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When we criticize sentimentality, perhaps part of what we fear is the possibility that it allows us to usurp the texts we read, insert ourselves and our emotional needs too aggressively into their narratives, clog their situations and their syntax with our tears. Which brings us back to the danger that we’re mainly crying for ourselves, or at least to feel ourselves cry.
Charlie tells me about his notion of “inner mobility,” something he picked up from Jack London, which basically involves just that—going somewhere else when he’s not allowed to go anywhere. For Charlie, inner mobility means reading books, but it also means following his imagination into other places, other scenarios: “I don’t treat it like fantasy,” he says, “where I always end up naked with the beautiful woman.” Instead it’s something trickier, less like wish fulfillment and more like making himself vulnerable to circumstance—one of the many subtle liberties this place denies: the freedom to be acted upon by many frames, many scenarios, rather than the single abiding context of incarceration. The principle of inner mobility is double-edged, opportunity and consequence: “I am free to nap when I want, go for a run when I want, fall in love, jump from a building, or eat cake till I puke,” he says. “The most important rule of my inner mobility is that I must follow the trail where it leads and sometimes that is not going to end well.” This articulation of desire fascinated me—to follow the trail wherever, not just someplace good. Incarceration doesn’t simply take away the ability to get what you want, it takes away the freedom to screw up—binge on cake or jump from too high or fuck the wrong folks.
There’s an online quiz titled “Are you a real cutter or do you cut for fun?” full of statements to be agreed or disagreed with: I don’t know what it really feels like inside when you have problems, I just love to be the center of attention. Gradations grow finer inside the taboo: some cut from pain, others for show. Hating on cutters—or at least these cutter-performers—tries to draw a boundary between authentic and fabricated pain, as if we weren’t all some complicated mix of wounds we can’t let go of and wounds we can’t help; as if choice itself weren’t always some blend of character and agency. How much do we choose to feel anything? The answer, I think, is nothing satisfying—we do, and we don’t. But hating on cutters insists desperately upon our capacity for choice. People want to believe in self-improvement—it’s an American ethos, pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps—and here we have the equivalent of affective downward mobility: cutting as a failure to feel better, as deliberately going on a kind of sympathetic welfare—taking some shortcut to the street cred of pain without actually feeling it.
These girls aren’t wounded so much as post-wounded, and I see their sisters everywhere. They’re over it. I am not a melodramatic person. God help the woman who is. What I’ll call “post-wounded” isn’t a shift in deep feeling (we understand these women still hurt) but a shift away from wounded affect—these women are aware that “woundedness” is overdone and overrated. They are wary of melodrama so they stay numb or clever instead. Post-wounded women make jokes about being wounded or get impatient with women who hurt too much. The post-wounded woman conducts herself as if preempting certain accusations: don’t cry too loud, don’t play victim, don’t act the old role all over again. Don’t ask for pain meds you don’t need; don’t give those doctors another reason to doubt the other women on their examination tables. Post-wounded women fuck men who don’t love them and then they feel mildly sad about it, or just blasé about it, more than anything they refuse to care about it, refuse to hurt about it—or else they are endlessly self-aware about the posture they have adopted if they allow themselves this hurting.
The post-wounded posture is claustrophobic. It’s full of jadedness, aching gone implicit, sarcasm quick-on-the-heels of anything that might look like self-pity. I see it in female writers and their female narrators, troves of stories about vaguely dissatisfied women who no longer fully own their feelings. Pain is everywhere and nowhere. Post-wounded women know that postures of pain play into limited and outmoded conceptions of womanhood. Their hurt has a new native language spoken in several dialects: sarcastic, apathetic, opaque; cool and clever. They guard against those moments when melodrama or self-pity might split their careful seams of intellect. I should rather call it a seam. We have sewn ourselves up. We bring everything to the grindstone.
The woman Tom describes, “wallowing” in self-pity and unable to decide what the world should do about it, is exactly the woman I grew up afraid of becoming. I knew better—we all, it seems, knew better—than to become one of those women who plays victim, lurks around the sickbed, hands her pain out like a business card. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t think this was just me. An entire generation, the next wave, grew up doing everything we could to avoid this identity: we take refuge in self-awareness, self-deprecation, jadedness, sarcasm. The Girl Who Cried Pain: she doesn’t need meds; she needs a sedative.
And now we find ourselves torn. We don’t want anyone to feel sorry for us, but we miss the sympathy when it doesn’t come. Feeling sorry for ourselves has become a secret crime—a kind of shameful masturbation—that would chase away the sympathy of others if we ever let it show. “Because I had grown up denying myself any feeling that even hinted at self-pity,” Grealy writes, “I now had to find a way to reshape it.”
Reshape it into what? Into faith, sexual promiscuity, intellectual ambition. At the pinnacle: into art. Grealy offers this last alchemy, pain-to-art, as possibility but not redemption. It seems likely that for all her wound has given her—perspective, the grit of survival, an insightful meditation on beauty—Grealy would still trade back these wound boons for a pretty face. This confession of willingness is her greatest gift of honesty, not arguing that beauty was more important than profundity, just admitting that she might have chosen it—that beauty was more difficult to live without.
Falling in love with C was not gradual. Falling in love with C was encompassing, consuming, life-expanding. It was like ripping hunks from a loaf of fresh bread and stuffing them in my mouth. In those early days, he was a man frying little disks of sausage on a hot plate in a Paris garret, asking me to marry him. Making me laugh so hard I slipped off our red couch. Loving the smoked tacos we got from a tiny shack just north of Morro Bay. Pointing out backyard chickens from the garage we rented behind a surfer’s bachelor pad. Putting his hand on my thigh while I drank contrast fluid that tasted like bitter Gatorade, before a CT scan to find my burst ovarian cyst. Playing the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on a road trip, putting a cinnamon bear on our rental car dashboard because it was our mascot, our trusty guide. Our thing. We had a thousand things, like everyone. But ours were only ours. Who will find them beautiful now?
In those early days, he was a man ordering room-service steak at the Golden Nugget after we said our vows in a Vegas wedding chapel at midnight. He was a man curled beside me watching our favorite obstacle-course program on TV, a man getting my face tattooed on his biceps, a man whispering in my ear at a crowded party.
He is still that man. I am still that woman. We have betrayed those tender people, but we still carry them around inside of us wherever we go.
My mother. After my parents split up, when I was eleven, it was just the two of us. On Sunday nights we watched Murder, She Wrote, eating bowls of ice cream side by side on the couch. She always solved the mystery by the second commercial break; she knew from the lost umbrella in the corner of the shot, or else from the fishy alibi that didn’t check out because the murderer used “he” to describe a female dentist. “Just got lucky,” she’d say. It wasn’t luck. It was her close attention to the details of the world, the same keen eye that kept track of every doctor’s appointment, every passing comment I’d made about a school project, a tiff with a friend; she always followed up, wondered how it went.
Her skin carried the sweet, clean scent of her soap—that blue tub of chilly white pudding that she rubbed across her high cheekbones. She baked loaves of fresh brown bread and gave me heels straight from the oven, still warm.
She helped me write down recipes in a little spiral-bound notebook of index cards so I could make us dinner once a week: sloppy joes with soy crumbles, or a casserole of pop-up biscuits and cream of mushroom soup. My economist father was on the other side of the country, or in his apartment across town, or in the sky. It was hard to keep track. He and I had dinner once a month. Sometimes more, sometimes less. He’d never had my biscuit casserole.
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When I met C, I was thirty years old. I wasn’t a child. But there was so much I didn’t know. I’d never made a choice I couldn’t take back. I was drowning in the revocability of my own life. I wanted the solidity of what you couldn’t undo.
C loved basketball sneakers and bodega snacks, drank soda rather than coffee. He was easily affronted and absolutely forthright. He was not afraid of hard work or a crisis; he was consolidated by difficulty. He always rooted for the underdog. He loved Lloyd Dobler, John Cusack’s character from Say Anything: the kickboxer wooing the beautiful valedictorian, standing beneath her window in a baggy beige blazer and a Clash T-shirt, hoisting his boombox high above his head.
The first time C and I talked about my eating disorder, a few weeks into our relationship, he asked me how much I’d weighed when I was sick. Partway through my response, he broke in to tell me how little his wife had weighed by the end of her life. The memory was so painful it cut through him, like a splinter breaking through the surface of his skin. He had no choice but to say it out loud. In that moment, and many others, everything I’d lived seemed trivial in relation to everything he’d survived.
Still, some part of me had wanted to finish my sentence.
Another part of me thought that making this man happy would be more meaningful than anything else I’d ever done. From early on, he said, “You are giving me another life.” Every time I felt a flicker of doubt, it seemed like a betrayal of this hope.
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