letter writing

In the summer of 2020, I took a writing workshop with Legacy Russell at Wendy’s Subway. It was about letter writing and we read a lot of love poems, some anti-love poems, Etheridge Knight and Richard Siken and Nikki Giovanni (who is one of my favorite living poets). It was all about addressing writing to someone even if wasn’t really intended to be shared, which is much more complicated than it might seem. So much writing is ultimately really about you. In the final exercise, I think I wrote a letter to a friend of mine who I felt deeply hurt by, and although I don’t really remember what I wrote, I do remember feeling a profound sense that I had failed at the whole point of the workshop.

Letter writing isn’t not about you. But it is a way of trying to relate, to span the gulf between extreme interiority and the assumed objectivity of traditional critical writing. On the internet, where everything mirrors the hectic speed of the breaking news cycle, a lot of writing feels a bit like a selfie camera. You’re looking down at your image instead of up at the camera while you’re talking. I don’t know how you escape that exactly. It’s very hard to be vulnerable with strangers. Instead, a lot of us default to therapy language. One of my new year’s aspirations (I can’t make resolutions) was to use less of that.

But a lot of my anxiety about letter writing isn’t just about sounding like an internet person. It’s also about the way that reflexivity breeds a kind of attentiveness to desirability. There’s so much slippage, particularly for women, between being found intellectually sufficient and being found desirable. It’s that cliche people say, you don’t know if you want to be with them or to be them. Particularly when I was younger, I really wanted intellectual validation from men and I also wanted them to want me and the two things were all muddied up. It never worked out because ultimately they’re two different impulses. Even if you fall in love with someone for their mind and personality, in the moment you don’t want to fuck their mind. No one’s really sapiosexual (god forbid).

Literature is full of female protagonists who aren’t like other girls. This is likely because of who writes books. Writers all have internal monologues, main character syndrome, god complexes, none of them are NPCs. In many books, the protagonist experiences the world more deeply than anyone else. But in women’s writing, you kind of have to transcend something to do that. Call it transcending an experience of being looked at (the male gaze) or reduced to embodiment. Something tends to happen in that process sometimes where women writing almost escape embodiment. What does this mean for other women? The carnal, fleshy ones, the objectified ones, the literary hotties, the women who just want to be happy and aren’t interested in intellectual competition?

My point is I think there’s still a certain kind of snobbery about who gets to have an inner life for all that literature has diversified. This is part of the point of the Neapolitan Novels: everyone’s a Lenú because she’s the one telling the story. (Someone told me I was a Lila once and I had to try and explain this theory).  A lot of this is about class in Ferrante’s books. Lila has no higher education and doesn’t use the standard written Italian that is the default literary language. But a lot of her life has also been shaped by being very desirable and controlled by men who want her, a condition Lenú partly manages to evade. Lenú gets to tell the story because she achieves class mobility but also because she devotes her life to being bookish, to studying and thinking and writing. Early on, the two girls are inseparable, almost equals. Then they go through puberty, start having sex, and start to radically diverge from each other. Lenú emerges as controlling the narrative and, in revenge, Lila evades representation.

In a recent essay in Frieze, Mackenzie Wark flips the idea of gender transition as a second puberty on its head, writing: “Actually, I think of it the other way around: there’s puberty, which is first transition; then, for trans people who come out after that, there’s second transition.” This shock of received identity isn’t exactly specific to gender or womanhood as a construct obviously. It’s a basic Lacanian issue of self-identification. Frantz Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks that many of his Black Caribbean patients viewed themselves as having no skin color at all in what he terms a “mirror hallucination” or disassociation to reconcile their self-image. Othering fractures the basic identification between self and other, which is rigidly constructed around gendered, racialized, and classed binaries in the modern west. Writing that doesn’t resist this is definitely harmful but it’s also just mediocre and uninteresting and simplistic.

I don’t know how you escape these narratives. As Morgan Bassichis says, “the very systems we are working to dismantle live inside of us.” But I do want to read more writing that resists the easy forms of selfhood that tend to populate novels. A very beautiful book I read last year that explored self and other in an incredibly meaningful way is The Furrows by Namwali Serpell. The protagonist, who grows up in the shadow of her brother’s disappearance/death, struggles to differentiate herself (and her lover) from him. Mourning and love and the furrows of the ocean shape the rhythm of the novel in deeply evocative, heartbreaking, and tender ways. Describing the plot makes it sound sad and it is incredibly sad, but it’s also funny and sexy and terrifyingly brilliant. Another favorite of mine with an unusual protagonist is Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados, where two broke young women are exploring New York for all its worth. In one scene, they go to a photography show where everyone they talk to asks what they’re doing there. “When Gala told them we were doing ‘absolutely nothing,’ she was met with raised eyebrows. They would add, ‘Do you have internships at magazines?’ […] I am quickly learning New York’s social currency.” Although the girls are clearly smarter than most of the people they meet, they’re not interested in intellectual competition or proving their achievements, a middle class game of resume sharing. They’re out for a good time.

If any of you have other recommendations, let me know! In the meantime, some other things I’ve been thinking about.

This poem by Legacy Russell (an excerpt below):

This dance improvisation by Tess Voelker which is what my body feels like right now:

This remix of Rosalía’s mournful tango “Catalina”, which is weird and wild and could be played at a club:

The scene from Aftersun where Sophie jumps into a pool with the older teenagers she desperately wants to hang out with and then slowly realizes she’s still just a child. (I can’t find it online).

I’m tired and sick tonight and wish it was summer. Happy weekend to everyone!