Engaging in What Others Make

Part 2 of What I Am Doing While I Am Not Writing 1,000 Words Per Day: Engaging deeply with things written and created by others.

In the last two weeks, I binged two podcasts pretty hard.

The first is a storytelling podcast, Personally by the Canadian Broadcast Co (Canada’s NPR!).

Season 4 is Discount Dave and the Fix, which is sneakily about one actor’s journey to sobriety, accountability, and purpose. But opens with a wild tale about a David Lee Roth impersonator at a bar being adored by aspiring actors.

The second is more of a guilty pleasure, but that isn’t quite the word. I find it over-reported and under-edited. I refuse all True Crime content involving murdered ladies, but I do love seeing a scammer exposed. Plus sometimes my body wakes up for the day at 4:30am and all I can manage is a puzzle phone game and a pod while the sun rises.

Chameleon is more my taste, and the two-part series called Mother of All Stories held me captive this week!

All of that said, I listened to all of Season 22 of Something Was Wrong in five days.

I’ve been undertaking some deep meditations on plot (thank you to the Frump Feelings newsletter!) and I find that my brain craves mystery or crime procedural to understand how cause and effect can be explained. It’s really,  really hard to craft a narrative out of real life, which I suspect unfolds based on random chance, mostly. But there is a human drive to tell stories.  At least, that is what drives me.

I picked a novel out of my To Be Read stack and I cannot remember how it came to me, but I did tear through The Double-Bind by Chris Bohjalian during my writing and editing hiatus.

I knew something was up with the narration from the get-go, and I am still not over how this reveals more at the end of the story. No spoilers!

I’m not sure how else to say this, but this novel set in Vermont and Long Island in approximately 2002 unfolds in my universe, except … The Great Gatsby actually happened, and its characters were “real” to all the characters here. Jay Gatz and Daisy Buchanan are still gossiped about, and the Buchanan dynasty continues up through the 21st Century. That’s an ambitious feat for an author, and I respect it! It also cued me to look for class commentary, and also look for what is illusion, or Gilded but not Gold.

I was immediately struck by the editorials of the close third-person narrator, who follows two young women from sophomore year of college through the next decade. I understand that the author may be doing something or several somethings clever while these two friends are stuck in a kind of arrested development. Laurel is stunted after a violent attack and Talia is trauma-bonded to her friend to “protect her.” 

And so, the narrator around these women is constantly asserting that they themselves are both “girls” but not women, and also that others around them are girls but not women. 

Here is how one coworker at a church youth group is described:

“Over the summer, Randy had cut most of her hair, and dyed what remained a creosote black, moussing it up most days into a series of small prickly daggers. The girl probably hoped that she looked a little scary—with all that black mascara—but her cheeks were too cherubic. In the end, Randy looked like nothing more than a little girl playing dress up.”

Cherubs and innocence and little girls. I would say Talia (whom the close-third-person narrator is following) is projecting here. Fashion is likely in the eye of the beholder!

This all-knowing narrator even calls out anyone who would assert that someone over 18 is not a child.

Laurel began volunteering at a homeless shelter after her own brutal attack by two men, strangers who grabbed her off the side of the road. After college, Laurel starts working at the shelter, enjoying the work but trying not to tie it to her attack in her own mind. One of her early successes is supporting a woman who is only a year or two older than she is named Serena.

“Laurel knew enough not to make any of the women or children who passed through the family shelter into a personal reclamation project, both because she was still a student herself and because she was a volunteer who really didn’t have the slightest idea what she was doing. She had experience, but no formal training as a social worker. Nevertheless, it was almost too tempting not to want to play god with a girl—and that’s exactly what she was, it was delusional feminism to call this starving sprite a “woman”—like Serena.”

There is a LOT going on there. I put down the book and thought about this section for a while. I considered not picking it up again, but understood that there are several deeper things going within the world of The Double-Bind.

Laurel is Hamptons-rich and trying to help others, and feels her own class-driven power over a woman close to her age who is pretty and thin (its own type of societal currency and remarked upon endlessly). The urge for a makeover montage announces itself, and it makes so much sense considering that this is 2002. A young woman’s desire to control one’s appearance, and all that it signifies in broader society, is very strong for both Laurel and Talia. (Talia is rich and thin and pretty but she is Manhattan-rich with dark hair, while Laurel is Long-Island-rich and thin and blonde. You follow?)

I was wondering, What is Bohjalian signaling with Laurel insisting on Serena’s innocence and girlhood, and Laurel’s boredom with early 21st Century feminism?

Laurel = Daisy Buchanan? 

They’re all pretty and thin and rich and white. There is a coldness here. But I also think this is the point: this is the Gatsbyverse. Daisy Buchanan’s famous monologue about hoping for beautiful, stupid daughters happened here.

It gives a different flavor to this novel as it paints a picture of two 28-year-olds who keep on renting their off-campus college apartment, continue working their first full-time jobs, and do not date seriously. In their inner monologues, both Talia and Laurel insist that they are offended at the notion that they themselves are grown-ups.

I don’t need to be a Freudian analyst to wonder if I am supposed to read:
Everyone else needs their innocence preserved = Why did no one protect my innocence?

Even before The Big Reveal at the end of the novel, as a reader I had concluded that these are characters written to be seeking solace after trauma by projecting sheltered, innocent girlhood status onto themselves and others. Which is sad and intriguing to read about!

I also love Bohjalian’s prose and style, and was surprised by how easily I read through a novel about trauma and its aftermath. Also …

Y2K is vintage, baby!

It’s a big swing and maybe almost a guaranteed miss to set a novel in the world of The Great Gatsby in the year 2002. But 25 years later, I think it’s working better with hindsight. Shopping-as-social-activity-and-personality-trait hit me with a wave of nostalgia. American life post-2020, to me, is drowning in stuff, choking on microplastics, driving by shuttered shopping malls while a dozen Amazon packages wait on your porch. The way Talia and Laurel fold mall trips into their days to hit up designer stores struck me as quaint and comforting. And the way friendships and relationships happened without cell phones or mobile Internet! A lot of just swinging by apartments to check if someone is home. Sigh. Those were the days!

Equally glorious and cringey: a big youth group paintball game is a major plot point with lots of buildup.

So my mind is a weird mix right now of one podcast about delusion and drug use, and a novel guided by an equally unreliable narrator. And then a different, procedural pod that is too painstaking in its reporting for my own taste. THESE ARE THE FACTS, BELIEVE ME, all of this art seems to say.

But it only serves to make me question how every single narrator comes with their own delusions and dishonesty.