Women We Read This Week

1. Patricia Lockwood’s “Escape From the Convent” in New York Magazine

Raves about Lockwood’s work have been all over my Twitter feed for months now, but I have to admit that I had that knee-jerk skepticism about a cultural figure who looms so large. Then I read and I understood: she really is that good. This brief excerpt from Priestdaddy was hilarious, lyrical, biting, and not at all frivolous in spite of the casualness of her tone. Caution, writers, because Lockwood’s is a voice that could easily pollute your own–her tone inflected mine for hours after I’d read–and in fact I would bet that in a generation or two there will be a whole genre of Lockwoodian imitators. Read the original now. (Plus, fellow Ohioans, her description of Don Pablo’s is genius.)

We tiptoed upstairs to my spartan little room. When we kissed, perhaps because we had so many teeth, it was exactly like two birdcages touching together. We laughed quietly, almost into each other’s mouths, and slipped out again to explore the neighborhood. Conspiracy had arrived to us, whole, intact, and just large enough for two people.

An hour later, we convened again in the living room. My father sat in a brocade chair, as richly embroidered as the Sun King’s underwear. He adopted his most lordly and intimidating position, with his thighs spread so wide it seemed like there might be a gateway to another dimension between them. Jason unconsciously adopted this position also. A person looking down from space might have thought they were having a squat contest.

Like Grant’s, my revolutions were as equally bland as they were radical. I went to a college that was Lutheran, not Baptist. I watched the Vagina Monologues, I skipped school to play tennis and read The Communist Manifesto. I smoked cigars when I was eighteen, I said the word “fuck” a lot. I know, I know. I kissed a boy I barely knew at a concert. But most revolutions happen in inches. They might appear small but they are no less fundamental. Amy Grant became the vehicle through which I was able to see myself as something more than the lines of orthodoxy that had been drawn around me. Grant was a woman with ambition, true, but she was also a girl who just wanted to sing about her faith and her God, and somehow wound up inside a revolution. I felt that way too. I was just a girl who wanted to read books, and somehow that forced me into a fight I hadn’t bargained for. What we both learned was that finding joy always seems to be a political act for the women pursuing it.

When you are disabled and rely on public services and programs, you face vulnerability every day. This vulnerability is felt in my bones and my relationship with the state. Fluctuations in the economy and politics determine whether my attendants will receive a living wage and whether I’ll have enough services to subsist rather than thrive. The fragility and weakness of my body, I can handle. The fragility of the safety net is something I fear and worry about constantly.

Activism, like alcoholism, can distract a writer from the demands of her desk. Actually, Paley didn’t even have one. She liked to type at the kitchen table, right in the messy heart of family life, rather than cloister herself in a Woolfian room of her own, though her characters often long for the luxury of a closed door. In her early stories, they are immigrants’ children, Jews mixing with the slightly more established Irish, Poles, and Italians in the tenements and row houses of Coney Island or the Bronx, where “every window is a mother’s mouth bidding the street shut up, go skate somewhere else, come home.” Privacy is out of the question. Brothers, sisters, cousins, neighbors crowd around; lurking everywhere are adult “spies,” like Mrs. Goredinsky, with flesh “the consistency of fresh putty,” who stations herself in front of her building on an orange crate, or the palsy-handed “Mrs. Green, Republican poll watcher in November,” who spends the rest of the year scanning the street for kid trouble.

One student, a woman in her early fifties and back in school to finish her undergraduate degree, raised her hand. She had scars along her jaw that gave the appearance of a permanent smile. She frequently volunteered in class, always with that hint of a smile on her face. Even then, while her eyes were tearing up. “All I know is that you can never give up,” she said. “You have to keep trying. You have to keep going. Always.”