memoir

Guest blogger Rebecca Hoffman asks: Is Lena Dunham’s new memoir feminism for a new generation? Or something else?

It has been said by women’s historian Laurel Thatcher that “well-behaved women seldom make history”.  Lena Dunham’s new book, Not That Kind of Girl, depicts early womanhood as a time fraught with adventures that dance with danger, emotional upheavals that rival any that a woman could imagine and an overwhelming immaturity that is perplexing to the central character of the book – Lena Dunham herself.

As I wrote this review, Dunham was ensnared in a media frenzy regarding the question of whether she had engaged in sexual misconduct with her younger sister.  The public and media were reacting to passages from this book in which Dunham describes interactions with her sister that struck the public as being unusual or inappropriate.

In case you may have missed it, a few links to current coverage to help give a context to the brouhaha here, here, and here.

It would be easy to say Dunham is badly behaved but it is more like she is filled with a self-loathing that allows her to get plunged into various circumstances which imperil and injure her emotionally and sometimes physically.  It’s almost as if she finds herself so unattractive and unimportant that the world just acts upon her and her role as a writer and thinker is to process these experiences without ever demanding something better for herself.

Dunham may or may not be making history but she is creating a highly readable, relatable story of her life that is often hard to read – especially the passages where she is interacting with her sister in ways that are generally deemed socially inappropriate. She’s like a tall glass of water spilling over its edges and puddling on the fine wood table below it.   The same cringe we have for the water on wood we have for Dunham as she recounts her various misadventures to the reader.

If this is feminism of the 2014 era, then I am scared for young women everywhere.  How will they survive their younger years, gain insight and correct their life courses to make a strong mark without destroying everything around them?  How does a strong woman emerge from such a variety of traumas?  Or are we confusing strong women from damaged, hurt women who have a capacity to endure any unpleasant circumstance that life throws her way. I’m not sure which way the text is pointing.

Had I merely picked up this book without knowing about Dunham’s successful show, “Girls”, I might have stopped reading partway through as her narrative, while very easy to read and very well written, traces the path of a person who simply does not seem to ever gain insight from her actions nor of their repercussions.  What’s particularly fascinating to me is how the show so closely mirrors the passages in the book and I wonder how much is truth and how much is fiction both on television and in the book.  Perhaps it does not matter but it is hard to separate an artist from her art and not wonder at least a little about truth versus creative license.

Curiously, this volume is a good read.  I found myself reading it with a hopefulness that Dunham would finally turn an emotional corner, find true love, contentment and settle enough to enjoy a life she deserves and gain all the power, credit and fame she is so hungry for.  Yet the narrative bumps along from one uneasy story to another tracing her emergent sexuality, her confusion about the world of work and how to build herself a good career and her “art” which could roughly be defined as her dogged determination to remain her “authentic self” while presenting her life without any filter to the audience.  What lays exposed are her tales of family, her relationship with her parents, her sister, her friends and with men who often treat her so badly one wonders how she manages to remain upbeat about each subsequent relationship.

Dunham is a good writer.  She writes in a beautiful, plain language that completely brings a reader close.  But would she lose more audience than other authors would were she to write about other topics besides sex, family dysfunction and her inner psyche?  I bet not.

What she is providing, I fear, is a perspective on early womanhood today and the true confusion many young women feel when they are trying to define themselves, make it in the big city, hone their skills, present themselves in the workforce and more.  What appears is a person who seems sort of half-baked, she seems like a terrific person who would benefit from a trusted mentor who could guide her to make choices that will not injure her and help her find the types of success and adoration she so deeply craves.

What insights did I gain from this book?  More than anything I am reminded that early womanhood is filled with conflicting societal expectations:  that women can be highly educated but a biological clock ticks louder and louder as years go on for many, that women and men are equal yet men often get the better of women when emotional or physical abuse enter the equation, that family often does not protect and boost a young woman into a position of power for her life to come, and that friends often will encourage each other to do outrageously stupid things.  Dunham shares so much with the reader, without filter, and I’m grateful to her for her viewpoints. However I am not certain her intimates will be equally delighted with her book.

Reading this book galvanized my thinking about girlhood to womanhood.  As a working mom with a daughter and a son, I see a real need to imbue each of them with a sense of personal self-respect and respect for others so that when they start to head toward adulthood they do it with heads up and awareness of the troubles they could encounter along the way.

I give Dunham credit for taking big chances by writing this book. Yet I do wonder by writing this what she has gained.  Perhaps it is relief from unbearable memories—memories that may resonate with more women than we can even imagine.

Rebecca Hoffman is Principal at Good Egg Concepts. She’s passionate about fostering creativity wherever in every aspect of life.  In her spare time Rebecca loves fine art and low culture, sketch comedy and travel to anyplace with better weather than Chicago. Follow her on Facebook.

What Would Simone de Beauvoir Say? Bringing Up Bébé by former Wall Street Journal reporter Pamela Druckerman is the latest addition to books that highlight our cultural obsession with motherhood, or the failings of American mothers.  Even if you haven’t read the memoir you probably know the gist of the story given the raft of media coverage: after some time spent living in France where she gave birth to two children, Druckerman concludes that French women are superior mothers because they have time for themselves and their children are better behaved compared with her American counterparts.

Plenty of critics have taken aim at Druckerman’s argument but few have spent much time discussing the differences between French (read “extensive and nationalized”) and and American (read “few and individualized”) social supports for mothers and families aside from a quick mention before they move on to tackle other aspects of her narrative.

Surely it’s not so easy to dismiss these massive differences and the social conditions they create for mothers in their respective countries.  As a feminist, I want to focus on these structural problems and solutions, not toss them into a “by the way” paragraph.  I agree with my fellow GWPenner, Deborah Siegel, who argues here that we still need to demand some form of national childcare and better work-life options.

Work v. Motherhood Again New research in Gender and Society finds that most moms would work even if they didn’t have to.  According to Karen Christopher’s findings, mothers said they found more fulfillment in paid work than in parenting, and most women (regardless of class, race/ethnicity, or marital status), said they would work even if they didn’t have to.

Mother-readers, does this ring true to you?  Don’t get me wrong: I love my work at the National Women’s Studies Association.  At the same time, I don’t want to have to rank-order work over my role as a mother.  To me this sounds like an either/or choice that we should refuse.

Feminist Ryan Gosling Okay, this isn’t about motherhood, but Feminist Ryan Gosling falls squarely into the “and Feminism” portion of my roundup.  I love Danielle Henderson’s take on “feminist flash cards.”  I also love that Danielle is a graduate student in Gender and Women’s Studies.  I think you’ll love her work and her sense of humor, too!  Check it out and then post a comment here.

My daughter Maya turns 10 today.  You may not remember what it feels like to hit double digits, but take it from me: this is a big deal.  Maya might say that hitting 10 means that she is definitely ready for a cell phone (not that she has one, however).

Now that I can talk about motherhood in terms of decades (well, at least a decade) instead of just years, it feels like a big deal for me, too.

In fact, motherhood has been getting a lot of media play these days.  If recent coverage is any indication, we’re either too harsh or too self-involved.  Consider the controversy surrounding Amy Chua’s Why Chinese Mother’s are Superior excerpt in The Wall Street Journal and Judith Warner’s roundup of recent memoirs in The New York Times. Warner claims that in contrast with their own feminist moms, today’s mothers are turning inward and embracing home and family with a “deep desire for rules and regularity”

Neither the overbearing mother nor the self-involved ones hunkering down at home sound especially new to me (Freud, anyone, or Cinderella?).  But I am wondering where I fit into these public accounts of motherhood and how to define my own mothering.

For example, learning to ski would certainly have been low on my list of life pursuits before parenting despite growing up in the Northeast Ohio snowbelt.  Now as a steward of my kids’ (I have a 7-year-old son as well) health, I try to cultivate an active lifestyle and exercise habits that can serve them throughout their lives.  Thus the skiing lessons, which I have found that I love, and which allow me and my kids to learn something together.

And while I have given a lot of thought to teaching students about social constraints and feminist responses to them, I have also discovered that it’s altogether different teaching my children how to be change agents.  For one thing, I have my children for more than a semester, so if I get things wrong we can always try again!

Last year Maya ran for class representative and found herself in a runoff, which she lost, much to her disappointment.  Talking at home later she explained that she voted for a classmate in the first round because she “wanted to give someone else a chance.”

Although her generosity of spirit is one of her admirable qualities, I explained that it is sometimes fine and even important to pursue what you want.  That is, if you want to be class representative, vote for yourself.

This year, I’m happy to report that Maya was elected class representative.  But before you congratulate me for offering a successful lesson on assertiveness, I should add that Maya explained that she did not vote for herself in the first round of balloting: she voted for a friend, and the friend voted for her.

That same friend and Maya spent their Martin Luther King Day “on” by selling “Cocoa for a Cause” at our local sledding hill and donating the proceeds to an area soup kitchen.  They raised $47.

Sometimes working together is the best way to make a difference.  That’s not a bad vision for either of us to have as we enter double digits as mother and daughter.

And GWP readers, what’s your take on the latest mommy wars? Do you have favorite accounts of motherhood to share, and what does feminist mothering look like?

This phrase, coined by Sharon Cameron for the title of her book about Emily Dickinson’s fascicles (the sewn bundles of folded poems found after her death) references Dickinson’s refusal to abide by the conventional poetic prosody of her time, and through her creation of the fascicles, her rejection of set sequencing of her work.

A little over a century later, New Yorker Rachel Lehmann-Haupt chronicles how contemporary women are eschewing linear expectations for family-building and creating innovative combinations of choice. The stakes couldn’t be more different, but this phrase (choosing not choosing) — about Dickinson’s deliberate resistance to restriction into categories — strangely fits as Lehmann-Haupt navigates the channels, islands, and walking-off-the-edge-of-known-territory-into-new-frontiers changes with reproductive options.

In Her Own Sweet Time: Unexpected Adventures in Finding Love, Commitment, and Motherhood recounts Lehmann-Haupt’s reach toward motherhood.  She details her relationships, some pulsing with hope they will lead to a walk down the aisle, some clearly just had for fun, but all viewed through the lens of wanting a child and cognizant of her likely decline in ability and aching increase in awareness of these limits.  She interweaves personal narrative with factual research and first-hand interviews as she educates herself about freezing her eggs, freezing embryos, single motherhood, donor eggs, donor sperm, and the attendant issues each topic brings – ethical, scientific, financial – and how this clashes with the still-longed-for- “dream.” She explores the consequences of creating an “insta-family” as women (and some men interviewed) grapple with dating and mating under the pressures of time.

Her voice is engaging, although some of the boyfriends grow tiresome. Lehmann-Haupt thinks so too, hence the succession as she also winnows down to what she most wants.  I found the book most rewarding when she’s not recounting the quirks of her dates or her busy, jetsetting life, but rather working hard to compress the vagaries of all the reproductive options now available.  I wished she would linger longer on the knottier topics that these choices generate.

There is “Luc” who thoughtfully donates sperm and is thrilled to meet the woman who will receive it, yet who becomes far less enchanted when he learns she plans to offer up extra frozen embryos for “adoption” to other families he won’t have the chance to know.  Or the doctor who suggests that while reproductive technology can extend the fertility shelf life for many women (at great price), why not work to undermine the system that tells women they should focus on their careers and delay childbearing in sync with their male counterparts?  Or the 46-year-old woman who has twins through donor sperm and donor egg but admits she could have been just as happy never having kids.  I hoped Lehmann-Haupt would dig deeper into these contradictions, but the book skates back to her dating life and internal wrestling with risk, reality, and wistfulness.  When the scientific facts square off with ethics and are then pressed through the powerful feelings her interviewees express, Lehmann-Haupt’s acuity is at its best.

“I don’t like not getting what I want,” says one woman interviewed by Lehmann-Haupt about her decision to become a single mother by choice.  And she realizes she feels the same way too.  While “choice” has become a highly charged word for women, “options” and wanting to keep them open, seems far less loaded.  Lehmann-Haupt ultimately decides to freeze her eggs to keep her reproductive potential likely available for longer into the future, despite knowing the success rates with pregnancy from frozen eggs are still quite variable.  In this thoughtful book, Lehmann-Haupt grapples with what “having it all”– or at least trying to – means when modern technology can make the path to motherhood wider or longer, and realizes glad as she is for this, she also really wants a partner to travel beside her. “But nature, in the end, will decide whether I have children or not; science can go only so far,” she writes towards the book’s end.   Her story starts when Lehmann-Haupt is in her early 30s; she finishes it on the cusp of 40, older, wiser, and leavened with the sobering sagacity more knowledge often brings.

Impossible Motherhood is a new memoir by Irene Vilar, editor of The Americas series at Texas Tech University Press and a writer who uses the history of her life and the lives of her mother and maternal grandmother to highlight critical relationships between colonialism, sexism, reproductive rights, and motherhood. But this will not be the headline that captures the interest of the public. Vilar’s fifteen abortions in fifteen years, on the other hand, seems to be causing quite a stir of attention.

In many ways, this is a memoir about misery. Throughout the book, Vilar critiques the idea that her success on paper — early graduation from high school and a move from Puerto Rico to the U.S. at the age of fifteen, marriage to a Syracuse University professor, book publishing – has not kept her from suffering with severe issues of depression, abuse, self-mutilation, and addiction. Her marriage to a highly regarded, intellectual writer several decades her senior, who defines “independence” by keeping her forever at an emotional distance from him and insisting that the couple cannot have children together, triggers a downward spiral which culminated in twelve abortions in an eleven year relationship, followed by three others with another partner after the dissolution of her marriage. However, with intense therapy and a happy second marriage, Vilar overcomes her painful ambivalence toward biological motherhood and gives birth to two daughters.

The seemingly happy ending of Vilar’s tale of thwarted motherhood will still raise ethical and moral red flags in readers, causing us to squirm uncomfortably as we embark on the author’s lifelong journey of recovery.  Vilar does not go for pat answers or self-satisfied conclusions about her decision to repeatedly abort unwanted pregnancies rather than utilize birth control (which was available during her time in the U.S.).  Instead, this a complex, emotional account of one woman’s emergence from cycles of oppression into an acceptance of her unique identity and experiences.

Vilar’s unhappy childhood – a distant philandering father and a mother who committed suicide when Vilar was only eight years old – contributes to her feelings of abandonment and a need to please authority figures, if only to ensure her survival. Vilar is not claiming to be a representative for pro-choice or pro-life arguments, though she does offer this disclaimer in the prologue:

“This testimony… does not grapple with the political issues revolving around abortion, nor does it have anything to do with illegal, unsafe abortion, a historical and important concern for generations of women.  Instead, my story is an exploration of family trauma, self-inflicted wounds, compulsive patterns, and the moral clarity and moral confusion guiding my choice.  This story won’t fit neatly into the bumper sticker slogan ‘my body, my choice.’  In order to protect reproductive freedom, many of us pro-choice women usually choose to not talk publicly about experiences such as mine because we might compromise our right to choose.  In opening up the conversation on abortion to the existential experience that it can represent to many, for the sake of greater honesty and a richer language of choice, we run risks.”

Reproductive justice movements, particularly in the U.S. and its territories, often have a tumultuous history with communities of color.  But many readers will likely approach the book with little, if any, background knowledge of reproductive justice movements in Puerto Rico. So how did colonialist policies and a U.S.-driven abortion counseling, abortion services, and abortion outreach contribute to these decisions?  In an interview with The L.A. Times, Robin Abcarian observes that:

“Puerto Rico, at the time, was a living laboratory for American-sponsored birth control research. In 1956, the first birth control pills — 20 times stronger than they are today — were tested on mostly poor Puerto Rican women, who suffered dramatic side effects. Starting in the 1930s, the American government’s fear of overpopulation and poverty on the island led to a program of coerced sterilization. After Vilar’s mother gave birth to one of her brothers, she writes, doctors threatened to withhold care unless she consented to a tubal ligation.  These feelings of powerlessness — born of a colonial past, acted out on a grand scale or an intimate one — are the ties that bind the women of Vilar’s family.“

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How did the pro-choice movement fail to help a survivor of abuse like Vilar?  Is there a theoretical and activist disconnect between three major intersections — martial strife/violence, psychological trauma, and reproductive justice?  Pro-choice communities would do well to examine books like these and form outreach for women who have experienced multiple abortions.  Vilar understands the stigma which confronts women who have had multiple abortions and does not shame these women, but tries to provide a lens of her own experiences with repeat abortions as a way to personalize this sensitive issue.  In a 2006 Salon.com Broadsheet post, Page Rockwell notes that:

Liberal message-makers would probably have an easier time if repeat abortions were rare, but the truth is, they’re not: According to a report (PDF) released last week by the Guttmacher Institute, which we found thanks to a flare from the Kaiser Foundation, about half of the women who terminated pregnancies in 2002 had previously had at least one abortion. (The report notes that because many women do not accurately report their abortion experiences, these findings are “exploratory.”) Rates of repeat abortion have been on the rise since Roe v. Wade, and ignoring that fact isn’t doing women who need multiple procedures any favors.

In the anthology Making Face, Making Soul, Gloria Anzaldúa wrote that, “[W]omen of color strip off the mascaras [masks] others have imposed on us, see through the disguises we hide behind and drop our personas so that we may become subjects in our own discourses.  We rip out the stitches, expose the multi-layered ‘inner faces,’ attempting to confront and oust the internalized oppression embedded in them, and remake anew both inner and outer faces…. We begin to acquire the agency of making our own caras [faces].”  This is one of those books that rips out the metaphoric stitches and exposes Vilar’s process of multilation and healing, addiction and recovery, for readers to examine.  This is not an easy or light book; it will trigger and it will probe and it will leave readers feeling as if they’ve been punched in the stomach, repeatedly.  But it also has the power to transform and expose previously hidden oppressions.

The outer face of Vilar is a brave one and so is the inner face.  Impossible Motherhood is a book for any pro-choice believer who wants a deeper understanding of the complex issues surrounding reproductive rights in the U.S. and its territories in the twentieth century.  This is also a book for people who believe in the power of personal redemption.  It will leave readers aching, hopeful, and perhaps a little more empathetic to Vilar’s life.

I’ve been so busy during this pregnancy either a) puking or b) helping start a social networking site and company that I haven’t found time to write much–or even journal about–the bizarro incredible experience that is pregnancy itself.

Part of me has feared that “pregnant women are smug”, and pregnant women writing about pregnancy are the smuggest of them all.  In other words, to say anything in public is to risk falling in with the sanctimonious mommy crowd. Perhaps this fear has something to do with the fact that one of the only times I pregnancy blogged these past few months, over at Recessionwire, I got flamed. (Thin skin anyone?  I blame the hormones. Thankfully, the editors took the really nasty ones down.)  Of course, it probably didn’t help that I gave that post a sanctimonious title, “The Fortune Within”, though in my defense, I used that title because I had wanted to contrast the way I felt about this much-tried-for pregnancy with the major theme I’d been writing about over there–love in the time of layoff, my lack of fortune without.  But apparently some commentors felt that any woman who writes about pregnancy is, well, smug.

So here I am trying again, after recent promptings from friends, therapists, and even my business partner.  Why not write about pregnancy, these people ask me, when it’s so foremost on your mind?

Whenever I try to kick myself into writing gear, I start reading again.  I realized the only two pregnancy/motherhood-related books I’d read during this pregnancy so far had clinical titles like The Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy, and Twins!: Pregnancy, Birth, and the First Year of Life.  The first had been given to me by my husband, the second by my husband’s mother.  When I gave myself permission to go one step deeper, I had reached for Amy Tiemann’s Mojo Mom: Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family and Amy Richards’ Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself. These books helped me feel it was possible to have a kid (two, in my case) and still have a professional life.  (THANK YOU, brilliant Amys!)  But they didn’t inspire me to write about what I was going through myself.

So the other week, I turned to memoir.  Thanks to the “Motherhood Books” group that Jennifer Niesslein formed over at SHE WRITES, I remembered I’d always wanted to read Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, when the time came.  That time, apparently, is now.  Anne Lamott is so quirky, so brutally and painfully honest about the horrible things as well as the beauty, that I got inspired.  She’s the opposite of smug.  And she makes it seem ok to want to tell the truth–which for me, has not been all shiny and baby blue and powder pink.  For me, the truth of twin pregnancy at age 40 has so far been about trying to balance physical ailments of striking (yet normal, apparently) proportions with an intense struggle to slow my life down enough to make room for an impending reality for which I feel massively ill-prepared.

And so here I sit, at 5:00am with pregnancy insomnia, tiny miracles kicking around inside me, writing about writing about pregnancy.  I don’t think I’m quite writing about it yet, but hey, it’s a start.

(Does this picture make me look smug?!)

If you’re a New Yorker reading Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, you can’t help but relive those first few days. So my question while reading it so far is this: Where do we draw the line between private expression and public expectation, between personal, psychological response and national script?

I was among that “mob of idle Good Samaritans,” as Faludi calls it, who was turned away for blood donation. The profound sense of impotence after the towers fell — it wasn’t just a narrative script, it was a deeply felt emotion. (And the firefighters, as I don’t think Faludi would negate, were heroes. I was living below 14th Street at the time, and I’d burst into tears on my morning runs through the frozen zone when I’d see their white-dust-covered engines drive by. For weeks, you couldn’t walk past a fire station, invariably flanked by a make-shift memorial of candles and wreaths, without weeping. It’s just how it was.)

I was also one of those women who got engaged soon after 9/11 in part out of the carpe diem spirit that overcame both my partner and me. Did we take refuge in the domestic, or did we follow our hearts?

Six years later (and one husband down), I’m still not sure that I could write neutrally about 9/11. Faludi is one of my favorite cultural critics, and, as to be expected, she does it well. So I’m not sure if my lingering question comes as the question of someone who still feels too close, or if it’s a larger critique. I’ll let you know when I finish the book! For now, I’m feeling a little un-ironic. Then again, perhaps that’s exactly her point.

Kimmi Auerbach’s reading at Border’s in Columbus Circle last night was packed–I’ve never been to a reading quite like it. Kimmi, author of The Devil, the Lovers, and Me: My Life in Tarot, picked three tarot cards from the deck and read the correlating chapters (each chapter’s title is the title of a card). Her performance was stellar; her writing hilarious, poignant, alive.

During the Q&A, someone asked how her parents (who were sitting in the front row) felt about turning up as characters in her memoir, and I had flashbacks to all the times I got that question while on the road with Only Child earlier this year. Among other bits of wisdom the 30-something wise-beyond-her-years writer dispensed was this, a line adapted (I think) from Kimmi’s friend and fellow funny girl Wendy Shanker, who was also in the house:

“The children who are loved the most are boldest on the page.” Meaning, children who are well loved don’t fear losing the love of their parents when they grow up and become writers who write about their past. I thought this was an interesting counter-sentiment to the words of the writers who told Daphne and me that they couldn’t safely write about their parents until they were 6 feet under. Interesting litmus test, I say.

Just back from a reading of Only Child upstate. Daph and I spoke to a group of 40 women in Chester, New York – the sisterhood of a synagogue out there on Sunday (thank you, Paula!). They were an incredibly warm and responsive audience. I kept looking out and seeing my mother, who, actually, was thousands of miles away in Istanbul that day. After reading out loud the part from my essay that paints her in a, well, somewhat critical light, I felt this overwhelming need to tell the sisters “I love my mother! I love my mother!”

Talk about Jewish guilt.

The enterprising, fearless ladies over at MotherTalk have invited me, along with hundreds of other women, to blog today about a fearless moment in my life, or a moment when I started becoming fearless. So here we go.

My father taught me if not to be fearless, then to die trying. He taught our golden retriever how to swim by throwing her off the pier, and he taught me how not to fear sailing by taking me out in a storm. I learned to love rain after my father dragged me outside to watch the lightning roll in over Lake Michigan and straight into our backyard. Together, we learned not to fear skiing by staying out during a mountain blizzard in Wyoming, yodeling fearlessly at the top of our lungs all the way down.

But none of this prepared me for the courage it took to leave a marriage at age thirty-five. I wanted kids of my own, and I knew that leaving the marriage — corrupted as it was — would postpone that dream, if not vanquish it. Up to that point, I had led a comfortable life. Leaving would leave me financially insecure. But I did it. I left. And I didn’t die.

With that leave-taking began a new life — one more thrilling than a sail in a storm, more charged than lightning, more exhilarating than a Wyoming blizzard. Leaving put me in touch with my truest instinct for self-preservation. And life will never be the same again.