"The Righteous Anger of Girls" - DH essay
Mar 20, 2015 2:54:28 GMT -5
Linda Rhaldeen, Cafe SalMONAlla, and 1 more like this
Post by Dante on Mar 20, 2015 2:54:28 GMT -5
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www.more.com/relationships/attitudes/righteous-anger-girls
The Righteous Anger of Girls
The best-selling author of the Lemony Snicket series on why girls are so furious so often—and where that rage goes when they grow up
by Daniel Handler
One million years ago, when I was maybe 17 and my sister was maybe 14, I was on a family vacation and saw something in a hotel room I never forgot. It was my sister, and she was very angry. It’s difficult to describe why it was such a sight to behold—she wasn’t trashing the room, or even yelling particularly loudly. I don’t remember what she was angry about, only that it was the sort of angry that turns into being angry about everything, and she was talking—not quite to me, although I was the only other person in the room—in a voice that rattled and heaved with fury. For years I thought of it as the angriest I’d ever seen anybody. I still do, in a way. But it wasn’t, really. You can find angrier people anywhere on the airwaves, or just by looking at neighboring cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and my life was not so serene and sheltered that I hadn’t seen the kind of anger that made me stare. It was just the first time I’d seen it in a girl.
I write fiction for a living, and just about all of my novels are based on the actions of women behaving fiercely. My first novel, The Basic Eight, is about a high school girl who, upon learning her crush on a boy is unrequited, bludgeons him to death with a croquet mallet (by the way, it’s a comedy). The books for which I’m known best, A Series of Unfortunate Events (published under the name Lemony Snicket), chronicle the travails of three orphans, the eldest of whom, Violet Baudelaire, is a gutsy maker of grappling hooks and battering rams. My new novel is called We Are Pirates and has as its heroine a young girl named Gwen who is furious at the world. Her anger drives her to mayhem—she gathers accomplices and steals a boat to commit acts of piracy in San Francisco Bay—and the book is dedicated to my sister. Gwen’s furious voyage is entirely fictional, but one of its inspirations was watching my sister become so enraged.
“I’m not sure this is going to work,” she says when I tell her I want to write an essay about her fuming adolescence, and ask if we could talk more about it. “You’re going to make me look like a serial killer.”
She’s laughing, though. We’re having cocktails at our usual place. We’ve always been pals. We swim together in San Francisco Bay—right where Gwen and her pirates set out for adventure—and hang out with our families, the kids sleeping downstairs while my sister and I howl with laughter on the sofa with our very patient spouses. You wouldn’t describe her now as angry. She has a solid marriage and raises two daughters with audacious cheer. While I spend my days making things up, she has a robust career in the nonprofit world, with a preternatural ability to raise money for noble causes.
“Getting angry,” she says. “Let’s see. Yes. I felt really angry in high school. Most of my anger was around feeling very stifled. Very restricted and exhausted about having to be this nice, friendly person. I felt like my faults were constantly being pointed out. I mean, if you asked anyone who knew me in high school, they’d probably say I totally had my salsa together. Which I did. In public. I mastered the art of being outgoing and generous. I had tons of friends and made time for lots of people. But I felt like I wasn’t given permission to be worn out, sad or angry. I was really pissed off about that.”
“Do you feel like boys had more leeway to be less OK?”
My sister gives me the look that indicates I’ll be paying for the next round, too. “They still do,” she says. “The world’s pretty hard on girls.”
I agree, and don’t we all? The world is pretty hard on girls. It’s one reason I put so many of them in books. The narrative is more interesting if there are more obstacles. A man walking alone down a road at night may or may not be a good story; turn him into a 12-year-old girl, and it’s already gripping. The vulnerability and the danger—the wrongness of a young girl wandering about—are a shortcut to creating a good read.
Still, what’s exciting on the page is dismaying in real life. If we put aside the mountain of statistics on gender inequality—and it’s Himalayan—it’s immediately clear that the world demands more of girls. I’ve noticed it all my life. A good girlfriend should do the laundry and maybe plan a dinner party when her guy’s parents come to town. A good boyfriend just has to not make passes at her friends. A good husband should have a job and not get violent; a good wife runs the whole damn show. The first time my wife and I took a walk with our infant son, someone called me a good father, because I was pushing the stroller. “I pushed that, my wife said to the passerby, gesturing to our sleeping son, Out. Of. My. Body.”
My wife sounded angry, and who can blame her? She’d been hearing this since she was pushed out herself. As a children’s author, I meet a lot of young people, all of them crackling with possibility. But with the girls, it’s more likely that they’re also hemmed in by a wariness—am I good enough? pretty enough? polite enough?—that I see far less of in boys. It’s enough to make you get angry, except if you’re female, that’s another thing you’re not really supposed to do. I visited a number of high schools on a book tour for my novel Why We Broke Up, which is told in the form of a long, furious letter from a high school girl to her ex-boyfriend, and many young women said how much they liked it that she was so upset. One girl told me about a workshop at her school that taught students to break up nicely. “Why should I be nice?” she asked me, in growly astonishment. “My boyfriend wasn’t nice to me.”
“Why should I be nice?” It has the ring of a rallying cry, something that could summon all girls to do a little swashbuckling. When I was writing We Are Pirates, a lyric by Emily Haines, the indomitable singer of Metric, kept running through my head: “Trying to fix it,” she sings, “when instead we should break it. . . before it breaks us.” Even without knowing what the “it” is, exactly—a personal problem? a political system?—I was reminded of how trapped my heroine feels, in a world asking her to calm down, and how powerfully she rages against it in her wild and bloodthirsty escape.
My sister’s escape was, of course, a lot less violent. “Swimming,” she says, although I would have guessed that part already, “and I also have so many memories of being in bed listening to my clock radio and feeling really soothed by it. Talk radio mostly.”
“Talk radio is soothing? That cracks me up. What kind?”
“Honestly, anything. Sports, love advice, weird politics. It was just comforting to hear adults chatting. Hearing about the larger world out there reminded me that there was much more to life than my math grades, my boy problems, family squabbles. And I started writing notes to myself called ‘When you’re an adult,’ which were full of advice.”
“For example?”
“A lot of it was about being a mom. ‘Talk to your daughter about her period.’ ‘Let your kids stay up late sometimes.’ I haven’t seen those notes in more than 20 years, but I still try to listen to that girl who felt so passionate about giving her future self some advice.”
“Did all that work? Did your anger vanish by the end of high school?”
“Hell no,” she says. “I continued to have a lot of anger and self-pity well into college. But, you know, eventually . . . ”
She trails off. Eventually. In writing my latest novel, I got to explore where anger goes sometimes and where it should go. In men I see the horrific results when it explodes out into the world, but more often I see the anger tamed, over time, into ambition and competition, two forces that usually get them ahead. In women it’s more complicated. We look at women who’ve channeled that energy similarly, who seem overly competitive or ambitious, and decide that somewhere there must be something wrong. Are they bad mothers? Bad wives? So girls’ anger too often goes elsewhere. In the case of my heroine, it leads to violent rebellion, but most women don’t end up pillaging boats. Where does the anger go? I ask my sister.
“As it turns out,” she says wryly, “sitting in a place of anger, or resentment, or self-pity, just isn’t effective. It can feel really good for a while, like trying on an old sweater. Cozy and familiar, but then all of a sudden you’re like, Eww, this sweater smells bad—get it off me!”
We laugh together, as always. The bartender is used to us. We tip big because we’ve been loud and because, you know, we’re nice. The answer to “Why should I be nice?” is that the world could stand more kindness and less anger. I’m glad my sister raises money and a family, as opposed to, say, terrorizing the high seas. Still, as I watch her leave to pick up her kids—the sitter is picking up mine—I wonder if asking women to be nicer is just another obstacle, something we should break before it breaks us.
A few days later, she emails me: “Three women I know are applying for this job I told them about. All three are asking lots of read-as-insecure questions (‘But do you think I’d be good at this?’). Meanwhile, this one guy I know who is applying just said, ‘Hell yeah, thanks so much, sending in my application right now.’ Very frustrating gender observation.”
“Does it make you angry?” I write back, reminding her of our conversation at the bar.
“Shut up,” she replies, and that might be the solution right there.
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www.more.com/relationships/attitudes/righteous-anger-girls
The Righteous Anger of Girls
The best-selling author of the Lemony Snicket series on why girls are so furious so often—and where that rage goes when they grow up
by Daniel Handler
One million years ago, when I was maybe 17 and my sister was maybe 14, I was on a family vacation and saw something in a hotel room I never forgot. It was my sister, and she was very angry. It’s difficult to describe why it was such a sight to behold—she wasn’t trashing the room, or even yelling particularly loudly. I don’t remember what she was angry about, only that it was the sort of angry that turns into being angry about everything, and she was talking—not quite to me, although I was the only other person in the room—in a voice that rattled and heaved with fury. For years I thought of it as the angriest I’d ever seen anybody. I still do, in a way. But it wasn’t, really. You can find angrier people anywhere on the airwaves, or just by looking at neighboring cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and my life was not so serene and sheltered that I hadn’t seen the kind of anger that made me stare. It was just the first time I’d seen it in a girl.
I write fiction for a living, and just about all of my novels are based on the actions of women behaving fiercely. My first novel, The Basic Eight, is about a high school girl who, upon learning her crush on a boy is unrequited, bludgeons him to death with a croquet mallet (by the way, it’s a comedy). The books for which I’m known best, A Series of Unfortunate Events (published under the name Lemony Snicket), chronicle the travails of three orphans, the eldest of whom, Violet Baudelaire, is a gutsy maker of grappling hooks and battering rams. My new novel is called We Are Pirates and has as its heroine a young girl named Gwen who is furious at the world. Her anger drives her to mayhem—she gathers accomplices and steals a boat to commit acts of piracy in San Francisco Bay—and the book is dedicated to my sister. Gwen’s furious voyage is entirely fictional, but one of its inspirations was watching my sister become so enraged.
“I’m not sure this is going to work,” she says when I tell her I want to write an essay about her fuming adolescence, and ask if we could talk more about it. “You’re going to make me look like a serial killer.”
She’s laughing, though. We’re having cocktails at our usual place. We’ve always been pals. We swim together in San Francisco Bay—right where Gwen and her pirates set out for adventure—and hang out with our families, the kids sleeping downstairs while my sister and I howl with laughter on the sofa with our very patient spouses. You wouldn’t describe her now as angry. She has a solid marriage and raises two daughters with audacious cheer. While I spend my days making things up, she has a robust career in the nonprofit world, with a preternatural ability to raise money for noble causes.
“Getting angry,” she says. “Let’s see. Yes. I felt really angry in high school. Most of my anger was around feeling very stifled. Very restricted and exhausted about having to be this nice, friendly person. I felt like my faults were constantly being pointed out. I mean, if you asked anyone who knew me in high school, they’d probably say I totally had my salsa together. Which I did. In public. I mastered the art of being outgoing and generous. I had tons of friends and made time for lots of people. But I felt like I wasn’t given permission to be worn out, sad or angry. I was really pissed off about that.”
“Do you feel like boys had more leeway to be less OK?”
My sister gives me the look that indicates I’ll be paying for the next round, too. “They still do,” she says. “The world’s pretty hard on girls.”
I agree, and don’t we all? The world is pretty hard on girls. It’s one reason I put so many of them in books. The narrative is more interesting if there are more obstacles. A man walking alone down a road at night may or may not be a good story; turn him into a 12-year-old girl, and it’s already gripping. The vulnerability and the danger—the wrongness of a young girl wandering about—are a shortcut to creating a good read.
Still, what’s exciting on the page is dismaying in real life. If we put aside the mountain of statistics on gender inequality—and it’s Himalayan—it’s immediately clear that the world demands more of girls. I’ve noticed it all my life. A good girlfriend should do the laundry and maybe plan a dinner party when her guy’s parents come to town. A good boyfriend just has to not make passes at her friends. A good husband should have a job and not get violent; a good wife runs the whole damn show. The first time my wife and I took a walk with our infant son, someone called me a good father, because I was pushing the stroller. “I pushed that, my wife said to the passerby, gesturing to our sleeping son, Out. Of. My. Body.”
My wife sounded angry, and who can blame her? She’d been hearing this since she was pushed out herself. As a children’s author, I meet a lot of young people, all of them crackling with possibility. But with the girls, it’s more likely that they’re also hemmed in by a wariness—am I good enough? pretty enough? polite enough?—that I see far less of in boys. It’s enough to make you get angry, except if you’re female, that’s another thing you’re not really supposed to do. I visited a number of high schools on a book tour for my novel Why We Broke Up, which is told in the form of a long, furious letter from a high school girl to her ex-boyfriend, and many young women said how much they liked it that she was so upset. One girl told me about a workshop at her school that taught students to break up nicely. “Why should I be nice?” she asked me, in growly astonishment. “My boyfriend wasn’t nice to me.”
“Why should I be nice?” It has the ring of a rallying cry, something that could summon all girls to do a little swashbuckling. When I was writing We Are Pirates, a lyric by Emily Haines, the indomitable singer of Metric, kept running through my head: “Trying to fix it,” she sings, “when instead we should break it. . . before it breaks us.” Even without knowing what the “it” is, exactly—a personal problem? a political system?—I was reminded of how trapped my heroine feels, in a world asking her to calm down, and how powerfully she rages against it in her wild and bloodthirsty escape.
My sister’s escape was, of course, a lot less violent. “Swimming,” she says, although I would have guessed that part already, “and I also have so many memories of being in bed listening to my clock radio and feeling really soothed by it. Talk radio mostly.”
“Talk radio is soothing? That cracks me up. What kind?”
“Honestly, anything. Sports, love advice, weird politics. It was just comforting to hear adults chatting. Hearing about the larger world out there reminded me that there was much more to life than my math grades, my boy problems, family squabbles. And I started writing notes to myself called ‘When you’re an adult,’ which were full of advice.”
“For example?”
“A lot of it was about being a mom. ‘Talk to your daughter about her period.’ ‘Let your kids stay up late sometimes.’ I haven’t seen those notes in more than 20 years, but I still try to listen to that girl who felt so passionate about giving her future self some advice.”
“Did all that work? Did your anger vanish by the end of high school?”
“Hell no,” she says. “I continued to have a lot of anger and self-pity well into college. But, you know, eventually . . . ”
She trails off. Eventually. In writing my latest novel, I got to explore where anger goes sometimes and where it should go. In men I see the horrific results when it explodes out into the world, but more often I see the anger tamed, over time, into ambition and competition, two forces that usually get them ahead. In women it’s more complicated. We look at women who’ve channeled that energy similarly, who seem overly competitive or ambitious, and decide that somewhere there must be something wrong. Are they bad mothers? Bad wives? So girls’ anger too often goes elsewhere. In the case of my heroine, it leads to violent rebellion, but most women don’t end up pillaging boats. Where does the anger go? I ask my sister.
“As it turns out,” she says wryly, “sitting in a place of anger, or resentment, or self-pity, just isn’t effective. It can feel really good for a while, like trying on an old sweater. Cozy and familiar, but then all of a sudden you’re like, Eww, this sweater smells bad—get it off me!”
We laugh together, as always. The bartender is used to us. We tip big because we’ve been loud and because, you know, we’re nice. The answer to “Why should I be nice?” is that the world could stand more kindness and less anger. I’m glad my sister raises money and a family, as opposed to, say, terrorizing the high seas. Still, as I watch her leave to pick up her kids—the sitter is picking up mine—I wonder if asking women to be nicer is just another obstacle, something we should break before it breaks us.
A few days later, she emails me: “Three women I know are applying for this job I told them about. All three are asking lots of read-as-insecure questions (‘But do you think I’d be good at this?’). Meanwhile, this one guy I know who is applying just said, ‘Hell yeah, thanks so much, sending in my application right now.’ Very frustrating gender observation.”
“Does it make you angry?” I write back, reminding her of our conversation at the bar.
“Shut up,” she replies, and that might be the solution right there.
---
