Hard to Love Read online

  to my friends and families

  CONTENTS

  Lean On: A Declaration of Dependence

  How to Be Single

  On Spinsters

  Pandora in Blue Jeans

  We Have Always Lived in the Vortex

  Dear Octopus

  Remembering How It Felt to Burn

  Coming Home to the Best Years of Our Lives

  Acquainted with Grief

  Hoarding

  Dear Flannery

  Tending My Oven

  Young Adult Cancer Story

  Everything You’ve Got

  Coasting

  On Sisters

  The Stars

  The Foundling Museum

  Waveforms and the Women’s March

  Moby-Dick

  Girls of a Golden Age

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  The times I didn’t write, maybe I was in love. Or beloved. Somebody was making me the object of love. It’s not bad. It’s short, but not bad.

  —TONI MORRISON

  Overbrim and overflow,

  If your own heart you would know;

  For the spirit born to bless

  Lives but in its own excess.

  —LAURENCE BINYON

  LEAN ON

  A Declaration of Dependence

  I like to lean. Too much of the time I have to hold myself up, so if an opportunity to swoon presents itself, I take it. When I’m getting a haircut and the lady asks me to lean back into the basin for a shampoo, I let myself melt. My muscles go slack, my eyes fall shut, and there is nothing holding me except gravity and the chair and the water and her hands on my head. I feel my tears of bliss slide into the suds.

  In photos I am often leaning. When I’m not resting my head on someone’s shoulder, I am hugging a column in a haunted castle in Great Barrington, or bracing myself against a big block of basalt on a pedestal in a Barcelona park. At home alone I improvise with bookshelves and doorjambs, but sometimes I need to lean on something alive. Seeking support on a stormy night, I run out into the rain and lean against the dogwood tree in front of my house until the wet bark soaks through my coat. The world is my trellis.

  Ten years ago I bought a Gordon Parks print of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward leaning against each other by lamplight on a big brass bed. They are sitting side by side, eyes closed, serene. He is leaning more heavily, his body slanted into hers, his head on her shoulder. She is resting more gently, her cheek against the top of his head. Her face is half-illuminated, half-eclipsed. They seem solemn and private and young. He is quiet in her shadow.

  I hung the photograph over my bed. Next to it I tacked another 1950s Paul and Joanne picture I tore out of a book. They are leaning on a bed again, and he is still slumped against her shoulder, but this time the lean seems more in league with an audience. They are both meeting the photographer’s gaze and smiling small smiles. Her eyebrows are slightly raised; she might be sly or smug. She is holding a cup of tea in one hand, and his head, proprietarily, with the other. He is supine and sated and holding a glass of wine.

  Paul and Joanne liked to lean for the camera. For their 1968 LIFE cover promoting Rachel, Rachel (she starred, he directed), they are layered on wall-to-wall carpet; she is reclining in the foreground, and he is her blue-eyed backrest. In yet another famous photo from an earlier era (Joanne is still in gingham, not yet in Pucci), they are leaning back to back with their shoulders against each other, their mutual pressure holding each other up, with an isosceles triangle of space between them, and a sturdy baseline of brick patio beneath them.

  I like to fall asleep under images of leaning every night, and wake up beneath them every day.

  I like to believe that leaning is love.

  I was raised to believe in the romance of leaning. My parents turned the tale of how they met into a bedtime story, and they told it to us until we had it memorized. My dad’s version was simple and sunny: My mom showed up at the commune where he was living, a vision of loveliness in green corduroy pants, and it was love at first sight. My mom’s version was heavier. She was a moody adolescent, with formless feelings that often overwhelmed her and a future that loomed without a shape. She was nineteen when she met my dad, and he seemed youthfully exuberant and dependably good: someone she could structure her life around. They married within a few months.

  What happened ever after was not part of the story they told me and my siblings, but we could see it playing out before us as the years went by. My mom could depend on my dad to work hard, hammering nails and hauling two-by-fours in all kinds of weather, slowly and quickly wrecking his body to try to pay the bills. My dad could depend on my mom to stay in the marriage and to keep six kids fed, clothed, washed, wrangled, read to, and rested, even when he broke his back on the job site falling from a high, rain-slicked beam onto the concrete foundation and was immobilized for six months; even when he was unemployed for a year and a half and people from church who knew we were broke were delivering food to our door; even when he became almost catatonic with depression for years, no longer recognizable as the man she had married.

  I was formed by this story, both as an aspiration and as a cautionary tale, and in my own youthful romances I leaned heavily. I was moody like my mom, plagued by sudden spells of panic, and depressed like my dad, susceptible to an undertow of doom, so I spent most of my twenties in long-term relationships with men who seemed so even-keeled that they couldn’t be capsized—so sunny and strong that they couldn’t possibly lapse into sadness for long.

  My college boyfriend was a safe person to lean on. He had a saintly serenity that came from his mystical and untroubled religious faith; the years he’d spent as the precociously responsible son of an intermittently single mother; the hours he spent fishing, mountain biking, and stargazing in the countryside; and his nightly dose of marijuana. He was warm to the core, and utterly unfazed by my dependence on him. It might even have reassured him.

  My grad school boyfriend was a much more dangerous person for a leaner to date. He was attracted to vulnerable women, but he disapproved of dependency. When I was in a writing vortex he would bring me sandwiches and coffee and give me expert editorial advice, and when I was shaking with fear and dark thoughts I couldn’t name, he would hold me until his warmth and weight and smell and steady breathing soothed me. But he also told me, not as a threat but as a simple statement of fact (but of course it felt like a threat, and it was a threat), that he needed to know that any woman he was with would be fine and functional either with or without him. He did not sign up for panic attacks and yawning existential dread. If I wanted to be with him for the long haul, I would have to get it together.

  And so I mostly did. For years I lived with the knowledge that if I ceased to be a successful, self-motivated, ambitious, size-six Ivy League blonde, I would lose love. And I knew I couldn’t live without love, so I stayed as successful and self-motivated and ambitious and size-six and Ivy League and blonde as I could. I formed friendships to tide me over between our times together. I learned to self-soothe. I tried to quell myself.

  The paradox was that my newfound self-reliance was a symptom of my utter reliance on him. I depended on his demand that I not depend. I leaned on not leaning on him.

  The irony was he left me anyway.

  I blamed our breakup on Ralph Waldo Emerson. Almost the whole time we were dating, my grad school boyfriend was writing his dissertation on Emerson, who is best known as the author of “Self-Reliance”—the ultimate anti-leaning manifesto. (After we broke up I wrote my dissertation on feelings.) “Self-Reliance” is a soaring sermonic essay that has so permeated American popular consciousness that it reads at times like clusters of vaguely libertarian coffee-mug quotes:

&
nbsp; Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

  Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

  Insist on yourself; never imitate.

  My friend Mary tells me that she often sees Emerson name-checked on men’s dating profiles along with Bukowski and David Foster Wallace as part of a macho literary trifecta.

  The self-reliant man, as Emerson describes him, seems like he would make for a comically terrible boyfriend, simultaneously entitled, dismissive, and hard to get. He has “the nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one”:

  independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you.

  We know this man. He is Rhett Butler, Mr. Big, Wyatt Earp, Donald Trump. (Or rather: He is the person Donald Trump is trying to seem to be.) He’s a high plains drifter; a gambler and a ghoster. He’s a lone cowboy judging the world from under the brim of his hat. My own grad student version was deceptively mild-mannered and soft-spoken and wore button-downs and khakis, and I courted him like crazy.

  I courted him both despite and because of the fact that I’ve always fiercely disapproved of Emerson’s version of self-reliance, in practice and on principle. Emerson believes in self-made men, but I experience myself as someone formed and sustained by others’ love and patience, by student loans and stipends, by the kindness of strangers. Emerson thinks of people as independent individuals, like an orderly orchard of freestanding trees, but I see them as an overgrown tangle of undergrowth, mulch, mushrooms, and moss, or as an indivisible ocean of brinedrops. I believe we are all obviously a part of one another, elements of one ecosystem, members of one body, all of us at the mercy of capitalism, weather, genes, and fate. Independence, to me, is nothing but a dangerous delusion. So I pushed back. And the more my craving to lean was thwarted, the more I defended my desire to depend, maybe even my right to depend. (Hence the shout-out in my ex’s book acknowledgments: “Thanks to Briallen Hopper for her skepticism about Emersonian self-fashioning.”)

  What I didn’t fully understand at the time is that maybe my swooning and skepticism were as necessary to my ex as his sunny sturdiness was to me. Because classic American self-reliance is often expressed as a defensive response to a gendered set of threats. As Emerson puts it: “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” And it’s impossible to ignore that these threats are often figured as feminine. The essay’s epigraph is a poem calling for a baby boy to be cast out into the wild so he can be nursed by a wolf instead of a woman, and grow up to be tough instead of weak. The disapproval of an educated consensus is described as a kind of “feminine rage” to be scorned; an outmoded theory is a “harlot” to be fled from. “Self-Reliance” is a man’s world, but it requires many metaphorical women in the wings acting like milky, emotional, seductive sirens. And that was a role that my twenty-something self felt born to play, no matter how shameful it might be.

  Because for Emerson, the primary emotional threat posed by dependence is shame. There’s shame in agreeing with what someone else says instead of being the person to say it first (i.e., being “forced to take with shame our own opinion from another”). There’s shame in being an object of empathy. (Emerson believes the person we feel sorry for should be “ashamed of our compassion.”) And there’s shame in capitulating to requests for help (“Though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold”).

  As it happens, none of the supposedly shameful things Emerson mentions has ever made me feel ashamed. Unlike Emerson, I love it when someone says what I’ve been thinking; it makes me feel less alone. I crave commiseration—I often sigh melodramatically, hoping my roommates will hear and ask what’s wrong so I can complain at ludicrous length. I am endlessly susceptible to GoFundMes and nonprofit fundraising appeals, and I try to remember to carry cash for panhandlers. (We are all members of one body; we are all at the mercy of fate.)

  Still, as the adoring girlfriend of an aspiring Emersonian, I found myself tangled up in shame. My shame came not from the consciousness of my utter dependence but from my perverse attraction to a man who represented every clichéd, obvious, all-American thing I didn’t want to want: unshakable entitlement, supreme self-satisfaction, and the seemingly effortless ability to wake up cheerful every day and be confident and productive and tall and Southern Californian and win prizes and eat vegetables and go to the gym like clockwork. It was as though through loving him I was outsourcing my craving for independent individualism and discernible muscle definition. I wanted white male privilege by association. I was frankly in love with it. It wasn’t pretty. And my resulting shame spirals were simultaneously unsustainable and hot.

  Because shame is hot. It’s a flush, a burning, a fire glowing behind your ears and between your legs and underneath your toes. I was ashamed that I needed him emotionally and existentially in ways he didn’t seem to need me. I was ashamed of my desire to hitch my wagon to his star so he could tug us both to overeducated upper-middle-class security and possibly the New York Times Weddings section. And I was ashamed of my willingness to settle for a love life in which my desire to twine like a vine was constantly thwarted by a man who was always carefully disentangling himself from my tendrils and tentacles.

  (At one point, years before we broke up, he Microsoft Painted an ostensibly affectionate cartoon of me as a blonde octopus in bright red lipstick, eager to surround him with all my arms, as he wielded a mortar trowel and built a brick wall to keep me away. The picture was doom in pixels—there was no recovering from it—but it was also the way we stayed together so long: turning our difficult love into a cutting joke. Meanwhile, frustrated by his unassailable self-sufficiency, which felt like a challenge I couldn’t refuse, I called him undentable; the Teflon Boyfriend; the Unmoved Mover. He would chuckle ruefully, and then open his arms and give me another crack at him.)

  Toward the end of “Self-Reliance,” Emerson writes admiringly about how the typical Maori man (or “naked New Zealander”) is, unlike effete white Americans, immune to wounds: “If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.”

  This is obviously a convenient belief for a settler colonial to have, since it makes any amount of white violence against brown people seem as harmless as slicing tar. It’s also a vision of self-reliant masculinity that is inhuman, even monstrous. Emerson idealizes beings who are so independent that they can survive all-out assault without any need for succor, sympathy, or balm.

  In his book, amidst hundreds of pages of praise, my ex briefly describes the most extreme form of Emersonian self-reliance as “an almost grotesque invulnerability.” When I read that fleeting phrase years later I saw a trace of my own skeptical perspective; a slight scar I had left on his invulnerable pitch-perfect mind.

  Emerson wants men to know that “they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves.” I was a leaning willow, and when my man could and did detach himself from me, I learned that leaning willows, unlike mighty oaks, are built to withstand quakes and storms. They can bend almost to the ground without breaking.

  At first I didn’t know I wasn’t broken. When I found myself abruptly single after six serially monogamous years, I thought I was thrown back on myself, a vine without a trellis. I made a long and ridiculous list of 102 things I thought I’d lost forever, including meaning, hope, sanity, security, snowball fights, the Sunday New York Times, consolation, ecstasy, peace, pleasure, ritual and tradition, teasing, making di
nner, quotidian contentment, taking care of someone, being taken care of, leaning on someone, and the Pacific Ocean. (My ex and I had driven up and down the Pacific Coast Highway together, and when I divided up our memories in my mind, he got everything.) I honestly believed that as far as I was concerned, all joy in life was gone, and the ocean bed was dry.

  I had come to a pivot point: a moment when I could have turned in desperation to the next plausible straight man to lean on, or, failing that, tried to reinvent myself as a self-reliant, independent Emersonian cowgirl. In the end I did neither: I was too wary to fall back into love and too much of a leaner not to lean. But I wasn’t yet sure what a third option would be, and in the meantime I kept sinking deeper into shame.

  Once, as an antidote to a shame spiral of her own, Joan Didion wrote herself a modern woman’s version of “Self-Reliance” called “On Self-Respect.” It’s an essay so consummately cool that, even though I’m hopelessly wedded to dependence, I’m still sometimes tempted to dip it in ice water and drape it across my brow whenever the shame fever starts to rise. It represents a path not taken; a way I occasionally imagine my life could have gone had I been constructed with fewer tendrils and a bit more fiber.

  Like me, Didion was once a young woman reeling from rejection, but she’d been rejected by Phi Beta Kappa, not by a man in khakis. In the wake of this rebuff, which shattered her belief that her various merits “automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honour, and the love of a good man,” she rebuilt her system of values. Instead of depending on honor societies and external accolades for her worth, she decided to depend on herself. “Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best,” she writes, “rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect.”

  It’s hard for me to imagine a less self-sufficient scenario than an attempted illicit border crossing—one is dependent first of all on someone to borrow credentials from, and then on the unpredictable power of border officials. But for Didion, there is something liberating about the idea of moving through the world without worrying about stamps of approval. “People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character,” she declares. Character, for Didion, is “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life.” The essay is written in the clear, uncompromising voice of a woman who leans against yellow Stingrays and Malibu balconies and nothing else.