Picture Her - Where is She?

[[picture her writing it->Jo]] lick your lips until they crack, and look closer still you say my bed is my confession you see an artist who desperately seeks a reaction and now you will not look away [[I write how I speak, and I like how I sound->Georgia]] I reach for them on the book shelf and find the underlined parts when I most need it, her music keeps me warm unfazed by my affinity towards her writing the cloaked, shameful delivery of life conceived elsewhere slinking into nothingness like the tide pulling back where is it, where is she? my grandmothers, your mother and one day maybe me I agree, I sink into many patterns with my body [[unable to peel myself, away from myself->Indah]] undermine the space she has carved out for herself [[their sardine tin shaped sleeping bag->Rohana]] a collage of the sordid and the unforgivable I think of this as recentering; an adjustment that corrects [[can you see my shape start to form?->Emma]] thanks, no one asked.

Public favor of Taylor Swift tends to seesaw throughout the years, but for some, she remains the enemy. Kanye West fans, for example, will simply not let go of the grudge that started in 2009 when a then 20-year-old Taylor so rudely interrupted Kanye’s acceptance speech for the VMA’s ‘Best Female Video’ Award. Oh wait – other way round. I was advised that I needed to provide more evidence because the hate towards Taylor Swift is not common knowledge. I disagree. Pop culture – popular culture – means exactly that. What knowledge is more common than pop culture knowledge? And whilst it’s true, not everyone across the globe will be well-versed in the history of shifting cultural perceptions of Taylor Swift, all this means is that this article is not for everyone. Instead of providing a platform for more hate to flow through, I’d rather skip the part where I give it a voice and instead share mine. Do we need to provide evidence for our views on music? Despite my muddled writing, my ordinary phrasing, I write how I speak, and I like how I sound. The common singular perception of Swift, as Wikipedia demonstrates, is that she is “often inspired by her personal experiences.” Whilst this isn’t an inherently damaging statement, it is a loaded one. This narrative, [[that female creatives publish their own diaries->Rohana]], dismisses the possibility of female creativity and imagination. It devalues Swift’s mind, and her writing. Writing from personal experience is not a bad thing, and it is strange how much of Swift’s public persona is centred around such a standard writing practice. Swift’s surprising choice of words, [[her poetic cadence->Jo]], or even her storytelling, are much more interesting to focus on. I had a (very short) conversation with a co-worker about Swift. I mentioned that I loved her music, and then he started talking about Lorde. That instinct: when discussing one woman, to bring up another, usually in competition. I said, “Taylor’s a poet” and he said, “Lorde’s cool.” Thanks, no one asked. The only connection I can see is that they’re both female singer-songwriters. Either way, bit of a stretch. I do wonder what it is about Swift that makes her so [[radioactive->Emma]]. I don’t know why so many are afraid to admit they like or even //know// her music. Is it the blonde hair and blue eyes? If she were a brunette, would she be cool and clever like Lorde or Adele or Kacey Musgraves? Did we learn nothing from //Legally Blonde//? If it’s not already clear, I am a Swiftie. Hers is the soundtrack to my growing up. [[I never thanked her for that->Indah]]. And now, when I most need it, which is most days, her music keeps me warm. Swift weaves realism and wonder so seamlessly into her writing that it unravels that part – that part where you listen to a song and decide what you think, if you like it. And despite this feeling, of already knowing deep down that this song is part of you now, it is not a kind of magic. This is Taylor Swift.

I am searching for Rachel Cusk. I am looking for her in her books. She writes //Outline//. She writes //Transit//. She writes //Kudos//. I am looking for the full picture, looking for the destination and a resting point. Searching for a kind of [[recognition->Georgia]]. Where is it, where is she? In //Outline// and //Transit// and in //Kudos//, Cusk writes Faye as both central and peripheral. She relocates the centre of the work by placing it on the outside, outline, outlying. I think of this as recentering. It suggests an adjustment that corrects. In //Transit//, Cusk writes that “people could become more capable when the person they relied on to tell them what to do wasn’t there”. I think about the capabilities I gain through Faye’s absence. We can talk about this absence as a suspension of personal identity, a radical experiment in passivity, a practice of being devoured. Practice because it happens over and over again and is catalogued. We can talk about it because Cusk makes us aware of it. She gives us the capability to see Faye’s disappearance. Cusk makes us look for Faye in the same way that I am looking for her. She makes us unsure of where we search. By hollowing out Faye, Cusk insists that we cannot look for the author in her character. She says Faye is not Rachel, [[this outline is not my life->Rohana]]. We are stopped, roadworks on the track in our unconscious that connects the female author with record keeper rather than creator. Cusk sees us here, she recognises us, she writes us. Faye notes of another female author that “she was attending this conference not on account of her credentials as a feminist writer but for her work as a translator”. The female writer as translator, a vessel through which life, reality, might pass to land elsewhere. We could go further. The female writing process as the carrying, and the cloaked, [[shameful->Indah]] delivery of life conceived elsewhere. Writing emerging from the female as rumination, gestation, regurgitation; r’s and g’s, [[round and base, gritty and jagged and unpolished->Emma]]. Faye’s silence is pregnant with all this; her almost-absence, which illuminates Cusk’s own almost-disappearance, leaves space for us to see it. In an interview for the Melbourne Writers festival, Cusk zooms in from London and occupies my screen, front and centre, and she says she is demonstrating communal storytelling. This is the idea of personal absence as intentional. She also says that femininity is a state of non-authored creativity. This is the idea of absence as unintentional. In //Outline//, she writes that “writing comes out of tension, tension between what’s inside and what’s outside. Surface tension”. I struggle with the idea of disappearance as both a choice and a byproduct of being a woman. Maybe I’ve located her in this struggle. This tension between creating and devouring. She says it. She writes it. Picture her writing it.

Susan Sontag Rachel Carson Audre Lorde Kathy Acker Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Are just some female writers who have inhabited [[the sick bed->Emma]]. The bed, which Anne Boyer writes in her memoir //The Undying// as being the place we make love in and the same place we might die in. The stigmatising silence imposed upon these women has been replaced by their capacity to produce language in “the pinkwashed landscape of awareness”. In my mind I continue to list women I am attached to by love. The woman that have not only borne witness to but endured this landscape: my grandmother, my other grandmother, your mother and one day maybe me. Awareness, or to be aware, is mentioned in gendered terms when we as a society speak about breast cancer. But the notion of being female is not what binds these writers, nor is it their sickness. It is their innate compulsion to write it down and spread themselves out. What burrows under my skin is the notion that women writers are [[criticised->Rohana]] for their memoirs being ‘confessional writing’. As stated in an article by the Guardian titled (link: "'Too much information? The writers who feel the need to reveal all'")[(goto-url: 'https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/27/confessional-writing-memoirs-biography-writers-feel-need-reveal-all?fbclid=IwAR1Lv2FrVft3HxEIKdsqRbPYZK8kIUTsUeEgobISZRKFVl5pJbxoOp4J3ss')], critics are inclined to dismiss it as the “equivalent of a selfie, a glorified ego trip”. A traditional mode, of which history has made a gendered performance. These modes – of disclosing and confessing – carry their assumption of sin, guilt and shame. It is thickly layered in the construction of the survivor memoir, coated in the frequent use of the first-person pronoun. It is compelling to read these women who de-clothe [[personal->Georgia]] and cultural responses to the sick body rather than overtly confessing the intricacies of the sick body. These women write into the pain to expose it, finding an acceptance of the thing through naming it. Boyer’s belief that pain changes language rather than destroys it, is a touchstone. Like words, pain requires attention. Do we, I wonder, have the vocabulary to adequately describe how it is to be in pain? I read online that the breasts are the first place weight gain manifests on the female body. My breasts have grown rapidly over the last week. I stand in front of the mirror, unable to peel myself away from myself. To stare too long makes me painfully aware of a misfitting which Lidia Yuknavitch suggests in her novel //The Misfit's Manifesto//, has to do with our bodies. I suppose change is as certain to happen as sun is to melt butter on a bench top. [[Rachel Cusk->Jo]] writes in an essay called (link: "'Shakespeare's daughters'")[(goto-url: 'https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/dec/12/rachel-cusk-women-writing-review')], that if a woman’s body signifies anything, it is that repetition is more powerful than change. But change is more wondrous, more enjoyable. I agree, I sink into many patterns with my body. I throw my clothes onto the floor and repeat my simple exercises in front of the full-length mirror. I roll back and forth on the same floor so as not to seize up. I confess many things by way of this body. I confess to my mother at a young age that I am scared of having a body that is sick. To which she replies, “You’ll be okay, just pay attention to it.” She pays attention to hers in ways both private and public, often voicing her doctor's visits, distress, aspirations and changes. I watch her sit opposite the TV in front of a pile of folded washing and grab at her breasts, searching for something that stands out. During these moments I find solace in writers’ words more than my own, more than my mothers. I reach for them on the bookshelf and find the parts I have underlined. I read them back to myself because they articulate the misfitting of our bodies and our attention to it, better than I ever could. Boyer sinks into confessional modes of writing like entering a warm bath, slowly and then all at once. Is there something to sharing women’s experiences of the body that both links them and separates them simultaneously? I think I have located a commonality. It is not the confessional, or the sick bed, or the misfitting, I think it is just me. Me who has cannibalised my writing. Me who tried to not frame sickness as an epiphany for the well but has felt language fail. Boyer writes, “everyone who is not sick now has been sick once or will be sick soon” and I think of all the ways one can be sick. I think of the man in the room who told me my chances are higher because of my grandmothers. But mostly I think of the women who have paid attention and written it all down. I will just sit here and read them over and feel comforted by their ability to take notes. But just like Boyer, I will not write women’s suffering as being generalised into literary opportunity. Just like Boyer, I would rather write nothing at all.

There’s a certain self-consciousness that accompanies literary criticism focused on Sally Rooney’s growing body of work. Critiques of this nature are often framed by an imperative to weigh in on the debate concerning Rooney’s status as the unsolicited (link: "literary voice of the millennial generation")[(goto-url: 'https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/21/is-being-the-voice-of-a-generation-a-curse-or-an-honour-for-novelists')]. Aware of their conscious contribution to the proliferation of commentary currently circulating the young Irish author; critics frequently preface their work by acknowledging their part in stoking the public’s fascination with Rooney’s oeuvre. Less than two weeks after the publication of Rooney’s third novel, LitHub named //Beautiful World, Where Are You// as (link: "the most reviewed book of all time")[(goto-url: 'https://lithub.com/sally-rooneys-new-novel-is-now-the-most-reviewed-book-of-all-time/')]. Rooneymania has reached its zenith and intrigued as I am by her latest publication, I have been equally captivated by the literary world’s (link: "interpretation")[(goto-url: 'https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/08/sally-rooney-and-hazards-writing-while-female/596218/')] of her fame in contrast to her own (link: "qualms about said attribute")[(goto-url: 'https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/sally-rooney-i-m-really-paranoid-about-my-personal-life-i-feel-self-conscious-1.4655068')]. When placed upon the shoulders of [[successful millennial women, unparalleled fame->Georgia]] is also accompanied by a burden of responsibility. Consider //Girls// creator Lena Dunham who was (link: "similarly criticised")[(goto-url: 'https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/lena-dunham-comes-to-terms-with-herself.html?')] as an inadequate representative of her generation. Insisting upon Dunham’s universality became the kind of backhanded compliment that could be eagerly referenced by those wishing to call attention to omissions in her work they identified as unforgivable. Must we constantly batter Rooney over the head with this ‘title’ too? Or is this, too, yet another disguised attempt to undermine [[the space she has carved out for herself->Indah]] in the contemporary literary landscape? The buzz around Rooney’s second novel //Normal People// was in full swing by the time I picked up her 2017 debut novel. With almost every bookstore featuring the bestseller, the image of the young couple interlocked inside their [[sardine tin shaped sleeping bag->Emma]] burned into my mind’s eye. Unfazed by my affinity towards her writing, I mostly attributed it to the relatability of her stories and the characters which populated them. I was enticed by the invitation to inhabit a world where the characters were reflecting many of my own preoccupations. Like Frances, the protagonist of //Conversations with Friends//, I too worried about how my behaviour would be interpreted by others in social situations. Like me, Frances also stumbled as she attempted to navigate new relationships. In direct and unadorned prose, Rooney dissects and articulates how the power dynamics between best friends and former lovers Frances and Bobbi are complicated when their lives become entwined with married couple, Nick and Melissa. It was refreshing. Not only were these characters processing uncomfortable emotions familiar to me, they were doing so by enacting behaviours that I too engaged in. Take for example, this passage which carefully details how Frances interacts with her mobile phone after receiving an emotionally loaded email from her best friend, //I was in work when I received the email . . . I read the message several times. For some reason I deleted it briefly, and then went into my trash folder to retrieve it almost straight away. Then I marked it as unread and opened it to read it again as if for the first time.// I knew this dance. I’d followed similar sequences myself when overwhelmed by the perceived gravity of a close contact’s digital correspondence. Of course, you may say, as an able-bodied 20-something, cis woman undertaking a liberal arts degree in a Western country, it’s not surprising that I would identify with Rooney’s principal characters. What’s more, we occupy a similar social milieu and share corresponding misgivings about how our carefully considered political viewpoints may inevitably amount to negligible social action. But isn’t that the point? The problem isn’t that Rooney has misrepresented young people everywhere by claiming that her novels are emblematic of an entire generation. The problem is that the media has interpreted Rooney’s popularity as evidence of her ability to speak for a whole generation and it’s this phenomenon that many critics take issue with. Australian author Jessie Tu asserts that the elevation of Rooney’s work is akin to a regression (link: "into a mass collective fandom for white bread")[(goto-url: 'https://www.smh.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/surely-there-are-better-literary-heroes-for-our-generation-than-sally-rooney-20210817-p58jfp.html')]. Assessing Rooney’s work for its literary merit is fair game but first we must learn to differentiate public perception from the work itself. Is it fair to denounce an author’s popularity because the media frenzy smothering them continuously reinstates their universality? Especially when Rooney herself has openly confessed that as someone who hadn’t (link: "had a very-wide ranging experience of life")[(goto-url: 'https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/i-have-no-idea-if-ill-write-another-book-normal-people-author-sally-rooney-37301171.html')] there was “only so much that I felt I could draw on imaginatively”. Rooney has written a few novels which articulate the position of a distinctive sliver of society because that’s what she knows. If it manifests that the publishing industry and the public more broadly engage with and respond to this perspective over others doesn’t that say more about the institutions which uphold and prioritise this viewpoint than the author who expresses it? Bubbling under the surface of critical reviews which seek to analyse exactly what makes Rooney’s work so unfathomably popular appears to be an [[anxiety which seeks to discredit the widespread success of her novels->Jo]]. Instead of focusing their understanding on the reception of her work, critics often condemn Rooney’s apparent lack of inclusivity, privilege and self-indulgent characters. Even articles which venture to understand contemporary literary trends teeter towards a familiar reluctance to accept novels written by women who draw from (amongst other things) their own experiences as works of literature in their own right. Illustrative of this is Stephen Marche’s reduction of Rooney’s prose to a (link: "literature of the pose")[(goto-url: 'https://lithub.com/winning-the-game-you-didnt-even-want-to-play-on-sally-rooney-and-the-literature-of-the-pose/')]. Her style, he claims, is exemplary of a literary world in “rapid decline”; one in which her work marks a “dead end, both creatively and spiritually”. What an odd appraisal of a book actively boosting the (link: "number of people")[(goto-url: 'https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/normal-people-sally-rooney-book-uk-charts-paul-mescal-tv-a9515746.html')] who engage with literary texts.

I sit in the half-light. A moth beats itself against the window pane, watching me. [[I am repurposing->Georgia]] the stubs of my cigarettes and the blood crusted in my underwear. My grimy slippers with their woollen lining and my sheets, which still hold my sour smell. I am learning that my own decay draws eyes and tutting tongues, as though seeing the melancholy of another could liberate us. But it only turns our gaze inwards, to the melting and congealing, the stickiness of our own bodies. This is your brief brush with open-mouthed annihilation. Lick your lips until they crack, and look closer still. Bacteria lives on my skin, slowly sucking away at me. Can you see it? My smudged taste is still on the rim of the vodka bottle on the carpet. In my bed, there are whole colonies of dust mites inside the pillowcases, rearing their children. [[And now you will not look away->Rohana]]. You say my bed is my confession, a collage of the sordid and the unforgivable. In scrappy plastic and rumpled cotton, you see an artist who desperately seeks a reaction. You surmise that this thing is rottenness, carved out in the white cube, out of place amongst the pretty-looking things. But my bed is tender. The sheets are still warm. My bed is heavy with life, slowly sinking into the wooden frame, the mattress spilling out between the slats. When you run your hands along the bed frame, [[you might know the story of everyone who has slept here->Indah]]. You might hear the whispers of bodies and mattress springs as they curl into one, the coarseness of the cloth. A sharp fingernail could snap each thread, opening the seams and letting the denseness of my bed sigh out. When you look, can you see my shape start to form? Can you hear how it sounds when I kick through the rubbish in the middle of the night, that dark crunch of being blackout drunk? When you see my sheets, will you taste my grit? Perhaps you can feel my cold fingertips gliding around, circling in on themselves. Do you know about the gravel rash on my knee from when I fell off my bike in the park? Do you know what it feels like to slide on the jagged ground? Maybe you only see the horror of it, rather than the gentleness of the slow drip, the snaking way that blood moves down your shin. There is loneliness in three unused condoms and a packet of birth control pills, but there’s hope of new life too. I could forgive you for wanting to turn away. But don’t. Imagine me watching the dust pirouette in a stream of morning light when I decided to leave my bed, to invest my hope in art without effacing the filth that marked the worst two weeks of my life. I know that running your hands along the edges of someone else’s filth is a sensitive act. It is hard to touch the grease and dandruff of another person without recoiling. You’ll see the familiar become obscure, the body strange and fractured. But the closer you come to me, the less you’ll know. Walk forwards, feel your feet sink into the carpet. Let the roughness press into you. Is my image dissolving in your eyes, slinking into nothingness like the tide pulling back? [[Do you know who I am?->Jo]] Or can you only see yourself? Breathe in. Embrace the dark, weeping abject, the stains on my bed sheets. Love the mites on my pillow, the gathering dust. Love all the indentations which refuse to heal. Feel my presence even after I have left, even when my body becomes yours, indistinguishable. And only then will you understand (link: "My Bed")[(goto-url: 'https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/emin-my-bed-l03662')]. Would you fluff the pillows?