love letters
on anaïs nin, sex and the city, being taken "seriously," lovers, ex-lovers, and ex-lovers' exes
scene from Marcel Carné’s Port of Shadows (1938) in Atonement (2007), filmic adaptation of Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel
An ex's (sort-of) ex writes about a summer spent together. It’s a matter-of-fact recounting, our (mine and his) mutual hometown as metonym—a perfunctory gesture at privacy, or perhaps the discursive denial of nuance as revenge—at least the part he allows me to hear via dramatic reading at dinner with our friends. We’re taking turns giving updates on our respective love lives. The general outlook, unfortunately, doesn’t seem great. The narration of details—first-date debates over the superior cigarette brand (Marlboro) and espresso-based drink (cortado), followed by afternoons spent baking and going to the movies—are somehow so generic they reveal almost nothing about the two people involved. I think I’ve heard hundreds of horror stories that begin this way, everything was great until…. An immediately familiar voice, the everywoman in sex columnist cosplay.
She wants to be Carrie [Bradshaw, of Sex and the City] soooo bad I joke, even though I’m certain that comparison has been made about me just as many times. EXAMPLE: dental hygienist in said hometown (named Ruth or something in the vicinity of Bridget) based on two biographical facts offered over the course of that awkward small talk occurring under blinding overhead exam lights, that 1) I wrote and 2) lived in New York. I try to convey my displeasure with the relatively harmless comment, but frowning is difficult with sharp, metal instruments crammed in the recesses of your mouth.
In spite of that marked displeasure, to this day I still think about Carrie a lot. Over two decades after Sex and the City first aired, her character remains the foremost embodiment of a certain aspirational young-womanhood, a modern day fairytale for city-dwelling femmes who want to have it all. Carrie has been loved and reviled by millions for many of the same reasons: her bold sense of style and dogged pursuit of her goals, her lack of self-awareness and often questionable behavior, the fact that she has a beautiful, $700 rent-stabilized apartment in the city with an enormous kitchen she doesn’t cook in. I, like Carrie, have also spent a ridiculous amount of money acquiring a closet of non-functional shoes and clothes, on a number of occasions failed miserably as a friend, and importantly, flopped hard in love. I didn’t tell Ruth/Bridget all this, but maybe I didn’t have to. Dentists apparently can tell a lot about your life by just looking at your teeth.
SATC, for all of its verifiable shortcomings, was a landmark in television making. Unlike its grittier network contemporaries, The Sopranos and The Wire, (both of which I also love but for different reasons) it was among the first pieces of commercially successful TV to boldly insist that the lives of women, no matter how comparably frivolous the problems at times, were worthy of plumbing, and not just by other women.
So Amanda, what do you think? our friends ask. In the capacity of ex-girlfriend, of course it’s all very amusing; the love letter, in the form of rants on failed situationships/relationships more appropriate for a diary or past correspondences between lovers somehow made public, is one of my favorite genres of writing to read, the insane slew of confession that forms the justification for a restraining order, the barely cobbled-together prose poetry fraught with unthinkably bad rhetorical devices. I’M IN LOVE WITH THE SHAPE OF YOU! Discovering the existence of such, especially when the subject is someone I know, the more personally the better, gives me indescribable glee. I thank my ex for sharing the existence of this document with the table. As fellow writer, well, I say that not everyone necessarily needs to write. In fact I’m realizing in real time that there are actually many ways in which my ex’s (sort-of) ex reminds me of a younger version of myself, and that I was probably being a bit harsh. Perhaps buried somewhere within the parody lay an admirable sense of vulnerability.
Sometime in the last year I stopped really wanting to be online, to have any significant portion of my life be on display for quasi-public consumption. I could chalk this development up to a few possible reasons: a brief stint in political journalism that left me feeling jaded about the state of the world and my own place in it; finding fulfillment in my real-life relationships; the realization in my ongoing struggle to uncover the secrets of long-lasting happiness that oversharing online was clearly not part of the answer. I withdrew inward. And while I was writing elsewhere about other things in a way that was ostensibly not about myself but ultimately was, I notably stopped writing here, a platform I associate with an intensely personal form which has become increasingly difficult for me to muster up the necessary courage and motivation to pursue.
Popular consensus for centuries was that the self, except when written about obliquely or as an ontological subject, was unworthy of serious intellectual and creative inquiry, its fundamental subjectivity incompatible with the tradition of Western rationalism. In other words, those affairs of the heart instead constituted the writing woman’s natural domain. Those lauded 20th century women critics—Didion, Sontag, Arendt, Weil— who achieved acceptance within the male-dominated academy and beyond, all chose detachment as an aesthetic strategy. The absence of sentimentality and the personal in their style has significant implications.
I have long sought intellectual validation, predominantly from successful, seemingly intelligent men whom I perceived to be in a position to confer that upon me, a pursuit in which any overt performance of femininity (in emotional expression or appearance) could inadvertently pose an obstacle. (This became especially apparent to me in college when I bleached my hair and developed a habit of wearing ridiculously long fake eyelashes.) So while attempting to establish myself as a “serious” writer and thinker in recent times, and equally in an effort to avoid future embarrassment, I eschewed writing about these subjects. They were hastily recorded and relegated, perhaps in the end for the best, to the leather-bound confines of my diary. (Referring to it explicitly as a diary, as opposed to just a journal, is similarly a deliberate pushback against such hyperfeminine and closely-related infantile associations.) But anyone who actually knows me knows that’s hardly an accurate reflection of their role in my life: for better or for worse, I have always loved to be in love.
Anaïs Nin, a writer best known, along with longtime lover Henry Miller, for ushering the erotic into the realm of literary respectability, remarked in 1932: “I am terrified of my conscious work, because I do not think it has any value. Whatever I do without feeling has no value.” Nin produced a number of boundary-pushing, genre-spanning works in her lifetime, but her secret diary is still widely seen as her crowning literary achievement. She lamented the characterization of Miller’s prose in now American classics like the Tropic of Cancer as “obscene” and “pornographic,” stating that writers and thinkers of the day, women and men alike, had forsaken love’s physicality for “lofty exaltations or timorous reactions in the head.” I would have loved for her to have been able to watch Sex and the City.
I have also been thinking about Nin because, in spite of being significantly less prolific, in my year or so of withdrawal I have written a number of things, works of primarily criticism and nonfiction, that I still believe to be good. But I would stop caring about them pretty much immediately upon completion or publication. Feeling, I realized, was what in fact was missing. Feeling, which is so closely tied up with desire, that invisible force which pulls us toward one another and propels us forward. Desire for another person, another place, another way to spend our days. And even though desire is a pretty much universal experience, it nevertheless can feel embarrassing to engage in, to desire (v.) and make known that desire, because in the end life never measures up to our dreams completely. And so, I have become interested in exploring the architectures of confession, how we (I) might begin again to offer up those biographical contours as a currency of trust, to freely articulate the enduring influence of that life force without the crippling fear of falling flat on my face.
But for now, this is the extent of what I’m willing to admit—
After the end of my most recent relationship, shopping for groceries in particular became a task of quiet devastation. The far-off idyll of sweet domesticity annihilated in a flash; the sense that in spite of what feels like the end of your life as you know it, the materiality of your body remains unchanged, that it still has to be cared for and nourished; the farce of 21st century consumer optionality as metaphor, knowing that you will pick the same things time and time again, and that you could in theory try something else is completely beside the point. That you’re focused so intently on deciding what you’re going to eat this week, but it’s really not about that at all. And one day while acutely contemplating the lyrics of Taylor Swift’s “Lover” in its full pop saccharine glory, you start crying in the empty ‘baking & canned foods’ aisle of the local Key Foods. A sad consequence of breakups is that they tend to have a foreshortening effect; you start believing every piece of media was written exactly with you in mind.
Thus far, the through line of those whom I have loved and loved me in return is that they are all very private people, frequently emotionally reserved to a fault. In the limited times they have written to me, I have kept such printed matter as physical proof of a time when I was loved enough for someone who normally spends their days typing to put pen to paper. After the end of my previous relationship, the aforementioned ex / hometown metonym suggested that I could use this opportunity to date someone very different from him, perhaps another writer. This, of course, did not happen. (I think many people who write or make art nowadays and are also attracted to men feel similarly terrified of becoming entangled with men of very serious artistic and/or literary engagements, for good reason.) But now I’m inclined to want more. Maybe he’s right; I would love to see what it would look like and mean for someone to be so caught up in the intensity of feeling for me—rapture, anger, desire, somewhere in between—that, even at risk of ridicule or humiliation, they would still venture to bear their heart to the world.