Years of writing clickbait headlines as a media reporter has resulted in my complete inability to engage with them, or their source. It was only after days of of having it cross my Instagram feeds that I finally gained the vaguest understanding of what the football dude said at the graduation ceremony. And even then the best response seemed to be lol. When your mostly enjoyable life represents everything these deeply-unworthy-of-our-attention men live in fear of it’s hard to muster anything more.
Except.
From Jessica Valenti’s newsletter:
The NFL player’s remarks would be so much easier to dismiss if they weren’t such a clear articulation of what conservatives want for American women.
After all, Benedictine College is in Kansas, where Republicans just passed a slew of Handmaid’s Tale-esque laws—including one that requires doctors to tell the state why a woman is getting an abortion. Not only are providers forced to ask women if they’ve been raped or abused, they must ask whether their patient wants an abortion because having a baby would “interfere with the woman’s education” or “interfere with the woman’s employment or career.”
If a woman doesn’t want to answer questions about her career versus motherhood priorities, the doctor must report that refusal to the state, too—along with how many times she declined to answer.
As Jo said, “But what I can’t stop thinking about is what it had to be like to be a woman in that audience.
Not to mention elsewhere. As Laura Bassett wrote:
But one can surely imagine the cognitive dissonance of being told, as a single woman at 40, that I have already failed in some fundamental ways, that I’m doomed to be unfulfilled for the rest of my life, that I am personally sentencing humanity to extinction by not having babies myself…and also, simultaneously, that the ways I might still be able to have a biological baby–namely, via IVF or surrogacy–should not be options at all.
And certainly, though it’s easier for me to lol now, one of the reasons I wrote No One Tells You This was out of some degree of desperation and panic that I was headed into dark, unchartered waters. And one of the reasons I wrote I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself was simply to say, actually, despite being told everything will get worse, it can actually be pretty great.
For years now, and with good reason, The Handmaid’s Tale has been the easiest reference point for what’s happening in America. But it’s another iconic Canadian writer who’s been on my mind this week. Alice Munro died on Monday. Unlike Atwood, Munro primarily wrote short stories. Finding the universal in the detail. What Cheryl Strayed described as evoking “hardscrabble place[s] with searing specificity.”
Growing up in Toronto in the 1980’s was to exist in a world where Atwood and Munro (and Margaret Laurence and Carol Shields ) were so present it felt like the walls were papered with their book covers. To this day, I’m not sure if I actually read The Handmaid’s Tale in high school or simply absorbed it osmotically. But I came to Munro much later. Her stories of what felt like small experiences could not hold the attention of a mind attracted to adventure and drama. Until they did. Because of course they are not small. They are life.
Friend of My Youth remains the one I return to most often. Amazingly, I came to it years before my own mother would die of Parkinson’s and subsequently reappear with regularity in my dreams, very much alive. Each time I read it, I recognize different elements of my own life; each time I’m more dazzled by Munro’s brilliant prose. And also, her faith in the merits of the stories she was telling.
I’ve also been reading the new translation of Colombe Schneck’s Swimming in Paris: A Life in Three Stories (related: what is it about swimming and women writers? As a lifelong swimming I love reading other’s experiences of it). The first story is about her abortion at age 17. In the introduction she gives credit to Annie Ernaux’s Happening for giving her the courage to write. For making her realize, decades later, her own experience was worthy of a story. Indeed, that telling it was necessary.
The forever argument is we need more and better stories about women, by women. But I think equally, we need to understand the lives of girls and women as worthy stories. An obvious statement, but one worth repeating.
On that note, here’s the only commencement speech I’m interesting in listening to, about another exercise near and dear to me: Le Bicycle.
Good Decisions:
I have two stories that published this week, which I wrote months ago but are very on theme. (Perhaps because the theme remains unchanging.):
A magazine feature for Deseret about who is being omitted when AI steals stories and language to teach itself, and the ramifications of this.
And a piece in Romper’s big Auntie package. You’re all doing great.
ENJOY Tour Dates! (So far).
June 11: I will be in conversation with Katy Tur at the Strand in New York. Tickets here.
June 17: I will be in conversation with Ann Friedman at Skylight Books in LA: Tickets here.
July 2: I will be in conversation with Marisa Meltzer at Books are Magic in Brooklyn. Tickets here.
July 9: I will be in conversation with Alyssa Mastromonaco at Oblong Books (Rhinebeck). Link to come!