I journeyed to Alawadi’s adopted hometown of El Cajon in Southern California to find out more about her death. El Cajon is a microcosm of Iraq, but an Iraq that no longer exists. More than 40,000 Iraqis are struggling to build a new life there, having fled persecution in their homeland. One local described to me a community where “There’s Chaldeans, Yazidis, Mandaeans. There’s Shi’a, Sunni, Kurds. There’s Assyrian and Armenian.”

The first wave of immigration came in the late 1970s on the eve of the devastating Iran-Iraq War. Others, including Alawadi and her family, fled after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, mainly Shi’a who unsuccessfully tried to overthrow a wounded Saddam Hussein at the urging of the senior Bush administration. The third wave was courtesy of the junior Bush’s 2003 invasion, which spawned Islamist militias that have decimated Iraq’s Chaldean Christians, Mandaeans (followers of John the Baptist) and Yazidis (a 4,000-year-old syncretic religion). Out of the millions of Iraqi refugees from the most recent U.S. war, 59,000 have landed on American soil.

Many have found their way to El Cajon. They tell of harrowing escapes from kidnappings, bombings and death squads, years in refugee camps and life savings spent to hopscotch from country to country. Recent arrivals come bearing deep traumas and have landed in a depressed economy where they often sink into joblessness, squalor and depression. They have also discovered not everyone is welcoming.

“There is a hate crime problem in El Cajon,” says Basma Coda, an Iraqi-American who works at the Chaldean-Middle Eastern Social Services. “We have documented six physical attacks since 2007 in which Iraqi refugees were beat up and had broken bones. All had to go the hospital. They were all over 50, and one was a 75-year-old man with Parkinson’s disease.” (The El Cajon police department did not return calls about the alleged crimes.)

“There are a lot of anti-Islamic groups and know-nothings here,” says California State University professor Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism in San Bernardino. Nonetheless, he and other hate-crime monitors are skeptical of some of the alleged details of Alawadi’s death. “Why are the police so quick to say it is an isolated incident? That suggests to me they are looking at other motives. There is the possibility this could be some sort of personal attack or revenge attack.” Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups nationwide, says that when he first heard about the threatening notes, “I raised an eyebrow. It’s too perfect. It’s highly unusual to have notes that spell out the motive on paper.” As for the crime itself, Potok says, “It is quite unusual to invade someone’s home, especially a woman, and violently beat her to death in the dining room.”

Indeed, in the days after her death several revelations called the hate-crime allegation into question. On April 4, an affidavit for a search warrant about the murder was “accidentally released,” according to the New York Times. The San Diego Union-Tribune, which first received the document, claimed it shows a “family in turmoil and cast doubt on the likelihood that her slaying was a hate crime.” Alawadi was said to be planning on leaving her husband, based on blank divorce papers found in her vehicle. Last November, police investigating reports of two people possibly having sex in a car found Fatima with a 21-year-old man. After her mother was called to pick her up, Fatima allegedly jumped out of the moving car at 35 mph. While being treated at a hospital for her injuries the court records state, “Police were informed by paramedics and hospital staff that Fatima Alhimidi said she was being forced to marry her cousin and did not want to do so she jumped out of the vehicle.”

The document also mentions “a neighbor reported seeing a skinny dark-skinned male running west from the area of Alawadi’s house” on the morning of the murder. According to the affidavit, as of March 27, the police had not confirmed the whereabouts of Kassim Alhimidi, Alawadi’s husband, at the time of the murder. And curiously, “a handwritten note was located at the scene that the family denied seeing before.”

Yet some in the community are still skeptical because there is no suspect, motive or murder weapon. Hanif Mohebi, director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says, “There are definitely questions that are brought up by the article, but we should not jump to a conclusion unless there is a real fact provided. Our community is not immune to these issues.”

Some observers worry that the new information in the Alawadi case will be misused. Hanif Mohebi says, “From the beginning we were very cautious about the murder because we are all human beings, and this could go any way. The Islamophobes will exploit this. If there is something that advances their agenda, they will most definitely use it.” Right on cue, Geller and Spencer began their postulations about “honor killings.”

Potok also stresses that, whoever murdered Alawadi, the rise in Islamophobia is genuine. The Southern Poverty Law Center has tracked a 200 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate groups nationwide from 10 such groups in 2010 to 30 in 2011. Potok attributes the spread to “the so-called Ground Zero Mosque controversy in 2010 that was really ginned up by opportunistic activists and politicians … This is a classic case of words having consequences.”

The rumors of notes, in particular, have unsettled Iraqi immigrants to El Cajon. The notes have hurled them back to wartime horrors they seem unable to escape. After the United States occupied Iraq, a favored tactic of extremist militias was to deliver a note to intended victims warning them to leave or be killed. Families would receive letters because a child or husband was collaborating with U.S. forces, or perhaps they were the wrong ethnicity or religion in the wrong part of town. Religious minorities were sometimes given the “option” of converting to Islam.

Basma Coda says, “We have threatening notes in our office that people brought from Iraq.” The notes say things like, “You are an infidel. You are a sinner. You deserve to die. If you don’t leave by a certain time, you and children will die.” Often they would be given a specific day or time to leave. Coda says, “The Iraqi refugees in El Cajon every day they live their fear. They live their trauma. The future is unknown for these refugees.” She says her social service organization is trying to help them, “but one incident like Alawadi’s murder takes them back to the trauma they experienced.”

On March 30, I attended an outdoor prayer service and candlelight vigil for Alawadi. I met one of her neighbors from Iraq. Abbas Almeali, 42, clad in traditional Iraqi garb and headdress, said he knew Shaima and her family from Samawa, the closest city in southern Iraq to the Saudi Arabian border. He fled in March 1991 after the revolt failed, but “was proud to be part of the uprising.” He said Alawadi’s father was tortured by Saddam Hussein’s regime and her uncle was hung during the uprising. “She was a nice girl, she had no problems with anyone,” Almaeli said.

Kamyar Hedayat, a medical doctor of Iranian heritage, spoke at the vigil. Hedayat said as he has practiced critical care for children, “I’ve watched children die, and I know how death affects families.” Hedayat said, “It is ironic that a woman who escaped the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein and the bombs of George Bush, Sr., lost her life in San Diego seeking safety and civility.”

Michelle Fawcett contributed to this report.

Much of the peculiar magic in “Damsels in Distress” comes from Gerwig, who gives a powerful and complicated performance as a young woman who’s difficult to like or to trust, but who goes through a crisis and ultimately wins our admiration. (Violet is a companion in spirit to Chloë Sevigny’s gawky heroine in “Disco.”) But Gerwig’s not alone in this potent ensemble piece. Violet comes with two sidekicks: the arch, intelligent and beautiful Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke), and the confident, poised and sublimely stupid Heather (Carrie MacLemore). This trio is devoted to ridding the fictional but ancient Seven Oaks University — an Ivy-esque liberal arts college somewhere on the Eastern seaboard — of the lingering vestiges of male privilege, especially as manifested in poor hygiene and body odor. During freshman orientation, they seize upon a doe-eyed new arrival named Lily (Analeigh Tipton) as a fresh recruit to their cause. As Violet explains, these girls only date guys they think are far below their own level, “in that sympathetic zone of being not attractive and not smart,” as part of a selfless effort to civilize them. It’s a classic, rather broad war-of-the-sexes setup, with the women at the center — but that tells you almost nothing about where this digressive, whimsical, silly and ridiculously fun movie is going.

When the sneering, leather-jacketed editor of the Seven Oaks daily newspaper accuses Violet of running a campus suicide-prevention center whose only therapy is tap-dance numbers, she’s hurt and angry. “We’re using the whole range of musical dance numbers which over many years have proven themselves effective therapies for the suicidal and hopelessly depressed,” she retorts. That’s complete nonsense, I guess, but it’s the kind of nonsense that also encompasses an insight into the human condition. Violet’s career ambition, after all, is not to work in a white-shoe law firm or a Wall Street investment bank or any of the other upper-crust fields that Seven Oaks graduates can reliably be expected to penetrate. As she tells her roommates, she wants to do something that will really change the course of human history: start a new dance craze. To many of us in this day and age, her quest will seem nobler by far.

So it is that “Damsels in Distress,” which starts out as a mean-girls campus farce mixed with a few bits of “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” concludes with a hilarious music video for Violet’s nonexistent and extremely complicated new dance, the Sambola. (I believe the name may carry a permanent exclamation mark: the Sambola!) Along the way there’s a full menu of ridiculous delights that Stillman’s fans will recognize, especially the odd combination of chatty, overeducated dialogue, pointed social and sexual satire, and unadulterated absurdity. Thanks to Lily’s seductive grad-student boyfriend (Hugo Becker, of “Gossip Girl”), we learn about the unconventional erotic practices of the Cathar religion, still carried on in secret by adherents today. (There’s at least a little historical basis for that one, surprisingly.) We meet a frat boy so dumb he doesn’t know his colors — no, he’s not colorblind; he just doesn’t know which one is which — and a transfer student so naive she has never seen an artichoke or tasted balsamic vinegar.

A lot of the funniest moments in “Damsels in Distress” are things that cannot adequately be described, such as the way Echikunwoke, playing Violet’s meanest and most intelligent lieutenant, repeatedly describes a guy she doesn’t trust, in her Anglo-Nigerian accent, as a “playboy-operaTOR type.” Or the wonderful scene in which that very guy, whose identity and status are in themselves a comic plot point (he’s played by Adam Brody), explains to Violet his thesis on the decline of decadence and the downfall of homosexuality. Once upon a time, he says, being gay was “something refined, hidden, sublimated,” that involved reaching for the heights of artistic expression, whereas now it’s about muscular morons in T-shirts.

It’s both a relief and a delight to discover that Stillman — an Oscar nominee for his first script, “Metropolitan,” way back in 1991 — remains one of the funniest writers in captivity. Why hasn’t he made a movie in so long? Well, it’s a long story, but as in most such cases it seems to boil down to not enough money and too much stupidity. (Lena Dunham, the star and director of “Tiny Furniture” and creator of the new cable series “Girls,” apparently played an instrumental role in helping Stillman finally push this one through.) As the downfall-of-homosexuality scene demonstrates, Stillman is sometimes simply too damn smart for his own good. You can’t always tell at whom he’s poking fun, or why, and it becomes unfortunately easy to typecast him as the WASP answer to Woody Allen and conclude that his movies are insufferably irritating documents of privilege. He himself is aware of that possibility the whole time, and bastes his entire worldview in a rueful, ironic-romantic glaze.

Indeed, the entire effect of “Damsels in Distress” is also something that can’t adequately be described. This movie defies all current conventions about how movies are supposed to be made: It’s too talky, too smart (when it’s not being willfully dumb), too long and 100 percent chaste. There is no nudity and no profanity; even the conversations about Cathar-style lovemaking are purposefully prudish. It takes place in an imaginary version of the present, with characters who speak in long, literate sentences, entirely free of contemporary slang. (Information-age gizmos are seen to exist, but play no role in the story.) To some extent, the plot is just an excuse for the movie to gradually turn into a musical, one that features tap dancing, and an Astaire-and-Rogers-style ballroom number. Oh, and the Sambola. Sorry: Sambola!

Maybe you could argue that this old-fashioned fable about the mating dance between young women and young men, crowded with seemingly retrograde stereotypes and staged inside an elite bubble, offers some wry sideways commentary on what has changed in gender relations (and what has not). But I wouldn’t oversell that angle. “Damsels in Distress” is deliberately and purposefully irrelevant; its irrelevance is its strength. It’s zany-in-quotation-marks and also flat-out zany. I laughed until I cried, and you may too (if you don’t find it pointless and teeth-grindingly irritating). Either way, Whit Stillman is back at last, bringing his peculiar brand of counterprogramming refreshment to our jaded age.

“Damsels in Distress” opens this week in Los Angeles and New York, with wider release to follow.

The “abortion survivor” has become a powerful symbol in right-wing politics. Wade into it, and you realize it’s defined so loosely that practically anyone can claim the title: Having a relative who had an abortion is enough to make you a “survivor,” according to some definitions. One self-described survivor was recently doing commercials for Personhood Oklahoma, and now Jessen’s story has inspired an antiabortion movie, “October Baby.” It opened in the top 10 at the box office last weekend on the strength of its Christian audience. Reviewing the film, Salon’s critic, Andrew O’Hehir, wrote, “The bizarre circumstances found in ‘October Baby’ presumably could happen in the real world, the odds are something like being struck by lightning and eaten by a shark at the same time. With a winning lottery ticket tucked in your swimsuit.” According to the Daily Beast, that criticism “irked” the director most of all, because the inspired-by-a-true-story element is so crucial to the film’s message.

But though fetuses have been known, in very rare circumstances, to survive intended terminations, those are roughly the odds, so far as they can be determined from the medical literature. One 1985 study found that of “33,090 suction curettage abortions performed at less than or equal to 12 weeks’ gestation, the rate of unrecognized failed abortions was 2.3 per 1000 abortions.” Both that study and one published in Norway in 1992 said earlier abortions were actually more likely to fail than later ones; the Norwegian study found an overall failure rate of .05 percent. Meanwhile, a 1995 Israeli study reviewed the literature and noted that “some of the reasons for these failed abortions include inexperience on the part of physicians.” Undiagnosed ectopic pregnancies, which are never viable, were also cited as a factor.

But for the antiabortion movement, the definition of an “abortion survivor” is so broad that these statistics are irrelevant. A right-wing website for teens, Teenbreaks, defines it three ways: “people who survived an actual abortion attempt”; “twin abortion survivors,” from selective reductions; and “sibling abortion survivors. These are people born into families where a brother or sister was aborted.” The testimonials that follow include Jessen’s, but also this one from “Breanna”:

I was 12 years old when I found out my aunt had tried to abort my cousin, Sean, who is now 5 years old. I was devastated, but the news I heard next was even worse. I learned she had already aborted three previous children who would have been my beautiful cousins….I stand against abortion. Knowing that three of my cousins were aborted and Sean was almost aborted hurts me deeply. So, girls, know that when you abort, it affects everyone, not just you and your child.

Melissa Ohden, a self-described “abortion attempt survivor” (also, by her account, in 1977 via saline abortion) and antiabortion speaker, strikes a similar note in a recent blog post: “Abortion changes everything. It not only ends a life, but it transforms others, forever. And not just a woman’s life, but a man’s life, grandparent’s lives, aunts and uncles, siblings, cousins, friends, communities. Relationships are altered; many are damaged or ended.” The banner on her website reads, ”One decision, one single moment, can have such a detrimental impact on so many people, living and dead, born and yet to be conceived.” It’s not enough to demonstrate — as research shows — that plenty of  women feel fine, even relieved, after an abortion. One suddenly has to account for how everyone around the woman feels.

Such stories have been a part of the political conversation since around the time when Jessen spoke to Congress, in the 1990s. Her appearance — and the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act she was speaking in favor of — were part of the antiabortion movement’s campaign to reframe the debate around rare and, for some people discomfiting, later-term abortions. By 2003, President Bush signed the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, specifically written with “abortion survivors” in mind. Plenty of Democrats supported the bill, but then-state Sen. Barack Obama wasn’t buying a similar bill in Illinois, telling antiabortion crusader Jill Stanek that he didn’t see any evidence of doctors delivering live infants and leaving them to die, and that existing law already protected an infant born alive. He added, “What we are doing here is to create one more burden on a woman and I can’t support that.” In 2008, Obama’s opponents tried to use this line against him, cutting an ad with Jessen where she declared, “If Senator Obama had his way, I wouldn’t be here,” to which Factcheck.org replied, “She’s wrong.”

These days, the antiabortion movement has moved on from later-term abortions to just about every kind of abortion restriction. But the movement still knows that it’s most often about a raw emotional response that either foregrounds someone else’s pain over the pregnant woman’s — the fetus, the “father,” even a niece or nephew — or sees some women’s eventual regret over their choices to abort as reason to ban the procedure outright for all women. An “abortion survivor” who says he or she actually made it through an intended termination is the ultimate manifestation of that alleged harm.

Hence the continued prominence of activists like Jessen. She says her mother’s failed abortion — which she claims is the cause of her cerebral palsy — took place in California in 1977. Jessen never met her biological mother and learned the story from her adopted mother. Even if we accept the story at face value, it’s unclear what its relevance is today: The conditions Jessen describes — a saline abortion late in the pregnancy — are exceptionally rare now, thanks to medical improvements and legal restrictions.

Explicit in narratives like Jessen’s is the idea that women have abortions either out of ignorance — because they were duped by doctors or a society telling them that this was a clump of tissue — or, if they knew that a medical error was all that stood between an abortion and a live birth and did it anyway, they were just selfish. That’s how you get to the mother in “October Baby,” whose representation as a cruel Mercedes-driving lawyer prompted Slate’s Libby Copeland to write that it represented the movie’s suggestion, consistent with misrepresentations of the antiabortion movement, ”that women choose abortion as a matter of convenience, that they opt for posh lifestyles and fancy cars as opposed to seriously weighing their ability to feed and clothe a future child. In fact the reasons real women give, as outlined in a study by the Guttmacher Institute, suggests they feel they have run through their options. They can’t afford a baby; they can’t have a baby and keep their job; they don’t think they can hack it as single parents. Many have other children to think about.”

Of course, if you believe it’s a woman’s choice to be pregnant or not be pregnant, it doesn’t ultimately matter, at least from a policy perspective, whether her reasons are selfish or not. And if you think she’s a murderer whether she takes the morning after pill or she aborts in the third trimester, we’re back where we started.

I sat with cold hands tucked into each armpit, only half-awake until the movie started, and my perception of the world shifted in a sudden and irreversible way.

The film offered something that made every hair on my body stand on end: a glimpse of a world that might be out there somewhere — urban, messy, lawless; with cool, caustic boys on scooters, careless girls bedecked in ripped vintage clothes, and enormous empty warehouse apartments.

In the film, Susan was a trickster, a character with no motives, no back story, and no possessions except what she could carry with her or fit into a Port Authority locker. She was all gesture and blithe indifference. She took what she wanted, whether that was a bottle of room-service vodka, the contents of a wallet, a pair of studded boots, or sex on a pinball machine.

Roberta was different: constrained by tradition, rules, responsibilities, life. She had a place in the world, even if she did not like it. And then in an absurd flight of fiction, one knock to the head, a change of wardrobe: Roberta became Susan.

And that wardrobe change seemed to be all she needed. She found a place to stay, a love interest, a job based on her newfound clothes (and confusion). Even after she regained her memory and kept exclaiming, “I’m a housewife from New Jersey!” the truth was subsumed, not just to the cops or the people in her new life, but also to her husband and friends from home.

The movie proposed this radical vision: A costume can change not just perception, but reality.

Precisely when a 13-year-old most wants privacy and autonomy, I had lost all control of my body. Blood, vomit, pus, shit: Everything was discussed, examined, weighed, quantified. Doctors made the major decisions, my parents the minor. I had no choice in even the smallest details; not food, not even bathing. I was not allowed to immerse my skin in water, not allowed to shower. My mother washed my hair in the sink every third day, wrapping fresh scars in plastic to keep them dry and safe.

Other girls might have worried about their appearance, but I didn’t need to bother. I knew that I was ugly—so mutilated, in fact, that I had a permanent gym class waiver to avoid having to disrobe and endure the mockery of my peers.

The surface is indeed superficial, but it matters — it is what you show the world, what you want the world to think and know. And the primary presentation of my essential self, then as now, were the scars. At the start of 1983 I looked garroted, as though I had been hung or strangled or cut in a knife fight. By the end of 1986, I would have hundreds of jagged red slashes and pearly white lumps trailing across my face, chest, shoulders, belly. Others were more obscure, hidden. But even if you couldn’t see them, I could feel them. They throbbed.

“Desperately Seeking Susan” suggested: So what? Don’t try to conform. Wear the costume, be a freak, because if someone is looking at your dress they are not looking at whatever you have hidden underneath.

- – - – - – - – - – -

Just after dawn on a wet gray Saturday morning a few weeks after seeing “Desperately Seeking Susan,” my parents dropped me off in a semi-deserted industrial town across the bay from our house. I was early, but not the first in line at the waterbed store, queuing up to buy Madonna concert tickets.

I recognized one of the boys in front of me, Marc. He had a locker near mine in the back hallway of a rural junior high school that resembled a penitentiary. I would never have dared talk to him at school  — he was in the ninth grade, while I was a mere eighth grader — but that morning on the sidewalk, we struck up a conversation. He introduced me to his friend Scott, and we whiled away the
hours chatting about music.

That is how it worked back then, back there. The music you listened to made a statement of intent: This is who I am. This is what I believe.

Arguably it was not a wise choice for a fourteen-year-old boy like Marc to declare a sincere love of Madonna. The taunt “fag” was a common and casual insult used to torment my new friends, but not necessarily because of the music they listened to. People our age didn’t have the context. Even then it seemed extraordinary to me that “wannabe” and “poser” were two of the worst insults that could be leveled at a person. How do you define authenticity in your early teens, anywhere, let alone if you live in a failing shipyard town? Should we have worn steel-toed boots and welders’ hardhats?

Madonna tickets secured, I went back to my routine of school, doctors — and drill team.

I had stopped riding the school bus because this kid named Troy tried to set my hair on fire. Lacking a ride for the eight miles home through dense second-growth forests, I was forced to find an approved afterschool club.

Technically, it was less a matter of joining the drill team (I was not issued a uniform, nor did I perform) as being drafted. The young, charismatic drama teacher in charge of the group caught me hiding behind the shrubbery once too often and put my idle hands to use running the tape player as the other girls snapped their necks and hips rhythmically to the latest pop tunes.

These girls were popular, the elite of the school, with a mongrel assortment of athletes as ballast for routines. The captain was Nikki, and her co-captain was Crystal. They, like all the girls on the team, had permed hair, blow-dried and feathered up into quiffs standing several inches above their heads.

My title was “manager,” though I was neither in charge nor even a mascot. I was just there, tolerated, ignored, so long as the teacher was watching. This was the most desirable of all scenarios. If I had any goal at all it was to be unremarkable, invisible, vanished, gone.

Practice was held in the commons, a vast multipurpose room where we ate lunch and attended assemblies, with a three-story atrium and potted plants the size of small cars. I stood at a folding table next to the concrete planters, hitting the buttons on a boom box, flipping the cassette tapes, pausing and starting “Hey Mickey,” “Eye of the Tiger,” “Honky Tonk Woman.”

Whenever the team took a break, I trailed behind them to the nearest restroom, where I watched as they painted their faces with cheap drugstore makeup and curled their hair with the butane curling irons they carried in white fake-leather purses.

I was not trying to fit in with the group (and the attempt would have been useless: Outside of drill team, these girls were among my most vicious tormentors). I was studying them in hopes of creating a reasonable camouflage. Belonging with the drill team without actually having to befriend them was conformity as strategy. If that required tedious long hours listening to adolescent girls’ gossip, fine. If I could parse their mannerisms, clothes, concerns, I might be able to stay alive.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

My new friends from the concert ticket line provided the first real social outlet I had in junior high, and I slowly edged toward the group of people who carried colored folders with pictures of their favorite bands cut out of magazines and taped to the front. These people shared my interest not just in Madonna but in the other things we had seen in stolen moments of the music video show Bombshelter Video, or heard on KJET radio: the Pet Shop Boys, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Tears for Fears, The Clash, the Eurythmics.

They, like me, hid in the library or art room at breaks. We tried to go to dances and football games to fit in, but never quite looked right, even though we were buying our clothes at the same places as everyone else.

Madonna made popular music (though the popular kids in our school didn’t like it) by trading on her sexual identity, and that fact upset our elders, but we were young: asexual, maybe yearning or experimenting, but unformed. She said, decide for yourself. Our parents did not necessarily agree.

We all existed in a liminal space of possibilities, with a profound lack of agency matched by a desire for control. We sorted ourselves according to bands, liking but not quite understanding what we were listening to. It would take a couple more decades before I figured out what the heck Morrissey was talking about in “Piccadilly Palare.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

It was time for me to prepare for another round of cancer treatment. Most common foods were rigidly restricted, and I was taken off the medication that controlled my metabolism and kept me alive. Starved of food and hormones, I could barely stay awake during the day. Classes, already fraught with social drama, turned into half-waking nightmares. I can’t even offer anecdotes and stories, just vague semi-delusional moments of horror. You’ve seen the movies: Take it as a given that if my life were scripted by John Hughes, I would be worse off than the nameless neck-brace girl portrayed by Joan Cusack in the movie “Sixteen Candles.” I wouldn’t want to read that story, and I certainly did not want to live it.

Outside of class, school was dangerous, even with security cameras in the halls. Violence was common, hazing and bullying were tolerated and often encouraged by staff. The worst of the scenarios, waking or dreaming, too often featured Troy, the kid who tried to set my hair on fire, or Nikki and Crystal, laughing — and the jokes often centered on me, because I could not defend myself. I was too weak to make a fist, and one tap would have shattered my jaw. I learned to be quiet, to watch and wait.

Some people believe there is nobility in suffering, and my family and doctors expected that my peers would respect my vulnerability. The reality is different; profound illness is deviance from the crowd, just like being too smart, too gay, too other. I was different, and different was bad. I was a target of harassment whether I tried to fit in or not. Too sick to succeed, and eventually too sick to care, I kept accounts, clocking each new humiliation.

My hair started to fall out, in strands and then clumps, and no amount of hairspray or sessions with a butane curling iron could hide the fact. One day, I locked myself in the bathroom at home with scissors and my father’s rusty safety razor, hacking and slashing until half the remaining hair was gone.

I was too tired to even flip the tapes as the drill team prepared for the regional championships. Instead, I hid in a restroom the girls did not frequent, sleeping in a toilet stall with my forehead pressed against the cold metal wall.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

The day of the concert finally arrived. It was the first concert I had ever attended, the first night of Madonna’s Virgin Tour, and therefore the very first Madonna concert ever. I had a seat in the front row of the balcony, wedged in among my parents, an aunt, and the sole friend left from before the illness, a girl named Christine. The place was a cacophony of sound and activity, though I was drifting, not thinking about much except radioactive isotopes served in a Dixie cup and days spent in cold exam rooms holding perfectly still as enormous machines scanned my body one millimeter at a time.

I was so tired.

The theater filled with rippling waves of enthusiasm, girls in sequins and lace and sawed-off gloves, and I watched as they excitedly took their seats, clapping and hollering for their heroine.

Then something enormously startling happened: The opening act appeared, snarling white rappers from New York City. So foreign, so improbable, so wrong for this audience. They raced around the stage, waving their arms and shouting, and the crowd went calm in confusion, then started shouting back in anger.

This was the first time Seattle met the Beastie Boys, and the city was not amused.

I put my hands over my mouth, laughing so hard I could barely breathe.

The band held the stage a little longer until nearly all the little girls were booing, then they exited with the refrain “Fuck you, Seattle!”

In the interval between the opening act and the concert, the fatigue of the illness and the excitement of the night proved too much.

I put my head down on the railing and fell asleep, missing the rest of the show.

It didn’t matter — I was alive, I was there, and I still own the souvenir T-shirt.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

One weekend afternoon a week or two later, we boarded a yellow school bus for the long drive to the other side of the county for the drill team regional championships. The team was psyched up and ready to prove it in their matching green-and-white polyester tunics and pleated skirts.

The venue was a windowless junior high gymnasium reeking of floor polish and sweat. We watched the clock, watched each other, the various teams whispering behind their hands about minor fashion differences in the sea of feathered bleached hair: a barrette here, a slightly less-than-white sock there.

Then it was time. My team marched out on to the gym floor in formation, hair and smiles perfectly organized, arms held stiffly at their sides, waiting for the music to start.

Standing behind the table next to other managers and the judges, I was supposed to cue their signature song, “Old Time Rock and Roll,” by Bob Seger.

Instead, I hit the button and started the Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias duet “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.”

Nikki did not lose her smile as she turned her head and made eye contact with me, hatred burning behind mascara, lip gloss, braces. I stared back, then shrugged, not even pretending to search around for the correct tape.

She signaled and the group dutifully started their routine, not at all in sync with the music, half the girls unable to follow the intricate patterns without the cues of the beat.

After the judges issued a verdict (we lost), the girls huddled together, several crying. I stood against a wall, arms crossed, thinking of the scene in Desperately Seeking Susan when Madonna robs her sleeping date, tips her hat, and walks out of the hotel saying, “It’s been fun.”

Sabotage? Simple exhaustion? I don’t know now, and I didn’t care then. Whether choice or accident, it happened. Motives make no difference, and anyway, those girls were never going to play nice.

- – - – - – - – - — – -

The fasting, medication, and tests that had made me too tired to watch the concert were leading up to an even more intense cancer treatment, scheduled for spring vacation to avoid interrupting my schooling. But then another unrelated anomaly was discovered, another surgery ordered. The doctors and my parents nodded and whispered and wondered: How to minimize the impact on my education?

The experts wanted to perpetuate this idea of a normal education, normal adolescence, normal life. I was just about ready to accept the goal of remaining alive, maybe, because it seemed to mean so much to my parents. But normal, by then, was too much to ask.

Clutching the skimpy hospital gown tighter around my shivering body, the paper on the examination table crinkling and tearing as I shifted, I said, “I’m not going back. I will burn down the school if you make me.”

Fuck you, Seattle.

The music was never as important as the delivery. The image. The style. Madonna offered a primitive and powerful idea of liberation, like many artists before and since. But her music was popular; it traveled vast distances, penetrated the forest where I lived. And, critically, her music was joyous. During the years when I had many legitimate reasons to feel sad, Madonna made music with an uplifting message: You can dance.

I made some friends, made some enemies, dropped out of school in the eighth grade. Later I went back, and that was probably the point: Wear the costume, and when it stops working, choose another.

There would be other songs, movies, concerts. Madonna embodied the dichotomy: virgin and whore, dutiful and independent, promiscuous and pristine. She did not require a lifetime of devotion — she did not even sustain her own relationships or defined interests all that long. Take what you need, and keep moving.

My life might have been the same without that concert, but it would certainly have had an inferior soundtrack.

The kids I met in line for concert tickets? We all moved away to find the urban, messy lives we were hoping for. Our friendships have unfurled across decades: adolescence, high school, college, emerging adulthood, coming out, marriage, divorce, raising our own children, travels across countries and continents. But though they are the friends who have known me longest, they (like anyone) only see the versions of myself I share and promote.

When I met one of those boys, decades later, in Europe, he asked,

“Why didn’t you tell me I was gay?”

I replied, “It was none of my business.”

I asked if he knew I was in treatment for two different kinds of cancer in the ’80s. He was shocked. “No!”

The disease wasn’t what I wanted to show, and therefore, he didn’t see it.

- – - – - – - – - -

Last year, I visited my hometown. I was sitting in a coffee shop talking to my mother about plans for the future. The question was where to move next: I was having trouble deciding. This was a conversation I’d had with dozens of friends and colleagues all over the world.

London, Paris, Berlin — which should I choose? I said the words, then started to laugh wildly at the perversity of having the discussion in that place. I was still laughing when I realized that someone at the next table was listening.

I turned to look. It was Nikki, with shorter but still-dyed-blonde hair, jogging clothes instead of the team uniform, and she was staring at me with revulsion. Just like the day I caused the squad to lose at regionals.

I stared back for a sustained moment, and it was like we were once again wielding colored folders declaring our cultural affiliations.

Did Nikki recognize me, or was she just annoyed to have her morning interrupted by the loud chatter of an interloper, someone so obviously from out of town? I’ve lost my rural accent. My clothes, the things I carry with me, communicate that I do not live in the Northwest, or anywhere in the United States. I can’t help it — that is just true.

I’m still the raggedy girl in spectacles, the drill team manager who hits the wrong buttons, dreaming of elsewhere. Nikki is forever the carefully groomed captain, the boss of her small syncopated corner of the world. Maybe there were no possibilities after all: Maybe we were simply what we were, and would always remain.

And maybe that is okay.

Excerpted with permission from “Madonna & Me: Women Writers on the Queen of Pop.” Copyright Bee Lavender, courtesy of Soft Skull Press.

Martin has always maintained that he’s been influenced at least as much by history and historical fiction as by the traditional epic fantasy of writers like J.R.R. Tolkien. Aficionados know that his novels (collectively called “A Song of Ice and Fire”) are loosely based on the Wars of the Roses, a vicious series of battles of succession that took place in 15th-century England. Martin has also listed Maurice Druon and Thomas B. Costain as models, two mid-20th-century historical novelists who wrote about medieval France, and you can see echoes of that material in his fictional universe, as well.

It would probably surprise several generations of British schoolchildren to learn that the dynastic politics of the late 1400s could be transformed into anything coherent, let alone entertaining. (“It’s worse than the Wars of the Roses!” Lucy Pevensie cries in dismay when someone tries to explain a particularly complicated bit of Narnian history in “Prince Caspian.” She speaks for many.) This, however, hasn’t kept many novelists and historians from trying.

It’s not that there aren’t fabulous characters and nefarious doings in the Wars of the Roses — Secret marriages! Mad monarchs! Vanishing princes! This is a story that concludes with one of the players being drowned in a barrel of wine, after all. But keeping the Wars’ family trees, convoluted legalistic arguments and perpetually shifting allegiances straight is enough to give anyone a headache. It certainly doesn’t help that all the male principles seem to have the same three names (Henry, Richard or Edward) or that they are forever gaining or losing and then gaining again the titles that serve to distinguish them from one another.

For fans who wish to investigate further into the real-life inspirations for Martin’s characters, one of the most lucid popular histories of the conflict is Alison Weir’s “The Wars of the Roses” (originally published as “Lancaster and York”). Some of Martin’s references to the Wars are easy to pick up. For example, the two dueling clans in “Game of Thrones,” the Lannisters and the Starks, have names that resemble those of the two sides in the Wars of the Roses. Like the Yorks, the Starks are northerners, while the Lannisters, like the Lancasters, are famously rich.

Both English families were branches of the House of Plantagenet who vied for the throne after the deposition of the last Plantagenet king, Richard II, in 1399 and before the establishment of the Tudor dynasty in 1485. There’s no one-to-one correspondence between the characters in “Game of Thrones” and actual historical figures, but Martin was clearly inspired by Edward IV in creating, say, Robert Baratheon, the great, strapping warrior who became a stout, ailing king. There’s a dash of Edward, too, in Rob Stark, a brilliant commander who makes an impetuous, disadvantageous marriage.

Cersei Lannister, Robert’s ambitious, conniving widow, is thought by many to have been inspired by the hot-headed Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI, the king Edward IV helped depose. Henry’s bouts of insanity left him frequently unable to rule, and Margaret, a leading Lancastrian, fought ferociously against those she saw as threatening her family’s hold on the crown. Historians view her as a prime driver in the Wars of the Roses, just as Cersei is substantively responsible for the War of the Five Kings in “A Clash of Kings.” Cersei also resembles Isabella of France, an earlier medieval English queen, who conspired with her adulterous lover to dethrone, and possibly to murder, her (bisexual) husband, Edward II, in the 1300s.

Cersei is a crude, incompetent politician, however, which cannot be said of Isabella. Although unpopular in England, where she was nicknamed “the She-wolf of France,” Isabella has acquired some sympathizers over the years, including the indefatigable Alison Weir, who wrote a contrarian biography of her in 2006, “Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England.” Weir has also written novels about various women in the Tudor era, no doubt aspiring to the success of Philippa Gregory, whose romantic historical novels routinely land on the New York Times Bestseller List.

For her own part, Gregory has already published three books in a series set during the Wars of the Roses, “The Cousins’ War” (an apt title, given the intricate blood relationships among the many combatants). The most recent of these, “The Lady of the Rivers,” may even be infused with enough magical elements to appeal to some “Game of Thrones” readers: In it, the character of Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, possesses psychic abilities (the real duchess was tried for witchcraft by her political enemies) and is initiated into the mysteries of alchemy by her first husband. For those who prefer a more grounded view, Gregory collaborated with two historians, David Baldwin and Michael Jones, on a nonfiction book, “The Women of the Cousins’ War: The Duchess, the Queen, and the King’s Mother,” published last year.

You may have noticed that most of these books are about women, despite the fact that, with very few exceptions, the women of the Middle Ages had little power. Much of today’s popular historical fiction about the rulers of the Middle Ages is read by women who are primarily interested in the lives and problems of women. Since the historical record contains next to no information on this topic, fiction has stepped in to fill the breach.

Another, more manly, popular contemporary historical novelist, Bernard Cornwell, has set a series of novels, “The Grail Quest,” during a slightly earlier period. His hero, an archer named Thomas of Hookton who gets caught up in the Hundred Years’ War, is an entirely fictional commoner in search of that fabled relic. What Cornwell’s novels lack in historically based, Machiavellian aristocrats they make up for in action-packed, blood-soaked battle scenes.

For the ultimate in medieval scuttlebutt, however, you can’t do better than Barbara Tuchman’s prizewinning 1978 history, “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.” This account of the Hundred Years’ War centers around the life of a French nobleman who married an Englishwoman, but it’s more expansive than any novel, taking in such fascinating details as the bizarre fashion for long-toed shoes in court (so long, they had to be tied up with strings and were inveighed against by puritanical clergymen) to the legendarily brutal rampages of British mercenary John Hawkwood through Italy. If you really want to know how the peasants fared while their rulers skirmished, the peculiar challenges of sewage-management in a stone castle, what the real agenda was behind the Crusades, or just how dastardly the highborn and royal can behave when it suits them, then look no further.