All the Lives I Want: Essays about My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers(2)

I loved Winona as a kid but grew even more affectionate for her in my late teens and early adulthood, long after the “Free Winona” T-shirts had cycled out of ironic fashion. She was wide-eyed and wistful but managed to find love from time to time anyway. I felt I could reasonably aspire to that.

Like many men before him, James was more capable of getting into relationships than he had let on, just not with me. He was leaving me for someone else, and when he said, “I know you want me to mess this up with her, but I won’t,” I paused a moment before speaking. “No, but I hope that she chooses someone over you,” I told him, with a suddenly regained composure. He went to leave and with my back turned to him, I said, “I hope she chooses someone over you twice.” My voice cracked as I delivered these last words, adding to the drama of the whole encounter and clearly cutting him to the core. I sat there devastated, in a pile of my own tears without a sister or a kitten in sight, but at least I’d delivered a line to remember me by.

An exceedingly quick search through Facebook revealed the identity of his new girlfriend. And there she was. A total. Fucking. Gwyneth. In addition to long blond hair, she had earnest gratitude posts featuring all the superboring emoticons. She posted photos of sunsets and filtered her selfies to hell and back with Instagram. On Facebook, she posted photos of a white SUV and nights out at a club. I couldn’t see her feet, but I joked cruelly to a friend, “She’s probably wearing espadrilles.” A quick Google search brought up a photo of her cheerfully giving what appears to be a presentation about industrial label makers. In sharp contrast to my online life, a collection of mostly drily despairing essays for online magazines and unfiltered Twitter jokes, her entire digital footprint accumulated into a collection of safe consumer reflexes more than a personality.

And though I am easily given to fits of envy, I looked at her life and couldn’t find a single thing to covet. I was a haphazardly medicated bipolar twenty-nine-year-old stripper and I didn’t want anything she had. I felt the way I imagined Winona felt surveying the foreign landscape of GOOP, laughing incredulously at the appeal of such dull aspirations but also completely and utterly alone.

I attached actively to my sense of Winona-ness in the months that followed the breakup. I shared the observation about how seeing this woman’s profile was how Winona probably felt if she ever read GOOP and left out the sad part at the end about being alone so that it could be a joke. If I was in on the joke, it couldn’t hurt me.

Although I originally thought being unchosen was my moment where Gwyneth snatched up Shakespeare in Love, I realize now that her getting James was less like getting an award-winning movie script and more like getting that scary VHS tape from The Ring that eventually ruins your life. I’ve instead come to see the whole experience as my moment on a surveillance camera in Saks Fifth Avenue. It was the episode in which the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was revealed to be the Depressive Witch Nightmare Woman that she was all along. It brought to life my sadness and desperation outside the vacuum where being mentally ill was a fascinating quirk that had no potential to create real consequences. I was breakable and broken and would not be confined to the narrative that James, and the long line of men whose footsteps he had followed in, had in mind for me.

The mythology I built around Winona Ryder saw me through heavyheartedness and I am grateful to have had her by my metaphorical side. But the deeper I dove into the archive of headlines about Winona, the more closely I read her interviews, and the more distance I got from my own postbreakup myopia, the more I realized that I had done Winona the same disservice that had been done to me. I had made her an avatar that represented my own suffering and refused to register both stated facts and notable omissions from the record that might suggest otherwise. The public discourse about Winona had trapped her as the long-suffering girl, and I was in collusion with it. The decision to actively disengage from that way of looking at Winona made me sympathetic to an unlikely ally: Gwyneth Paltrow.

Giving Winona back her full humanity meant giving it back to Gwyneth, too. So as humiliated as I was to be left for someone I identified as a “Gwyneth” before, my thoughts about her turned mostly into hopes that she’s safe and happy. Because the thing about Gwyneth Paltrow that James couldn’t articulate is that there’s not really anything about her. Or at least there’s not anything about her public image that is especially unique or controversial. She’s a safe canvas onto which others can project their own desires, including the defiant and childish desire to define oneself as against the things she is alleged to stand for. I know very well that the woman James left me for is not an empty collection of label makers and earnest Facebook posts, just as I know that Gwyneth Paltrow is not her terrible newsletter.

Her breakup with Chris Martin was widely mocked in the press for being identified as a “conscious uncoupling,” as though she could not bear to have anything so human and messy as what it was: a divorce. For months after the split, rumors flew that Gwyneth was terrified that details of their marriage would emerge, that the perfect filter she had chosen for the world to see her through would be ripped off to reveal all the blemished and broken parts. Such forms of protected and limited self-projection are calculated and intentional. And that seems like its own kind of solitude. Despite whatever loneliness, real or imagined, Gwyneth experiences, she seems steadfast in her commitment to being in on the joke in a way that I know well.