people feminism. White people feminism. Because the opportunity for conventionally attractive, mostly white housewives on TV to make money isn’t a landmark moment for labor or gender equality; it’s capitalism with beauty gatekeeping thrown in. And what oppressive systems were we dismantling, exactly, by replacing skin-tight jeans with…skinnier, tighter leggings? (Leggings that, in 2013, Lululemon founder Chip Wilson proclaimed “just don’t work” for all bodies.) Critics dubbed the era’s pathetic attempts at feminism as society paying lip service to progress while making none at all. And they were exactly right, except for one thing: Not enough people who needed to hear this criticism—and yes, I’m talking about white women—were calling themselves feminists, anyway.

Most were in a period of I’m not feminist, but… a line I distinctly remember telling my college roommate in 2012 after one of our school’s star athletes allegedly sexually assaulted a female student and received little punishment. Not even Sophia Amoruso, the largely forgotten white woman who coined the term Girlboss, considered herself a feminist, telling Elle Magazine in 2014, “I don’t really like to use that word.”

But the deeper into the 2010s we went, the more many women’s relationship to the word changed. Maybe it was because one in five women were sexually assaulted in college—a new stat for the public in 2014, even though it seemed obvious to me and so many others who’d attended college in the 2010s. Maybe it was because of Beyoncé. Isn’t everything good that happens, on some level, related to Beyoncé? Or maybe it was because the more times society leaves you saying, I’m not a feminist, but…, the more opportunities you have to ask yourself, But why not? Which is to say: The 2010’s embrace of feminism—particularly for white women—took time. But once we arrived, the Girlboss’s rebrand from superficial symbol of vaguely empowered white woman in leggings to superficial symbol of a white feminist was swift. 

And there’s no doubt she was a superficial symbol, because if this new Feminist Girlboss had any substance to her, then we would have addressed the important critiques about how class and race and wealth and other factors create uneven pains and obstacles for women. 

But she didn’t. So we didn’t. 

Worse, by the time masses of white women did start considering these critiques, we were approaching November of 2016, the moment we thought we had a fool-proof plan to solve them. As New York housewife Carole put it: “This is a historic election [because] … we showed the world that Americans will not tolerate division, exclusion, fear-mongering, sexist, and racist rhetoric.” Carole is reading from a pre-written speech, of course, one she never delivers. But it’s a speech that echoes what my fellow Girlbosses and I had been so sure was true: We were going to solve gender inequity by making a thin, blonde, white lady the first female president of the United States.

The 9th season of The Real Housewives of Atlanta filmed the summer before the 2016 election but aired mostly in its aftermath, premiering just two days before the election where the lady president did not save us.

I was a 27-year-old who stayed up crying until 2 a.m. on election night, desperate to hear officials had found another 70,000 Democratic ballots in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. I wasn’t so surprised the country couldn’t elect her, but the idea that America was cruel enough to elect him forced me to do some long-overdue white feminist Girlboss reflecting. 

“Don’t blame me,” Atlanta housewife Kenya quips about our new president at one point. She’s joking, but not, because, Black women aren’t the reason we failed to make the thin, blonde, white lady president. As for white women, that’s another story, but this Atlanta season features an all-Black cast. (Atlanta is, in fact, the only city to feature any Black Housewives for the first decade the show is on television, apart from one woman on one season of the since-forgotten Real Housewives of D.C.) Still, the Atlanta wives had their own reflecting to do.

Phaedra sets the self-improvement tone early by making peace with Kenya—a woman she’d nicknamed Kenya Moore Whore two seasons prior—and declaring, “As women, it cannot be acceptable to call each other hos and bitches and prostitutes… We have to make a conscious effort to change.” Then the message explodes in her face at the end of the season.

But first, Shereé and Bob. We spend much of this season rooting for Shereé to get back with her ex, Bob, only to later learn that Bob previously abused her. This comes to light when Bob jokes(!) on a group vacation that maybe he “didn’t choke [Shereé] hard enough” years ago. In a confessional interview, Shereé says she didn’t want to cry because that would give a man power while ruining everyone else’s day. I know Shereé thinks she’s being the strong, feminist woman we were all supposed to be now, but in practice, that Strong Woman^TM is just another way we teach all women to stay small and quiet, now under the guise of having power—and for Black women, this trope comes with bigger consequences. 

Meanwhile, Porsha and Kandi are fighting. It starts when Kandi says Porsha hooked up with one of her exes, and escalates all season until Porsha says she heard Kandi wanted to drug and sleep with her. Which, yes, would constitute rape. Porsha accuses Kandi of wanting to rape her. Kandi vehemently denies it, while Porsha stands her ground, saying her source is sure. Then at the end of the season, Porsha’s source admits she made up that rape rumor after all. That source? One Miss Phaedra Parks: The woman who told us to make a conscious effort to be better.

Watching the women digest this news, I felt like I did on election night: Unprepared for how cruel we could be. It’s in that moment, though, that Phaedra’s message feels more necessary than ever. It is time for us to commit to changing.

The world had hurt us. Men had hurt us, women had hurt us, and we had hurt other people, other women. But we couldn’t go on like this. Something had to change.

Still, it’s hard to be better when you’re so angry: At the man who hurt you, the woman who lied about you, the people who voted for that new president (not to mention the ones who didn’t vote). I was 27 years old and had spent a lifetime trying to be the “right” kind of woman. Just when I thought I’d figured out how to be an empowered, feminist Girlboss, the country elected a man credibly accused of rape to become its next president. So yeah, I was angry. Every woman who’d been hurt by a patriarchal society was angry. Finally, we were ready to put our anger into action. 

Support women. This was the decided way forward. Not Black lives matter, or trans women are women. Just, support women. #WomenSupportingWomen. Sure, some of us thought these other mantras were implied by our support women cheers, though if we’d looked at who was chanting with us, we might have known better. Alternatively, we could have watched The Real Housewives of New York City, noticed that a show taking place in one of the most diverse cities in the country included just one woman of color in 10 seasons, and no one who wasn’t straight, so maybe we needed to be more explicit about inclusion when trying to solve the problems of women. But we didn’t notice. We were busy being women supporting women.

In 2017, as I entered my late twenties, we marched in pussy hats, took down Harvey Weinstein, and shared our stories of MeToo, a movement I’d say maybe half of us knew was started by Tarana Burke, a Black woman, years earlier. We combined that work with more emotionally symbolic victories, like buying t-shirts proclaiming “The future is female,” “Nevertheless, she persisted,” and “Girls just want to have fun-damental rights.” The Merriam-Webster Dictionary made “feminism” its 2017 word of the year. Imagine, a word I’d personally shunned five years earlier now the word of the year.

At that moment, I thought we were going to do it. We were going to make life materially better for women. The winds of change were on our side.

In reality, everyone seemed to be on our side—a clear sign that our side had problems. “Support women,” after all, didn’t draw distinctions over what support looked like or who deserved supporting. So while I thought we were going to listen to the problems of women we’d long ignored and try to do something to fix them, not everyone agreed, including some women of the 10th season of The Real Housewives of New York City.

The season aired in 2018—a peak year for proclaiming support of women—which is probably why Ramona and future union matriarch Bethenny both race to accuse one another of not living up to the standard. It begins when Bethenny calls Ramona to tell her she’s being mean to other women (specifically, she’s being mean to Bethenny). But Ramona beats Bethenny to the punch, screaming from a New York City sidewalk, “You don’t support other women!” Ramona’s reasoning has nothing to do with Bethenny becoming rich off of her brand SkinnyGirl, a name that doesn’t at all support women. Instead, Ramona drops this bomb because Bethenny made fun of Ramona, gossiped about Carole, and wasn’t happy when fellow housewife Dorinda gifted her a human-sized nutcracker for Christmas.

At the risk of stating the obvious, one rich white lady’s right to be thanked for gifting another rich white lady a toy nutcracker is not what feminists meant when we said support women. None of the behavior Ramona mentions is because it doesn’t contribute to the systemic unfairness we wanted to stop—though, here’s a behavior that does: Voting for the accused rapist to be president, which Ramona almost certainly did.

No housewife mentions voting records when Ramona yells at Bethenny. Neither do viewers. Viewers turn the moment into a GIF and buy t-shirts with Ramona screaming “You don’t support other women!” Then in September of 2018, a few months after this fight and one week before my twenty-ninth birthday, we watch Dr. Christine Blasey Ford tell the world Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her—receiving support Anita Hill could’ve only dreamed of. We are emotionally shattered when it doesn’t matter.  

Clearly, the support women mantra had been co-opted by bad actors—by Ramona and others. (A predictable outcome given white women’s aforementioned 2016 voting record.) But those of us who wanted systemic change needed to accept that our problems ran  deeper. As 2018 became 2019, the marches and takedowns of men like Harvey Weinstein slowed. That’s not our fault—toppling powerful predators is hard; it can’t happen every day. But we could wear spunky feminist t-shirts whenever we wanted, and increasingly, it seemed like that was the only goal we consistently worked toward. It was as if we’d decided feminism was easy, gender equality one “This pussy grabs back,” t-shirt away.

But feminism isn’t something you wear or even proclaim. Feminism is paid maternity and paternity leave. Feminism is recognizing housekeeping and childcare as work. Feminism is a world that respects, protects, and grants the same opportunities to everyone, regardless of race, sexuality, and gender identity—and making that abundantly clear in the work you do. Feminism is work—massive work—that involves reconstructing our political and social systems. Pretending it’s easy won’t keep alleged sexual predators out of the White House or off the Supreme Court. It just put a shirt quoting AOC in my dresser. And ones quoting Ramona in the drawers of others.

There is only one way to make the world better for women: You have to make the world better for everyone. You have to care as much about violence against Black men and trans women as you do about violence against young white women—and recognize the latter is a lot less common. By 2020, society seemed ready to do that. Having failed in every other attempt at world-betterment, we finally understood the need for intersectional feminism, considering how class and race and wealth and other factors impact a woman’s experience in the world. (So, yes, broad swaths of women “discovered” in their early thirties the ideas queer and trans writers and writers of color had raised during the Girlboss era of my early twenties—ideas that weren’t new then, either.) 

Our move toward intersectional feminism succeeded on one metric: We transformed the idea of a woman on The Real Housewives. Admittedly, we made little progress in queer inclusivity—17 years in, there’s two openly LGBTQIA+ housewives, despite legions of queer fans. The franchise has, however, made a serious commitment to casting non-white women on the show, including Garcelle, the first Black housewife on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. The problems came when the white women needed to be as serious in their commitment to the new wives.

The 11th season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills aired in 2021 and opened with Garcelle telling Kyle, a white housewife, why it matters that Kyle accused Garcelle of not donating to her charity after pledging to do so. “I don’t think you realize the effect it has on me as a Black woman,” Garcelle says. “There are stereotypes that people think we don’t pay for our rent, that we don’t tip.” Kyle later recounts this conversation to Sutton, another white housewife, and Crystal, Beverly Hills’s first Asian-American housewife. Crystal begins articulating the pain of experiencing racist stereotypes, until Sutton interjects to say this isn’t a race thing; everybody deals with stereotypes. And with that, the cracks in a white woman’s allyship come into view.

“Are you one of those people that [doesn’t] see color?” Crystal responds. “Tell me you’re that girl. [The one who says] I don’t see color.” Cue the dramatic music added in post-production. Cue Sutton tearfully declaring, “I really don’t see color. I don’t see race.”

“Race exists,” Crystal responds. “I’m proud of my race.” But Sutton and Kyle don’t hear her. “The word ‘racist,’ to me is like a virus, worse than COVID… To even get into this upsets me,” Sutton declares, to Kyle’s agreement. The women are defensive now, seeming more afraid of being labeled a racist than of engaging in racist behavior. Like too many white women before them, they want to correct the problem until it turns out they might be part of it.   

Maybe The Real Housewives isn’t the best medium for informed discussions on race. “I feel like most people watch these shows for the escapism and to laugh at it? The race stuff is depressing and stressful,” one Reddit user wrote, echoing posts I’ve seen online. But inside these comments is more than a request for a venue change; it’s Sutton and Kyle’s desire to not have the conversation at all. And inside that refusal is an admission that intersectional feminism is too much work, that life was better before we had to think about how to be fairer to everyone.

But it’s no coincidence that the fall of Roe and disintegration of reproductive freedom coincides with the removal of accurate Black history from classrooms and the eraser of queer and trans rights across the country. When you don’t care about advancing all people forward, you put others’ rights and lives in jeopardy. 

That was where my Real Housewives re-watch ended until Bethenny gave it an epilogue. By moving to create a union for The Real Housewives, she gave those women—yes, those rich, straight, and cis, but slightly less white women—a chance to win. Public support for labor unions, after all, is high. The popularity of the WAG and SAG-AFTRA strikes, both of which secured labor-rights wins, are testament to that. And if as The Real Housewives go, so go women; if as the rights of women go, so go the rights of every overlooked and underprotected person, then we should all want a Real Housewives union win. Yet every day, I’m more convinced it will turn out like all those other things we failed to achieve for the last 17 years. 

Vanity Fair recently published an article about The Real Housewives’s behind-the-scenes. It contains some damning details, including #WomenSupportingWomen bad actor Ramona using racial slurs. But the most memorable moment to me came from Eboni, New York City’s first Black housewife. According to the article, “Presented with the idea that she might participate in Frankel’s organizing, [Eboni] said, ‘Fuck Bethenny Frankel. You think I’m going to let some white girl speak for me with my experience with a multibillion-dollar corporation?’” I’m not exactly trying to call out Bethenny’s intersectionality here, though the quote is telling. It also shows how much work is left to make life better. I’m still convinced The Real Housewives reflects how we treat actual women, but I understand that connection isn’t random: What society accepts from its least-respected pop culture is always a barometer for how we treat the least-respected people. To the extent The Real Housewives has let us down with its representations and treatment of women, and, frankly, anyone, it’s because society has let us down, too. I want to believe the world can be better. So I’ll keep watching and looking for answers. I’ll keep hoping one day that it will be.

The post What the Real Housewives Franchise Tells Us About the Triumphs and Pitfalls of Modern Feminism appeared first on Electric Literature.

Before 2016, I dated Republicans without much shame. I didn’t agree with them politically, but I subscribed to the mathematically-sound belief that the wider your net, the more likely you are to get a boyfriend. Besides, I thought politics was private; how we vote is anonymous, after all. However, on a date in early 2018, when a man told me his only deal breaker was that he wouldn’t date a Trump voter, I responded with, “well, of course I wouldn’t date a Trump voter.” And I meant it. Which meant that somewhere along the way, something had shifted.

I hadn’t fully understood why until I read Cecilia Rabess’ phenomenal novel Everything’s Fine—the story of Jess, a young, liberal Black woman and Josh, a young, conservative white guy. They meet in college, get to know each other on the trading floor of Goldman Sachs, and begin dating while she works for him at a hedge fund. 

Everything’s Fine was flooded with bad reviews before it came out. Readers found the premise—that a Black woman would date a racist white man—racist. I’m a white woman; it’s not up to me to decide what’s racist, but I don’t condone reviewing a book before reading it. At the same time, I can conceive of a book description so racist that the book itself should be discredited—which is why this controversy made me curious. So curious, in fact, that I bought the book. 

I’m glad I did, because I loved it. The criticism isn’t unfounded; Josh makes insensitive and ignorant comments about race throughout, which qualifies him as a racist. And yet, I’m of the opinion that all white people in this country (myself included) have made insensitive and ignorant comments about race at some point—and in this case, I thought it was fair to leave it up to Jess to choose whether or not to forgive. 

Jess, for her part, isn’t perfect either. She feels guilty walking by Occupy Wall Street protestors on her way to her Goldman Sachs job every day, but she changes nothing. She benefits from Josh’s wealth and tolerates his behavior for years. 

And I related to Jess’ dilemma. Like her, I often find myself torn between an opposition to capitalism and the necessary acknowledgment that it benefits me. And I related to her romantic predicament: existing in a relationship that looks terrible from the outside (Jess’ friends describe Josh as “toxic” and even question if it’s ethical for Jess to date him), while knowing there’s something there my friends can’t see. But as Josh continued to offend, and as her political views developed, tested by the inequities of the so-called real world, I began to wonder: was she ever going to draw the line with him?

She reaches the end of her rope in Summer 2016, in a moment that’s very specific to their relationship, and yet so glaringly familiar. Searching for a lost item in their apartment, she discovers Josh owns a MAGA hat. And then, Jess is done.

And as she’s breaking up with him, Josh snaps too. He says aloud what Jess has been fearing for years: that she’s a hypocrite. He claims she’s a beneficiary of the same power structures she theoretically opposes. He’s not wrong, but at the same time, Jess is also a victim of these power structures—she’s the recipient of routine racism and sexism on Wall Street. Rabess asks us not to oversimplify oppression—a person can be on both ends.

More convincingly, Josh says it’s unfair for Jess to hold his Trump support against him, as he’s never hidden who he was. She already knew he was a registered Republican, that he’s always voted for Republicans. He voted for Mitt Romney, he works at a hedge fund, he owns a $4 million apartment, and he’s opposed to most social welfare programs. He hasn’t changed.

He’s once again not wrong; given everything we know about Josh, his support of Trump is expected. Here, I recognized the innate hypocrisy of my own line. Is a Romney voter much better than a Trump voter? They are largely the same people, and I mean that as a statistical truth, not a moral assertion. Most Romney voters voted for Trump, and the ones who didn’t were largely educated wealthy white professionals. Republicans vote for Republican candidates; that’s one of their defining qualities. To this very day, 91 charges later, 70% of registered Republicans are still with Trump.

And yet, even if Josh’s support is to be expected, even if it’s in line with everything he’s ever done, and even though I remember exactly what was happening in Summer 2016, I still gasped when Jess found the hat. But why? Why was it different? Why was this Jess’ line? Why is it mine?

On the one hand, it’s obvious. Because it’s Donald Trump. Trump is and was so blatantly racist and misogynistic that no Black woman should have to explain why they dumped their white boyfriend for supporting him. Nor any woman in general. Even though Josh was a Romney voter, Trump is so much worse. 

Furthermore, when Josh voted for Romney, he wasn’t dating Jess. Perhaps Jess wanted to think Josh had adjusted his views merely by osmosis, even though he never caved during any of their arguments. Here, again, I related strongly. We all like to think we can influence our partner’s political views, and sometimes we can. In 2014, I successfully convinced my conservative investment banker boyfriend that his time was too valuable to waste voting. That was the only time, though.

And Jess didn’t dump Josh when he told her he was voting for Trump, she dumped him when she found the red hat. Josh tries to argue it’s “just a hat.” But of course it’s not just the hat, it’s his show of enthusiasm the hat represents. As Rabess writes:

“It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net….and Josh—now it makes her think of Josh.”

It’s not just me and Jess. Politics is a common line to draw in romantic relationships, in theory. I wouldn’t date anyone who I know definitely voted for Trump—and 71% of registered Democrats say the same. And even though I have more firm lines than I used to, it’s still my preference to know less about someone’s politics early on in the relationship. For example, I’m grateful I was already in love with my partner by the time he revealed he voted for Gary Johnson. Relationships are hard enough without adding politics in. 

But Jess’ line was with Trump himself, not Josh’s politics. And so—I had to admit—was mine. Did Trump change what it means to date a Republican? What you’re conceding when you do? 

On the one hand, Trump has said and done so many abhorrent things that it feels like a no-brainer. It would be impossible to date anyone who even tries to defend him. There’s a reason the 2017 Women’s March, the day after his inauguration, was the largest single-day protest in our country’s history. Supporting Trump feels like a hole so deep it would be impossible for a relationship to climb out intact. 

On the other hand, maybe I’m just using Trump’s specifics as an excuse. It often feels like “Never Trump” Republicans just want us to go back to a time when Republicans were polite about their tacit support for income inequality. Maybe I just want absolution for the Republicans I dated pre-2016. Maybe a more progressive person would tell me the same thing Josh told Jess: Republicans vote for Republicans.

Everything’s Fine doesn’t end when Jess dumps Josh. He goes to great lengths to win her back—he shows up in her hometown, even though she’s ignored his calls for months, and at one point, he even offers to sacrifice his job to save hers. She remains on the fence. Indeed, she’s as undecided after their breakup as she was during their relationship. 

I don’t hold this indecision against her. I don’t hold it against anyone for breaking their own rules, for crossing their own lines. Whatever we say we care about when it comes to our partners’ politics often goes out the window in the face of attraction. I say I wouldn’t sleep with a Trump voter—and to my knowledge I haven’t—but maybe that’s because an attractive enough Trump voter hasn’t hit on me (it brings me no joy to say this, but some Republicans are hot). Dating may compel us to compromise our political values, but then again, so does politics itself. I could fill a book with abhorrent things Democratic politicians I’ve voted for have said or done; I regret none of those votes. It’s not as though I had infinite choices. 

Furthermore, it might not be helpful to draw political lines in romance. Sometimes, I feel like my refusal to date a Trump voter is self-indulgent, for the same reason I tend to roll my eyes when the privileged discuss how they’ll move to Canada if Trump is reelected; the people with the resources to move countries are exactly the ones who don’t need to worry. Maybe a white lady swiping left on moderates is false martyrdom; making it about me when it doesn’t need to be. Maybe choosing to let politics affect one’s personal voice is a privilege afforded to those for whom politics don’t bombard their personal lives against their will. 

So maybe there’s absolution for those who date people with abhorrent political views. Jess forgives Josh so many transgressions, but I forgive her for her forgiveness. Josh is funny and sweet and loves her very, very much. And there’s more to him than his politics. My favorite scene comes near the end, at a party thrown by Jess’ friends. Jess is annoyed at Josh for announcing he thinks eviction is fine. Moments later, she finds him out on the balcony, having rescued a stray kitten. Jess is both wholly charmed and deeply annoyed. She wants consistency, but Josh eludes easy labels of “good” or “bad.” 

The juxtaposition of the cruelty of his politics and the warmth of his affection for a kitten reminds us that everyone has a softness to them, everyone contains multitudes. The book is worth reading for the very reason people tried to cancel it before it came out—because it isn’t afraid to find the humane side of those we vilify, often for good reason. Everything’s Fine argues that it’s worth asking if a racist Trump voter is as worthy of love as anyone else.

Rabess’ choice of Trump as the demarcation, the point of no return, is apt, as he’s unintentionally moved the line many times. After each unspeakable transgression, he gives his old supporters a new chance at redemption; after each massive moral failing, a new crop of “Never Trump” Republicans were born. On the eve of Trump’s third nomination, is it time to ask if there’s redemption for 2016 Trump voters? Are those who voted for him in 2016, but not 2020, now dateable? Those who were with him until Charlottesville? Until the pandemic? Until he told the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by? Until January 6th? And if there is—could you be the one to give it to them?

On its face, Everything’s Fine asks us to consider where to draw the line. Zoom out slightly and the fundamental question broadens: do these lines benefit us? Does the very act of moving the line make you a hypocrite? If so, are we all hypocrites? I can’t reveal what Jess chose, but it’s a mark of Rabess’ phenomenal storytelling skills that I was left guessing until the very last page.

The post Before 2016 I Dated Republicans Without Much Shame appeared first on Electric Literature.

I skipped the day we discussed Frankenstein in my Romantics Literature seminar in my sophomore year of college. It was the late 90s, a time when email existed but was only used for the most urgent and timely emergencies, text messaging was charged per send, and a professor could still reasonably request that you make up for a missed class by visiting them during office hours.

I wish I could remember what I believed Frankenstein to be before that lecture, but those impressions escape me. Like Frankenstein itself, and what would continue to be true throughout my many love affairs with the indelible text, Frankenstein brought joyous and affirming worlds into my life, just as it brought troubling ones. I suppose it wouldn’t be Frankenstein without it.

I sat in my professor’s cramped office as he gestured dramatically in his oversized blazer—TBH he was the exact image one might have of the absent-minded professor—and I tried to make myself as small as possible, something I did often in those days. To give myself credit, I was at least self-actualized enough to have arranged for my twin and me to escape the house of my father—my first Frankenstein—the year before, knowing I needed more than to fight for crumbs, to be bigger than a crumb under his foot.

I tried to stay present to the lecture my professor was giving as he held some worn crinkly yellow legal sheets with blue handwritten notes in one hand, and almost hit my face with his interlocution in the other. This professor would become a disconcerting presence in my life. I was looking for a father to love me with tenderness anywhere I could find.

I couldn’t tell you how we suddenly found ourselves having four-hour breakfasts monthly for many years, but I had to ultimately divorce myself from him when he kept mentioning all the ways he’d taken note of my appearance over the years we’d known one another, which eerily coincided with my friend telling me about a student he’d had a long-running affair with, who also happened to be biracial and Asian. I never saw him again.

But, before that would take place (Frankensteins, Frankensteins everywhere, and not a drop to drink), he would utter one sentence theorizing about Mary Shelley and her Creature I couldn’t let go of. 

Like I said, this was the 90s, before we archived every moment we experienced. I kept a tiny audio cassette recorder in my backpack, but my friends and I tended to use those for serious interviews or getting drunk and bolting silly songs or conversations just so we could play them back and laugh at the versions of each other we loved. So, needless to say, I didn’t record this lecture, so I could never know for sure whose version stands.

But what I remember is that he said that Mary Shelley refers to the Creature as Creature until the world shuns him for his hideousness, at which point Shelley refers to him as the Ogre, the Daemon, the Wretch, etc. It was the moment I realized I needed to offer Frankenstein more of my time and focus. Years after the fact, that professor would insist he’d never said that, although he found the idea intriguing. He would not be the first person to tell me I’d internalized something that wasn’t quite accurate, but I’ll keep this revisionist history. In fact, we will return to this behavior of mine—of remembering something that was never quite there—in due time.

I returned home and decided to reread the novel less as a means of finishing it in order to messily make it through a college class, and more for what it had to offer me. I was 19, the same age Shelley was herself when she first penned the novel, and I wonder what it is about that age that can tether a person to the ideas of creation and narcissistic (ir)responsibility. 

How can I describe my sensations on beholding it? I’ll say it again. This was the 90s. Filled to the brim with white, neurotypical, well-adjusted teens proliferating in young adult novels. White cis people on television. Don’t get me started on the ways The Joy Luck Club didn’t represent my experience (nor would I want it to). I adored Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but what could it say about my biracial hybridized American life? About living as a mixed-race identical twin? About being incubated by my violent father who immersed us in a language we were never given access to? What stories could you find about the Asian children being left by wild, unreachable sparkling white mothers? 

And yet, here was this very white, assumedly cis, 19^th-century novel that seemed to connect to so many of my anomalies I had never been able to voice before. When Frankenstein and his Creation began to circle one another, using the same language to describe their plight which acted as a kind of mirror, it felt like Shelley was speaking to the complicated relationship I held (and continue to hold) with my mirror twin, compelled towards and repelled from one another in equal measure. When the Creature was relegated to eavesdropping and surreptitiously borrowing books from the De Laceys in order to learn language, it reminded me of my childhood during which I spent so many hours in a corner in an abandoned police station or various Chinese restaurants while my father rehearsed and performed Chinese plays, or spent time with his friends. I would read the facial expressions and gestures that accompanied the phrases and exclamations in Mandarin I had never been taught, never been welcomed to learn. When the Creature began to learn of the monstrosity of mankind, and how they viewed their fellow man, how they viewed the ugliness in human life, I thought about what life had been as a half-breed, a mongrel, a slant-eyed ogre, a chink, or a banana.

I thought about the time my mother called me Oriental, just a couple of years before, on the telephone, and when I asked her not to call me that anymore, scoffed: I had three of them. I’ll call them whatever I want. When the Creature begged to their mother who had long since banished them, to be left with someone, anyone, I wondered, what would it take for my mother to want me? When my father hurled insults while striking us with his hands and told us it hurt him more than it hurt us, I felt the disgusting beast lurking inside me. 

Shortly after I received my MFA in Poetry, during which I wrote these small, very controlled narrative and imagist poems about the complicated familial relationships I navigated—largely with my twin and my father—I found myself returning to Frankenstein. The Frankenstein poems ribboned out of my early days in therapy, and so did the space I began to take up on the page. I initially came to poetry to make sense of my chaotic emotional life, my clinical depression. But once I started the healing process, those rigid lineated structures now made me feel boxed in. These early prose poems were the earliest measure of reclaiming space that had been taken from me for so long. It was also through therapy I had finally acknowledged what I’d hidden from myself my entire life, but in plain sight. That my mother had abandoned me over the course of my life, in insidious, subtle, dramatic, ways throughout my entire childhood. I began to write prose poems, largely dramatic monologues, that helped me come to terms with all the parts of myself that resonated as I read and reread the novel again and again—as an abandoned and unwanted child, as a biracial person of color, as a twin at odds with their sibling. It was the first time I’d actively made work around Frankenstein in order to come to terms with my own wounds, but it wouldn’t be the last.

But, as they say, it takes a hundred times to learn the same lesson.

A Frank Love Affair

I first met the Frankenstein who would take the longest recovery, a painter I’ll call D, at a launch for a literary magazine housed at my alma mater, for whom I’d been the first official intern in the late 90s. I met him at the same time I’d begun taking up more space for myself, but was, for all intents and purposes, very new in the healing process around childhood trauma and the hold narcissism had on my emotional life.  

I’d seen his work three years before, at an exhibit that had a profound effect on me, centering Black conceptual artists. It was where I first encountered W.E.B. Dubois’s notion of double consciousness, which led me, in one way or another, to so many artists who remain hugely influential: Adrian Piper, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and so many others. His work was interesting but impressed me the least. A writer I knew well in the community and the managing editor introduced us. Within a few minutes of meeting, he expressed an interest in collaborating with me on a project centering Don Quixote. We traded phone numbers. 

He called three times. I wish I had understood why I’d refused to take his calls, that there was an intuition within me that knew to keep myself from the danger of his machinations. 

Even though it was I who asked to be introduced, there was something about him that frightened me. I wanted what he possessed, something I also recognized in my father. It was around this time I told my therapist, “I know I need to be with a narcissist, since I imagine only an artist could handle what I come with, I just need to find a nice one.” Of course, I had no true idea what I meant by that, what it could mean.

A short while after the initial ignored calls, I took my students to see a talk of his given at the university, which happened to be his alma mater. 

Again, he called three times. Again, I didn’t answer. On the fourth call, he promised he wasn’t a serial rapist. I called him back, although now I can see his call for the warning that it was. 

He wanted to work on a project about love. He was interested in Derek Walcott’s Love After Love, and he wanted to include writing, perhaps poems I would write, alongside the paintings. The more he spoke, the more he reminded me of Frankenstein. In a therapy session, my therapist asked me how I was Frankenstein. I redirected: “I’m Shelley.” She retorted, “That’s too obvious. We have to talk about the ways you’re Victor. The ways you, too, might be the narcissist.” Isn’t the most insufferable quality of Victor is that he never addresses what’s right in front of him?

The more we spoke, in cafes and wine bars, and the more he spouted off all his random ideas around love he wanted to include—the more Frankenstein whispered its name into my ear. Just like the number of times he ignored me, so, too, did he ignore the idea that we should consider Frankenstein, until I let him read my poems.

He was interested in the recurring title I used, taken from my favorite sentence in the text, from when the scientist first looks upon his hideous creation: The beauty of the dream vanished, and in its place—. Only, when I returned to the text to find it, I only found that first phrase, and the one that was my favorite, “and in its place,” nowhere to be found. 

I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

Remember what I said about revisionist history?

We began to work on a show together about Frankenstein. As collaborators, and, shortly thereafter, as lovers.

I became his muse. I taught him the psychic underpinnings of this painting or that one. I stood patiently as he pontificated about his work, or about our developing show on Frankenstein, taking notes in my little black notebook with a blue pen. He stared at me with fondness—or something else I have no word for—as I took bubble baths on the second floor of his studio. We had tenderless sex. We talked about the future, but did we ever speak of love? The memory escapes me.

Before I knew it, I had entered into a pattern of narcissist and narcissist object. I would be brought up and up and up until I had been elevated to the ceiling, and then I would express a frustration, I would challenge one of his thoughtless assumptions, or I would get upset if he brazenly sexualized another woman in front of me, and I would be kicked out of his studio and perhaps his life, until he called and needed me again. 

The first moment I knew I needed to free myself of this Frankenstein was the moment of the dress. We were going to see Bill T. Jones, who he’d met before, and who he hoped to convince to collaborate with us. I stepped into a red dress with silk floral cut-outs, a Spanish-inspired frill up the leg in a diagonal. As I walked towards his car, I saw the look on his face: patronizing, disapproving, infantilizing. He demanded I change my dress. “Don’t you understand that you represent me?” he screamed, even though I hadn’t been unwilling to acquiesce. It was that sentence I couldn’t overcome, and neither could group therapy when I told them what had happened. I felt like I was drowning, and I didn’t know how to find my own air.

The second moment I knew I needed to free myself of this Frankenstein was the moment of the baked potato. He’d been painting all day, and called me to come over for a break, for us to have dinner. We were going to order takeout, from a barbecue place down the street. I said, “Oh, I’ll have a chopped beef potato,” not thinking anything of it, but feeling increasingly unsafe for reasons I couldn’t discern, as he looked over me with a strange, creeping glare. “No, you won’t,” he said, still staring. “You’ll eat what I tell you to eat!” I didn’t know if he was joking or serious, but I’d learned not to rock the boat. Besides, I’d become a pro at holding steady with a father with an unpredictable raging temper, an emotionally wild mother. I turned my face to the side, and I released the anger out of my mouth in a slow exhale. I turned back. “Can’t you take a fucking joke!” he screamed. I ran out of the studio. His apology came as it always did—“Can you tell me why I did that?”—but I was growing disinterested in expending emotional labor to explain to the Maker what made him.

The final moment was the moment of the painting. I’d allowed him to photograph me for a painting in the show that was intending to “subvert” the idea of “the beautiful woman as monster.” He would call it killer’s kiss. I posed nude, hip cocked, chopsticks holding up my then-long dark hair (vomit) and my feet in strappy bright blue heels. Next to my body rested a sculpture of his, a pregnant African figure—a goddess of fertility. I was nearing the end of my period, but I’d later learn I was already pregnant.

I didn’t remember what I tried to embody when I posed for the photographs that he would use to make the painting. That I had attempted to embody what it was I saw in my twin sister. D told me that seeing the painting would be intense for me. That he would wait to show it to anyone until I felt comfortable. When he showed me the painting, I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how I was feeling. I saw the person I wanted never to become. Before I could even come to terms with all that I had witnessed, all that mirrored within me, he had kicked me out of the studio and stopped speaking to me.

The next day, I went to my favorite breakfast place with a friend, hoping I was having cramps. It was my favorite, my Friday morning ritual: breakfast tacos, fried potatoes, organic coffee. I could barely stomach it, because my belly was wrecked with nausea. I complained about periods, and my friend said, well, that’s better than being pregnant. It was the first moment the possibility occurred to me. 

I bought two home pregnancy tests. They turned positive so fast I didn’t have time to wonder.

I didn’t have the kind of mother I could call for this. My therapist was out of town. I called his mother. By the time he got on the phone, he wasn’t happy. “This is not good news. I will send you checks in the mail. We will no longer have a relationship. If you keep this child. Don’t think you’ll automatically be a Mary Poppins.”

The Maker tried to convince me to have an abortion. He used every means imaginable. In the end, I chose to terminate the pregnancy because I could see living beneath the skin the dark heart of my father, who I had tried so hard to run from. 

“Your mother abandoned you. I’m your mother, and she abandoned you,” my therapist said when I first told her in session that I was pregnant, when I curled into her soft white chair where so many of my tears remained embedded in the fibers, so many Frankensteins, so many of my monsters. 

When I want to remember a time in which I was integrated, felt truly loved, I think of my therapist. I went to group therapy, but I was scared to fall apart. I didn’t know if I could tell them that I would have an abortion the next day. I hadn’t had a chance to tell them I was pregnant. One woman in Group had a newborn, the other eight months pregnant after a long journey. She shined. My therapist was connected to my pain then, her eyes quivering as mine did, while I wore D’s oversized shirt he told me to wear to conceal myself. My therapist and I both began to cry. It was a sign of tenderness I’d never witnessed before. I thought to myself, this what it must be like to have a mother not abandon you, to hold you in your pain. 

D had already insisted he wouldn’t come with me to the abortion. He didn’t want anyone to recognize him. My therapist and my entire Group offered to come. It was this fact I used to guilt him into coming. His mother also came. I delivered messages to him through her as the proxy. 

The nurse asked me if I wanted to know if I was having twins. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to proceed if I would have the opportunity to be there for a birth experience that I’d had. I answered yes. They weren’t twins. While the doctor suctioned out the pregnancy, I talked to him about Frankenstein.

I tried to recover at his mother’s house. He called with every possible thought or projection, believing we would return from this. I knew better, but I had my own healing to do first. When he learned I’d sought out another friend for comfort, he withdrew the privilege of staying at his mother’s house. His mother, refusing to endure the aspect of the being he created, blamed me for letting him “browbeat me into an abortion.” I rushed out of the room.

A few days after the abortion, he left a check for his half. Under the memo, he wrote: ART. Shortly after he called letting me know he had made the decision to exhibit the painting in the largest collection in Houston. I decided to write a piece about what it had meant to be a muse, a partner, a collaborator, a monster, an object. I typed ten pages without stopping. I placed my hands on the desk. Another call: he decided not to put the painting in the show.

One year after the abortion, D sent me an email with an image of a painting called Frank, a rip-off of Louise Bourgeois’s Nature Study. The painting included a young girl’s crying eyes streaking mascara, and just above them, a dead-end sign in the snow. The amoebic sculpture is golden, and D’s interpretation holds a shovel in one of its gooey holes, a face on the backside of it. 

Four years after the abortion, D exhibited a series of paintings, including the painting I posed for, but also one involving a trampled bridal bouquet, the same African goddess of fertility holding a shotgun in her arm, called Puzzle for Pregnant Girls.

The last email D sent me: 

still working on the paintings

please forgive me

Somewhere along the healing process from the abortion, from my loss of innocence, I decided I needed to learn what caused me to enmesh so deeply with narcissists. I initially sheltered myself from the world, with baths and tears, counting down the hours until therapy, who generously saw me twice a week in the early days after. Eventually, I was ready to uncover what led me to this monster, this maker. I returned to the text that continued to open out for me, Frankenstein, which I began to read as a self-help text. I woke at 6 every morning and drove to my favorite café and read and read and read. I began to uncover the thematic underpinnings of male hysteria in the text. It was then I started reading everything I could get my hands on: about Mary Shelley, her marriage with Percy Shelley and how it related to her father, the ideas of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft. If I could come to terms with how I had gotten here, then maybe I would never return again.

I wanted to turn this pain into art, and I felt this story would make a compelling dance theater work. I wasn’t a choreographer, but had loved dance since I was a child, and I pitched the idea of a dance theater adaptation to a queer contemporary ballet choreographer whose work I admired. I’d already seen him produce dance theater adaptations of Titus Andronicus, Romeo & Juliet, and on Mozart, so I knew he was interested in how dance could offer a new embodiment for a literary text. I’d seen him choreograph complicated, psychologically-driven male-male duets, which seemed befitting for a story of this magnitude. It took a year of regurgitating everything I’d studied about Frankenstein monthly in cafes, but soon the choreographer said yes. I gave all the feelings that whirled in me to this production.

I brought in ideas around the score, costumes, lighting, staging. All of those days I’d spent early in my youth watching my father produce Chinese plays, all of that watching where I couldn’t understand the language being spoken around me, came out of me into this new work. The choreographer and I came together to create this work outside of my own relationship with narcissism. I’d begun to understand my own queerness, and I’d finally started to detox from the role I’d taken on as a narcissistic support. I started writing a play about all the women within the Frankenstein universe, The Shelley Monologues, bringing them back to life, and I suppose, also me.

What I learned when the curtain rose on our Frankenstein: I would never leave behind what I created, and nothing I created would become monstrous in my own eyes. 

I would continue to make work featuring Frankenstein. So many Frankensteins! I wouldn’t finish The Shelley Monologues, but I would write a nonfiction manuscript, titled the same as my unpublished poetry manuscript where the Frankenstein poems lived, after the phrase I believed had been written into the creation scene, but that only existed in my own imagination: and in its place—. In the memoir, I merged Shelley’s story, the stories of Frankenstein, and the text of Frankenstein itself with other texts regarding Shelley into the lines of my own story.

I read from this memoir in 2018, and was asked about the role of whiteness, twinning, being a biracial Asian, and a queer person factored into my understanding of Frankenstein. Although I clearly knew how those aspects of my subjecthood brought Frankenstein to me, I found myself at a loss of how to answer, having spent so much of my time investigating Frankenstein from the lens of my relationships with cis white men. I put this ambivalence in my pocket. 

In 2019, retellings cast from the bodies of queer and underrepresented experiences were rising. Georgia was starting to ban early term abortions. I was in love and believed I would start creating a new life of my own, using IVF technologies. As I began to do more research into reproductive technologies, and as more organizing began to develop to advocate for birthing bodies, I returned, yet again, to Frankenstein, realizing I could bring new life to this text, once again. I foolishly believed I’d finally met someone who wasn’t a narcissist. I naively assumed the life I had dreamed for was finally within reach. 

I started Unwieldy Creatures, my queer biracial Asian nonbinary Frankenstein, in the heart of the redwoods outside of Santa Cruz, at a residency called Mary Shelley Month: A Laboratory of Fiction. I wanted to see what would happen if I cast Frankenstein as a queer woman of color intent on creating the perfect specimen for herself and other queer people, Elizabeth as a man, Ezra, who left behind the softer parts of himself when his white abusive father silenced them. I wanted to see how IVF would portend darker futures. I wanted to cast white masculinity as the villain.

I wanted to use this new and terrifying political and technological landscape—that in which reproductive technologies were building in ways that brought about a whole new world of ethical implications while at the same time fighting against restriction of bodies—to set a modern story of a creation gone wrong. 

Unwieldy Creatures was both of its own fictional experiment and also deeply personal, as I wrote it preparing and testing my body for my own creation that was never to become. By the time I came home, Caroline, Ezra’s wife, had been hanged, innocently framed for the death of her child, caused by the Creature Ezra was responsible for creating, with sabotage. My own love would also sabotage our unborn, bailing on our first appointment the night before, and blaming it on my writing career, on the masterpiece I was created with this new Frankenstein.

A few days later, I would learn everything he had told me was a lie. I’d spent so much time exorcizing the monster within my own body, from the narcissists that I was born from, that raised me. I’d never seen the true wretch all along, right in front of me.

When I left my marriage, the Frankenstein I was making remained unfinished. I didn’t know if I could ever return to it. A few months later, still in despair, COVID blew through the planet. What did this Frankenstein matter when we would all be eradicated from the earth? How could I write through such darkness when even getting through the day felt an ominous miracle? Somehow, somewhere, within me, I barreled through it. 

Dr. Frank, a queer biracial Indonesian scientist, determined to find a way to create life without the need for cis men, uses in vitro gametogenesis, a process that uses stem cell technology to create both egg and sperm, and implants the embryo in her first love, a Spanish Japanese woman. When Ezra tampers with her experiment, Dr. Frank makes the most Frankensteinian choice, to withhold the information from the partner who willingly offers her body to carry her life’s ambition. In trying to evade men’s presence in her life, she becomes more like the toxic white father who had caused her so much damage. By the time they learn that the fetus is growing with a genetic condition, one that could be dangerous for both the child and Hana, it’s too late to acquire an abortion, as late-term abortions are illegal in the part of the South where they live. Unwieldy Creatures was informed by and exploring abortion bans in Georgia in 2019. In June 2022, Roe v. Wade would overturn. Six weeks later, what is now the only time period one can easily attain an abortion in many states, and the length of the pregnancy I terminated, Unwieldy Creatures would come to life. 

I’m 44 now. And Frankenstein has carried me through every major upheaval in my childhood and adult life for over twenty years. I won’t ask what will come next, but I know when and if it does, that Shelley’s Frankenstein will carry me through, and Shelley, just like she did when I created poems, monologues, memoir, dance theater, and fiction, will be there to guide me, to help me find my own self, to cradle the creatures within me, and let the monsters be damned.

The post My Love for “Frankenstein” Taught Me To Let The Monsters Be Damned appeared first on Electric Literature.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre remake came out one day before the United Nations affirmed, for the third time, the importance of US troops in Iraq and the duty of the rest of the West to contribute to the war as well. On TV, commercials for the 2003 movie aired between those for dive-bombing jets, armed forces rappelling down a rock wall, desert fatigues. The film reflected all of that, MTV-style sheen slicked across the screen and dirty browns and tans running everywhere and gore filling every second. It opens with a hitchhiker who seems to have been sexually assaulted—blood running between her legs—blowing her brains out in the back of the main characters’ van. Then, the film escalates to a menacing sheriff licking his lips over her dead body with a necrophiliac longing. Watching the movie on Netflix years later with a friend I was fucking—a girl who whimpered during the scary parts, liked to be hit hard, and walked with me to get ice cream the first time we had sex—I shut it off after thirty minutes. I couldn’t bear any more.

Maybe I hated it so much because the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the one that came out almost exactly fifty years ago, is my most-loved movie. It’s not the one I often tell people is my most-loved: the title tends to turn people off. What they picture is something closer to the remake: a blunt object, a leering gaze, a body turned into an object to be fucked or cut up with nothing in-between. Instead, for the longest time, I’d tell people I loved art-house films most: the movies of Apitchatpong Weerasutakhul or Ingmar Bergman or Terrence Malick or any other director who specialized in long, winding, thoughtful shots and barely restrained emotions. And I do love those films. But of all the movies I’ve seen, I’ve seen Chain Saw the most—a revving engine of a film, sick and quick and all deep reds. 

This is how it worked: first I loved it, and then I loved myself.

I first watched The Texas Chain Saw Massacre  in high school during the brief window when full movies were first uploaded to YouTube, the image 240p and broken up into six parts to circumvent YouTube’s then-fifteen-minute video limit. I lived at a residential school then and started it in my dorm room between second and third period, finishing the movie after chemistry lab. I was miserable in school but it was a misery I couldn’t even name. I didn’t even think it was a unique misery: everyone hated their bodies, I thought. Everyone pictured themselves sliding into a lake and not coming out again. I watched the movie because it had been framed online as an endurance exercise; if I could endure The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I thought, it would distract me from the life I was trying to endure too.

What I didn’t expect was how the film looked, shining bright even through digital grain. Fields of tall grasses rippled slowly in the breeze. A car rumbled down the highway, exhaust exhaling behind it like a ghost. And at the moment that Sally Hardesty, the movie’s beleaguered protagonist, is held captive at the cannibal family’s dinner table, grandfather preparing to hit her with a hammer, the film zooms in unexpectedly on one of her eyes flitting around in fear, and the iris was the most verdant green I’d ever seen.

I had been in North Carolina for just over nine years at that point. I hated the state. I missed the icy sharpness of Pennsylvania, the way Lake Erie froze over completely every winter, waves still mid-crest. I missed the emerald jungles of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, where I spent the first four years of my life. North Carolina didn’t have the cold beauty of the Northeast and it didn’t have the shimmeringly blue seas and white beaches of the Caribbean. It just had swamps on the eastern part of the state where my parents lived and brush and loblolly pine in the middle where the school was. And worse than that, everywhere you looked there were hicks, drawls hanging off their words like a busted door hinge. I expected Texas Chain Saw Massacre, with its rural cannibals and grindhouse title, to just reaffirm my existing prejudices. The South was ugly, I thought; it looked ugly, and its people acted ugly, and I wanted a film that would reflect that. I watched to endure it, but also to confirm what I already knew: my new home sucked.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was short, straightforward, part of the reason I was able to finish the movie in just two chunks between classes. A group of hippies from the local college town set out to visit their grandfather’s old property. They pick up a hitchhiker, who sets a picture of them on fire and tries to slice at them with a knife; they kick the hitchhiker out of their van. They stop at a gas station to fill up and have a brief conversation with the proprietor, who’s also a barbeque cook; the man leers as they drive away. They visit their grandfather’s house, and then slowly everyone drifts to the house behind their grandfather’s, where a family of workers laid off from the local slaughterhouse live. The hitchhiker is there. A grandfather who looks centuries old is there. Leatherface, a six foot seven murderer in cowboy boots and a mask made out of human skin, is there. Eventually the gas station cook is there. Quickly, everyone but Sally dies, leaving her screaming and laughing alone, splattered in blood, in a flatbed truck speeding away from the house at dawn. It’s over in just eighty minutes.

At the residential school, we looked at slides of pond water through multi-chambered microscopes donated by Duke University up the road. We picked apart frozen cat bodies, peeling back the muscles on a leg one by one to reveal the femur, the tibia, the stiff ankle bones, the phalanges. It was a free school, built on the run-down grounds of a former hospital, and one that had been wiggled into the state university system: our student IDs, we were told, could get us into any library or science lab we wanted access to. We were the pride of the state, the best it had to offer. I’d wake every morning to birdsong.

Because of its low budget, much of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was shot with natural lighting, which is part of what lends an eerie prettiness to the surroundings: their world, with its scrabble of brush and dust smeared everywhere and slowly setting sun, looks just like ours. A couple in their mid-twenties gently pushes the long amber grasses to the side to explore a neighbor’s house. House spiders weave webs, fibers shining in the afternoon light. At night things purple under dim moonlight, and in evening the film is heavy with sun, bright and sticky as a melting blood orange. Texas isn’t North Carolina, but at that moment I started to see both as not just ugly but gorgeous as well, decentering in their breadth. There, the trees and low shrubs have seen everything. There’s nothing that doesn’t promise to blossom, in one way or another, into an intimacy intractable in its depths.

I entered the movie wanting to be scared because I dealt with my problems at the time by being scared. Otherwise, I’d feel too needy, too vulnerable and exposed. But that which entrances us and frightens us is so often the same. I hated the South, feared being Southern myself even, but in Chain Saw, everyone talks with an accent—even the heroes. Everyone walks through the grasses, runs through hardscrabble Southern trees. It’s not whether you’re from the South or not that matters, the movie seemed to be saying: it’s what you do with it, and how you or others are hurt despite it. The South is like everywhere else: both fucked and beautiful, indefensible and resplendent at the same time.

I don’t know if these themes were intended. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was a film notoriously shot on the fly; director Tobe Hooper stayed up all night shooting the last twenty minutes of the movie, and no one washed their clothes through the whole shoot because they couldn’t afford second outfits and were scared of them being stolen from the local laundromat. All the rotting animal parts in the film were real and by wrap day everyone was nauseous from the smell. The film couldn’t even afford stunt people, so in a scene where Sally Hardesty jumps out a second floor window, the script consultant pulled on a blonde wig and did the jump herself, twisting an ankle in the process. I don’t even know if the movie was intended to look as beautiful as it does; maybe its starkness just came from a budget constraint that aged especially well, the same way that the cheaply-recorded folk albums from the ’70s sound less dated than the studio schmaltz a big budget could get you. In filming, it seems, there was little thinking involved; the whole movie instead just existed as an experience. When the shoot was over, the rumor goes, the crew made shirts that said “I survived shooting Texas Chain Saw Massacre!”

But ultimately I’m not interested in intention. I felt things watching the movie, and those I showed it to also felt things. We talked about it afterwards, everyone offering their different interpretations as to what Chain Saw—loud, intimate—was about. With a girl from my MFA I would start dating just weeks after we watched the movie, Chain Saw became a film centering animal rights abuses. We had just shared a joint, wound up and electric with energy. “See?” I said, pointing to the shots of a slaughterhouse where the cannibal family used to work. “They’re treating the humans like cattle. Anyone who can’t keep up with the demands of an ableist society gets killed.” With an ex I fell back in love with over the pandemic, it was a film about feminized labor, and even transness. Leatherface, the person who ostensibly does the killing in the family, is also the softest member. He wears masks made of human skin but covers them in eyeshadow and lipstick and is viciously bullied by his siblings for not fitting into what they think a man should be. “He dressed up for you,” Leatherface’s brother cries mockingly to Sally as she’s held captive at the dinner table, and it’s hard to say who he’s making fun of more. My partner and I saw the film as being about disability and being different. There are two families in the movie, the killers and the killed, and both of them have disabled characters at their core. Franklin, Sally’s brother who rides in a van with the rest of the victims, uses a wheelchair and is constantly berated by his peers. Leatherface, who doesn’t even speak or show his face outside of a mask, appears to have some sort of developmental disability, and is kicked and hit and beat by his older brother as he whimpers in pain.

More than anything, though, I saw a movie about the South, and coming to love it despite everything fearful that happens there. Maybe this wasn’t the film’s doing, but something changed in me the first time after watching it. As I’d walk down the sun-dappled streets of Durham, where the residential school was—sometimes heading to my therapist’s office, sometimes just walking to get a lavender milkshake from the malt shop on West Broad Street—I pictured the plains and thatchy backwoods of Texas, and a preemptive longing for where I already was crept over me. Around me sprang tall reaching trees and bullfrogs. Cardinals and thrushes chirruped from telephone poles, sun-warmed cricks everywhere. From the instrument repair shop run out of a trailer off Broad, staticky country music drifted over the radio. My parents moved to North Carolina for work when I was in third grade, and it wasn’t until I saw the movie that I realized the South, not Pennsylvania, not St Thomas, was my home. Chain Saw felt like something emerging, fully formed, from a bog, and I was emerging too, albeit much more slowly. And who hasn’t fallen in love with the place where they realized who they were? Who hasn’t made a home out of fear without in some way loving that fear, too?

There are marks that are left on us, and there are marks we leave on ourselves, and I’m not sure there’s a significant difference between the two. The South shaped me, and the South hurt me, but I’m Southern nonetheless. Maybe there’s no difference at all. To know a place is to be hurt by that place and to grow up is to hurt that place in its own ways too. Until I turned sixteen, I treated the South with a smug superiority, one that cut me off from who I was. Because I grew up there, the South left its sticky summery marks on me, and then once I rejected it I left my marks on me too.

Texas Chain Saw Massacre also drew me in because of how unrelenting it is in its cruelty. Leatherface spends the film’s end in pain, accidentally chainsawing through his leg after his brother is killed by an 18-wheeler chasing Sally, blood splattering over everything. The twenty-something protagonists are menanced and turned into meat with alacrity. Even the heroes are cruel. Sally’s brother Franklin is brilliant, funny and anticipates everything that happens in the movie—but the other people in the van, the ones who die first, hate him. “Franklin’s no fun,” goes the refrain, even though our introduction to Franklin is him being blown out of his wheelchair from the backdraft of a semi and no one rushes to help him as he tumbles down a steep hill into a ditch. Even though Franklin is dragged around to ancestral mansions with steep steps he can’t get his wheelchair up and then left behind as his friends run off to go swimming; even though early in the movie he’s cut by the deranged hitchhiker; even though at the halfway point is sawed in half, the most violent death in the movie, by Leatherface. Even the audience hates him: I’ve read review after review about how insufferable and annoying Franklin is, although consistently he’s the only one doing everything right.

When I first watched Chain Saw, I’d creep into the shared dormitory bathrooms at 2 or 3 AM to hit myself until I started crying and then hit myself more until I stopped feeling anything after that. I’d practice cruelty against myself that crept into cruelty against others; a stiffened unapproachability, a studied distance intended to prevent anyone from getting too close. When I set out to watch the movie, I wanted it to hurt like I hurt me. And the movie is cruel, but it’s beautiful too. I found myself in that beauty, but at the time didn’t even know I wanted to be found.

Chain Saw was remade again—or remade-cum-sequel’d—in January 2022. In it, like in every other one of the 8 miserable sequels and remakes, splays of gore and pop nihilism replaced everything I loved in the original. A group of woke teens are massacred on a party bus. A woman’s life is saved due to the Second Amendment, firing away at Leatherface with the shotgun she scorned earlier in the film. It’s all reprehensible in a crypto-Republican way, but more than that it’s boring. It’s an old story at this point: Hollywood finds a film that’s striking and decides it’s striking for the wrong reason, and then capitalizes off that mistaken assumption. That was actually why my friend and I watched the 2003 film: we wanted to see if what we had just seen, the most recent one, was the nadir of the franchise. But there’s always a lower level one can sink to.

But even despite this endless progression of worse and worse movies—and I don’t doubt there will be more, worse movies to come—it doesn’t take away from what I love about the original. This is because what I love about the original, at least in part, is the way it taught me to love. At the end of the film, Sally is escaping on a speeding flat-bed truck. Her brother is dead, chainsawed out of his wheelchair by the only other disabled character in the movie. Her boyfriend is dead. Her friends are dead. But the movie doesn’t end. As she’s laughing in fear and relief, the film cuts to Leatherface who, limping and illuminated in the rising sun, raises the chainsaw first to his side and then above his head and starts to pivot his body like a ballerina. Soon, he’s fully pirouetting, clearly hurt and angry and sad and confused himself. As the chainsaw brushes against the camera, the film cuts to black, and then finally it’s over—nothing left but his pain and her relief and what they made together from both. I am sixteen, staring at my laptop in between classes. Someday I will stop hurting myself, but not yet. Someday I will learn to love everything I find gorgeous, including myself.

I don’t believe that a film’s legacy can really be defined by what happens afterwards towards it—sequels or prequels or bad-acting fans or whatever. I think anything you love exists, at least partially, in the moment you first love it. Maybe that’s why I’d go on to watch the original Chain Saw with so many people I’d love. Beauty can stun too, and sometimes the only thing to do with that is to share it. There can be a thin line between enduring something and finding intimacy with it, after all. With each rewatch of Chain Saw, I got further away from the me in high school and closer to a me that was loved and safe and in the gleaming present, whole and uninjured.

I loved Texas Chain Saw, I think, before I loved myself. And maybe the two aren’t related, but one did follow the other. 

Outside, a cuckoo warbles and the mid-day sun crescents through the dorm’s venetian blinds. Throwing on my heavy denim jacket, I vault down the stairs to class, arms bruised but not yet burned. As I leave the dorm building, I look at the state around me—greening leaves, rickety pines, kudzu creeping up the side of a building—and for the first time see it as something not just harsh but also irreducible, beautiful. I brush against a stairwell too abruptly, hit a bruise, wince, air sharp and cool as I inhale. It comes into me like birdsong, and eventually I will be free.The croak of leaf-roller crickets starts up, and from a distance they almost sound like a chainsaw’s hum. I’m starting to know what it means to care so much about something that you share it instead of holding it secret. I’m starting to realize that everything about my life will have to change. It’s bright and yellow outside and the air smells like pine. Soon the sun will set, and there will be nothing between me and what will come next. Already the scariest parts of Chain Saw are starting to flash across my eyes: a man pancaked by a semi truck, a body dripping on a meat hook. Soon, I will leave the state, hurt myself again in ways I can’t hide. My bruise aches as I breathe in, winding my way towards the dilapidated biology hall. There is no place I’d rather be, and that knowledge stings as it comes in. Soon I will rewatch the movie again and again. Soon, I realize, I will be beautiful too.

The post I Loved “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” Before I Loved Myself appeared first on Electric Literature.

But Bella looked right at me. 

She was familiar. She could be anything I wanted her to be. Chestnut hair and dark eyes, a soft glow. Blank skin blank face blank canvas, her skin fine-toothed paper. I was envious of her beauty. I wanted to bask in it. She was too sweet, and I was too young to have my own story. I looked to her for answers. She looked cold. I wondered what it would feel like to hold someone, to share their warmth. To be desired. I wanted to be the apple cradled in her hands.  

The text on the poster promised that nothing would be the same. 

At Hot Topic, past the racks with Jack Skellington’s face stitched onto black book bags, past the clerk who preened her electric blue highlights in the reflection of the body jewelry showcase, I found two rows of shirts. All sizes, all black, with white lettering: Team Edward and Team Jacob.

It was my freshman year in high school, and everyone was divided. People who hadn’t seen Twilight, people who had, people who didn’t want to care found themselves unwittingly subscribing to either side of the binary. I came to school with Edward’s name branded on my chest. I was in the minority. My friends, most of whom would go on to choose healthier relationships later in high school and college, chose Jacob. 

Over the next ten years, I chose a lot of Edwards. They were tall and short, monied and broke. They spoke Spanish and Italian and came from Columbus and Ft. Meyers and Perth. After the flowers and fine dining came a bounty of brooding, clipped responses, and slammed car doors. They showed up uninvited to my house. They held phone calls hostage with self-absorbed monologues or punishing silence. My friends and parents despised them. They all had charisma. They knew how to convince me that while it was forbidden to be with them, they were precisely what I needed. They knew how to convince me that I was special but also disposable. They lured me into the forest, called themselves Lion, and named me Lamb. The percarity was intoxicating. They knew I’d chosen Team Edward without ever needing to see my T-shirt. 

When I gave in and made them the center of my world, they gave up. When they said they loved me, they would disappear. Their skin did not shimmer. 

I chose Team Edward because Bella chose Edward. 

In 2009, First Boyfriend Edward dumped me so he could reunite with his ex-fiancée who lived somewhere in Michigan. I was 14, he was 18. Age wasn’t supposed to matter, but suddenly, it did. Of course it did. It wasn’t a 90-year age gap, but it was something. 

I locked my bedroom door and sulked like Bella did in New Moon, after Edward abandoned her “for her own good.” Breakup protocol called for me to delete our texting history, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Loss had my stomach bottoming out. I sat at my desk, which overlooked the front yard, and my questions yawned into the night. 

What had I done wrong? How had I failed? 

I convinced myself that this breakup would mean that I was now free to find my real, true match. I had to let it all go. My laptop screen glowed dim and blue. On iTunes, Paramore’s Hayley Williams mused on “Decode”: 

Do you see what we’ve done? 

We’re gonna make such fools of ourselves… 

Bella had found her Edward, after all, and so would I. 

Between the Edwards, there were the Rosalies. They were electric, beautiful, accomplished. They floated in and out of my life, suggestions made in a language to which I did not have the code. Toronto Rosalie liked to ask me to come to MAC with her to try on lipstick. Soccer Rosalie was from Montenegro, well over a head taller than me, with a full tattoo sleeve and Amazonian features. During her English tutoring lessons, I was always the one who got tongue tied. When I ran into Cheerleader Rosalie in a bar after high school, she asked how I had been doing, and I responded by promptly spilling an entire glass of water down my shirt. I wanted to sparkle for each of them. 

Toronto Rosalie and I were in Dublin when she let me kiss her on the lips. We were in a club called Dicey’s Garden, drunk on Guinness. She tasted like strawberry chapstick and malted barley. We smiled, sheepish, half-embarrassed that we had done it, that we had enjoyed it. We were friends, so we never spoke of it again. 

My mind could not write a happy ending for Team Rosalie, although I could feel her interest each time through the foggy haze of my self-denial. She wanted me, but she didn’t need me. There was no trap door behind her smile. My inability to interpret her openness, coupled with a heteronormative society that lacked the visibility of queer romance, was enough to let her iterations slip away again and again. 

First Boyfriend Edward came back after things didn’t pan out with his Michigan ex. It was a ten-year cat-and-mouse, between all the other Edwards. He often brought me to the bar and left me near the tap, making sure I saw him flirt with all the blondes who wanted a piece of his shiny new police badge. 

There was Writer Edward, who waxed poetic about Eros but was never interested in my creative writing, who took me into his arms after a steamy Miami evening in his bed, only to say, “I don’t think I could ever love you.” 

And of course, there was Abuser Edward. In a spontaneous moment of mania, he insisted on whisking me away to Venice for a weekend filled with a gondola ride and fine dining, only to lash out later, accusing me of being a “financial burden.” I put up with it, knowing that even if he was mad at me, that it meant he wasn’t talking to other women, which was his near-constant compulsion. Sometimes, on the phone he would say: “When I’m inside her, I’m thinking about you. Can you feel it?” 

Different faces, same name, same ending. 

In my senior year in college, I watched the Twilight movies with my friends. We all piled on the couches in the living room, boxed wine in coffee mugs. Everyone—my roommates, their boyfriends, and a few guys trying to become my roommate’s boyfriends—laughed at her, Bella for staying with a clown like Edward. 

This was the same time that I was compulsively checking my phone for a message from Abuser Edward, wondering what I had done this time to get the silent treatment. He lived in Australia, but we had met during my study abroad semester in Dublin. In the same breath Abuser Edward had been swearing he wanted to marry me—he’d even lived with my family for a month the previous summer—he’d claimed he needed to get back with his old girlfriend in Perth to “let her down easy.” I soon realized that this girlfriend hadn’t known that Abuser Edward was gallivanting around Ireland with an American ten years his junior for several months. I had become the Other Woman, growing dizzier by the second as I watched Bella spin through the seasons, alone in her bedroom. 

The same friends who were gently urging me to dump my abuser were now laughing with disbelief that Bella had fallen into an unrelenting depression, sitting in her room for months after Edward had disappeared from Forks. Their sensitivity for the situation evaporated as they fell into a harsh, albeit valid criticism, of the movie. 

Bella’s so ridiculous, what the hell? I can’t believe this. Who would ever do something so sad? Get over it, girl, move on. 

And I probably curled into my part of the sofa, feeling self-conscious, even though everyone’s eyes were trained on the screen. My heart had probably started hurting, a sharp pang had been the trend back then, and I wiped my palms on the legs of my jeans. But she loves him, I thought. She’s waiting for him. What’s so silly about that? 

I wondered if the thoughts my friends shared with the screen were the thoughts they shared in private, to each other, when I wasn’t around. 

Twelve years after its release, I would watch Twilight again in 2020, this time with a guy named Adam. After an agonizing breakup from Abuser Edward, I didn’t know who I was, only that I wanted to write. I moved from my hometown in Maryland to Miami, Florida to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing. Adam had used his miles to fly down from Maryland for a visit. 

The movie’s saturated grays and deep blues washed my West Miami apartment with uncharacteristic maudlin. Adam and I were still in the dating phase, marked by a respectful distance between us on the bed. Later I would find out he suggested watching the Twilight Saga because one of my college girlfriends told him it would get him points with me. It did.

We were at the point in New Moon where Edward is telling Bella that she shouldn’t leave her house. She plans to resist him and leave anyway, but doesn’t get far. The thin veil of protectiveness tears to reveal his controlling, obsessive nature. Somehow, he’s managed to deflate the tires of her 1953 Chevy. A snake twisted in my stomach. This scene hit differently from when I was a teen. 

I asked Adam which team he would choose. I realize now that this question was a test. Edward is toxic, he said, point blank. Besides, Jacob is better-looking. Just look at that hair. He ran a hand through his own black coils, which had sprung to life in the late summer heat. It was probably the queerest thing he’d ever said, and would ever say again.  

Right around this time in 2020, I started to read Stephanie Meyer’s newly-released Midnight Sun, which is really just Twilight, but retold from Edward’s point of view. In an ironic, self-referential twist, law-school dropout Glasses Edward had given me Midnight Sun as a gift. Sensing things were getting serious with Adam, Glasses Edward had started dropping poems in my mailbox every day for the past few weeks. He was “just happening to be in the neighborhood” with all of my favorite groceries in hand. He brought me to his apartment, blindfolded, to reveal his studio transformed into a bistro for two, complete with stringy-lights and a three piece tuxedo. Against his deep anxiety over phone calls, he had started ringing me when I stopped responding to his texts. 

As it had with any Edward, this one’s gallantry had broken away into the vampiric fear that his emotional supply was leaving him. So I silenced my phone and, with satisfaction on a sunny afternoon, pulled out his gift and started to read.

Too quickly, a shroud of dismay overcame me. I had expected the prose to be lackluster, and it was certainly that. But even still, there was supposed to be something magical going on. Not even my nostalgia could salvage my expectations for this book. The way Edward described first seeing Bella in the school cafeteria was wooden, even less than an object. She was like a granola bar half-chewed and left for birds to pick at the fragments. It was all about Edward’s hunger. Stephanie Meyer was selling the same insidious story. I could only stomach the first three chapters before I put it down for good. 

I made myself find Adam. I really did. 

In a rebellious fit against Glasses Edward, I thought of the nicest person I knew and dared to believe for a moment that I deserved someone kind. Adam came to mind, with his shy sideways grin and starry brown eyes. We’d met at a mutual friend’s birthday party six months before, but I doubted he even remembered me. We had nothing in common – or so I thought – as he was the founder of a non-profit internet service provider, and I was, well, me. I was close to broke, writing pages and pages of a novel that nobody else had seen. In spite of this, I asked a college girlfriend to set us up. And to my shock, he agreed to meet for a date. 

While walking together around the Baltimore neighborhood of Fed Hill – it was the middle of the pandemic and we kept a polite distance – Adam wouldn’t look me in the eye. Or look at me at all. Being so used to Edwards raking their eyes over me, I thought perhaps this was a mistake, that he didn’t even want to be there. It took a moment to realize he was trying to be respectful. 

He was kind to me, he asked questions, and actually, actually listened. I let him in. I told him about my Nana who was grieving the recent loss of my Pop Pop, about how my passions for Irish history and queer desire had made their way into my novel-in-progress. After a while I would sputter, wondering why the spotlight was still on me, how it hadn’t yet been yanked away for a self-indulgent monologue. I truly didn’t know how to continue, and attempted to remove myself to the sideline of conversation. But Adam held space for me, encouraging me to keep talking. I was baffled. I had no script for this. We walked and talked for eight hours and shared a pizza on top of Fed Hill. Below, the city twinkled quietly. 

It was normal. It was a gift. 

As an adult child of alcoholics, my neurological destiny had been written; a narcissistic, ego-driven Edward could sniff out my anxious attachment from miles away. I had been conditioned to look for thrills, to expect them, alongside the uncertainty. The headrush of the love-bombing, the bottoming-out from the emotional withdrawal. Edwards were a project for me to fix; they were damaged goods that I could cure with my unending love. My voice had become small. I covered my brittle confidence in eyeliner and a busty tank top. I saw in myself only what I could give — my energy, my body. 

But Adam is not an Edward. He is self-effacing and kind. Motivated and curious. And startlingly, unbelievably silly. He was the chaotic kid in school who had the messy backpack filled with loose papers. He was a running back for his high school football team. He’s a Runescape legend and knows how to build his own computer. He’s an uncle. He has a Greek tortoise named Buddy that likes to get massages with a toothbrush. He’s my best friend. Adam is not a mystery, he is not a trophy, he is not larger than life. He is life. 

We understand that Bella is nestled somewhere between the spaces of my ribs. That this is my story, and I am learning how to be the center of my own heart. We know that it’s my task, this work towards self-loving. We affirm to each other that a healthy relationship is the joyous third entity shared between two self-assured people. His hands are ever-warm, like the world under his skin is constant sunshine. 

Nearly three years later, Adam and I strike out to Forks for my birthday weekend getaway. We had relocated to Seattle six months prior; it was the only way we could convince his Muslim parents that we should live together, by coincidentally getting jobs in the same city on the other side of the country. 

For those first six months, we—meaning I—talked of visiting Forks. By the time we got our car onto the Kingston ferry, the trip was taking on the glow of a pilgrimage. February is the gloomiest month out here in the Pacific Northwest, and this trip was no exception: the forecast called for rain and gusting wind. Rows upon rows of bleak coniferous trees ebbed into mist. It was perfect, because this was the weather that vampires went to school in. 

Forks is a small logging town in the northwestern corner of the Olympic Peninsula. Bella wasn’t kidding when she said she “exiled” herself there to live with her Dad. Only in my research en route had I discovered that the Cullen house, and other notable landmarks, had been filmed in Oregon. When we got to Forks, the main street held fuzzy street lamps, under which black lifted trucks and huge vehicles with felled trees rumbled through an insistent rain. The Twilight fandom had breezed through this town and dried up after the series ended, leaving behind old posters in storefronts and a shuttered cafe once called The Twilight Lounge. Adam and I grabbed reheated carry-out pizza from the only open restaurant. We ate on a concrete bench under an awning, watching the mist. He joked, not without edge, that he might be the only brown person on the entire peninsula. 

Eventually we found Native to Twilight, the only fan store still open. 

Inside the store, beyond kitchy coffee mugs and signed posters and movie props for sale, there was a giant cardboard cutout of Edward and Bella on their wedding day. They stared at one another with a vacant sort of passion, and the fluorescent lights cast a synthetic glow around them. There they were, and there I was with Adam, foils of what had been, what could be. 

I wondered how many of us end up marrying our Edwards because we don’t see any other path for ourselves. I had seen firsthand how an Edward can masterfully distort reality to make leaving them feel like theoretical self-annihilation. But it’s all a selfish mirage, constructed from their own fears of abandonment and inadequacy. If we settle for the familiarity of hurt, what do we end up sacrificing in return—our dreams of safety and validation? 

I wanted to gently take Bella’s hands, and tell her to look, look at Adam, see how tender he is. There is no danger in his eyes, but a promise of adventure, yes, and of warmth. There is room for you here. It is possible. I wanted to take Bella to Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park, where the spruce and hemlock and cedar trees have shallow roots. It rains so much that they don’t need to dig deep. All they have to do is reach hundreds of feet into the sky, and trust the rain will come. 

On the drive home, the sky in front of our windshield is gray, the tendrils of low clouds hover over the evergreens that march up the mountains. No thunder echoes through the valley, but it may as well have, because it does in my mind. I scroll through Spotify and play Supermassive Black Hole for the umpteenth time, reliving the scene where the Cullens play extreme vampire baseball under the cover of a thunderstorm. 

Again? Adam’s guessing there’s a Twilight connection. He’s mildly mystified, and charmed that I can’t let these notes go. He knows this is more than a fandom. While I am bobbing my head to the song, his hand is a warm anchor on my thigh. 

I really don’t like Forks, he says. 

I laugh. I don’t think I do, either. 

Then Bella’s Lullaby is the next track to play, and the delicate piano notes drip like rain onto the hood of the car. 

I suspect the world will always need Twilight. In the years to come, Twilight will be a model for what not to do when looking for love. It will be a comedy of wooden acting and a poorly written screenplay, a time capsule of de-fanged nostalgia to share with friends. I will continue to learn from and laugh at Twilight, yes, but not at Bella—never at Bella. If I did, then it would mean I would be laughing at myself, at others who have been completely consumed by a toxic relationship. 

Edward and Bella, they failed me. They were supposed to meet me here, at the end of the world. They were supposed to grow with me, out of themselves. All there is, of course, is trees. And flat, cardboard characters. Adam’s hand is reassuring on my leg. I turn up the music, and open the window so the rain can tap my skin. 

But the trip to Forks wasn’t totally a wash. In front of the cutouts of Edward and Bella was a registration book, where fans could record where they were visiting from, and of course, which Team they were on. My heart sank as I flipped through the pages. Not a single person in hundreds had written they were for Team Bella. 

So I picked up the pen, set it to the next blank space, and did what I should have done fifteen years ago. 

I chose Team Bella. The sun is going down and the clouds steadily darken. Perhaps, in a way, Edward and Bella had met me here at the end of the world. This music is mine, this romance is mine, I re-write it with every re-visiting. I tell Adam, which is to tell myself, all the ways they got it wrong. The rain doesn’t sting, it’s a blanket of mist over me. In spite of them — and perhaps because of them — I’ve found something deeper, richer, than twilight.

The post I Survived a Lot of Edwards and Now I’m Team Bella appeared first on Electric Literature.