What prohibits the young girl from actually being an author? I think this idea of tradition is important. If she only sees herself as a character in the books she is given, these characters that are often pathologized, can she have the audacity to dream of being an author? Perhaps with girls there’s less of a belief in their future genius.
And if their stories are published they are immediately branded as “women’s fiction” or “young adult” or “chick lit.” Hence not LITERARY. This doesn’t happen as often to male coming-of-age narratives. Folded in this is the fucked-up idea that men don’t read women, which is endemic of this disgust and ambivalence towards the Feminine in our culture and in our literature. V.S. Naipaul recently bleating about “feminine tosh” in women writing, decrying the novels of Jane Austen for their sentimentality (but even Fitzgerald wrote romances; it’s who is privileged in our culture, who gets to name, who controls the narrative).
I remember what it was like to have no real sense of self, to be dull with flashes of brilliance, trying on jobs like hats. Bored, restless, wanting. To live life quite foggily. And then to have one’s fabric altered by the experience of suffering — this is when the young girl gains consciousness in the acuteness of her solitude.
Like that girl in my classroom I too wanted to be a writer before I wrote anything. And I too lived my Bell Jar days, I had my glossy magazine internship at Time magazine my senior year of college, where I buried myself in my room at night at the Webster, my all-girls boarding house, to work on an incomprehensible play on madness, going mad in the process. Me maxing out a newly opened credit card to buy clothes that felt Manhattan-appropriate. (Esther Greenwood sickened by being the happy girl in the magazine spread, feeling removed, alienated, from that outside image. Scott bought Zelda the Patou suit because he wanted her to be more stylish in the big city.) Everything was gray and corporate and I was experiencing my solitude for the first time. I sunk into a voluptuous depression — walking around the Village by myself, writing in my journal in diners, tapping away at my play in one of the rooms on the first floor where girls were allowed to receive male visitors, printing it all out illicitly at the Time Warner building after-hours, all while helping write little tourist pieces about literary landmarks in Manhattan where I had to tail it to Edgar Allan Poe’s house in the Bronx or fact check something about the Alice in Wonderland sculptures in Central Park. And then returning back to Northwestern feeling so sure I could not be a journalist, that I needed to be a playwright or a novelist, but I didn’t know how, and I felt intensely the weight of my failure.
This is what catalyzed my fall — the fall and the call and the pills and the alerted parents and the taxicabs to shrinks out of the telephone book and the hallucinations at 4 am from the cocktails of drugs licit and illicit and the waterbed I hacked to pieces with an axe because I didn’t know how to get it out of my subletted apartment — the surreal certainty that I was a character, not a writer. That I would never be a writer. Why did this disturb a girl of 21, who had only written a bad play and a few even more mediocre short stories and boxes of unfinished journals and articles and theater reviews for the school paper? That I would not, could not, be a writer?
I became frightened by my sleepless nights. I was looking for any type of savior. The student health center gave me a photocopied hand-out on panic attacks. I opened the Yellow Pages, and I went that day, to the first psychologist who took me. During the diagnostic interview she asked me whether I drank, whether I took drugs, how many sexual partners I had had. I didn’t realize you were supposed to lie. Within that single session she diagnosed me as bipolar. She slid my credit card through a machine in her office for payment and motioned me next door to her business partner, the psychiatrist, who could see me immediately, and prescribed me a cocktail of Lithium, Depakote (an anti-convulsant), Klonopin, a benzo, and Paxil, an SSRI, which shot me through the roof, which the psychiatrist said made even more appararent my mood disorder, which is called in the DSM-IV bipolar III.
It was, in a way, despite the pharmaceutical intervention, an existential breakdown. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I was supposed to be graduating — and everyone else was lining up in suits for interviews with Anderson Consulting or getting reporter jobs at feeder papers for the Trib or the Times—I was reading Dostoevsky and Artaud, chainsmoking and writing madly in my diary. I didn’t want to be a journalist anymore. Maybe a performance artist like Karen Finley, tits out, on stage, ranting in her huge voice, who I was reading about in C. Carr’s collection of columns she wrote for the Voice in the 80s on the underground New York performance scene. Or a puppeteer. Or a mime. My senior year, I helped produce an experimental theater festival in a dilapidated building on campus called “The Shack.” Wearing crystals from MAC around my eyes and flowing Indian tunics from the import shop.
I was coming into a consciousness then — in that I realized that I had been living my life as a sort of unformed character. As Lispector writes of her girl-character Macabea in The Hour of the Star—“To probe oneself is to realize that one is incomplete.” And yeah, there was something about a boy. God, how I have been decimated by love affairs. Is this what interrupted me? Instead of writing novels I wrote painfilled journal entries and begging letters.
Yet I also knew I was changing. My depression, my broken heart, my solipsism, was at least making me turn inwards, have an inner experience, come into consciousness.
I was supposed to move to New York after graduation, and live in Queens with a girl I had met at the Webster, who had an internship in the costume department at Juilliard. I had an interview for a copy-editing position at the Voice. But instead I cracked. Became a psychiatric patient instead.
You’ll always be spinning your wheels, Katie, the psychiatrist said to me at the time, trying to convince me to stay on the drugs, confident with that sort of armchair assurance that if not, my future was already written. At the time, my biggest desire was to finally really write, to complete things, even a journal. He told me that this was not likely if I lived my life unmedicated.
The girl read as undiscipined, disordered, not just struggling.
Scott to Zelda: “You were going crazy and calling it genius.” SHE is too often read as a psychiatric transgression.
He was so sure that this was my identity, and I believed him. Until the meds stopped working, or were making things worse, and he wanted to admit me into a mental ward and begin a treatment of electroshock. How very Sylvia Plath in the 1950s, I thought at the time. My parents decided instead to take me back to my childhood home in the northwest suburbs, and I went off the pills. My mother also decided while at home I needed to get a job (like Esther’s mother in The Bell Jar pushing her to volunteer at the maternity ward). The Steak ’n Shake nearby was opening — I lasted there in that paper uniform for a week (the busboy grabbed my ass and stole my tips from my tables). Soon I moved to Wicker Park, in the city, where I lived with Molly, my partner-in-crime from university, my fellow toxic girl. I waited tables at a 24-hour greasy spoon, the Hollywood Diner, where I served gangbangers and yuppies and tattoo artists and homeless people and hipsters and cops and pimps.
Even when I didn’t write anything but in my diary, I thought of myself at that time as a writer, in the romanticized mode of a Hemingway, or now perhaps a William Vollman (without the, you know, wars and bullfights and heroin, although there were hookers). Like Jane Bowles’s two serious ladies looking for a different level of experience, in slumming. Everything I did I did for EXPERIENCE, in order to someday write about it. (It was only years later I realized that I was pathologized, in part, for my experiences. I was diagnosed once I told of my past of hooking up and doing drugs.) At the Hollywood everyone thought of me as the well-educated writer-girl, who would someday write a novel about all of them. I always carried around a little notepad in my apron, or took down notes on napkins. I was a waitress waiting around to write something, eventually, once the intensity of life settled down.