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.

Here is a rather typical method I’ve used. Most query letters contain three or four paragraphs, and you’ll want to keep it to no more than a page, single spaced. [Please note: I’ve inserted additional comments in brackets.] 

First Paragraph 

There are one of two ways to approach the first paragraph. You can keep it simple by stating the name of your work, the genre, and why you are querying this particular agent or editor. For example, here is what I used for How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences. 

Dear _, [and be sure to include the name of a specific editor or agent, spelled correctly] 

Thank you for taking the time to talk with me about How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences at the recent AWP conference. My hope is that you’ll find it to be a good fit for the University of Nebraska Press’s American Lives Series. 

Or if you don’t have a personal connection with an agent or editor, you can simply begin by saying, “I am querying you because_.” [Study the website of each editor or agent. Determine what you think they’re looking for and include that here. In other words, do they seem interested in books on the same topic as yours?] 

Other opening paragraphs can have more of what’s called a “hook,” or what I call a “seduction.” Here is one I found on the Agent Query website for the nonfiction book Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer. 

On assignment for Outside Magazine to report on the growing commercialization of the mountain, Krakauer, an accomplished climber, went to the Himalayas as a client of Rob Hall, the most respected high-altitude guide in the world, and barely made it back alive from the deadliest season in the history of Everest. 

I could have used more of a hook or a seduction for How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences by saying something like “Don’t want to die? Read this book!” And I might have used some thing like that if I’d queried an agent since New York publishing is more “into” eye-catching taglines than university presses. Which is to say you need to tailor your query to the audience—the agent, editor, or publisher—you’re contacting. 

Second Paragraph 

The second paragraph of your query letter is a mini-synopsis of the book and should be under two hundred words. In it you want to introduce yourself as narrator (that is, not the “real” you but the “you” on the page) and address the major conflict or the nature of the narrator’s journey. You can also include the types of obstacles standing in the way of a successfully completed quest. 

Here is the mini-synopsis I wrote for How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences. 

In this book of thematically linked essays, the narrator explores the taboo subject of death. While several pieces use gallows humor as a way to deflect, Silverman also directly confronts her fears of the ultimate unknown. Her fear stems in part from a sexual assault she hid for years. This experience attests to a fact many women know all too well, that death and sex are intimately tied—not in some philosophical way but in everyday life. As this baby boomer grows, from childhood to adulthood, she explores other origins surrounding her fear of death—as well as her goal of surviving it. Her quest is, by turns, realistic and fantastical, worldly and other-worldly. The odyssey begins with the narrator dubbing herself “Miss Route 17,” while cruising New Jersey’s industrial-strength landscape. Along the way, she survives everything from a piano teacher who stifles her natural talent to a faux heart attack to various maladies that afflict us as we age. Her more internal journey to live forever finds the narrator hoarding memories as well as archaic words, which she uses as talismans against the darkness, overcoming and transforming death through language, memory, and metaphor. 

You will be able to find many other examples on the web. See, for example, the Agent Query website.

Third Paragraph 

The third paragraph focuses on your biographical information. Keep it short and related only to your writing credentials, such as journals in which you’ve published, awards you’ve won, where you received a degree, with whom you studied, and such. Here you can also mention any expertise in the area in which you’re writing, if appropriate. 

Fourth Paragraph 

In the final paragraph, thank the agent or editor for their time and consideration. If, on their website, they’ve asked, say, to include the first ten pages of your manuscript, mention that you’ve done so. Some agents or editors also want to see an attached proposal. Be sure to read all the guidelines carefully. Some are even very specific about what you should include in the “subject” line of the email. 

That’s it. Submit. You can’t get published if you don’t try.

Excerpted from Acetylene Torch Songs. Copyright © 2024, Sue William Silverman. Reproduced by permission of The University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

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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.

When I start a book from scratch, not one page is typed. There are just a few ideas kicking around in my head, some handwritten notes. Usually there’s this sort of vaguely plump feeling in my brain whenever I think about the characters, where they are, mixed with this hazy notion of their conflicts, external and internal both. I think: How the hell am I going to do this again? Go from zero to hundreds of pages.

But I’ve learned to transform the nerves into enthusiasm for the most part. My approach is: “I get to write a novel” versus “I have to write a novel.” And I think about what I desire. What kind of stories I want to tell, what voices I want to give life to in the world.

You may be starting a new project, too. Now might be a good time ask yourself why you want to write it, and what kind of writer you want to be.

And there may be some of you who are trying to finish long-term projects. Dusting off drafts that have been sitting in drawers or trying to push through to the end of something you’ve been toiling on for years. This book can feel heavy in your mind. There are all kinds of feelings already attached to this work from your personal history. You may be thinking to yourself: Why haven’t I finished this already? 

Don’t talk yourself out of it. Ask yourself instead: why do I want to finish it?

Whatever happened before this moment is irrelevant. We tear off our clothes and race down the sand to the icy cold water. We embrace the sting. To show ourselves we can. We start anew on our work, together. We just have to try. 

I believe in you. You can do this. Now let’s begin.

What Do the Words Do for You?

The words do so many different things for people. If your writing is for comfort, let it comfort you. If your writing is for process, let it be for process. If your writing is to change your life or even the world, let that change roll. If your words are a war cry, for the love of God, please howl.

I know what the words do for me: for an hour or two, when I write, it’s a place I can go to feel safe. It has always worked that way, ever since I was a child. The safety of a sentence. The sensation when I push and play with the words is the purest I will ever feel. The calm space of my mind. I curl up in it. I love when sentences nudge up against each other, when I notice a word out of place and then put it in its correct spot. I can nearly hear a click when I slot it into place. I love making a sentence more powerful, more dramatic or moving or sad, and I love when I make a sentence quiet enough that I can almost hear the sound of my own breath. More than anything, I love when a sentence makes me laugh. 

The words light up on the page, showing me what to do, where they want to go. They have always been my best friends in the world. All I need is for a few of them to show up. To soothe me.

Yes, yes, it is different for everyone—but we are all still here together. I can only speak of my particular intimacy and hope to connect with you. That’s what writing is: our particular intimacies. I offer up the idea of the safety of a sentence for you right now, the possibility of a place to put yourself, to put your heart. A place to rest for a while from these feverish days. 

Today, before you begin your writing, ask yourself: what do the words do for you?

Make a Choice 

We often wonder how to know if we’re making the right choice creatively when there are so many possibilities. I understand fear. I understand caution. But at some point, we must shake off the indecision and just move forward with our work. Choose your project. Choose your sentences. Choose your ideas. Choose your ending. It’s your trip and no one else’s.

If your biggest dream was to write for television, you wouldn’t say things like, “I should really write a television pilot.” Instead you would say, “I am writing a television pilot,” and you would get up an hour earlier every day to work and you would lock yourself in your house on the weekends, also to work, and you would read those television writing books and you would buy that impossible software program and you would join a writing group or make friends with someone else who wanted to write for television and you would swap scripts and give each other feedback and go out and get drunk one night and toast each other for being brilliant (and maybe there would be some sort of awkward sexual chemistry between you but that’s your business and not mine) and then you would try and find an agent and then who knows what happens next? But this would be you in fact doing enough to try and achieve this goal.

But what if you don’t do it? Are you the kind of person who lives your life mired in regrets or are you the kind of person who makes your decisions and moves on with them? Can you see the fact that you are not doing these things as choices you are making, to make room for the things you can and want to do? The people doing all the things you want to be doing, for the most part, no one is doing the work for them, no one is handing it to them on a plate. 

Certainly, some of them have generational wealth or connections or are over-achievers, but most of them are worker bees like the rest of us, buzzing about the giant hive of creativity. We cannot envy them for trying. We should look to them as role models, instead.

If you want something, do what it takes to get it. If you decide not to pursue a path, accept your choices.

Valuing Your Creativity 

It’s important to value your creative self and what it can give you. I don’t think you can be your best without that. We love our friends, we love our family, our partners, too: there is a system of mutual support there. We need these relationships to be healthy and whole. But to feel fulfilled we also need our relationship to be healthy with our creative self. We do this by paying attention to the conscious choices we make to benefit our ideas and artistic output, and what we gain from producing our work. We won’t be as happy as we could be without engaging with that side of ourselves.

I am always excited about witnessing how the creative mind works, both in myself and in my peers. How it solves problems even when we aren’t even necessarily thinking about them. And how it operates beyond our conscious control to give us what we need. It is intimate, the relationship we have with our creative self. It is purely for us and no one else.

Your creative self is comprised of your brain, your heart, and your time. To protect your creativity, you must tend to them all.

The creative self looks out for us—if we look out for it. If we do our work, invest our time in ourselves and our art and our imagination, keep our mind clear for stretches of time just to rest it, balance ourselves between blankness and stimulation, get enough sleep, read, write, think. If we honor that thing that provides us with so much, it just might help us out one day. After the rain stops, it shows up. Quietly slips a solution to a plot problem into your head, for example, and cracks open the narrative of your book. Makes us feel good and sunny and proud and able to communicate with the world.

Are you caring for yourself, the deep, intimate creative self? Are you giving it the nurturing it deserves? The goal is to always be getting closer to the creative self. 

Respecting your creativity is respecting yourself.

Excerpted from 1000 WORDS: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round. Copyright © 2024, Jami Attenberg. Reproduced by permission of Simon Element, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.

The post This Year, Ask Yourself What Kind of Writer You Want to Be 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.

Brutalistically gray and unassuming, the science museum watches over its surrounding homes and greets my partner and I on our daily walks. This is why I notice immediately when the sign shows up, overnight. Small and vague, planted right by the entrance. All I can make out are the words “Orchid Show.” There are no dates listed, so I’m not sure if it happened already, if it’s happening now, or if it’s happening in the near future. But it has an attractive air of mystery that pulls at me—freshly out of graduate school and trying to figure this life thing out, trying to find something to care about. I’m desperate for, as cliche and literal it is, a sign. For the universe to come around and smack me in the face with something important, worthy. And this cipher, flimsy on a white board and metal legs, has a luring specificity.

Upon returning to our apartment, my partner, Jonny, looks up the information. “Orchid Show, Rochester” is the only search term we can think of to return the result we want. What comes up are various orchid societies, one from the Genesee Region of New York and one encompassing the entire country: the American Orchid Society. It turns out this year marks the latter’s 47th annual show, complete with lecture talks, orchid sales, and living art pieces created and cared for by members of the local chapter. In essence, it’s a carnival for the flower’s most dedicated followers.

The show’s last day is Sunday, and Jonny goes with me under the pretense that we’ll only stay if it’s free. Who are we—two broke, recent graduates—to spend any amount of money on something so silly? We pull open the heavy glass doors.

“Okay, we’ll just look around,” I tell him. Internally, I’m cursing myself for not knowing about this event earlier, thinking I could have pitched coverage of it to my local newspaper. Already, in my head, I know I can’t turn away. Already, I’m experiencing each moment through the lens of how it would work in a story.

There are more people smushed into the tiny welcome room than I expected. And on the far side, there’s a row of meticulously styled orchid arrangements, all assembled by members of the local society. One is built of a hollow rod of bamboo with an oval cut out in the middle through which water and pussy willows build up and over the smooth edge. Another is impossibly delicate, the mere whisper of an orchid cradled in the black circular vase’s arch. “That one looks like your purse,” Jonny tells me. If the entrance fee means more of this, I’m inclined to pay it.

In 1998, Susan Orlean published The Orchid Thief, her tour-de-force journalistic memoir (though I don’t think she’d ever refer to it as such) following the orchid obsession that was tearing through Florida, leading more than one individual to the brink of criminality. Orlean centers the story on John Laroche, a man possessed by an indescribable desire to capture and appropriate the ghost orchid, Polyrrhiza lindenii. He is driven by greed, but also a lilting intelligence. A man who claims to know everything, and, to some degree, just might. He is quick to obsess, and even quicker to slash his stash once the passion is gone; by the time Orlean encounters him, he’s already abandoned similar fascinations with turtles and ice-age fossils.

At the start of the memoir, Orlean has left her home in New York for Florida, unsure if Laroche will even agree to speak with her. The project was triggered by a newspaper article she stumbled upon, but really, she’s chasing an impulse, letting the story build around her. The article outlined Laroche’s trouble: how he, and a group of Indigenous Seminole people, were arrested for attempted poaching of ghost orchids in the Fakahatchee, a protected Florida state park. Members of the Seminole Tribe were let off with a warning, having successfully argued their right to the land. Laroche was not.

Much like Orlean, I’ve always been drawn to passionate people. It’s in my nature to wonder how those with obsessive interests find themselves at the point of no return. Like Orlean, I’m perpetually curious, scanning constantly for meaning. Like the collectors, I’m hunting for fulfillment, convinced it’s right across the road, if only I’m tenacious enough to claim it.

The first exhibit we see in the science museum is a photograph display titled “Orchids That Don’t Bloom for Shows,” which features images taken throughout the year by one individual on their cell phone. Certain photos bear a ribbon already. What they’re marking, I don’t yet know. Just steps from us, the real orchids are putting on a show, blue and red and white ribbons pinned along their terracotta chests. These flowers are scored on tangible things, like color and strength and petal shape.

The main event is down the hall, inside a miniature auditorium. Up on the stage, two women work diligently to repot purchased orchids behind a rickety plastic folding table. On the floor, sneakers squeak against the freshly waxed wood. There are at least four vendors here, their bodies encased by an array of plants at varying levels of growth. Around them, a jungle erupts, countless displays of orchids, from impossibly small flowers that snake up curving stems to individual beasts the size of my hand. They are pink and red and yellow and purple and orange and white. Some look like spiders with spindly petals, others look murderous with great big chins to catch bugs. Small black plaques identify their Latin names and astonishing price tags. At one show, Orlean discovered a display containing nearly forty thousand dollars’ worth of orchids.

A man near the entrance to the auditorium wears a U.S. Navy lanyard and says he’s been collecting since the 60s. His first job as a teenager involved moving giant pots of orchids, the kind of terracotta behemoths that line the front walks of impressive mansions. “It’s a lifetime obsession,” he tells me.

Another collector wears a chambray shirt embroidered with a pink orchid above the chest pocket. He sells orchids that smell like chocolate and raspberries and I overhear him telling a woman, “It’s my therapy. Something that keeps me occupied, where I’m always learning.”

In the middle of the room, a man dressed in all black dissociates in front of his life’s work. I rouse him from another dimension by asking how he got started. “I saw my first orchid in a Buffalo store window 35 years ago,” he says. “I had never seen one before but I was transfixed.” His display is heavy with blue first-place ribbons.

Orlean asks a collector what it is about orchids that “seduced humans so completely that they were compelled to steal them and workshop them and try to breed new and specific kinds of them and then be willing to wait nearly a decade for one of them to flower?” Orlean doesn’t describe how the collector formulated his response. If he faltered, if he felt attacked by the intensity of her observational interest. But she does tell us what he responded: “Mystery, beauty, unknowability, I suppose. Besides, I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. I mean, no obvious meaning.”

As writers, all we do is search for and make meaning from the mundane. We are sensitive to overheard conversations, to the passing of coffee from employee to customer. Moments that fester and form inside us until, one day, they burst forth demanding to be made into something new. We craft, constantly. It’s an obsession, all this meaning-making. A sort of high that we are constantly chasing. Just like Laroche, I suspect we are also hoping that some form of success (money or meaning or, ideally, both) waits at the other end.

It’s easy—for me, at least—to slip into a mindset of ransacking, rather than excavating. Like Laroche breaking into Fakahatchee because his obsession was powerful enough to support a belief that he was entitled to disrupt the natural order, writers risk falling into the habit of living for a story, rather than writing in congruence to living. I’ve already begun to recognize this pattern in myself. Where my decision-making process for attending an event, confronting old friends—really anything—has been reduced to asking myself: “Would I be able to write about this?” Often, it feels like lying. Like falsifying the impulse behind memoir and art. My end goal has switched from gaining a deeper understanding of myself and the world around me to calculating how much I can produce, publish, craft.

In The Orchid Thief, Orlean never sees a ghost orchid in person. In a traditional story, in a story built on the author’s meticulous plan to craft the perfect plot, seeing it would be the crescendo moment. Where everything that’s been building over hundreds of pages finally explodes in relief. The moment she comes face-to-face with the fragility of beauty, the cause for so much treachery and loss and obsession.

But Orlean’s book is not a novel. When she attends her final orchid show, a sort of peace washes over her as she realizes the ghost orchid won’t be there: “It was a relief to have no hope because then I had no fear; looking for something you want is a comfort in the clutter of the universe, but knowing you don’t have to look means you can’t be disappointed.”

What would happen if I stopped searching for the story in every turn signal, every stranger passing on the street, every minute shiver of the trees? What if I stopped fabricating intention and metaphor where there is neither? What if a sign outside the local science museum was just a sign, promoting an event, without outsized metaphorical significance? What if I just walked away, as Orlean does at the end of The Orchid Thief, without the perfect ending?

My first essays were purer. I didn’t know what they were going to become as I wrote them: the decaying deer carcass I found in the woods; the extra pigmentation that made itself at home on my face; my need for validation that morphed into inappropriate bonds with English teachers. I lived my experiences as they happened, and only later twisted them into something charged. Those stories feel more real and palpable than anything I’ve since forced into existence. They have heart and complexity, overlapping themes and invisible threads that I later wrangled apart and put back together again. That doesn’t happen when you decide what a story will become before it happens.

At the Orchid Show, I bump into an older woman holding a clipboard. She’s two heads shorter than me. I ask if she has a booth and she tells me no, she doesn’t. “I’m a society member,” she says. “I do the judging.”

I ask her what she thinks it is about orchids that attract so many people, that make her job necessary in the first place.

“They’re a special flower,” she says.

To her, it’s that simple.

She tells me that some of the vendors have green houses where they force orchids to stay in bloom all year in order to bring them to shows like this. In nature, an orchid blooms for six to ten weeks. But first place ribbons guarantee revenue and, like most obsessions, disruption of the natural order is the price.

Orchid pollination is a delicate dance, she explains, because some flowers have the ability to self-pollinate—if they get impatient, if their environment isn’t exactly perfect, they don’t wait around for moths or butterflies or birds to deliver that elusive pollen.

As the woman speaks, my first thought is that this kind of efficiency might be a good thing. Less work for everyone involved, a self-reliance that keeps the species going. It’s impressive that beauty can be made authentically, without force or artifice.

But, of course, it’s not that easy.

Self-pollinated orchids, the woman tells me, only bloom for a single day.

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