Notes On Another New Life #12
Growing Pains: Entering a second life.
If you get people to stay with you out of obligation, they will never forgive you, and I’m with them. In recent years, it’s come to my attention some people may have stayed with me from duty and confusion. I had a way, even before kindergarten, of sitting next to you at a bar and striking up a conversation. Before you knew it, I would get in your car and go home with you, and I would live with you until you kicked me out or I got bored.
I met Linda when we were seven. She had a furred softness about her. She had thick hair. She could kick a ball to god knows where. She taught me to play chess. We made plans to get married. She had a brother who lifted weights and a dog that looked like a small deer. The dunes and the ocean were right down the block from her house. The way I situated myself with friends I fell in love with, their life was an all-expense paid vacation on the Riviera compared to the life I would have had without them.
When you look back at your life, you hover like a ghost, and things become visible that were formerly in the shadows. Like how did my mother feel about a kid who was happy living anywhere but home? Gaining new knowledge feels like starting a second life. In the second life, I should be as young as I was in the first life. Imagine my appreciation for life’s comic reversals when I looked in the mirror and saw a face that was the same age as me, 77.
The last few days I’ve been reading Love Me Tender, an autobiographical novel by the French writer Constance Debré. Early in the book, the unnamed narrator, who is 47, describes her appearance as a series of facts, with no emotional weight attached to them. Nonetheless, you can tell from the things she picks out—she’s lean and tall, swims every day, has tattoos, and wears clothes that are black and white and that both sexes can wear—you can tell she’s hot as hell.
She writes, “Head in the water. Forty minutes. Front crawl for two kilometers. It’s my contract with myself. My only commitment. It’s a question of life or death. The day I stop will be the day I fall apart. I always feel better after my shower. I only take showers at the pool now. There’s a lot of space. A friendly atmosphere. I’m in pretty good shape thanks to all the swimming. Just by the way. It’s important to look good. To look good and be strong. Otherwise I would have blown my brains out long ago. Each day I save myself. Then I do it all over again the next day.”
Three years before the book begins, the narrator has decided to leave her husband, Laurent, start sleeping with women, give up practicing law, and write novels fulltime. The couple have a son, who is five when she leaves and eight when the book begins. The narrator and her ex-husband have been sharing custody. When she makes it clear she is interested only in women and is never coming back to him, he goes to the courts to prevent her from seeing her son, using what she calls her “homosexuality” and her life as a writer as evidence of her unfitness as a mother. For two years, Laurent keeps the narrator and her son apart, and during this time she discovers the risks and illuminations of surprising people with who you are.
Mostly, people tell her that what she’s doing is not who she is. They tell her who they want her to be, based on her make and model and the amount of discomfort she arouses in them about who they might be. Mostly what the narrator discovers while she’s waiting—in a fever of grief at being separated from her son and in a fury at being restricted from circulating freely—is that she likes having sex with as many women as she can seduce. She also discovers that most of the words applied to what humans do and feel—such as love, intimacy, and motherhood—don’t describe things that are firm or necessarily real.
She probably could have discovered these things without selling all her belongings, moving into a flat the size of a monk’s cell, and living on no money because she no longer has a job. Her life becomes an Outward Bound experience to test what she can get by on, and this makes her happy. Everyone’s life becomes an Outward Bound experience when they intentionally or accidentally break out of the mold they’ve been formed in. Also, all we have in life to guide us—and this is a cause for celebration because it makes life understandable and slimmed down its to basics!—all we have in life to guide us, truthfully, is sex fantasy and fashion. You don’t have to agree with me.
One of the reasons Debré’s narrator is writing this book is to document her success attracting women and moving from one to the next. She reports this with a sense of amazement, not that she can attract the women but that she doesn’t feel a need to explain herself in psychological terms or to apologize for anything. She calls the women “girls.” She doesn’t think she is “a girl.” Why not? She can’t say exactly. She says, “What does it mean to be a girl? How should I know?” It turns out, in her book, a “girl” is anyone she can take to bed and rummage in their refrigerator who isn’t a man.
In my book, being “a girl” doesn't mean anything if you are one. It isn't a real thing. It never was. It never will be. There is nothing to aspire to. There is nothing to desert. You don’t have to agree with me.
Reading Constance, I began to think of other things there are words for that don’t exist, and I woke up the other morning muttering to myself, “There’s no such thing as virginity. There are no virgins. Everyone is always, at the same time, experience and wonder. This condition that is supposed to define life number one and, after it ends, usher you to life number two is nothing but a nasty, dull sword that hacks up the time and space of women.
You want to know what a bigger deal is than fucking for the first time? Fucking for the first time is the reason the word “anticlimax” was invented. It takes time to learn to fuck well. Falling in love is a bigger deal than fucking for the first time. Falling in love is something that tells you who you are, because you are the one doing the wanting.
The other day, I read a piece by a woman who confused being the object of desire with falling in love, herself. I wanted to tap her on the shoulder and say, “That is not falling in love. That’s when someone falls in love with you, and it can be annoying—like when that guy at the bar bothers you, or when I bother you.”
Falling in love is yours forever. It doesn't even matter if your love is returned, or if the object of your desire moves on. It’s irrelevant because your attachment to wanting is what turns you on. The other person’s body turns you on, and your desire is something that can’t be controlled or diminished by anyone else. It’s perhaps the deepest part of who we are. You don’t have to agree with me.
One of the questions Love Me Tender asks is: Can the narrator get away with living the life she’s chosen? Who can stop a woman in her forties from living the life, more or less, of a man in his twenties? What will it cost her? We know early on, it will cost her custody of her son and that she will fight against this with everything she has in her. It will cost her enormous amounts of disapproval by other people, including her son. It will prompt her to question her moves continually. Is this the way I want to live? What do I really feel, in this moment, fucking this woman, or learning from my lawyer what rights I may or may not be denied?
Debré creates a fascinating tension in the book. She wants to tell you a story about unfair treatment and the homophobic bigotry that works against the narrator in the courts, but she doesn’t want to tell you the story of a victim. To the contrary, she wants to tell you the story of a hero, who works to win back her child. One minute, you’re thinking, “You go, girl.” Another minute, you may be thinking as I did, “Hey, rich girl (Debré comes from a family of wealth and power), there’s a big difference you might have noted between the pared down life you’ve organized for yourself and being poor and abject because you have no choice.”
As the narrator’s case moves through the courts, she’s made aware more than ever of what women are expected to be—or else. She’s made aware of how the language applied to women works to separate them from how they actually feel. As you read a brilliant passage I’m about to quote, try to remember when such ideas were everywhere in the air of feminist awakening. They were radical not because they hadn’t been thought before. They were radical because everyone had thought them and had not said them aloud. In the past, you heard this fearless wildness publicly, this giant exhalation that comes when, all at once, women stop allowing themselves to be gaslit and stop drinking the Kool-Aid of, “This is who you are, even though you know this is not who are are”:
“Mother is worse than woman. It’s closer to servant. Or dog. But less fun. . . . If people want to believe that women have a connection to the Moon, to nature, a special instinct that forces them to cling to motherhood and give up everything else, that’s their business. But I’m not interested. There’s no such thing as a mother. Mother, as a status, an identity, a form of power, a lack of power, a position, dominated, and dominant, victim and persecutor, it doesn’t exist. None of these things exist. There’s only love, which is completely different. Love that doesn’t need love in return, love that doesn’t ask for anything, love, that knows what love is, love that never doubts, love that knows pain is nothing, that pain has nothing to do with it, that it’s futile, that violence is always about the person inflicting it. My son knows all this. My son’s a little mensch.”
When women write female characters and show the way they really feel—their doubts, their moments of coldness, their ambition, their blindness, their states of frozen confusion—I mean all or anything that’s true about how women exist in their lives, these authors have created what's generally considered an "unsympathetic character." A woman who is unlikable. For the most part, in the general critical reception of literature, the only way a female character wins "sympathy" for the reader is NOT to shock them into an awareness of what women really are.
This is one of the reasons it's so refreshing and exciting to encounter Love Me Tender. The narrator doesn't care if you find her "sympathetic." She doesn’t need you to. The first sign that a woman has gained freedom on the page or in life is that she’s lost status with men—as well as the moral approval of everyone else. It’s the beginning of freedom for a writer and for a person.
I’m not going to tell you how the plot unfolds or the feeling state the narrator has entered when the book ends. I want to talk about converting the narrator’s game plan for her second life into tips for how I might exist in my second life. The narrator choses a radical break from the life she’d been living. I have not chosen my radical break. My radical break concerns being classified as old and all the word old ushers in about how the world understand you.
In terms of becoming old and in terms of having gained a new awareness of my past actions with people that may or may not be accurate but feel important to me, in terms of this sense of living a second life, what might be the equivalents for me of leaving a marriage, having sex with anyone I please, trying to win back a child who’s been taken from me, and quitting the law to become a writer? The answer comes quickly to mind: resist every understanding that comes at you and rethink what you’re wearing.
When I read about the wardrobe choices of the tall, thin narrator, I wanted to adopt her look. There was once a time I could have pulled it off. I still have the jacket. Four and a half years ago, when Richard and I moved to Hudson, I had a different body I don’t know what happened to. I didn’t wake up from uneasy dreams to find myself transformed into a giant beetle. I could see the body changing, off to the side.
I have begun doing daily yoga exercises on a phone app. Later this month, I will travel to my beloved plastic surgeon on Long Island, and he will inject my face with Botox and filler around the mouth, and I will look noticeably improved to no one but me, the person I am doing this for. I will be happy for another of life’s small theaters of pleasure. Whatever you may think about this, I don’t care, and I don’t need to know.
When people say, “Accept your age,” it’s code for, “Go, die, according to my schedule for you. I'm looking at my watch. Chop, chop.” These days, most people have trained themselves to look at bodies that arouse anxiety in them—let’s say the bodies of fat people and trans people—they’ve trained themselves (I hope) not to instruct those people about what to do with their bodies. Those bodies arouse less anxiety than the specter of old age, because not everyone is going to be fat or trans, but everyone is going to get old unless they die young. People who are not old, when they see you, when you show them what will happen to them, the gloves come off and they will tell you to shut up and move on with a vaulting sense of justice on their side. To them I say, “I don’t care what you think, and I don’t need to know.”
The other day, a bobcat walked across the back yard. It didn't see me. I said hello. Its tail was bobbed. It loped along on its tall legs. I think I would look good in antlers.
There are so many things to appreciate here, it hard to know where to begin.
At 45 I left my husband of 27 years. I chose myself. Even those who saw the massive flaws in the marriage did not agree with my departure.
What about your sons? My sons learned that you cannot treat a good woman like shit and keep her in your life. That’s what. I wish I had said “You don’t have to agree with me “ and moved on. Instead, I spent a lot of time worrying that I had effed up my boys. One did not talk to me for a year. We are fine now; he told me a while back that he was upset when I left but now he sees how happy both his parents are in our new lives.
I left an unsatisfactory marriage at 45. At 45.5 I finally lived myself enough to find satisfaction everywhere, including between the sheets. My ex was selfish in every way. I did not switch teams but I met and later married a man younger than me who values himself and me equally.
It took til 45 to love myself well enough to “fuck well”. 😉
Everything about the book you are quoting and your response to it infuses me with power.
We women need to make choices for who we are, not who we are supposed to be. Thank you for the reinforcement of what my heart knows to be true.
Wow. As a 47-year-old woman who quit practicing law to write a memoir about, among other things, shaving my head when I was a teenager in the '90s, clearly I need to read Constance Debre. I'm so interested in this urge that I, and so many other women, have in our 40s to pare down our lives and get back to what mattered to us in adolescence, before we became caretakers for other lives. Thank you for writing about this, Laurie!