Nonfiction

Gore’s life is evidence that there is no conventional script for happiness in American womanhood. The daughter of hippie parents, she skipped college and traveled around the world in her late teens, until she became pregnant at 19. More than a dozen years later, Gore is the founder of the award-winning literary Web site Hip Mama, the author of six nonfiction books, and a mother of two. Salon spoke to her from her house in Portland, Ore., about feminism, the weird powers of positive thinking and the joys of doing it all imperfectly.

How do you think feminism became the fall girl for women’s unhappiness?

People said, OK, if women are less happy than they were 40 years ago –  which, in itself, would be very hard to measure — then they thought, Well, what happened 40 years ago? Oh yeah — feminism! So therefore feminism failed! It’s this crazy talk because the first rule of research is not to confuse correlation with causality. What else has happened in the past 40 years? Well, hey, maybe women have replaced the time we used to spend talking with friends with TV watching. When you study postpartum depression, there is a very clear understanding that in communities where you see more support, there is less depression. How come nobody said, “Oh, women are unhappy because of TV!” It’s at least equally plausible.

Some commentators have blamed women’s alleged unhappiness on unrealistic expectations. Is there any truth to the idea, or is it just an anti-feminist cop-out?

When Marion Milner’s book “A Life of One’s Own” came out in the ’30s, reviewers said, “Oh, the reason this woman is unhappy is that she wants too much.” It’s crazy, especially in American culture, to say something like that, because American culture is built on this notion of striving. I do think it’s pretty rich to then turn around and say, “Oh, ladies. It’s back to the ironing board for you.”

But I think there is a kind of depression that is more available to people with more privilege, whether that is economic privilege or feeling fully empowered, because then it really is just down to you. You can’t say, “Oh, if only I had gone to college …” You think: “Shit! I did go to college!” I do think there is a sort of existential sense of failure that is more available if you’ve had every opportunity.

Some people tend to thing of happiness as a luxury item, the kind of thing you only get to start worrying about once your basic needs are met.

There’s been a lot of criticism of American positive psychology, because that has been the premise: When we’re not at war, when we have our basic needs taken care of, then we start looking at what makes us thrive — which is presumably why [positive psychology] has focused so much on men, elite men, people who feel like they have maximum control over their lives. But Buddha taught us that life is suffering. You’re not going to get rid of that. So then is false cheerfulness the only thing left to us? Do we have to pretend that everything is hunky-dory and then we can look at what’s going to make us happy?

It’s so interesting, even right now, that some of the most powerful images coming from the earthquake in Haiti are images of joy. Some of the most powerful things I’ve seen on TV are of people singing. And it’s not a joy based in denial. It’s like, “Oh, this is it. This ability to rejoice in the face of suffering.”

One of the studies you bring up in your book found that women are both happier and sadder than men. How might that connect to this idea of happiness as rooted in finding solace in conflicting emotions and circumstances?

For my research for this book, I didn’t talk to a lot of men, so comparative things became sort of hard to wrap my mind around. In our cultural history, all emotions have been more culturally acceptable to women. There’s this icky side to that, where it’s been our job to be like, “Eek! A mouse!” or to really wail at the funeral, or just do most of the emotional work for the family. But then there’s the upside of that, which is that there has been more openness for women to express their emotions. You could say maybe that is a biological thing, but I have no opinion either way on that. I don’t really care whether it’s my conditioning or whether it’s my PMS: It’s still real.

Both you and Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of “Eat, Pray, Love,”  write about happiness as being an “act of will” — something you can strive for. Do you think that might reflect a kind of post-feminist ethos, i.e., you deserve things more when you work for them? Is it peculiarly American? Or is it more universal?

The first person who ever told me that happiness was work was this manic-depressive artist I knew when I was in my 20s. I was like, What are you talking about? Happiness just happens. That’s even the root of that word. How could it be work? We tend to think the same thing about love — it shouldn’t be work; it just happens. But it makes sense if we reframe what work is — that work is not necessarily toil, but attention and consciousness. I’m sure that this notion is contemporary in a way, especially from a feminist point of view. But it’s been kicking around for awhile. Certainly a goal of many spiritual traditions is how you can be in control of your own emotional reality despite what happens. Viktor Frankl, the author of “Man’s Search for Meaning,” talks about that a lot. In the middle of a concentration camp, amid all that suffering, what do you have control over? You have control over your emotional steadiness.

You point out that one of the downsides to American positive thinking is that it can lead to a kind of victim-blaming that presumes people may be to blame for their own bad fortune. So if you live in the projects, you know, you must not be visualizing well enough, whereas those people living on the hill are actually better people. How do you reconcile that with the idea that you can work toward your own happiness?

They are kind of opposite philosophical explanations. That whole you-create-your-own-reality thing is so complicated. In any circumstance, can you be open to all emotions, and be emotionally steady, to allow yourself to be devastated by the violence of life and the suffering of life? That’s control over your own emotional steadiness, not “I visualized a big house, and I got it!” That’s magical thinking in this cuckoo way. But there’s some truth to the idea that, say, if I can imagine myself going to college, I may be more likely to go. But all these ideas get oversimplified.

I get a strong sense in the last part of your book that you seem to believe one way to make oneself happy is to be a rebel — to reject the script, whether it’s the Republican script, the traditional mother script, the feminist script. Is that true?

It is. And it speaks to this question of perfectionism. Somehow that rebellious spirit is the same spirit that feels like it’s OK if there’s mud on our pants. There’s something to just not doing what you’re told that allows for a little more self-forgiveness that seems to be required if you are not just going to have a total anxiety attack every day.

Part of the reason these things come together in a really complicated way for some women may be because you have these greater expectations, and yet we are still stuck with this kind of 1950s-style perfectionism. So yes, I’ve written six books and I’m raising two kids and I have this cute little house and yet I can still say, “My house is a mess! My kids aren’t doing well in school! I have failed!” if I want to set myself up like that. I mean, that’s a setup, right?

Gaby Rodriguez, the author of the memoir “The Pregnancy Project,” soon to be a Lifetime movie of the same name, lives in Toppenish, Wash., population 9,000, 75 percent Latino, with a casino and a discount movie theater where second-run movies cost $3; where 98 percent of the students at her high school qualify for free lunch and teens compete with their parents for jobs at Dairy Queen and Taco Bell, and in migrant labor.

When Eleanor announces she is pregnant at 16, it is taken for granted that “her future” can’t include a child until well after college and a suitable marriage. When Gaby, the youngest daughter of a woman who has seven children between the ages of 14 and 35, and 31 grandchildren by the time Gaby is in her early teens, does the same, it is greeted as the expected outcome for a girl like her.

Abortion isn’t an option considered by either girl: “[M]y parents would more likely kill me if I had an abortion than if I were just pregnant, because that’s very against their religion,” says Eleanor (emphasis mine). Gaby, who describes herself as “very pro-life” says she “really had no idea what Planned Parenthood did” until she walks into their office at 16; after reading their literature, she decides it is “designed to make girls feel okay about getting abortions.” But while Eleanor’s pregnancy is real, Gaby’s is not: As part of her senior project, she decided to fake a pregnancy, with the help of her boyfriend, Jorge, her mother, the school superintendent, and a belly sculpted from clay and padded with fabric.

Each girl faces both stereotypes and discrimination: some quite similar, others inflected by each girl’s very different class and cultural expectations. Although Eleanor’s parents work with African AIDS orphans as their life’s work, they see their daughter’s pregnancy as shameful. Eleanor and Lam marry, are given summer jobs at the camp his parents run to force obese children to lose weight, and are paid with lodging in a “one-room cabin heated with wood, with the kitchen up the hill in the main house, and the bathroom a hornet-infested latrine six cabins away” — not exactly comfortable for a pregnant woman who visits the latrine several times a night. As part of the deal, Eleanor has to “pretend I’m twenty (yeah, lying — what a great example), and we have to be married and pretend the marriage came before the baby, so it doesn’t look like I got knocked up by accident or anything.” Another counselor, Jen, mocks her for her perceived stupidity about birth control and alleged sluttiness — though she’s got where she is with one partner and a broken condom — and informs her, “If I had a baby, my dreams would just go down the toilet.”

Although Eleanor herself is seen as damaged goods, her baby — assumed to be that much-sought-after commodity, a white, healthy infant  — is much in demand. Lam’s parents, who lost a child in infancy, want to raise the child as their own; her parents would like her to give the baby to “perfectly prim, older sister, Sarah — just hand it over like a sack of potatoes.” After all, says Sarah, “We’re young and we live in a beautiful home.”

Nolan ends her novel with a surprising but very satisfying and believable twist that profoundly underscores the idea that demanding “perfection” in parents or children can be its own fatal flaw, and that sometimes passion, determination and a woman’s connection to her own child can mean more than a perfectly groomed nursery.

While many of Gaby Rodriguez’s friends and family decide her teenage pregnancy is unremarkable — “they’re used to teen moms,” says one classmate to her best friend — it is likewise assumed that she has “ruined her life.” Gaby points out, “Pregnant or not, I was still in school and getting great grades. I was in the top 5 percent of my class, with a 3.8 grade point average. With everything they knew about me, why would they be so quick to write me off as another statistic?… Didn’t they believe in me enough to know that, even if I were pregnant, I’d still find a way to go to college and achieve my dreams for me and my baby?”

Although young mothers are statistically less likely to finish high school and go to college, it may be comparable, she says, to the four-minute mile, which was once thought to be an impossible goal for a runner. But within three years after the first runner came in at four minutes, 16 others did the same. Why not see the academic plans of women like, say, President Obama’s mother — who earned a doctorate and raised two children, one of whom became president — as “the four-minute mile of teen pregnancy”?

Gaby removes her fake stomach at an assembly in front of all her classmates and a single local reporter. By the next morning, her story has spread across the wires, and she’s fielding competing offers from “Good Morning America” and the “Today” show, culminating in a contract for said Lifetime movie and this very memoir, helped along by credited ghostwriter Jenna Glatzer. At the assembly, she writes, there were “about seven girls” who were actually pregnant. “I hoped they would know I wasn’t trying to embarrass them or betray their trust,” she writes, “but that I was honestly trying to give them a voice.”

Gaby Rodriguez is sharp and compassionate; no one could credibly accuse her of naiveté or the desire to exploit teen parents, with whom she is intimately familiar through her family and community. But one can’t help but wonder why outsiders saw her — a teen who could have been pregnant but ultimately was not — as such an extraordinary mouthpiece for understanding teen mothers. Might it have more than a little to do with exactly the kind of prejudice she described in her book? No one was clamoring to interview her when she was one of eight presumed teen mothers at the school. Why did it take revealing she was not a teen mother for her to gain the authority to “give a voice” to those who were?

“The Pregnancy Project,” in this light, brings to mind “Black Like Me,” the 1961 book by John Griffin, a white man who impersonated a black man in order to describe the prejudice he encountered in the South. In part, the revelation comes from seeing how the exact same person can be treated so differently, depending on the circumstances. But at the time, Griffin surely benefited in part from white readers who conferred more authority on a white author. One can’t help but wonder if Rodriguez similarly gained moral authority to talk about a group of women who experience prejudice once it was established she was not a member of the group. In her book, she quotes a teen mother on a message board who writes: “When you get pregnant as a teenager, a lot of people give up on you and treat you like garbage, no matter how smart or nice or hard-working you were before. Nobody wants to ‘encourage teen pregnancy’ so they feel it’s their duty to make you suffer.” That writer remains anonymous.