I want to bake you a cake for you eat in the Hunger Games

Three totally unrelated things, except I guess they are related because I want to talk about them!

1)  My parents are cleaning out their attic. On Sunday, over the phone, they were telling me about the things they found there;  my dad asked me if I remembered when my sister and I took scraps of wood and painted them and made little gynmast figurines/gymnastics equipment. I didn’t really… just very vaguely.  He was saying he was probably going to get rid of them, and my mom interrupted him and was like, “No! You’re not going to get rid of them, I want to keep them!”  It meant a lot to me, for some reason.  Like, as you grow up, when you become a teenager, your parents want to hold onto your childhood and you think it’s ridiculous and annoying…  Maybe it’s the young adult novels I’ve been reading, or overly analytical discussions about a certain TV character, but I’ve just been thinking a lot about the transition from youth to adulthood, from innocence and trust and hopefulness to something less innocent, more skeptical, more cynical–also stronger; how so much gets lost there, and that of course the change is necessary, but ultimately all those good, dumb, childish things left behind get forgotten. And I caught myself wishing that somehow someone else in the world would remember what was, what got lost. And then I was like, THAT’S WHAT MOTHERS ARE FOR. I suppose this sentiment is ill-timed; it would have made a much better Mother’s Day blog entry. Maybe I’ll contact Hallmark with my brilliant epiphany.

2) I finally read The Hunger Games.  I watch the trailer and start to cry whenever I see Rue. Seriously, at this point it’s like this stupid Pavlovian response. RUE’S LITTLE FACE: TEARS.  Does anyone think they would be good at the Hunger Games? I’m genuinely curious. I think one of my roommates, Megan, would do okay, because she’s very resourceful. My other roommate, Jessie, counters Megan wouldn’t be able to kill people. Hot debates within the walls of one Somerville apartment. I’ve always thought I’d be able to make it in prison (I don’t know why I’ve thought about this before, BUT I DEFINITELY HAVE), because I know how to align myself with powerful people; however, in the Hunger Games, since there can only be one winner, this would not be a very good strategy! And I do not tolerate discomfort well. And I like to take naps.  Maybe if I had a smart phone with me–if I could Google things in the forest… I might be able  to make it. Also, I love this:

3) These days I find it easiest to talk to people about the one thing I’m proud of about my life, which is my writing. At the end of 2011, after about five years of work, I finished a short story collection called Hero Worship, and I’m trying to get it published. I can write query emails in my sleep now. I don’t know if I’ll have any luck–it’s the most Rebekah-esque thing in the world that I spent so much time working on it, then AFTER I WAS FINISHED, learned people don’t want to publish short story collections any more.  Uh, whoops. Still… I think it’s important that I finished, because now I’m ready for something new. And I panicked pretty hardcore, wondering, WHAT AM I GOING TO DO NOW? And! I am writing a novel. Which also makes me panic, but I am hoping it’s a motivating sort of panic. I hope it doesn’t take me five years! Very generally, it’s about Stockholm Syndrome.  I have been reading way too many Wikipedia entries about kidnapping. I have a ridiculous-looking storyboard on my bedroom wall.

I’m really excited. I guess the only thing that scares me more than writing a really shitty novel is being a person who says they want to write a novel and then never does.  So I’ll do this.

who’s gonna drive you home tonight

I got a car! I am naming her Cindy Leisure. I did not take this photo while driving.

I remember when I was little, around eight years old, getting really scared one night, so scared I had to wander into my parents’ bedroom and ask them to reassure me. No nightmares, no monsters under the bed! Just absolutely terrified I WOULD NEVER BE ABLE TO PAY BILLS.  Not as in I thought I wouldn’t be able to make money, but I was convinced I would never be able to figure out how to have a bank account, write checks, get electricity in a house, etc. Like, all those processes seemed so mysterious and complex to me, and I didn’t think I was smart enough to understand them.

Obviously at some point I realized these things were not as difficult as I had imagined them to be.  But I still had/have a long-standing doubt in my ability to navigate … I don’t know what to call these things… red tape, paperwork, detailed instructions, complicated processes.  For several years I didn’t think I would be able to be very “adult” unless I had a partner who was helping me through all of this scary and intimidating stuff.  I don’t know why I thought that way, but I did.

I decided that before I turned 30 (which is happening in November… shudder), I wanted to buy a car, and I wanted to do it all by myself. And then I did! I got a loan (Cindy Leisure, in addition to being the name of my new car, is an actual person–she was my loan officer at my credit union, and very lovely), I got insurance, I got registered in MA and got my license plates, I flew out to Baltimore to pick up the car, drove it back to Boston by myself, got it inspected, got my parking permit.  My friends, my sister and my sister’s boyfriend, my parents, and my insurance agents helped me along the way, but for the most part I did it alone. And maybe it’s not that big of a deal, especially in the grand scheme of things, and maybe it’s something that would be really easy for most other people, but I’m really proud of myself.  My little eight-year-old-self would have been AMAZED.

And, pictured below: from a few days ago: Joyce, my cat, sitting on top of my MA license plates right after I got them. Please note of all the parties listed who were involved in helping me, Joyce was not mentioned. That was not by accident.

Don’t Talk About Religion, Politics, Or Sex

Sometimes, it’s like the impulse to pick a scab–I go searching around the Internet for the latest articles/essays/books on homosexuality from a conservative Christian viewpoint. As in, “It’s wrong to be gay and here’s why.”  I don’t know why I do this to myself–if it’s a form of masochism, if I just enjoy feeling oppressed and then self-righteousness, if I believe that by reading up on this stuff I can respond to imaginary accusers by saying “Look, I really have tried to understand! ”  Like, what, if God meets me at the pearly gates and condemns me I can be like, “But! Hey! What about all those Internet articles I read?” Or maybe I’m testing myself, to see if there’s anything I feel, any pull. I grew up as a conservative Christian and held these same views on homosexuality until I was about 18 years old, so there’s something in my brain and probably in my heart that can still get grabbed that way; even when I’m not convinced I’m still drawn in.  It was a part of my past way of thinking, so it’s still a part of me.  It’s a lot about remembering, I guess.

I recently read Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality by Wesley Hill.  It’s a little book.  Wesley Hill identifies as gay and he also identifies as a Christian, and he believes that the right response to both of these things is to live celibate.  In other words, he doesn’t think he consciously chose to be gay, he doesn’t believe “converting” to heterosexuality is an option for him, but he also believes that it is a sin to act on homosexuality feelings/to have gay sex. He is honest about his struggles and his process, and he even details the parts of him that resist the idea that God condemns homosexuality. He writes that he gets lonely. One solution he explores is that the Church can possibly be an (imperfect) answer to his longing for human connection–that by nurturing relationships with other Christian believers he can find closeness.  His struggle is not unlike that of an unmarried person, or even people who are married but still feel fundamentally relationally unfulfilled. Misery and loneliness are part of the human condition.

While reading, I thought a lot about the ways the author and I are alike.  We’re about the same age, we come from similar backgrounds–healthy and loving Christian families.  He attended Wheaton College–I had a friend in high school who went there, probably around the same time he did, and I also seriously considered attending similar colleges to Wheaton (Calvin and Taylor–like Wheaton, Christian colleges that were on the more ~intellectual side). I struggled in the exact same ways as he did as a Christian, when I figured out I had homosexual feelings–afraid to tell anyone for a while, trying like a starved person to find books or just any information at all that would help me in any way, refusing to seriously consider any kind of alternative that would say it was okay to be gay because I really did believe it was wrong/against God’s will.  Like, the exact same process and frustration–down to listening to radio broadcasts from Focus on the Family. Then finally deciding, out of desperation, to share your struggle with another Christian, then a few other Christians… and they counsel you, pray for you… And then that’s where the author’s and my paths split–he decided to keep going–I decided to stop.   I didn’t want to be lonely.  I didn’t want to be celibate. I couldn’t live like that.  So I found a way, somehow, to believe that it wouldn’t be a sin to be actively gay.  At that point in my life it was more like an excuse than anything I actually believed, but I guess all I really needed was an excuse, however flimsy. And then I started telling people who weren’t Christians, and I started dating women. And then a lot of the other Christian stuff–beliefs, systems of morality–just slowly began to fade away from me, lose their power.   So while reading Washed and Waiting I kept wondering why… what made him continue like that, and what made me go this way instead? I can’t really answer that, except that maybe my longing felt stronger than God’s presence and/or my own conviction.

This was what primarily struck me about Wesley’s Hill’s account.   I was moved by other things about his writing–his honestly, his vulnerability, his willingness to face both the light and the dark parts of life–but most of all I felt, viscerally, both pained by and impressed by his commitment to his God, his system of belief, the people in his Church–so much so that he would sacrifice a lot of his happiness.  I really am not at all interested in listening to a straight person tell a gay person they should be celibate, but a gay person who has chosen this for themselves–in this instance, I don’t think it’s stupid or repressed or anything like that. I mean, if you really do believe the Bible, it calls people to give up their happiness for God. Even for the very earliest Christians it was a sign of faithfulness–like, they were actual martyrs, they literally got tortured and then killed for their beliefs.  I do think it’s possible for a person to believe in something unseen that strongly. I am curious about it–maybe a little jealous, too. I have never had that kind of faith and I don’t think I ever will.

And it wouldn’t be true at all for me to say that the way I have lived, as opposed to the way he has lived, has meant I’m so much happier, so much more well-adjusted, so much less lonely. I don’t think I am.  And it struck a sad chord in me to read about his longing for a partner, because I remember that longing in myself, and I thought the only thing that separated me from that kind of fulfillment was my Christianity. I thought if that as soon as my Christianity wasn’t inhibiting me, I would be able to find the kind of love I dreamed about–the kind of love I imagined that broke through my whole life, my family, my religion, my friends, my own self.  But that’s not actually the way it goes, not always, as it turned out. There are a million other things that inhibit happiness and love.

Still, though, Washed and Waiting didn’t sit totally well with me.  And I think this conclusion is going to get really huge and abstract, so I apologize in advance.  What frustrated me was the proposed solution to loneliness for a celibate gay person–find companionship and love in people in the Church.  The thing is, I don’t think it’s real love.  I don’t think it’s possible for the Church to love anyone fully while also condemning them (or condemning what they do–honestly, it really is about the same thing).  You can’t even KNOW someone if your priority is that they’re living by some book of rules before they’re just a whole human being to you. And yes, I guess that means I have a problem with the entire concept of sin. I just don’t think people are made up of these discrete entities where parts of them are good/are from God, and other parts of them are bad/are from something evil. Especially not sexual orientation, which may be culturally constructed to be so important to us, I don’t know.  But honestly, I think, if I was ever so convicted–I can imagine going without sex, I can imagine going without romantic partners–but I can NOT imagine going through life surrounded by people–looking for love in people–who don’t know me and accept me. Like, as much as the Church advocates understanding and accepting for GLBT people, their bottom line will always be, “I love you, but what you want is wrong.”  And I don’t want to go without those moments where someone looks at me and says to me with the kind of authority I could try to believe, “There is nothing wrong with you for the way you feel.”

Sweet Hearts

If I had to pick the top three things that have happened to me, ever–I know it is a ridiculous premise–one of the things I would pick, easily, is that I got to have a sister/more specifically, I got to have a sister I like a lot.  And there all the obvious things that come with having a sibling who is a really good person–someone to share bizarre childhood in-jokes with, someone who understands the EXACT ways your parents are annoying, someone who drives to a funeral with you and stops at Taco Bell on your way there. Etc. But one thing that is sort of unexpected, or, just that I hadn’t considered much before now–and maybe this is like, the most narcissistic version of having a sibling–is they hold a version of you inside of them. They knew you from when you were really young, when no one else knew you except your parents.

As adults, my sister reads way more than me, which is slightly remarkable because when we were teenagers I was obsessed with reading and she wasn’t.  A few months ago she was telling me about a book she was reading, Sweet Hearts by Melanie Rae Thon.  She said, “Do you remember in high school, you really liked Melanie Rae Thon and recommended her to me? I’m reading all her books now.” And I actually didn’t remember reading Melanie Rae Thon at all!  But when she said that to me, I remembered again.  So I decided to read Sweet Hearts. And I love it. It’s a book a lot about siblings, and thus this post comes full circle!!!

And though I do enjoy talking about how much I like my sister, my real reason for writing this post is because I wanted to include an excerpt from the book. I just wanted to associate myself with these paragraphs somehow, however arbitrarily, even just on a dumb blog.  I don’t think it ruins anything, so Book Club people,  I think it’s safe to keep reading. It’s an ALLEGORY, about the relationship between mothers and their children, or something maybe a little farther away than that:

Once upon a time a crow laid two eggs; once upon a time the coyote ate them both.  Foolish bird, the crow flapped and squaked. She hissed at the coyote: Eat me if you’re so starved. She offered her neck. She laid her body down.  The coyote thought of her smooth eggs, slick and warm inside their shells, golden and good as they slipped down his throat. The chicks they might have grown to be filled his belly and his heart.

He looked at her: black feathers, black eyes, sharp beak, bony skull.  She was all crack and pluck–wrinkled hide, stringy meat–too much trouble to break, too much work to chew. He told her he’d rather gnaw a pair of old leather boots. He said, I am what I eat; your babies are part of me forever now.

She looked at him straight in the teeth.  He said, You’re my mother in a way, so you should love me as your son. With a yip and a yelp, he turned to go. The childless mother saw the feathery plume of his long tail and the sheen of his silvery coat…

The crow laid three more eggs. Kept her faith, guarded them well. One day they hatched and the skinny coyote heard the chicks’ tireless squawks. When their mother flew away to find them live crickets or a warm mole, the coyote shook the tree, and a featherless nestling fell straight into his mouth.  Empty though he was, he could not bite down. He dropped the nestling in the woods. Words had given shape to thought: the crow was his mother after all, her chicks his own flesh and blood.

He ate only the dead: fish washed up on the beach, beetles on their backs, a festering horse. Sometimes he’d rather starve. On those days, he swallowed pebbles to fool himself. Full and heavy with stones, the coyote stumbled through the forest. At night he prayed to the bird gods, eagle and owl. He wanted to be saved, to be eaten alive, to be torn apart.

Lately I have been finding lots of things sad. And not finding things sad in a sad way, but in a way that makes me feel more human. Like McNulty went on a bender on “The Wire” and I just got SO SAD for him. When I read this ALLEGORY in Sweet Hearts it was like something moving inside, hopeless but hopeful at the same time. And in terms of art more generally–because I was thinking this while I was reading Melanie Rae Thon’s work–like, oh she is so good, I am so impressed by her skill! But at some point you aren’t even thinking about what they’re doing, or how they’re doing it, you’re just feeling things. I want more of that in my life. Anyway, thanks for the reminder, sister.

stupidity followed by self-hatred and further analysis

I am going to revel in my fascinating unpredictability! So it may not be all that unpredictable, but it came as a surprise to me! I don’t usually like stand-up comedy and I don’t usually like boy-centric things, but I am kind of in love with Louis C.K.  I think what’s immediately apparent about him is how inappropriate he is (which I love), but the more I’ve been listening to his stuff–and watching his FX TV Series, “Louie”–I have felt really… errr, inspired? is that a terrible word to use? or, touched?… by the way he puts himself out into the world in such an honest way. He doesn’t just make fun of things/people; he makes fun of himself too–more than that, he makes fun of himself at his most vulnerable. I just used the word “inspired” because it felt like something that could be applicable to myself, too, the way I live or write, or how I feel about the way I live or write–the idea that it’s okay to open yourself up, look at the worst parts of yourself and turn them  into something funny or poignant or whatever.

His version of life is something very dark and very miserable, but with some sparks of light too.  I’ve decided the song that closes the “Louie” season 1 finale is my official celebratory end-of-2011-beginning-of-2012-song (Internet, this is such an important decision!!!). After trying to go out with people to a crowded/loud party and feeling alienated, he does a quick stand-up routine where he says he’s only really good at two things, masturbating and raising his two daughters. And then he gets home and falls asleep on the couch and his daughters wake up him at 4 AM and they want to go to breakfast, so he takes them, and then this song plays. It made me cry a little.

had a bad night, had a real bad night, kind of night where you wish you didn’t have to have any more nights. had a bad night, boy was that a shitty night, wasn’t your first and it wasn’t your worst, but all the same could someone please stop these shitty, shitty nights? now the night is over, bring back the sky, the whiskey is gone and my calm is dry, there was a time when all we would do is sit on the floor and get high. that don’t work, you can’t say goodbye, you’re too young to cry, you’re too old to die, the ones who see the night ends say they know just how a bad night turns to day. but it’s another day. please give me another day. could be bad one, could be the worst one, might not be a better one. another day. turn off the lights, shut it down. bad nights turn to day. give me another day.

four for you glen coco

Dear Internet,

I just ate two fried eggs, two pieces of toast, corned beef hash, freshly squeezed orange juice, diet coke, annnd a cinnabon, so now feels like as good as any time to explain my grand Christmas wish for the world…

Several years ago someone asked me if I remembered the first time I got anxious.  It was when I was little, when I woke early Christmas morning, and I was so excited, but I knew I had to wait until 7 AM for my parents to wake up too–so I started shaking, and felt like I was about to throw up, and couldn’t go back to sleep.  Then I got older and I fell in love for the first time, and I got the same feeling–waking up in the morning before I saw her, shaking and feeling like I was going to throw up.  For a while I was actually throwing up all the time and I lost a lot of weight; I went on anti-anxiety medication, which resolved the issue.  But it took me a long time to figure out/understand that kind of discomfort could even be identified as “anxiety,” because I wasn’t exactly worrying–it was just excitement trying to burst out of me, turning physical beyond my ability to stop it. Other stuff was mixed in too of course–terror, I think, and the exhaustion of waiting for something I wanted more than anything.

Yeah low-grade mental illness in a middle-class adolescence, what a rare and special occurrence. The point is.  In a lot of ways it was miserable, but it was also a measure of something really important, that I weirdly value and now find meaningful. And what I was thinking about, when I remember how Christmas was for me when I was little, in the morning–yes the clock turned to 7 AM and I went into the living room and dumped out my stocking contents and my mom washed her face and my dad made coffee, but the moments before all that, when I was laying in my bed in the dark alone and shivering even though I wasn’t cold and staring at the clock as the numbers went up one by one.  As far as my grown-up Christmas wish goes, I’ll just ignore world peace for now, and happiness and love, etc, and say that’s the thing that I would wish for myself and for others–not always, not often, and maybe not in that extremity, but every once in a while–to be waiting and to feel something so much, excited and terrified, that you think you’re going to puke.

So, Merry Christmas! I hope you throw up!

when the spark of blog monogamy begins to fade…

I really love the Internet, and I really love blogs.  Sadly my excitement for the medium has meant I have created and then left SO MANY DEAD BLOGS in my wake.  This includes, but is not limited to: After After Ellen (a WordPress blog devoted to making fun of After Ellen), the Puke and Run Club (a Livejournal focusing on accounts of throwing up and then… wait for it… running away), and something called, if I am remembering correctly, uhh, Pussy Patrol, which was something like an attempt on Diaryland to keep Riot Grrrl alive.  I think I was 18 then… RIP PP.

So, I am sort of blog-promiscuous. Still I dream of a long-lasting and fulfilling blog relationship.  I am really trying this time to maintain a blog that’s straightforward, that’s connected to my real name and to my writing, and that most people in my life (in whatever capacity) would enjoy reading regardless of their specific interests/hobbies/ideologies.  But without my clever angles (COME ON THOSE ANGLES WERE REALLY CLEVER) I’m a little at a loss about which direction to head in.

My dear 3-4 readers, what would you like to see more of? More book/film/tv reviews, more stories, more personal/relational-type reflections? More pictures of my cats? More about my fiction writing? More gay stuff? And so help me if you say “all of the above,” in a fit of wild despair I’ll delete your comment, delete this blog, start a new blog about which particular $5 bottle of red wine goes best with which particular of episode of Xena: Warrior Princess, and then abandon it. Juuuust kidding. Probably.

like dead flowers

For an early birthday present, my parents got me flowers, which were delivered to me at work .  (My boss saw them and was like, all intrigued, “Ohhhhh! Flowers?” and I was like, “They’re from my parents.” and then she said, “Because of your cat’s eye?” This exchange is sad for so many reasons.)

Even though they’re now dying and even though I’m going to be out of the office for a few weeks, I still felt SO TERRIBLE about throwing the flowers in the trash.  And though I’ve had a difficult time throwing away flowers from friends and lovers, I can’t say it’s quite as fraught-ridden. For the most part I am the opposite of a hoarder–I impulsively throw away things I shouldn’t. But I know I have a similar response to gifts from my parents that have expiration dates… example: last year for Halloween, from my mom I got a plastic pumpkin with black cat painted on it–and it remains in our apartment living room for all of the seasons. (Sorry, roommates.) I was contemplating possible dramatic metaphors found in my resistance to discard. Here they are in bulleted form.

• Throwing away flowers=acknowledgement of parents’ mortality?
• Throwing away flowers=facing guilt about larger emotional agency as discrete entity from parents’ generous nature?
• Throwing away flowers=confronting the occasional necessity of rejecting/saying no to loved ones?
• Throwing away flowers=remembering all the times I refused my (Italian) mother’s spaghetti sauce and told her I liked other people’s spaghetti sauce but not hers.

Anyway, like you do, I kept the vase.

ALTHOUGH WHAT DO I DO WITH THE VASE NOW?

I don’t know what to “tag” this post as. Object relations? Ha, ha. A bit of wordpress Freudian humor.

well technically

I could (and have) talked about Xena: Warrior Princess for um “a really long time,” but for the purposes of this blog I’m attempting to keep myself down to a few paragraphs.

This weekend was a very Xena-intensive one for me–my friend Cait and I dressed up like Xena and Gabrielle for Halloween (for two nights!), then watched …six episodes on Sunday. A slight Xena overdose. In-between episodes I was taking a shower and thinking about the debate “Is Xena gay?” and the justification from those who don’t/didn’t think so, which included for a while even the lead actress of the show, who said she didn’t really think Xena was gay until the very last episode. Here’s a YouTube video for reference, which I’m sure nobody will watch as it is over EIGHT MINUTES LONG, but it serves as a nice summation/explanation of Xena’s and Gabrielle’s relationship trajectory anyway, if you have ever caught yourself wondering, “So was Xena actually gay?”  (I’m sure you debate that in the shower ALL THE TIME, just like I do.)

There are all sorts of debates re: Xena’s sexual orientation, like about authorial intent and audiences making their own meaning beyond or even in opposition to the main text; about how sexuality exists more on a multidimensional scale than as a binary; etc.  I even read some debate about asexual appropriation of the warrior princess. They are all (or mostly) important and interesting discussions. But, it can get messy and abstract, and I only really want to say one thing.

The Great Theory I developed while taking my shower is that culturally most people are familiar with a very narrow range of narratives for what it means to be gay. Ellen DeGeneres, as one example, is a familiar gay narrative to us: she “comes out of the closet” and realizes she had been gay her entire life, begins to ID as a lesbian, dates women, has sex with women, with the goal of marriage/long-term commitment.   When people read/watch/experience a story that isn’t familiar to them as a gay narrative, they don’t think it’s gay.  But my idea is that there is the possibility for all sorts of narratives, different ways of women desiring other women in a variety of capacities. The gay umbrella should be HUGE and lots of stories should fit underneath it and desire shoots in all kinds of directions.

gay pajamas, fake diaries, & high Midwestern gothic trash

I think what normal girls do is they read/watch Sybil when they’re like 13 years old, get disturbed and enthralled, and then they move on—to horses or boys or pot or whatever. However, this “OMG BUT I TRANSCEND NORMAL” girl latched onto what salon.com calls high Midwestern gothic trash—after I first saw the movie in my high school psychology class, my fixation turned into a long-lasting love. I got a Sybil-inspired tattoo on my arm after college (it’s part of an abstract painting by Shirley Mason, the real-life Sybil), and I can’t count the number of obscure in-jokes I’ve shared with friends who I insist watch the movie with me (“Sybil has dissociated into a baby… get her some cheesecake”). Last summer I took a trip to NYC, looked up the address of Shirley’s old apartment in the library’s archived phone-books, and walked by it. Here is a photo of my creepy stalker feet on her former front steps!

I don’t know how to explain how much the story has meant to me, in part because its meaning to me has changed over time, in part because I have a moderately obsessive personality and it’s difficult not to sound like one of those silly teenage girls. (Maybe a part of me will always just remain a silly teenage girl?) I was talking about it with my roommate this afternoon, trying to figure out a way to articulate why it has been so compelling, why it’s not so much the stories of horrific abuse that drew me in, why it’s not even about Sybil having multiple personalities. I was always dubious about the extent of both, understanding they were likely exaggerated for the sake of drama (like most “based on a true story” tales are). But the appeal of Sybil, for me, was something to do with the expressed emotional intensity of a girl that was not about her being a villain or a passive victim. She finds her voice, she gets help, she heals.  Her craziness is glamorized in the story, for sure, but especially in Sally Field’s portrayal I think it’s not just superficial glamour, there’s something legitimately beautiful about her vulnerability. Also, there was something that surprised me—and moved me—in the way Dr. Wilbur (her [female] psychiatrist) interacted with Sybil, though when I was a sophomore in high school I didn’t really understand what that was (which I’ll get to in a moment!).

Last week I heard about Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case by Debbie Nathan—a new book that argues Sybil, the original book written by Flora Schreiber, was largely a hoax; it examines notes from Dr. Wilbur, notes from Schreiber, and interviews with people who had known Shirley (Sybil), Dr. Wilbur, and Schreiber. I thought I’d read Nathan’s book and formulate a convincing response for why the Sybil story could still stay safely protected and pure in my heart. From the initial reviews I read, I believed the book would sensationalize and that its information would be slanted with Nathan’s own bias, which is a history in journalism of critiquing false memories of child abuse.

And Sybil Exposed was both of those things, somewhat. (I was most suspicious of the excessive ambition of some of the closing chapters, which made dramatic and sweeping implications about Multiple Personality Disorder and false memories in general.) But the book also seemed thoroughly researched and written with a gentle kind of carefulness I did not expect. I was actually pretty heart-broken by its convincing case, because it reveals some really awful, disturbing distortions in the Sybil story. Examples: Dr. Wilbur kept Shirley on an intense combination of psychotropic drugs for many years which seriously messed up/confused Shirley, which might explain why, in part, she felt so tortured, and perhaps made her suggestible to Dr. Wilbur’s preconceived hypothesis of MPD and abuse; Dr. Wilbur was super boundary-crossing and unethical, promised to pay for Shirley’s grad school if Shirley agreed to let her write a book about her, made down-payments on apartments for Shirley, etc, so Shirley became essentially financially dependent on her; the diary of Shirley’s that convinced Schreiber of the validity of Shirley’s multiple personalities was likely faked, so says forensic evidence. Mostly I was really bothered by the level of fucked-up-ness in the co-dependent relationship between Shirley and Dr. Wilbur—Shirley was lonely, neurotic, and desperately wanted a maternal figure’s approval/attention; Dr. Wilbur was arrogant, hoped to make a name for herself, liked to feel powerful and needed. Their desires fed into each other. It’s like together they created this huge inescapable mess in one another and then drowned in it.

And while I can’t dispute the claims of Sybil Exposed, I might question the extremity of them, especially the enormous damaging cultural responsibility Nathan argues Sybil holds.  And I still wouldn’t call Sybil a complete hoax—this might be naive but I think that surely there must have been moments of authenticity somewhere, at some point, even in the muck.  I do think there were a lot of smaller-scale deceptions, especially cases of people lying to themselves. Dr. Wilbur was confused, but she didn’t think she was, and instead believed she knew everything. She was unable to understand the complexity of what was happening to her and Shirley. But, at the same time, I was also frustrated at Sybil Exposed for similarly over-simplifying whatever it was that went on, particularly 1) Nathan’s entirely too-neat cultural/feminist thesis explaining and then effectively dismissing MPD, and 2) when Nathan guessed at people’s motivations (i.e Dr. Wilbur always wanted to have black hair, so obviously Dr. Wilbur must have looooved Shirley right away the first moment she met her because Shirley had black hair!).  OH ALSO. Cheap shot about Shirley’s dolls, Ms. Nathan. Yes, adult women who have dolls are creepy. WE GET IT.

As a lighter/more entertaining aside, one thing that amused me as I read Sybil Exposed was that I was not the only person in the world who picked up on the lesbian subtext of their story.  I remember when I first saw the movie and hearing Sybil confess to Dr. Wilbur, with large amounts of angst and shame, that she loved her, and Dr. Wilbur not being horrified by her affection, but accepting it—I remember being shocked and really happy, though like I said I didn’t understand why at the time. Anyway, it seems that Schreiber herself noticed something, too!—at some point she became convinced Dr. Wilbur and Sybil were lovers. I LOVE the exclamation of one her irritated friends, who said, upon hearing about the Sybil story, “What the hell? You’re dealing with a psychiatrist who is obviously having a homosexual relationship with this girl!” Schreiber also didn’t like the screenplay adaptation for the movie because she thought it had lesbian overtones. Haha. I knew it. Finally, there was apparently some convoluted controversy involving a lawsuit against the Sybil book because in the book there had been a phrase about a particular store selling “gay pajamas.” Schreiber had meant “gay” in the colorful fun way, but the store owners freaked out, thinking people would assume the store sold “bedroom apparel to some ‘sick’ i.e. lesbian’ girl.” I don’t even know. GAY PAJAMAS. Amazing.

Back to the gloom. I finished Sybil Exposed last night at 3 AM feeling really sad and disappointed.  Sybil had been such a hopeful and beautiful story to me, with a happy ending about a troubled/lonely/confused girl who learned, through love and self-awareness, how to make herself whole. And then I was just thinking: so there might not have been a happy ending after all; much of it may have been manufactured; people are hopelessly complicated and messed up, we entangle one another so miserably, why do we even try to get close to each other, why do we even try to help one another? I wish there had been at least a story or two from “the other side” that gave even a tiny glimpse of something good that happened, allowing for more gray area. I know Sybil Exposed is a cautionary story, so it must focus on the negative. It sounds like stuff got so ugly for Shirley.  But somewhere there must have been some kind of promise of hope. This afternoon I looked up some information about a friend of Shirley’s, from her later years, just to try to glean any kind of positive or more reassuring take-away. I do not know anything about this woman—I saw her speaking on the Sybil DVD, that’s all—but she is one of the only other present-day voices about Sybil I could find. She has kind, generous words to say about her friendship with Shirley, and she includes a prayer; it concludes: may we… realize we are not alone. I don’t know what there is to say about that, in general or in relation to the Sybil story, but somehow those words just feel like the best way to end this (rather long-winded) post.