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I started reading Lament for Julia by Susan Taubes, which the New York Review of Books is publishing this summer. It’s a terrifying story about consciousness, free will, womanhood, dark and intense and voyeuristic. It’s made me think, as did Divorcing and the selection of short stories included in the book, about the dark wormy undersides of fairy tale narratives and how bound up they are with linear ideas of femininity. There’s a particular scorn for the blithe naïveté of women who believe in happily ever afters, in a karmic universe that will fulfill all of their dreams and then some. But a belief in fate is actually a deeply fearful and chaotic view of the world. It leads you to an airless and hostile existence subjected to the mercy of external forces or the goodwill of other people. If you think there are guardian angels on your shoulders, as I do when I step out blindly into the streets of New York City every day, then you also run the constant risk of those angels abandoning you. In fairy tales, the universe always turns against you eventually.

There’s a famous Ursula Le Guin quote that is often trotted out as a pretext to dismiss femininity, although I read it more as a description of this grafting of predestination onto gender. “But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. […] But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”

Is it too much to hope that we can both think and feel blindly? It is hard to untangle “instinctive” knowledge, irrational elemental feeling, from disrupted self-knowledge. In one of the creepiest and most visceral stories in Lament for Julia — a collection full of women who are committed to insane asylums, groomed by predatory psychoanalysts, rebuffed by their husbands, who murder their children — a young girl falls in love with Death after he comes to her personified in the form of a lover. They have a pact that they will kiss (the kiss of Death) when she’s 14, but when the time comes, she tells him she’s too young. He keeps coming back and she keeps putting him off even though she loves him. Eventually, she calls him, at a low point in her life, but he tells her she’s too heavy now with the weight of her grief, her tears, her memories. He can’t carry her. Instead, he sets fairy tale conditions. She can come to a midsummer ball where everyone will be in disguise. If she is able to correctly identify him in his costume and invites him to dance, he will kiss her. She gets to the ball and finds him based on the wild beating of her heart in his presence. But when they dance, he becomes all teeth and claws. He rips her to shreds, “shakes out her memories.” By the time he kisses her, there’s nothing left of her.

Few feelings ever seem so irrational, so elemental, so tied to some dysfunctional script of predestination as feelings of romantic love. This is also often (derogatorily) chalked up to rom com tropes. You meet, you fall in love instantly, you suffer for a suitable amount of time to create a narrative arc, you reconcile, the cameras cut. This isn’t as rare in real life as you would think. Romance is addictive, it’s high drama, possible if not exactly easy to stage out over and over again. If you’re a romantic in any sense and you believe in this unerring collision of things, it can be profoundly destabilizing when it goes wrong. It’s not just that love is sobering hard work or that people are imperfect and prone to disappointing each other. It’s also that what can feel like the most concrete evidence of magic, a wild lightning current, requires intentional reciprocity. Being wildly in love, willing to surrender some piece of your autonomy to someone else, looks beautiful and fateful and like the stuff of movies. Being wildly in love with someone who is indifferent or playing along or even manipulating you for their own gain, looks more like delusional behavior.

This attachment to romance is basically what Lauren Berlant called cruel optimism. Attachment to things and ways of being that fundamentally debilitate you, keep you from flourishing. In an interview, Berlant called it “a heartbreak that the world isn't worthy of our attachment to it, that it gives us objects or ways of life or forms of life that are constantly betraying us. […] The easiest example of this is a broken heart…when you realize you haven't fundamentally been recognized in a way that you can bear, the fear is that when you lose that relation you would lose your world.”

Everything, once you start really looking at it, is a kind of cruel optimism. Love is a kind of ontological glue that bind our selves to the world. It’s how we come to understand each other. There is some level of fairy tale determinism to this regardless of how you do it. But cruel optimism conceptually isn’t intended to describe a blind commitment to persevering so much as the experience of the things you attach to and try for slowly destroying you.

I’ve been rewatching old seasons of Grey’s Anatomy, probably an indication of my state of mind. Every time someone dies or is miraculously saved or falls in love or falls out of love, which is literally every episode of this show, I start crying. I haven’t been able to bring myself to rewatch my favorite part of the series, the two part sequence in which Meredith nearly drowns, communes with the spirit of her estranged mother to find forgiveness, and then is nursed back to life by the love of Patrick Dempsey and her friends. Meredith, always famously dark and twisty, has almost no life force left. She has hypothermia for an extremely long time (because of the way Grey’s Anatomy is spliced up, I’m not always sure how time works in it, but it feels like forever). Karma always comes for you on Grey’s Anatomy, one of the most humorless and melodramatic TV series ever filmed. On the soaps and in general in fiction, no one wants to see happy people. If you’re thriving one episode, it’s a near certainty that you will live out the worst traumas of your life in the next one.

This is generally the law of narrative and it’s hard to resist extending it to the real world. Sometimes what feels like irrational wisdom, in the way Le Guin means it, is really just narrativization. Loving things that will abandon you or let you down or that are insufficiently good is basically an inevitability and that fact can easily take on grandiose dimensions, the certainty of a universe that seems eerily designed up to trip you up, that is full of symbols intended just for you, a world that bends on its axis to reward and to deprive you by appropriate turns. This is not what is happening, though. The world is big and our societies are systemically unjust and our attachment styles are all fucked up. But the rule by which you must suffer a certain amount in order to experience happiness, by which all good things must be dramatically disrupted by extreme deprivation, by which your own personal timeline is linear and definitive is a form of storytelling. It’s kind of pervasive. It’s leaked into everything we do and say. It’s popular to complain that we can’t escape romance tropes but in reality we can’t escape the scripts of traditional myth making which have their own kind of rigidity, one by which everything happens for a reason on this earth.

Once, I stepped out into the street in Flatbush right before the light changed. A man standing on the curb next to me did the same. A second later, a car sped through the yellow light nearly running us both down. The man turned to me without missing a beat. Hey beautiful, he said, we nearly died together.

It’s like Rihanna says, who cares when it feels like crack? I’d like to think that if my life were a rom com, it would be a fun one like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, where an anti-romantic cool girl magazine writer goes looking for a date to write an article and ends up finding love. But in reality, it would probably You’ve Got Mail, a meandering story centered around the elusive spark forged over dial-up internet, and a mawkish indie bookstore owner who is dating an obnoxious literary guy but is secretly in love with her rival, a corporate bookstore chain executive. In the end she gets bought out but gets romance as a consolation prize. In other words, she gets doubly fucked. It’s a story that gestures vaguely at an ideological point about capitalism and heterosexuality and how the two are inevitably intertwined and then falls back instead, comfortingly, on tropes.

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