The Empathy Exams (29 page)

But what if some of us want to take our scars seriously? Maybe some of us haven’t gotten the memo—haven’t gotten the text message from our boyfriends—about what counts as bathos. One man’s joke is another girl’s diary entry. One woman’s heartbreak is another woman’s essay. Maybe this bleeding ad nauseam is mass produced and sounds ridiculous—
Plug it up! Plug it up!
—but maybe its business isn’t done.
Woman is a pain that never goes away.
Keep cutting me open; I’ll keep bleeding it out. Saving Leona Lewis means insisting that we never have the right to dismiss the trite or poorly worded or plainly ridiculous, the overused or overstated or strategically performed.

In the reader’s group guide to my first novel, I confessed: “I often felt like a DJ mixing various lyrics of female teenage angst.” I got so sick of synopsizing the plot, whenever people asked what it was about, I started saying simply:
women and their feelings.
When I called myself a DJ mixing angst, it was a preemptive strike. I felt like I had to defend myself against some hypothetical accusation that would be lobbed against my book by the world at large. I was trying to agree with Ani: We shouldn’t have to turn every scar into a joke. We shouldn’t have to be witty or backtrack or second-guess ourselves when we say,
this shit hurt.
We shouldn’t have to disclaim—
I know, I know, pain is old, other girls hurt
—in order to defend ourselves from the old litany of charges: performative, pitiful, self-pitying, pity hoarding, pity mongering. The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.

Wound #11

Once I wrote a story from that open wound Yeats calls “the rag and bone shop of the heart.” In this particular case, my rag and bone shop had been looted by a poet. He and I had a few glorious autumn months in Iowa—there were cold beers on an old bridge, wine in a graveyard, poems left on pillows—and I thought I was in love with him, and maybe would marry him, and then suddenly we were done. He was done. I knew this wasn’t an unusual occurrence in the world, but it hadn’t ever happened to me. I kept trying to figure it out. A few nights before the end, feeling him pull away, I’d talked with him for a long time about the eating disorder I’d had when I was younger. I honestly can’t remember why I did this—whether I wanted to feel close to him, wanted him to demonstrate his care by sympathizing, whether I just wanted to will myself into trusting him by saying something that seemed to imply that I already did.

After he was gone, I decided maybe this conversation had something to do with why he’d left. Perhaps he’d been repulsed—not necessarily by the eating disorder itself but by my naked attempt to secure his attention by narrating it. I was desperate for a
why
—at first, because I wanted to understand our breakup, and eventually because I realized any story I wrote about us would feel flimsy if our breakup had no motivating catalyst. Pain without a cause is pain we can’t trust. We assume it’s been chosen or fabricated.

I was afraid to write a story about us because heartbreak seemed like a story that had already been told too many times, and my version of heartbreak felt horribly banal: getting blackout drunk and sharing my feelings in fleeting pockets of lucidity, sleeping with guys and crying in their bathrooms afterward. Falling on Sixth Avenue in the middle of the night and then showing my scarred knee to anyone who’d look. I made people tell me I was more attractive than my ex. I made people tell me he was an asshole, even though he wasn’t.

This kind of thing, I told myself, wasn’t what I’d come to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to write about. Maybe sadness could be “interesting” but not when it looked like this. The female narrator I’d be depicting in my story—a woman consumed by self-pity, drowning her sorrows in drink, engaged in reckless sexual self-destruction, obsessed with the man who’d left her—didn’t seem like a particularly appealing or empowered sort of woman to think about or be. And yet, she was me.

Maybe drunken heartbreak was the lamest thing I could possibly write about, but this was precisely why I wanted to write about it. I wanted to write against my own feelings of shame at my premise—its banality and waft of self-pity, the way in which its very structure suggested a protagonist defined almost exclusively in terms of her harmful relationships to men. The story wouldn’t just
seem
to be about letting men usurp a woman’s identity, it would in fact
be
about this. My own squeamishness goaded me forward: perhaps self-destruction in the aftermath of heartbreak was a trite pain, but it was
my
trite pain, and I wanted to find a language for it. I wanted to write a story so good that my hypothetical future readers would acknowledge as profound a kind of female sadness they’d otherwise dismiss as performative, overplayed, or self-indulgent. There were also practical concerns. I had a deadline for workshop. Seeing as how the breakup was all I thought about, I didn’t see how I could write a story about anything else.

I wrote the ending first. It was an assertion:
I had a heart. It remained.
I liked it because it felt true and optimistic (my heart’s still here!) but also sad (my still-here heart hurts constantly!). I put the eating disorder conversation into the story so that readers could point to it—if they needed to point to something—and say,
Oh, maybe that’s why he got out.
I also meant the eating disorder to clarify that my protagonist’s impulse toward self-destruction wasn’t caused so much as activated by the breakup, which had resurrected the corpse of an older pain: an abiding sense of inadequacy that could attach itself to the body, or a man, an impulse that—like a heat-seeking missile—always sniffed out ways it could hurt even more.

I realized that this causeless pain—inexplicable and seemingly intractable—was my true subject. It was frustrating. It couldn’t be pinned to any trauma; no one could be blamed for it. Because this nebulous sadness seemed to attach to female anxieties (anorexia and cutting and obsession with male attention), I began to understand it as inherently feminine, and because it was so unjustified by circumstance, it began to feel inherently shameful. Each of its self-destructive manifestations felt half-chosen, half-cursed.

In this sense, I was aware that the breakup was giving me a hook upon which I could hang a disquiet much more amoebic—and not so easily parsed. Part of me knew my story had imposed a causal logic on the breakup that hadn’t been there. My ex had been pulling away before I’d ever confessed anything to him. But I recognized a certain tendency in myself—a desire to compel men by describing things that had been hard for me—and wanted to punish this tendency. Punishment involved imagining the ways my confessions might repulse the men they were supposed to beckon closer. When I punished myself with this causality, I also restored the comforting framework of emotional order—
because I did this, this happened; because this happened, I hurt.

In the meantime, I was nervous about workshop. Would I be lauded as a genius? Quietly understood as pathetic? I chose my outfit carefully. I still remember one of the first comments. “Does this character have a job?” one guy asked, sounding annoyed, and said she might have been a little easier to sympathize with if she did.

Interlude: Outward

As it happened, that story was the first one I ever published. Sometimes I get notes about it from strangers. One woman in Arizona even got part of it tattooed on her back. Men say it helps them sympathize more with certain female tendencies. These men write to me about their relationships: women who once seemed like reckless bitches, they say, start to seem like something else. A frat guy wrote to say that now he “got” girls better. I trusted he meant: understood. Another guy said:
I have always been curious of the psychology of women who tend toward a want to be dominated.

A Hawaiian real estate agent wrote about his little sister. He’d never been compassionate about her painful relationships with men.
I’m sure that your goal was not to educate men on the psychological nuances of women
, he said, but he felt he could relate to his sister’s self-destructive tendencies better after reading the story—
a little wisp of understanding
, he said. I was thrilled. My pain had flown beyond the confines of its bone shop. Now it had a summer home in the Pacific.

I wouldn’t say writing that story helped me get over my breakup any faster; it probably did just the opposite. I ended up consigning that ex into the realm of legend—a sort of mythic prop around which I’d constructed this suffering version of myself. But the story helped me weave the breakup into my sense of self in a way that ultimately felt outward, directed toward the lives and pain of others.

And yet—do I still wonder if my ex ever read that story? Of course I do.

Wound #12

The summer after my freshman year of college, my mouth was wired shut for two months while my jaw healed from an operation. The joint hinge had been damaged in an accident—I’d fallen off a vine in Costa Rica, twenty feet to cloud forest floor—and certain bones had been drilled into new shapes and then screwed back together again. The wires held everything in place. I couldn’t talk or eat. I squirted geriatric energy drinks into the small opening between my teeth and the back of my mouth. I wrote notes on little yellow pads. I read a lot. Already, then, I thought of documenting my experience for posterity. And I already had the title of my memoir in mind:
Autobiography of a Face.

That’s how I discovered Lucy Grealy. Her memoir,
Autobiography of a Face
, is the story of her childhood cancer and enduring facial disfigurement. I read it in an afternoon and then I read it all over again. Its central drama, for me, wasn’t Grealy’s recovery from illness; it was the story of her attempt to forge an identity that wasn’t entirely defined by the wound of her face. At first she couldn’t see her face as anything but a locus of damage to which everything else referred:

This singularity of meaning—I was my face, I was ugliness—though sometimes unbearable, also … became the launching pad from which to lift off … Everything led to it, everything receded from it—my face as personal vanishing point.

These are the dangers of a wound: that the self will be subsumed by it (“personal vanishing point”) or unable to see outside its gravity (“everything led to it”). The wound can sculpt selfhood in a way that limits identity rather than expanding it—that obstructs vision (of other people’s suffering, say) rather than sharpening empathic acuity. Carrie doesn’t do anyone any favors. Rosa Dartle is all edge.

Grealy had been craving the identity-locus of damage even before it happened to her; and was happy, as a little girl, when trauma first arrived: “I was excited by the idea that something really was wrong with me”—like Molly with a razor at her cheek, trying to make herself a Misfit. Years later, Grealy still took a certain comfort in her surgeries. These were the times when she was cared for most directly, and when her pain was given a structure beyond the nebulous petty torture of feeling ugly to the world. “It wasn’t without a certain amount of shame that I took this kind of emotional comfort from surgery,” she writes. “Did it mean I liked having operations and thus that I deserved them?”

In Grealy’s shame I see the residue of certain cultural imperatives: to be stoic, to have a relationship to pain defined by the single note of resistance. These imperatives make it shameful to feel any attachment to pain or any sensitivity to its offerings. What I love about Grealy is that she’s not afraid to be honest about every part of her pain: how she takes some comfort in her surgeries and feels discomfort at this comfort; how she tries to feel better about her face—over and over again—and just can’t. She can’t make ugliness productive. She can’t make the wound fertile. She can only take solace in how much it hurts, and in how this hurting elicits the care of others. In this confession, of course, the wound
does
become fertile. It yields honesty. Her book is beautiful.

As a little girl, Grealy learned to be what she calls “a good patient,” but the book itself refuses this posture: she offers no false resurrections of the spirit. She insists on the tyranny of the body and its damage. Her situation was an extreme one, but it gave form and justification to how I was living then, silently: my own existence defined by injury.

Most of the negative Amazon reviews of
Autobiography of a Face
focus on the idea of self-pity: “She was a sad woman who never got beyond her own personal pain,” “I found this book extremely sorrowful and drowning in self-pity,” “it seems like she could only think of herself, her complete misery and pain at being ‘ugly.’”

A man named “Tom” writes:

In all of the books I’ve read, I’ve never encountered such terribly [
sic
] moaning and wallowing in self-pity. I can easily sum up the entire 240-page book in 3 words: Woe is me … In addition to a mess of crying, the author cannot seem to make up her mind on anything. First she says she does not want to be felt sorry for by anyone, then she proceeds to scorn others about their inability to feel an ounce of sympathy.

The woman Tom describes, “wallowing” in self-pity and unable to decide what the world should do about it, is exactly the woman I grew up afraid of becoming. I knew better—we all, it seems, knew better—than to become one of
those
women who plays victim, lurks around the sickbed, hands her pain out like a business card. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t think this was just me. An entire generation, the next wave, grew up doing everything we could to avoid this identity: we take refuge in self-awareness, self-deprecation, jadedness, sarcasm. The Girl Who Cried Pain: she doesn’t need meds; she needs a sedative.

And now we find ourselves torn. We don’t want anyone to feel sorry for us, but we miss the sympathy when it doesn’t come. Feeling sorry for ourselves has become a secret crime—a kind of shameful masturbation—that would chase away the sympathy of others if we ever let it show. “Because I had grown up denying myself any feeling that even hinted at self-pity,” Grealy writes, “I now had to find a way to reshape it.”