During that time I decided someday I wanted to write the Infinite Jest for fellow fucked-up girls, for the slit-your-wrist girls like me. I hadn’t even finished Infinite Jest, but I knew it didn’t speak to me, just like I knew Kerouac’s On the Road didn’t speak to me, because he kept on writing about jumping into girls, and I knew I was one of the girls who were fucked and forgotten.
Yet no one had actually told me you could write about being a fucked-up girl. No one had given me permission, or told me that the young female experience was valid to write about in literature. This was not experience we are told we can use — our breakdowns, our love affairs. Too personal. Too emotional. Too “feminine tosh.”
My only antecedents I knew about were the radical New York downtown writings of the 70s and 80s, the exploits of Kathy Acker’s “lousy mindless salesgirl” Janey Smith in Blood and Guts in High School and the George Miles cycles of Dennis Cooper or the memoir of the John Waters actress Cookie Mueller that I read while bored behind the desk in my brief stint at Powell’s bookstore in Chicago after the Hollywood, while also waiting tables at an Italian café. A job I quit because one day I decided I’d rather drink bloody Marys and fuck my bass-playing boyfriend at the time in the bathroom of some bar in Lincoln Park rather than go into work.
It wouldn’t be until years later that I would discover more writers in that era and then go back and reread Acker and Cooper more seriously and began to cohere it together in my mind as a tradition I could maybe be a part of, the ones that for me broke all the rules of what a novel should be, what writing should be, kind of my excessive-emotional connection to the outsider girl modernists, the High Risk anthology, the stories of Mary Gaitskill, David Wojnarowicz’s ecstatic essay-rant Close to the Knives, the nonfiction novels of Chris Kraus or Eileen Myles, Laurie Weeks’ Zipper Mouth, my publisher Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water. Some of these writers classified themselves as New Narrative writers, they bathed their works in theory like a mud bath, getting off on Bataille and Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, they were jacking off and defecating on the page/on their ancestors/on the establishment, the equivalent of what performance artists were doing on stage with bodily fluids like Finley with the chocolate smeared all over her mimicking shit, or Ron Athey piercing himself like some HIV-postive St. Sebastian on stage. They were writing with their bodies, writing that dealt with the disordered body. And their works were not only about fucking and not only about ideas but also about emotion, emotion for and through and transcending all of these things, pages and pages of goopy intense twisted emotion. When I finally discovered some of these writers, it wasn’t really until my late twenties, almost 30, and it began to click for me — yes, I could write about being excessive and toxic, my whole life that came before could be drawn from, to write against the culture.
Why was my training as a toxic girl not considered the life experience with which to write my own coming-of-age story? There’s this idea in our culture and in our literature that it’s bad to write our excessive selves. To be excessive. The objective correlative.
The roaring twenties were actually literally Zelda’s roaring twenties — she was born in 1900. Who doesn’t fuck up and fuck around in their twenties?
We live in a culture that punishes and tries to discipline the messy woman and her body and a literary culture that punishes and disciplines the overtly autobiographical (for being too feminine, too girly, too emotional).
We question our desires to write, wonder whether this is a self-destructive impulse, like that girl-student in my classroom. This was used against Zelda, against Mary McCarthy, a narrative corroborated by psychiatrists, critics, husbands — that it was anti-therapeutic to write of others, hence alienating them. The act of writing her life seen as a psychiatric transgression. How women have been pathologized or continue to be for taking back their own narratives. Even now the emotionally excessive text punished, criminalized. When she writes of an affair or fantasizing about an affair, when she critiques the domestic role.
Even in a class on creative nonfiction, still my student felt a prohibition against memoir, that it was BAD somehow. Perhaps counter to how girls are trained — to be nice, liked, no, loved. To not show the ugliness. Also this desire not to be disowned (yet we are already disowned by the culture, pushed back in the minor supporting role).
It’s one thing to feel a sense of ethics when drawing from one’s life. But the sense of guilt or shame or badness when writing the story that is our own seems to me a form of discipline and punishment. HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES. I wonder if Lowell or Fitzgerald felt the same internal pressure when they wrote their narratives, their break-downs?
The shame and guilt for writing her life, for living her life, the self-censoring violence. A silencing campaign.
Why is the girl so fearfully depressed? She feels she cannot write of her breakdown, of her interior state. She is fearful of being psychologized, pathologized, placed somewhere on the DSM. Like Woolf distancing her Rhoda, her Septimus Smith. She worries over being disowned, of being named, of being outed, ostracized. Yet all the more we need to fight against this ideology — to write these breakdown narratives, however naked.
My former partner-in-crime Molly is dead now — she killed herself right around the time John and I moved back to Chicago from London. At that point we had been estranged for many years. I had just started writing, seriously. My mother’s death a couple years earlier was a catalyst, a further coming to consciousness, but I think for me Molly’s death was truly what made me begin writing — when my other self died. (We were one, at one time, we were one and the same, my double, just like Esther and Joan in The Bell Jar.)
The girls I have known whose narratives have never been told — I feel such a responsibility towards them. Towards my former self as well.
Thinking about the scarring done when that psychiatrist had the audacity to name me (if erroneously, therapists since then have discounted the idea that I experience the manic, or even hypomanic episodes to be considered bipolar). It was a trauma to my nascent writer-girl self. More than anything, he made me lose my nerve.
You will always be spinning your wheels. He said. Diagnosing me with an “obsessional illness” just like Zelda. “You were going crazy and calling it genius.”
It cemented something in me, that maybe I wasn’t a writer, that maybe I was just fucked-up, still these voices come at me in the dark, when I’m blocked, sometimes even when I’m too productive — what if this is all just word salad? What if I’m just crazy? The diagnosis works as a form of gaslighting. The neat disciplining frame. And then these narratives, we are told about women like Zelda or Vivien(ne), or even Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf, the myth-making, the demonology, that is gaslighting too. We don’t want to be classified as the crazy chick.