I’m a 28-year-old woman, a registered Democrat, and a staunch enough liberal that I take would-be epithets such as “flaming,” “knee-jerk” and “bleeding-heart” as compliments. I believe that George Bush’s policies are at best misguided and at worst evil. And yet I love Laura Bush. In fact, there is no public figure I admire more.
Looking back, I can see that the love that dare not speak its name came over me gradually. In January 2001, I found watching George W. Bush’s inauguration on television so surreal and horrifying that I had to call a friend, and the two of us just sat there in our separate apartments, not really talking except to say, “I can’t believe this. Can you believe this?”
A few months passed, George Bush and Co. settled into the White House, and in the June 2001 issue of Vogue, I read a profile of Laura Bush in which it was revealed that she is “indifferent” to clothes and shopping; she finds giving interviews “kind of boring”; and when an acquaintance saw her in line at the post office while her husband was governor of Texas and asked what she was doing, she calmly replied, “I’m mailing a letter.” Then an October 2002 article in the New York Times described the White House symposiums Laura hosted at which complicated books and topics were discussed and to which writers who clearly disagreed with George Bush’s politics were invited. Multiple authors — including biographer Arnold Rampersad and historian Patricia Nelson Limerick — told the Times that they had assumed beforehand that Laura was unfamiliar with both their work and their views; they had been humbled and impressed to learn they were wrong. In spite of myself, I found all of these details extremely endearing.
Now, with the publication of “The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush,” by Washington Post reporter Ann Gerhart, I finally feel ready to share my love of Laura with the world. The book is generally flattering — though Gerhart does take Laura Bush to task for “spoiling” her daughters and not being a more “effective” first lady — and is filled with anecdotes that illustrate Laura Bush’s integrity, unpretentiousness and intelligence. Admittedly, anyone who doesn’t already admire the first lady isn’t likely to be drawn in by either the book’s retro-sounding title or the cover, which features a baby blue background and a photo of Laura gazing up at her husband while he speaks. It looks, at first glance, like bedtime reading for someone’s 70-year-old Republican grandmother. When I purchased it at Kramerbooks, an independent bookstore a few miles from my home in Washington, the cashiers seemed so disdainful that I was compelled to announce, “It’s for research!” One of them, a woman with a crew cut and all-black clothing, simply looked at the book and shook her head without speaking.
My (decidedly liberal) friends are just as appalled. My friend Jamie said the fact that I publicly admit I admire Laura Bush is evidence that Republican operatives have planted a chip in my brain. When I mentioned to my friend Emily that, according to People magazine, Laura recently read the same short story collection Emily and I were reading — “The Shell Collector” by Anthony Doerr — Emily exclaimed, “She’s not one of us! She’s on the dark side!” My friend Matt said, “I hate Laura Bush because she’s culpable, and she’s culpable because she’s intelligent.” Much of the public frustration with Laura seems to stem from her perceived passivity, especially in light of widespread assumption that she’s significantly more liberal than George Bush. But what, I asked the people I know, is she supposed to do? Their answers ranged from “drive a wooden stake through her husband’s skull” to “poison him.”
Clearly, liberals’ visceral loathing of George Bush transfers into a loathing of Laura as well. But that transference strikes me as reductive and even sexist. Because here’s the thing: Both the new biography about Laura Bush and Laura Bush herself are a lot more complicated than they initially appear.
As the Gerhart book proves, Laura Bush is a true role model. She’s smart and curious about the world. She’s sincere and down-to-earth and compassionate. She’s both confident and modest, she knows who she is, and she doesn’t try to prove anything. I suspect the reason so many people I know believe her to be fake is that she doesn’t aggressively demonstrate her authenticity.
But to read any part of “The Perfect Wife” — which is based on over 100 interviews, including several Gerhart conducted with Laura herself — is to realize that Laura Bush is the opposite of fake. In one anecdote Gerhart relates, it is December 2000 and the Texas Book Festival, an annual event started by Laura in 1995, has kicked off at the same time that the Supreme Court is deliberating on the presidential election recount. The day after the court rules in Bush’s favor — that is, the day after he officially becomes president of the United States, while he is preparing to deliver his acceptance speech on television — Laura, who earlier gave the Book Festival’s opening speech, attends the festival’s wrap-up meeting.
“At that very moment of this unprecedented election being decided, history was about to change,” Stephen Harrigan, a novelist and festival organizer, told Gerhart. “[Laura's] life was about to change. And she was sitting there listening to how many T-shirts we had sold, and asking were those tote bags moving well, because we would need to order them again.” What I love about this story is its implication that Laura is respectful of other people, that she takes her responsibilities seriously, and that she maintains a life separate from her husband — what Gerhart calls Laura’s “stealth independence.” And these rare, impressive qualities are shown again and again.
As a young woman, she purposely sought out poor, nonwhite schools to work in as a teacher and librarian, and as a political wife, when Laura visits classrooms, “Hers is not the usual condescending conversation with children that is actually aimed at the adults listening in,” Julia Reed noted in the Vogue profile. Gerhart similarly observes that “there is never a child who hugs her too tightly. She is not a woman to worry about getting a nose wiped on her silk sleeve. Over and over, I have seen her intuitively drop into a teacher’s crouch so she can look right into their faces.”
And then there are the dozens of smaller daily examples of Laura’s unpretentiousness and modesty: When George Bush was governor, Laura’s favorite place to hang out during parties at the mansion was outside with the dogs; she’d shop at Wal-Mart and fly Southwest Airlines to visit her friends around Texas (friends who are, notably, political liberals she has known since grade school); her favorite outfit is jeans and white shirts and her ideal restaurant is a cheap Mexican place. In other words, Judy Dean has nothing on Laura Bush in the squished cupcake department. Laura Bush cannot stand the title first lady and instructs her staff to refer to her as Mrs. Bush or Laura Bush. During her first year in the White House, Gerhart writes that “even after she had walked hundreds of times into rooms where people cheered, she would look over her shoulder involuntarily, to see who they might really be applauding.”
To be sure, all of this is excellent P.R. fodder, and certainly the Bush camp has tried to exploit it. “She cuts right through the posturing and positioning,” her husband once told a New York Times reporter. “America’s starved for something real. And that’s what she brings.” But Laura, who is known to closely monitor media coverage of her husband, does not seem to care all that much how she herself comes across. Revealingly, she did once object when she was quoted by newspapers as saying to an audience that, as a former librarian, she could tell them to “shut up” when she had actually used the far more refined “hush up.” But more often, Laura’s “management” of her own image seems to waver between strikingly unvain and downright uncooperative. She often must be prompted by others to discuss her work, such as her role in obtaining $215 million for a reading readiness program in Texas. “This is as startling as it is refreshing, in Washington,” Gerhart writes, “a city where people fall over each other to take credit for things they didn’t do.”
Gerhart also touches on the first lady’s relationship with the media in the book’s discussion of Laura as a mother. The depiction of the Bush twins as obnoxious and indulged is, not surprisingly, the part of the book that has attracted the most media attention, but it left me unpersuaded. The anecdote about then-20-year-old Jenna Bush calling her father right before he was to deliver the post-9/11 State of the Union address to announce she’d lost the sticker for her car — an anecdote clearly meant to exemplify Jenna’s self-absorption — was, to me, so funny and normal that I called my own father to tell him about it. Of the White House’s “no comment” stance on the twins, Gerhart writes, “The problem with such a communication strategy was that the only public image of the twins was a highly unflattering one [e.g., Jenna being cited for underage drinking]. If they were feeding the homeless, or tutoring poor children, or writing impressive senior theses, no one would ever know.”
But if the Bush twins were feeding the homeless or tutoring poor children or writing impressive senior theses, they would know — and more to the point, so would the homeless, or the poor children, or their thesis advisors. The notion is widespread in our culture that if something isn’t documented by the media, it didn’t happen. Laura Bush’s refusal to buy into that notion, or to sacrifice her daughters for it, is all the more impressive given her powerful position.
More personally, I suspect my admiration for Laura Bush is tied to the fact that we share major interests: I teach ninth grade English and I like that Laura was a teacher herself and continues to advocate for education. I write fiction, too — my first novel will be published next year — and I love that Laura Bush is a voracious reader of fiction. In fact, I see this as the defining aspect of her personality.
It’s the reason I believe she’s smart: For one thing, her favorite book is “The Brothers Karamazov.” Besides that, for Laura Bush, as for most people who aren’t professors of English, reading fiction is ostensibly useless and therefore without motive; it can only be something she does for pleasure. Her love of fiction is also what allows me to accept the contradictions in her life that other people find either mystifying or just appalling: How can she really be a good person if she’s married to him? How can she be married to him if she really is more liberal than he is? But ambiguities are the foundation of fiction; it is only in the world of politics that they’re met with hostility.
Literary fiction acknowledges the discrepancy between how we act and what we feel. When I teach creative writing to teenagers, I tell them to think about going with their parents to a party. The people are boring, and the house smells bad, and you just want to leave. In real life, you say to your hosts, “Thanks so much! I had such a great time!” But fiction admits how boring and smelly it was.
Reading a lot of fiction can, I believe, make a person expect the nonfictional world to operate by fiction’s rules: There will be revelations and climaxes, people will speak eloquently, events will progress coherently and conclude satisfyingly. And, of course, massive contradictions — personal, moral, situational — can exist quite comfortably. A year ago, a symposium Laura Bush had organized on the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman was canceled after some contemporary poets who had been invited revealed plans to read poetry protesting the impending war in Iraq; the entire symposium series was, effectively, brought to an end.
An argument can be made that Laura was naive to believe she could smoothly import lefty writers into a right-wing White House. But I actually think it was the poets — specifically, Sam Hamill, founder of the Copper Canyon Press, who organized the protest poetry — who were naive, and who shot themselves in the foot. I bet Hamill could have gotten away with showing up and reading antiwar poetry, but how could Laura, as first lady, let him do so knowing about his plans ahead of time? Instead of chatting with reporters before the symposium, he should have been more subtle — he should have taken a lesson in stealth activism from Laura herself, that mastermind of stealth independence.
The central question raised by Laura Bush, Gerhart told me in an interview, is this: “You didn’t do anything to get the megaphone, you didn’t seek to have the megaphone, your association to the megaphone is purely derivative power — but if somebody hands you the megaphone, are you supposed to pick it up and yell through it?” Gerhart herself answers the question by saying, “I would argue that you are.”
But I think it’s trickier than that, and this is something else that fiction acknowledges: that there is plenty in the world a person can literally do without realistically being able to do it all. We are constricted by manners and appearances and obligations, and I suspect that if Laura Bush told reporters that, say, she had opposed the war in Iraq, such a statement would do more to make the public question the stability of the Bush marriage than it would to support peace efforts. (I am aware, by the way, of no evidence to suggest she did oppose the war.) Could Laura Bush do more for women’s rights and poor kids and the environment? Sure. But I’d say that she already does more than she gets credit for.
In addition to her work on early childhood cognitive development, teacher preparation and recruitment, and women’s heart disease, Laura, Gerhart indicates, actually does stay on top of and weigh in on issues behind the scenes. Talking to an Associated Press reporter, Laura once seemed to inadvertently reveal that she was far more familiar than anyone expected with the exact amount her husband’s administration had refused to give the United Nations Population Fund. More publicly, her National Book Festival last October brought 70,000 people (one of whom was me) to the Mall in Washington to hear various writers. After Sept. 11, she appeared on five television networks and, as Gerhart told me, “She was very comforting and nurturing. And while that seems like real bland bromides to a lot of people, all the men of the administration were running around scaring everybody half to death. She’s the one who says, ‘Let’s be sensible. Let’s turn off the television set — that freaks kids out.’”
There’s also what Laura doesn’t do: function as a mindless Republican mouthpiece. Gerhart recalls that in “the 2002 congressional campaign, she changed a speech at the last minute to remove attacks on the candidate’s opponent, a Texas Democrat she admired, whom she had worked with on education issues.” And I’d argue that Laura derives some of her power from using it sparingly; when she told Katie Couric in January 2001 that she did not believe Roe vs. Wade should be overturned, it attracted attention partly because it was the only time she has commented publicly on abortion.
There is a final reason I find Laura Bush both charming and fascinating, and it might seem, from the outside, like the most peculiar reason of all: To an uncanny degree, Laura Bush’s own life resembles a great novel. Big, dramatic things have happened to her, certain themes have recurred, and she is such an easy heroine to root for — smart and nice but just flawed enough (she still sneaks cigarettes!) to remain likable. A often-repeated maxim of writing workshops, typically attributed to Flannery O’Connor, is that a story’s ending should feel both surprising and inevitable. For surprising and inevitable, try this:
Laura is born in West Texas in 1946, a much-loved only child who grows up on Humble Avenue. At the age of 17, in a tragic accident, she hits another car being driven by a handsome, athletic high school classmate, a boy she’s believed to have had a crush on. She is single until the age of 30 — relatively old for 1970s Texas. When friends want to set her up with George Bush, she is reluctant because “I thought he was someone real political, and I wasn’t interested.” But already, they have been circling each other for years without meeting — they attended the same Midland junior high for seventh grade and lived, as 20-somethings, in the same apartment complex in Houston. They meet, fall in love quickly and have a six-week courtship and a six-week engagement. She marries the son of a former congressman, ambassador to China, and CIA director in a “two-piece dress she had bought just days before the wedding, off the rack.”
They are newlyweds during his campaign for Congress in 1978. He loses, and it does not appear, for many years, that he’s all that ambitious or really that inclined toward politics. She encourages him to curb his heavy drinking, and he gives it up altogether at the age of 40. She is ambivalent about his running for governor, and he becomes governor. She definitely does not want him to run for president, but what better way is there to ensure that something unlikely will happen than not to want it? Ten months after their arrival in the White House, her husband’s administration, and the country, face one of the worst crises in American history.
In the first version of the Laura Bush novel that exists in my head, Laura married George because she wanted to have a family and they were the last two single people left in their extended social circle. (She has jokingly said as much.) My doubts about how much she actually liked her husband made her sympathetic to me; she had settled, but for ordinary, understandable reasons — who wants to grow old alone? — and if her decision to marry him brought unwanted consequences, with their life together becoming increasingly political and public, she was stoic about them. However, any good novel, even an imaginary one, should contain surprises for its author, and after reading “The Perfect Wife,” I think George and Laura Bush have one of the healthiest marriages I can imagine, that they genuinely enjoy each other’s company and are at their best together. He makes her laugh, and she calms him down and looks after him — according to Gerhart, when she leaves town, she calls one of his fraternity brothers to come stay at the White House so he won’t get lonely.
As a Democrat, I cannot completely reconcile my admiration for Laura Bush with her marriage to someone whose professional decisions are affecting so many people in ways I believe to be negative. And even the strength of the Bushes’ marriage is, no doubt, partly a result of their privileged life and the fact that Laura hasn’t had to work — she’s had time to be “the perfect wife.” But I’m still impressed. As for the cover of “The Perfect Wife,” where Laura is gazing up at George Bush while he speaks — take a closer look. It’s not a vacant, worshipful expression on her face at all. “She looks like she’s really keenly paying attention,” says Gerhart, who selected the photograph. “It’s open to interpretation [and] that’s what I liked about it.”
Christine and Max made the pact in their late 20s, while on vacation in Mexico: If neither of them was married by the age of 40, they’d marry each other. Though they’d never been an official couple, their friendship had, over the course of five years, resembled something awfully close. As Christine explains it, in addition to traveling to romantic destinations such as Mexico, “We saw sunsets and held hands and did karaoke and met people together and went to weddings together.”
Christine and Max (all names except those of experts have been changed) were both living in New York when they met on the set of a short film. Initially, there had been a reason for them not to become involved — they’d both just been through painful breakups. Then, after time passed, Christine actually valued Max too much to date him. “I never wanted Max to be an ex-boyfriend,” she explains. “It was way more fun to just have a really close good friend that I could count on for anything — to know what I loved, to remember my birthday.”
And yet she was attracted to him, and she could imagine, in the long-term, sharing her life with him. Hence the pact. It was 1996 and Max had recently moved to Los Angeles to pursue his acting career. Christine visited him in California, and they went on together to Mexico. “Things were coming to a head,” Christine says. “[We were asking], are we going to be together as a couple or are we not going to be together as a couple? I just couldn’t make that commitment at the time. But then we made the pact. I was like, ‘Look, it’s not that I don’t love you.’ It wasn’t really about finding somebody better. I wanted him, but I also wanted something else — I just didn’t know what it was yet.”
Christine and Max aren’t the only ones making marriage pacts. They are by now so widespread that if you’re under the age of 35, there’s a good chance you’ve made one yourself, and if you haven’t, you probably know someone who has. Pacts inspired the 1997 Julia Roberts movie “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” and have served as subplots for episodes of “Friends” and “Ed.”
But what do these pacts really mean? Do they imply an absurdly naive and wistful idea of adulthood — you say it offhandedly, and therefore it will be so? Or is their phoniness implicitly understood, the matrimonial equivalent of saying, “We should get coffee”? Are they the shy person’s way of flirting, with the subtext being I’m madly in love with you? Or are they the coward’s contingency plan? — I’m only moderately into you, but if it looks like I’m going to end up alone, you’ll do. And finally, what happens when the person you were supposed to marry marries someone else?
The meaning of the pacts, it turns out, depends on whom you ask — and apparently marriage pacts, like actual marriages, can be pretty complicated. They’re often made in jest, but according to Cathie Gray, a Washington couples therapist, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if more people made good on them. “What makes a marriage really work over a long period of time is companionship,” Gray says. The two people “trust each other, they respect each other, they feel emotionally safe with each other. I know of people who’ve made these sort of pacts, and the upside is you’re transitioning into a relationship called marriage with somebody [where] there’s a secure friendship. That’s a positive. The deficit is [the feeling that] the pact is made out of a default rather than an active choice.”
The pacts also can be something of a cop-out or crutch, says Rhonda Britten, a Boulder, Colo., life coach and the author of “Fearless Living” and “Fearless Loving.” “Most people, if they have a level head, do it more for fun than reality,” Britten says. “But some people actually use it to stop themselves from having intimacy. They go, ‘I don’t know how to have intimate relationships,’ or ‘I always pick the wrong men’ — [but] I don’t have to really try to get past this because George is over here, and George and I get along great.”
Britten herself, now 42, has been in such a pact for 13 years. She and her friend Clark went out for a year when she was 29 and he was 25. When they broke up, they promised they’d marry when he turned 30 — which then turned into 40, “and now we say when we’re 50,” Britten says. “We’re never going to get married.” For her, the pact is basically a good-spirited joke — and, in fact, she was married to someone else for seven years in her 30s — but for Clark, “I actually believe it has stopped him,” she says. “He has said many times to me, ‘When I date somebody, I date them for a while, and then I think about you and compare them.’ It’s like he uses me to avoid intimacy. I’ve actually told him, ‘You gotta go for it. We’re never getting married. You gotta get over it.’”
For Alex and Karen, who grew up together in Rhode Island and are now both 28, making the pact definitely wasn’t a coded way of declaring their love. If they were to marry, says Alex, “It’d be a pragmatic decision. Here’s someone you’ve known your whole life. All the tough parts are out of the way. Your families know each other, you like the same activities, you have the same values. It would be a marriage of convenience, and you would have to create the physical side. The rest of it would come easy [when] usually it’s the opposite.”
But “creating the physical side” can be challenging. When there’s zero chemistry, says Gray, “that relationship is going to be mighty dull.”
If Alex sounds pretty passionless, to be fair, he isn’t the one who suggested the deal in the first place. “I think Karen proposed it as soon as she began to get jaded with the world,” he says. “Usually it comes up whenever we hang out and have a few drinks. It’s in the context of a bigger talk about how guys suck, she can’t find anyone else, and all her friends are getting married.”
Adam’s and Michelle’s pact involves slightly more passion — but not much. Adam and Michelle went to their high school prom together as friends in 1992, and they made the pact at 3 a.m. in a field in upstate New York, while around them their drunken classmates were making out. Adam was a year ahead of Michelle and when they’d first met — he was a sophomore, and she was a freshman — he says, “I was desperately in love.” But by the time of the pact, which occurred his senior year, “I had given up on that and she had become one of my best friends.” In fact, they openly admitted that they were each other’s prom dates only because neither of them had anyone better to go with.
Making the pact “wasn’t flirtatious,” says Adam, now a 29-year-old lawyer in Washington. “It was genuinely [saying], ‘You’d be a good person to be married to’ just because we got along and knew each other so well. We thought if we’re completely alone when we’re the geriatric age of 35, why not just get married and comfort each other?”
When Vivian and Tim, both writers, made the pact in 2001, there actually was some genuine romance involved — at least for one of them. Asked about the dynamic between herself and Tim, Vivian, now 28, says, “Besides me secretly chasing after him, pretending to be his friend?” The two of them lived in Iowa City, Iowa, and while walking around the college town one day, Vivian brought up the pact. “I liked him and I wanted to raise the subject” of being involved, she says.
For those moldering in the swamp of unrequited love, proposing such a pact can feel like a declaration — but it’s actually the ultimate nongesture. It allows the proposer to make a “move” that requires no immediate action or response, and allows the proposee to avoid rejecting a friend. After all, what’s the harm in agreeing to an imaginary marriage years away? Not that Vivian was brokenhearted for long. She and Tim now live in different cities — and both cohabit with the people they’ll most likely marry for real. “The key ingredient to this whole thing,” Vivian says, “is that when you’re so desperate you would make a pact with your best friend, things can turn around in five minutes. You can meet somebody else and …” she laughs, “forget about your best friend.”
David, a 30-year-old English teacher in Boston, made the pact with Nancy when they were college freshmen at Washington University in St. Louis in 1991. They lived in the same dorm, hooked up early freshman year, decided not to keep hooking up, and then just became good friends. “We were really close, like we had a secret handshake,” David explains. During college, David went home with Nancy for Mardi Gras — she was from New Orleans — and the fact that he got along with her whole family increased his ability to see himself with her in the long-term. At their college graduation in 1995, the two families ended up hanging out. Six years later, at Nancy’s wedding, David found himself commiserating with Nancy’s mother that he wasn’t the one her daughter was marrying. “Her mom said I had lost my chance,” says David.
David was “pretty unimpressed” with Nancy’s new husband. “The thing about her is that she’s 6 feet tall and blond and really pretty, but she always would go for these short guys,” says David (himself 6-foot-6). Granting that her allegedly short husband did seem “supernice,” David says he was happy for Nancy — and also “sort of sad because whatever element of youth that led me to have that pact with her had passed, and the possibility of that ever coming to be between the two of us was no longer an option. It made me get more nostalgic and unrealistic about the fact that we should have gotten together.”
Acknowledging that the pact had been made “on a whim or a lark,” David says it did have a meatier subtext: “It’s sort of acknowledging, ‘We could be lifelong partners, but I’m 21, and I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, and I want to not know what the fuck I’m doing for a while.’ I wanted to go through a lot — to have different stages in my life that didn’t all involve one person.”
According to Gray, that’s the most positive subtext for marriage pacts (especially as compared to desperation or fear of being alone), and it’s the one most likely to result in a wedding — even if it didn’t for David and Nancy.
“Sometimes what [the couple is] saying is, ‘You’re the person I could see going the long haul with, but in my 20s I need to explore and feel free. If you’re still available when I’m done doing that, I could see us being together.’” In this version, Gray says, the pact is about the opposite of desperation — it’s about a connection so profound that even while the man and woman date other people or live in separate places, they keep returning in their minds to each other.
“I know somebody who was in a relationship for four years starting midcollege, and I remember him saying this was the right person but the wrong time,” Gray says. “He knew he hadn’t really dated a whole lot and he hadn’t gotten his career going. He hadn’t done a lot of the things he wanted to do. They broke up and each of them over the next four or five years tried out a variety of relationships, careers, graduate school, but they always kept touching base with each other and remained friends. And they did get married but not until they were 28 or 29.”
Which brings us back to Christine and Max — the “friends” who held hands and watched sunsets. In 2001, Christine did get married … but to Andrew. “I went through several relationships while I was friends with Max,” Christine says, “and those relationships were very passionate but [had] lots of madness. [Max and I] always got along. It was always comfortable. Even when we fought, and we did because we were like a couple, it wasn’t a manic fight. It was like a discussion. I guess I felt like maybe the two things weren’t compatible — maybe you couldn’t have this insane passion, which you sort of crave, and a friendship at the same time.”
When she made the pact with Max, Christine says, “I was still looking for those two things to collide and I didn’t know if that could happen. So the basis of the pact was, if that doesn’t exist, I want to have a family and I want my life to be calm and I don’t always want to be searching. If I get to 40, I will find it very appealing to be with somebody that I like.”
Lucky for Christine, when she was 33 passion and friendship did collide — and she and Andrew were engaged within seven months of meeting. But at their wedding, which was held in July 2001, vestiges of her marriage pact with Max remained. “I pulled Max aside during the reception and we had a little 10-minute alone-time hug,” Christine says. “I definitely felt like there was a chapter closing.” When Max gave a toast lamenting the fact that he wasn’t marrying Christine, “everybody was laughing, but I think everybody felt a little tense,” Christine says. “My husband was upset about it. He said, why would anybody bring up that they were in love with your wife at a wedding?”
Since then, Andrew has not just grudgingly accepted the role that Max plays in Christine’s life, he has embraced it. Christine and Andrew have moved to Eugene, Ore., but whenever they’re in New York, they see Max’s parents — and their infant daughter even calls Max’s mother Nana. Max, for his part, has a serious girlfriend whom Christine believes he will marry. “And I have to tell you,” Christine says, “I’m a little jealous.” Even now, when she’s talking about Max, it’s almost as if she’s surprised by how things turned out. “It’s so weird that I’m actually not married to Max,” she says.
David, too, seems a bit regretful that his and Nancy’s secret handshake at Washington University didn’t lead to more. “I think we were made for each other,” he says. “But it just never worked out.”
Then again, it’s not always so bittersweet. When Adam, the one who made the pact with Michelle at their prom, e-mailed her last year to say he was engaged, her reply e-mail contained a single word: “Whew.”
- – - – - – - – - – - -
We want to make you a part of this series. What is the state of your union? Did you find the one and never look back, or has finding lasting love been a marathon of trial and error? Did you have a fairy-tale wedding only to watch things crumble once the reception was over, or have you glided along in marital bliss since Day One? We want to hear your stories of joy, romance, heartbreak and pain. After all, partnership, as we all know, is a complex concoction of all of those things. (Please remember: Any writing submitted becomes the property of Salon if we publish it. We reserve the right to edit submissions, and cannot reply to every writer. Interested contributors should send their stories to marriage@salon.com.)
I am, according to my friend Susanna, a wedding ho. In the last five years, I’ve gone to every wedding I’ve been invited to — 12 in total. My so-called wedding vow started after two college classmates married each other in the summer of 1997. I decided not to go to the wedding because it was across the country, because my then-boss didn’t want me to take time off, and because I had grown apart from the friends I’d once shared with the bride and groom. And since it was going to be a Mormon wedding, it wasn’t even like the awkwardness could be smoothed over with booze.
But afterward, after I hadn’t gone, I regretted it. Even though weddings are in many ways ridiculous — people spend vast sums of money to act out corny and antiquated rituals in a frenzied setting — they still mean something. They’re an act of optimism, a time when people come together for happy rather than unhappy reasons. And I hadn’t been there.
Since then, repentant, I have attended weddings in Florida and Rhode Island and Oregon, in New Hampshire and South Carolina and California. I have spent dozens of hours and thousands of dollars buying gifts on the Crate and Barrel Web site — surely, if the store had a frequent flier equivalent, by now I’d be entitled to an entire Calphalon Contemporary Nonstick Cookware Set ($299.95, oven safe to 450 degrees). And, in my faithful attendance of the weddings themselves, I have had ample opportunity both to observe and to participate in all the behaviors associated with a phenomenon known as the wedding boyfriend. (Please note: “The wedding boyfriend” exists in many permutations depending upon your own gender and sexual orientation. He also answers to the name of wedding girlfriend.)
Here’s how it works: You go, dateless, to a wedding. You start hanging out with a particular guy, also a single wedding guest. You can, but don’t have to, hook up with him; the only requirement is that the question of whether you’ll hook up must exist, hanging there like champagne bubbles. Ideally, you meet your wedding boyfriend at the rehearsal dinner and then your relationship — your minirelationship — can unfold over the next 36 hours. Even if you don’t meet your wedding boyfriend until the reception, the wedding boyfriend is still the person who, for you, defines the wedding. It’s the unique structure of the wedding weekend that allows for these compressed relationships. “With the rehearsal dinner [and] wedding back to back, you’ve greased the skids for familiarity with people,” says Scott, a 33-year-old law school professor in Washington. (All names have been changed to protect the single and still-looking.) “It’s pretty rare, if you think about it, to go out on consecutive nights with people that you’ve just met. It almost never happens in other circumstances, and when it does happen [at a wedding] you’re in some place where you’ve traveled, so you get this weird combination of vacation and familiarity.”
According to Jake, a 33-year-old New York photographer who has ended up in bed with wedding girlfriends at six out of his last six weddings (“At a certain point,” he says, “it approached pathology”), the Friday night before a wedding, when various friends typically gather together, “is like the first day of camp. You form your little social circles and everyone figures out who’s attracted to whom and what’s going on.”
Then, once you’ve found your wedding honey, you get to enact all of the stages of courtship, speeded up: After the meeting and the initial connection comes the bliss, followed by the growing sense that it’s about to end, followed by the end itself — aka the breakup. When you’re ripped apart at the conclusion of the weekend — let’s say he’s flying home to Dallas, you live in Boston — you feel disproportionately bereft; you get to luxuriate in the logistical unfairness of it, in the knowledge that surely if you lived in the same city you would start dating immediately. Hell, you’d probably end up married yourselves. Of course, the reality is, it’s this very distance, and the ephemerality of the weekend — plus, often, a lot of alcohol — that allows people to be so open to a romantic connection in the first place. “It’s more safe,” says Amanda, a 30-year-old doctor in Philadelphia. “[You don't] actually have to deal after the weekend is over.”
Amanda recently found wedding love with a guy who had been preselected for her. Amanda was the best friend of the bride’s sister; Ben was the best friend of the groom; both had been hearing about each other for several years. When Amanda pulled into the dirt road leading to the bride’s family’s house on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, Ben and the bride’s sister Jill “walked up to meet me and hopped in my car,” remembers Amanda. “Jill’s like, ‘Meet Ben, your date for the weekend.’ And he handed me a can of Budweiser.” In other words: Ben was an arranged wedding boyfriend. Ben was cute and confident, and he was wearing a John Deere hat that Amanda liked, but she wasn’t totally convinced. Then, at a bonfire that evening, “He put his hand on my butt,” says Amanda. “I went up to Jill and was like, ‘I think I am going to hook up with him.’” Conveniently, Amanda and Ben were not only both sleeping at the bride’s family’s house but they’d been assigned a bed and a trundle bed a foot apart. However, the romance of the first evening was cut short when Amanda, having had several gin and tonics and not much else for dinner, threw up in her bed. But this turn of events actually allowed Ben, in true wedding boyfriend mode, to show his helpful domestic side — he proceeded to strip and remake the bed and bring Amanda water.
The two of them spent much of the next day together — not Amanda’s usual M.O. even after a successful overnight first date. They swam together in the lake and helped prepare for the ceremony. That night, Ben’s mother was present at the wedding, and Ben introduced Amanda to her “like one would a new girlfriend,” going so far as to hold Amanda’s hand in front of his mother. Amanda’s not sure she and Ben would hit it off in the regular world — “He’s just really gregarious and has to be the center of attention all the time,” she says — but that’s the beauty of a wedding boyfriend: It doesn’t matter. After all, Ben and Amanda live 3,000 miles apart.
Although Ben and Amanda did hook up on the wedding night, a wedding boyfriend isn’t the same as a wedding hookup. There’s overlap, of course, but sex isn’t mandatory — it’s more about intensity of feeling. Julia, now 30 and living in Washington, was 23 and about to enter a graduate writing program when she met George, a teacher in his 50s, at a wedding reception in Virginia in the summer of 1997. “I spent the entire night talking to him,” she remembers. “His wife had recently died of cancer and my mom had recently had cancer and we were totally bonding. He started crying at one point and I was crying. We sat and talked for three hours.”
Nothing physical happened (“There definitely was a spark,” Julia says, “but my parents were there, for one thing, and he was so old”), but they decided to keep in touch. “We had this huge hug goodbye, exchanged addresses, and e-mailed every day.” The e-mails, naturally, were flirtations: “I would tell him about dates I went on and he would give me advice or be like, ‘He’s not good enough!’” After a few months, the e-mails stopped abruptly, when both Julia and George began dating other people.
“There’s an excess of sentiment” at weddings, says Scott, the law professor. But the sentiment isn’t always positive, and the wedding boyfriend has an ugly inverse — the already-existing relationship that blows up at a wedding. “I’ve definitely been to weddings before with guys I’m dating but not that serious about, and I think that’s a bad thing to do,” says Amanda. “It can almost hurt a relationship that’s not there yet [in terms of seriousness] or not ever going to be there [because] it puts pressure on people.” Pressure, that is, to get engaged themselves — or at least to seem deeply and conspicuously in love.
In fact, a friend of Amanda’s was at a recent wedding in Sun Valley, Idaho, in which not one but two separate girlfriends burst into tears and stormed away from their boyfriends when the bride rose to serenade her new husband with a love song. “Rather than being happy for [the couple] that they were getting married, the [girlfriends] were upset that they weren’t,” says Amanda. According to Jake, the New York photographer, “It can be one of two things [with women]. Either they’re in a sordid jealous panic, in which case frankly they’re not at all attractive and I’m not going to hook up with them. Or they can be the type that are completely on cloud nine — they’re psyched for their friends — and when you see that, that’s contagious. At [one wedding] a close friend of the bride [was] a very confident woman, very athletic, very open, and a force of nature. When I saw her, it was like, I gotta have some of that.” Not only did Jake have some — he had it at 3 o’clock the afternoon before the wedding. Blame it, or credit it to, the convenience of the beds. In the morning, “We went shopping and just ran stupid wedding errands together,” he remembers. “Then we were back at the hotel and we hooked up.” Jake adds, “I’ve never had bad sex at a wedding.” About his six-for-six wedding-girlfriend streak, Jake says, “I do not go looking for them. I haven’t slept with dozens of women in my life. I’m not a bar-picker-upper.” But there’s just something about a wedding. “Without being corny, love is in the air.”
As for me, it was only this past summer, a summer during which I attended five weddings, that I gave a name to the wedding boyfriend. Then, as with any new belief, there seemed to be evidence of it everywhere, and I could retroactively pinpoint them all: Alex, with whom I’d worked in the same office building for more than a year and almost never spoken to before we both moved away and remet at the wedding three years later (having vaguely known your wedding boyfriend in the past is actually pretty common; before, you were acquaintances, but at a wedding at which neither of you necessarily knows many other people, your relative familiarity with each other is part of what draws you together in the first place); Kit, whose lap I sat on in a crowded car after the reception; Mark, whom I started arguing with in the driveway of the bride’s house, while I was wearing a bright red linen dress. There is always a wedding boyfriend, I decided. It’s just a matter of identifying him.
I also decided, based on past experiences, that the wedding boyfriend shouldn’t transcend the wedding. Normal life is more awkward and less giddy, and if you see the guy again, it’s hard not to taint the bubbly fun you had before. E-mailing is fine because, well, e-mail is only half-real. But in-person contact should be kept, like the tulle on the bride’s dress or the sugared flowers on the cake, within the confines of the wedding weekend. Yes, I know that all the time people meet at weddings and get into relationships, and sometimes even get married themselves — for real, and not just in their heads. But when that happens, the guy in question isn’t, and never was, your wedding boyfriend. Then he’s just your boyfriend.
- – - – - – - – - – - -
We want to make you a part of this series. What is the state of your union? Did you find the one and never look back, or has finding lasting love been a marathon of trial and error? Did you have a fairy-tale wedding only to watch things crumble once the reception was over, or have you glided along in marital bliss since Day One? We want to hear your stories of joy, romance, heartbreak and pain. After all, partnership, as we all know, is a complex concoction of all of those things. (Please remember: Any writing submitted becomes the property of Salon if we publish it. We reserve the right to edit submissions, and cannot reply to every writer. Interested contributors should send their stories to marriage@salon.com.)
First, the facts: In its 2001 “Summer Fiction Issue” the New Yorker printed four stories by “debut writers,” a title defined by the magazine as “young writers who have not yet published a book.” Among the four was Nell Freudenberger, then age 26; her contributor’s note mentioned both that she was an editorial assistant at the New Yorker and that her piece, which was called “Lucky Girls,” was her first published story. Author photos accompanied all the debut stories, and the three other writers had been photographed at, respectively, a park, a restaurant and a marina. Freudenberger had been photographed in her apartment, shot from above while sitting on what appeared to be a shiny, velvety mauve and silver bedspread. She had pale skin and shoulder-length dark hair; she wore a serious expression; it would be overstating it, but not by much, to say that you could see down her shirt.
On the June day the magazine appeared in my mailbox, I set aside what I was doing, which was, if I remember correctly, nothing (I had just graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was still living in Iowa City) and read much of the issue, including the story by Freudenberger. I think I liked the story, though it’s hard to say now — a bit like having been given a hamburger by a man at a picnic and only later, after finding out the man was Ray Kroc, trying to evaluate that hamburger. What I do remember is thinking Freudenberger looked kind of awkward, but in an endearing way.
I was quickly disabused of this idea. Nell Freudenberger was, as one of my Iowa classmates announced at a party that night, completely hot. (If you’d like to verify this for yourself, she has appeared in recent issues of both Vogue and Elle — go on, get to the newsstand.) A bunch of us were sitting on someone’s back porch, drinking beer, and the other males present (of course everyone I knew subscribed to the New Yorker, and of course everyone had anxiously consumed that particular issue) concurred. A debate about the story’s merits ensued; most people had, apparently, been less impressed by Freudenberger’s writing than by her appearance. Naturally, there were cracks about her insider status as an employee of the New Yorker. Which is all to say that the conversation wasn’t particularly flattering to Freudenberger, but still — the assumption was that she warranted conversation. (Among the other debut writers in that New Yorker was Jonathan Safran Foer, whose novel “Everything Is Illuminated” would come out the next year, but I don’t remember any real talk about him.)
And yet I think I didn’t truly understand the Freudenberger phenomenon until a woman at the party, a woman whom I thought of as gorgeous and brilliant and poised and intimidating, said she had gone to Harvard with Freudenberger and that Freudenberger was, basically, gorgeous and brilliant and poised and intimidating. Of everyone she knew, this woman said, it was utterly unsurprising that Nell Freudenberger should be the one to have a story in the New Yorker.
Probably that night, on the porch, some of us already hated Freudenberger. And yet, remarkably, this was before the things started happening that really made her hateful, or at least it was before all of them happened and certainly before news of them made their way out to us in Iowa. This is what occurred next: Amanda “Binky” Urban became Freudenberger’s agent; a bidding war broke out, on the basis of that single story, for an as-yet-unwritten book by Freudenberger; she was offered a reported $500,000; she turned down the reported $500,000 and instead took a reported $100,000 in order to work with Daniel Halpern at Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins. (Meaning she was, like, virtuous and un-greedy on top of everything else — it was sickening!)
For a week or so, over e-mail or when we ran into each other in town, I exchanged Freudenberger tidbits with people who’d been at the party. (It was summer in Iowa. What else were we supposed to discuss?) And, apparently, Freudenberger gossip — that is, schadenfreudenberger — was not restricted to bored Midwestern MFA graduates: According to my friend J., a writer in New York who’d see Freudenberger at parties, “There was all this whispering, like, ‘She hasn’t even written it yet; she has no idea how difficult it is to write a whole book.’” Freudenberger’s party persona, which according to J. was one of refined reserve, only perpetuated notions of her as charmed and undeserving. “She’s just one of those people who always make me feel loud and drunk,” says J.
Truthfully, among the people I know, the schadenfreudenberger tapered off pretty soon after her story appeared in the New Yorker, and I haven’t heard a lot in the two years since. But on the occasions when her name is mentioned, it’s guaranteed — if at least one of the two or more people present is from either the MFA circuit or the New York media universe, someone will be compelled to announce, loudly and violently, “I hate Nell Freudenberger!”
And while my friends and I may have gotten distracted in the past two years, others have remained more vigilant — a Web site called “The Complete Review” closely monitors Freudenberger’s in-print activity and even features a play about her ascension titled “Whoa Nelly!” (A sample line, referring to her New Yorker photo: “I must say I do like the aluminum-foil skirt.”) The site is, apparently, providing a much-needed service. As reported in an October 2002 entry, “Visitors to this Literary Saloon seem particularly curious about Nell Freudenberger — ‘Nell’ and ‘Freudenberger’ remain (ridiculously) the two most popular search engine request terms that lead users here — ahead of even ‘literary’ and ‘saloon.’”
Now — as of this week — Freudenberger’s collection, titled “Lucky Girls” after the story that appeared in the New Yorker, is finally out, and the mainstream media is working itself into a similar lather. In addition to her appearances in Vogue and Elle, Entertainment Weekly has declared her “the summer’s hottest young writer.” (Hotter, presumably, than Tom Clancy who also has a new book out but has not yet appeared in E.W., as Freudenberger did, sitting on the floor against the wall, hair falling over one eye, next to a bowl of cherries.)
None of which makes hating Nell Freudenberger fair. It isn’t fair. Most of the circumstances leading to the hatred happened through no fault of Freudenberger herself — which is exactly the problem. As my friend R., a writer living outside Buffalo, wrote in a recent e-mail, “It just seems to have happened for Nell’s career — sitting at the desk, playing assistant, and then, oh? This old thing? This little story I wrote on a whim? And $500,000 worth of dominoes start falling into place.” As J. puts it, “She didn’t do what you’re supposed to do — she sat in 4 Times Square until [then New Yorker fiction editor] Bill Buford came to her.”
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that four factors could lead to one young writer’s becoming the object of other young writers’ loathing. Let’s say these factors are that the writer in question is thought to be attractive, thought not to have paid her dues, known to have gone to Harvard (horrors!), and believed to be without talent. The bad news for Freudenberger is that she represents the overlap of all these factors, thereby becoming emblematic to other 20-something aspiring literati of all that’s unfair and demoralizing about publishing. It’s not any single thing — after all, I know several people who have gotten book deals comparable to the larger one Freudenberger supposedly turned down, and they don’t elicit the contempt she does — but rather it’s everything. And, largely because of age (Freudenberger and I both graduated from college in 1997), she seems overly accessible; she’s not different enough from the rest of us to be enjoying such different circumstances. To put it another way: I’ve never looked at Jonathan Franzen and thought, But that should be me!
The problem is, Freudenberger actually doesn’t represent the overlap of the four hate-inviting factors; the exception is the last and most significant one. She’s not without talent. In fact, her new collection is really good. The five stories are well-written, well-plotted, intelligent and surprising.
Believe me: I didn’t want it to be this way. I came to the book eager to uncover its most damning aspects. For instance, the title — didn’t it cry out to be incorporated into headlines in a mocking comment on Freudenberger herself? For God’s sake, it was like calling a really wretched novel “The Big Disaster.” And how about allowing just five stories to constitute an entire collection? Wasn’t that a bit thin?
I was pleased when, on Page 8, an older man says to the young American woman who is the first story’s protagonist, “You’re extremely pretty.” Aha! I thought, licking my chops. This will be the kind of fiction where other characters are constantly telling the disingenuously self-effacing main character, clearly a stand-in for the author, how alluring she is. (Such fiction is only slightly less odious than fiction in which other characters are constantly telling the disingenuously self-effacing main character, clearly a stand-in for the author, how witty she is — especially when there’s nary a funny remark to be found.) But the older man’s remark in the story is offset both by the thrill it gives the protagonist, who is unaccustomed to such compliments, and by the protagonist’s own apparently ingenuous admission that she is, in fact, not extremely pretty.
I still wasn’t won over, though. The stories are set occasionally in the United States but more often in India and Asia (both Thailand and Vietnam), and in the margins of Page 21, I noted that Nell Freudenberger was probably the kind of person who had, during college, returned from a year abroad pretending not to remember the English words for things. But then something happened. It started happening in the second story, as the evocative details and vivid images and casually realistic lines of dialogue accumulated — I think it was somewhere soon after the description of “orange and white carp [gliding] just under the green surface, like pale, fat feet floating in a lake” — and I found myself spending less time trying to be appalled and more time just, well, reading.
It was on Page 80 that Freudenberger got me, with a sentence uttered by a woman who is grievously depressed: “I thought of going to bed, but what I really wanted was to be inside the bed — inside the mattress, where it was warm and dense and silent, with the stuffing packed around my arms and legs.” What got me about the sentence was both how weird it was — weird in a sincere rather than quirky way — and how understandable. And I am pretty sure that’s the point of reading fiction — so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately.
The publisher’s press release I received accompanying the book describes Freudenberger’s work as “exquisite.” In some ways, though only bad ones, it is kind of exquisite: Her characters are the type of people who write poetry and use actual leaves and a strainer to make tea. What I ultimately admired about the book was not its precious moments, however, but its oddness and unpredictability, its willingness — Freudenberger’s willingness — to make the stories messier in a way that also makes them more real. There are many moments of drama that are built up to and then don’t happen, even when, at least initially, the characters believe they have. A father reminisces poignantly about his daughter as a 7-year-old, but instead of letting that section end in an achingly beautiful way, a way that would be truer to fiction than to life, the narrator reveals that she thinks her father’s memory is inaccurate. In another story, an American girl living in Bombay tries to seduce her Indian tutor by dancing in front of him — but, though the girl is attractive, “she was not a good dancer.” The dialogue, which does an especially nice job capturing the cadence of both teenagers and close family members, features people saying things such as, “I’m sorry I’m all gross from tennis,” and, “Scallops are weird. Do they even have heads?” The beauty of such lines is that they’re not, thank God, exquisite.
The stories are thematically linked — in addition to travel, they touch repeatedly on absent mothers, adolescent sexual initiation, and writing itself — but they’re not heavy-handedly so. There is something patient about Freudenberger’s writing, a gradual build-up to the important moments so they really feel important. Or, in the writing workshop lingo that is both cringe-inducing and hard not to use, they feel “earned”: “He looked at me directly, with a sudden focused intensity. It was a quality of attention I hadn’t experienced before, an ability he had to suggest that everything that had gone before had led to this precise moment.”
Both the individual characters, especially the stories’ protagonists, and the stories themselves, possess an unusual knowingness. In many cases, the characters possess a kind of double awareness — they know what they know, and they also know enough to try to protect others from their knowledge. When a child sees a deformed man in a slum in India, “I looked quickly at my shoes, to reassure whichever adult I was with that I hadn’t seen [him].” Eventually, the double knowingness becomes a triple knowingness — the final story, told by a teenage girl, concerns a famous writer and blithely mentions, in a discussion of the famous writer’s work, the presence of “the one weird detail that makes you know it’s real” as well as the commonplace assumption that the author and his or her characters are more or less the same person.
In these moments, it is hard not to think of Freudenberger herself, and, simultaneously, it’s hard to locate where exactly she comes down on any given situation or idea. Which is not to say the writing is coy, more that it’s admirably lacking in ego — it’s not an assertion of the writer’s personality. I don’t know, based on her writing, who Nell Freudenberger is, but the more I read her book, the more I saw that she was in control, that she had known all along what would happen. And I was forced to admit: Given the preponderance of characters who are young, female and privileged without necessarily being happy, “Lucky Girls” is exactly the right title for the book. And five stories, especially five longish ones, is exactly the right length. It’s no secret that in collections with the more standard eight or 10 stories, three or four usually stink — so why not preemptively cut the flab?
In Freudenberger’s last story, the famous writer is revealed to be less than likable, and yet he is given what I thought (and I’m not particularly fond of fiction about writers) was the book’s loveliest passage:
“For a few minutes after he’d finished [writing] a book, when he knew it was good but before anyone else had seen it, he felt no pressure to exist at all; the book existed for him. It was like being invisible in the silent woods, so strange a figure that someone passing on the trail above him would only with great difficulty focus on him and think: That is a man. Instead they would see a shadow or a storm-broken tree and move on … He knew it wouldn’t last, but for these few, charmed moments, looking at the frozen reservoir, Henry felt that things had been put in order; nothing could touch him; he was outside of everything, and at peace.”
For me, this is it precisely — Nell Freudenberger’s book not only reminded me why I read, it also reminded me why I write. In my defense, I didn’t love “Lucky Girls” (phew!), I didn’t feel as though I needed it, but I did like it a lot.
So now that it seems I’m the newest member of the Nell Freudenberger fan club (you know, just me, Bill Buford, Binky Urban, and Daniel Halpern, hangin’ out, shootin’ the literary shit — I suppose Richard Ford could be let in, too, as he gives Freudenberger a glowing blurb on the book cover), I’m not sure what’s next. On the one hand, my congenital bitterness and envy feel unfocused, at loose ends. On the other hand, there are lots of MFA programs, conferences, literary magazines and anthologies, and every day they get filled by writers younger and cuter than I am. Plus, there’s a lot of really bad fiction out there — not just wish-it-was-bad fiction that’s actually really good, but bad-bad fiction. Surely it’s only a matter of time before I find someone new to detest.
| Like everyone else, I have no idea what women want (and I, despite my name, actually am a woman). But I do know what adolescent girls care about. How? Last spring, I served as one of five judges in Seventeen magazine’s annual fiction contest, an institution whose former winners include Sylvia Plath, Lorrie Moore and the dread Joyce Maynard. Among the 400-plus pieces I read, I ended up picking both the first- and third-place winners. I also ended up being highly entertained and unexpectedly charmed by all the stories that the teenage writers chose to tell.
I’ll be honest: I didn’t enter into being a judge anticipating that I’d learn much. For one thing, at the age of 23, I am myself not that far removed from adolescence. And for another, I had won this same contest six years earlier. When I won, in 1992, it was the summer before my senior year in high school, and the judge who selected me as the winner (I submitted eight stories — you know, just to be safe) was Jennifer Egan, who went on to write the novel “The Invisible Circus” and the story collection “Emerald City.” In the years since then, I have had both fiction and nonfiction in Seventeen several times, and I’ve been receiving what seems to be a lifetime subscription to the magazine — its appearance first in my college dorms and now in my apartment is a source of both confusion and amusement to visitors. They’re even more surprised when I tell them that I actually read it.
This is all just to say that before serving as a judge, I already believed I had more than a passing familiarity with the world of girls. But there was something about hearing (or reading) so many of their voices — in the aggregate, unedited, as they chose to present themselves instead of as someone else, like Time magazine or the WB, chose to present them — that was both surprising and endearing. The stories came from nearly every state in the country — Arvada, Colo., and Niceville, Fla., and Ypsilanti, Miss. — as well as India, France and the Philippines. Their authors were named Brandi and Aimee, LaKeisha and Prudence, Willow, Meredith, Denise, Desiree, Abby and Melissa. Often, the handwriting in the notes that accompanied stories was big and bubbly. “I spilled my guts out for you and I hope you enjoy it,” wrote one girl. Another signed her letter “your eternal reader” (addressed, obviously, to Seventeen and not to me). Several authors included class pictures, which I simultaneously had no idea what to do with and felt unable to throw away.
As for the stories themselves, a few showed a great deal of talent,including the excellent winning story, “Farewell, Angelina,” by 17-year-old Susannah Rutherglen, which is out now in the March Seventeen. Susannah’s writing is clean and understated, her characters seem real and her details are just right. All of this was pretty obvious within the first fewparagraphs. Most of the other stories, meanwhile, were abysmally bad. Maybe that sounds mean, but I would argue that the same great-abysmal ratio applies to any batch of writing produced by people who are not, by profession, writers; that is, it had nothing to do with the fact that the writers were an average of about 15 years old. One summer during college, I was an intern at the Atlantic Monthly, and our primary responsibility was reading unsolicited fiction manuscripts. Unfortunately, the experience helped me understand why instead of featuring so-called fresh voices, magazines choose to print stories by John Updike or Joyce Carol Oates overand over again.
There was, however, one significant difference in the submissions I read for Seventeen: In the writers’ awkward phrasing or corny descriptions, you could imagine all the ways they might improve if they stuck with it. And that was precisely because they were 15 years old.
I found that most stories featured one of three plots: The narrator decides that this is the year she’s going to become popular; a cute boy moves to the narrator’s neighborhood/joins the narrator’s class/makes meaningful eye contact with the narrator at the amusement park; or early death of some sort occurs, usually by either suicide, homicide, car accident, AIDS or cancer. Adolescence in these stories is marked by a vacillation between excruciating self-awareness and complete lack thereof (“I was feeling very depressed and I had to do some major soul-searching pronto. I checked my watch. I had 42 minutes of lunch left, plenty of time”); by the looming presence of boys (“Her name is Skye and her decision involved 11 different guys. She had to decide on her escort to the homecoming dance, and it wasn’t easy”); by endless self-definition and categorization (“Shevaugn and I are the second richest teens on the block. The richest teens are Adrian and Taylor”); and by improbable coincidences:
“I don’t believe it,” Nick said, laughing.
“What?” Mackenzie asked, bewildered.
“You have a peanut butter and banana sandwich cut in half, pretzels, two Oreo cookies and a Hawaiian Punch juice box.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s exactly what I always pack.”
Another staple of the stories is elaborate descriptions of physical appearance: “She had wavy brown hair, green eyes, and a perfect smile. She was tall and slender. The perfect body. She wasn’t too big, or too small in the northern and southern part of her body. She also had a good tan.” Or: “Matt was a truly unique person. He had shiny red hair and beautiful hazel eyes.”
And clothes, apparently, are just as important as hair and body: “It was a half an hour before the party … I was going to wear my blue velvet mini-skirt with my white baby-tee, my blue vest and my hair pulled back in a little ponytail and curled. Shevaugn was wearing her purple velvet skirt that was down to her knees, her white belly blouse that tied in front, and her hair was in a low ponytail with a green fluffy elastic on it.” Of course, physical descriptions aren’t always gratuitous — sometimes they’re central to the plot: “Jason’s about five-six, and he has wavy blonde-brown hair down to his chin and big, dark, green eyes. It suddenly hits me like a ton of bricks. Omigosh! Jason’s hotter than I thought!” (I’ll end the suspense — yes, the narrator and Jason do end up together. As she reports near the story’s conclusion, “He’s teaching me to play drums and he’s learned to like Fiona Apple.”) The importance of appearance informs all the stories, even when a particular person’s looks aren’t being described.
“Is that it then? You don’t like the way he looks?”
“Well,” I had to choose my words carefully. “I just wouldn’t want to walk around a mall with him.”
This passage contains what I love most in these stories — a kind of unapologetic honesty about what matters, even if it’s not what should matter. Like Woody Allen’s heart, these narrators want what they want. And they usually go after it, regardless of what’s considered appropriate. As one narrator tells it, “The perfect, all-that-you-will-ever-need-in-a-man guy approached me to ask for my number in a club that I had no business being in at the age of 12. I immediately wrote it down and gave it to him.” This honesty also manifests itself in the titles of certain stories, which are so explicit they basically obviate the need to read any further: “Traumas in Adolescent Life,” “Penelope Learns to Deal” and (my favorite) “The Day That My Best Friend Went Psycho and Told Everyone Everything.” If in writing workshops, the show-don’t-tell approach to conveying information is something like law, the contest entries both did and didn’t follow the rules. At pivotal moments in the stories, the writers are usually a little too enthusiastic, lest you as a reader should miss the importance of it all: “Jonny, I know you love me. But I’m not the same person you fell in love with two years ago. I like sports and hanging out until one o’clock in the morning. I hang out with all kinds of people. I’m not the same person. Don’t you understand?” But in describing the daily lives of teenagers (the number of stories about adults was negligible), they hit the mark exactly in both subject and diction, and they do it seemingly unconsciously:
It wasn’t until after our next class, when he walked up to her and handed her a note, that my heart started beating a little too fast. Leah, Jackie and I all ran into the bathroom to read it. I almost flipped when Jackie read the words “does Melanie really like me? If she does, then ask her out for me.” We all looked at each other, screamed at the top of our lungs and then burst out laughing. Later that day I had my sister call Justin and tell him my answer.
Or:
It all began when my best friend, Sophie, and I were tied for first place at the gymnastics competition. She thought she had won when she scored a 9.6 on the vault, but I scored a 9.8 on my floor routine. Things have been different between us ever since.The writing also seems unconscious when, embedded in a paragraph about something else, the narrators reveal entire philosophies about larger issues — age, say, or gender or family. A few examples:
- Mom was laughing her brains out … I turned away after a while because it started getting embarrassing. It was the kind of thing a mother shouldn’t do. It was like parents having long kisses. There are some thing you should stop doing when you get old.
- We decided that we didn’t want children because they just pose a problem in a small apartment.
- Like women, he could never stay with the same job for more than a couple months.
And what would stories by teenagers be without a little melodrama? One narrator is both vivid and succinct: “I have come to believe that I am at the armpit of despair.” Other descriptions are more elaborate: “Penelope began to cry. She couldn’t bear the pain of her twice-broken heart any longer. She ran out of the cafeteria, alone and sobbing. Her tears were so intense that she didn’t notice her friend Angie in the doorway, who was also bawling.” (Thankfully, this is Penelope of “Penelope Learns to Deal.” Whether Angie learns to deal is less clear.) The stories also demonstrate a kind of unself-aware feminism. These girls don’t hesitate to ask out the boys they’re interested in dating. And, while it may well be true that adolescence is the time that girls start suppressing their own needs in favor of fulfilling the needs of other people, quite a few of the narrators demonstrate not-very-well-concealed self-interest: “That summer we grew very close and became almost best friends. About a week before she had to leave, she suddenly decided that she wanted to stay up here and live with her father. I was thrilled at the idea, trying to keep my knowledge that she would make me extremely popular in the back of my head.” Yes, the narrators often berate themselves for being somehow inadequate — frequently, it’s in comparison to their sisters or best friends — but when they’re looking good and acting cool, they know it, and they don’t hesitate to congratulate themselves. “In my violet mohair sweater and snazzy iridescent sneakers, I felt like I was riding high,” says the heroine of one story. Another narrator feels so positive about herself that upon arrival at the school dance, she can’t even find anyone who deserves to talk to her: “We scanned the crowd. It was mainly freshmen, and, being that we were juniors, that just wouldn’t do.” Many stories were topical when it came to pop culture — El Niqo, Hanson and “Titanic” all receive mention, and one story was titled “Thank You, Leo,” though it was not, to my disappointment, a paean to Leonardo DiCaprio. Technology also makes a few appearances:
“I just asked my mom what she thought about Internet relationships and she basically said it was crazy,” Maggie said as she felt the hot and heavy tears trickle one by one down her cheeks. “Oh, Maggie, every parent says that.” Maggie’s skeptical mother aside, there were few stories that hinged on issues that are uniquely contemporary. The overview I got of what it was like to be 15 years old in 1998 did not lead me to believe it was much different from 1990, when I was 15, or even 1970. The same conflicts still arise, the same insecurities persist, and all you can do is put your hair in a low ponytail with a green fluffy elastic and hope for the best. The larger lesson I took from these stories was (surprise, surprise) more about me than about the authors: I understood, suddenly, why people had always encouraged my own writing when I was a teenager, even when I was churning out angst-ridden dreck. It was, I realized — and I say this at the risk of sounding hopelessly gooey — because writing is a way of explaining your life to yourself, a way of making your life bearable and a way of connecting with other people. And these are all good and important things always, but they’re perhaps most important when you’re in, say, ninth grade. Given that, the issue of whether a story has any literary merit is pretty much irrelevant.
Then there’s the fact that the mere existence of these stories, no matter what their subject matter, reveals both discipline and optimism. Discipline because it can be fun to write a few paragraphs, but a whole story is almost always work (and, therefore, even when I was laughing at and not with particular lines, I always respected the writers’ efforts). Optimism because — in light of all the stories that have already been written, and of people saying, Oprah’s Book Club notwithstanding, that fiction is in general biting the dust, of thousands of other aspiring writers entering this same contest — what else but optimism can explain the apparently unwavering belief that you have a story to tell and that you deserve a wider forum for telling it? This optimism often filtered from the act of writing the stories into the stories themselves (the notable exception, of course, being all the tales of death). Boyfriends were obtained or, at least, lessons were learned about how boyfriends being obtained isn’t the most important thing after all. In all their wistful absurdity, such conclusions genuinely touched me. It would take someone more jaded than I am not to root for these characters and for the writers who invented them, girls who live in a world that is precarious but still filled with possibilities. Nothing is ever certain, of course, but as one narrator explains in what seemed to me a cleverly modern version of a very old clichi, “We hope to live happily ever after.”
