All the Lives I Want: Essays about My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers(9)

A radio appearance by Kanye West in early 2015 is instructive of how successfully Amber took ownership of her own image after the breakup. West claimed that he needed to take “thirty showers” after dating Amber before getting with Kim Kardashian in remarks about a recent spat between Khloe Kardashian and Amber on Twitter. More than anything, the remark shows that Amber is impossible to diss artfully. West is arguably the greatest hip-hop wordsmith of his generation, yet he was reduced to making frat-house jabs at Amber for a job she had years ago that she is not ashamed of. A predictable public pile-on soon followed and included her own ex-husband, Wiz Khalifa, briefly adding and later retracting his claims that Amber was an unfit mother by virtue of her past.

Amber responded by arranging a SlutWalk, one of a series of protests designed in response to a rape culture that lays blame on women for their own assaults and for gendered mistreatment more generally. Though SlutWalks have been critiqued for their inadvertent exclusion of marginalized women who experience sexual violence more often and in different ways than the women who started them, Amber’s had a distinctly more inclusive feel for which she was commended. In one of the most commonly circulated images from the event, Amber holds up a protest sign that reads “Strippers have feelings too.” It is a simple message that appears intended to be funny on its surface. But I read in it a radical statement about the women employed throughout the adult industry onto whom customers project so many fantasies and then demand impatiently that those fantasies be reflected back. I read in it a demand to hear the real women onto whom social anxieties about the nexus where money and gender and sex meet are projected relentlessly but who are not granted permission to voice their own. It is the audacious claim that we are more than the echo chambers for imaginaries of womanhood. And it is a promise that if we didn’t want to, we wouldn’t have to do a happy little dance on their behalf forever.





All the Lives I Want


Recovering Sylvia


JUST DON’T END UP DOING a Sylvia Plath thing” is not advice that is given to save lives. It is advice given to save face. It is not a warning against the pitfalls of a rotten marriage or the disappointment of publishing only a single novel. It is not intended to help anyone prevent isolation or despair. It is certainly not a thing people say to stop you from sticking your head in the back of an oven. No. Telling people not to do as Sylvia Plath did is universally understood as a good-natured suggestion that a writer not put too much of herself into her creations—lest she accidentally write about something as ordinary as being a woman. For feelings remain the burden and embarrassment of girls. They are not the stuff of art.

Sylvia has become the most recognizable standin for the tedious, ill-advised twentieth-century confessional author. Despite her coming of age among a cohort of men describing their own venereal disease as if the pustules themselves were matters worthy of the canon, it is Sylvia’s interior life that is so often pointed to as a case of something crass and self-indulgent. To this day, even as Sylvia is long dead by her own hand, her cautionary tale is not about lives poorly lived but about feelings too earnestly expressed. Nearly half a century after her death, we remain more interested in girls’ being kept palatable than being kept alive.

The number of hands that have been wrung and fingers that have been wagged at girls who dare to give voice and name to their interior lives suggests that the written history of the world is absolutely awash in the stuff. But the female voice, and the girl’s voice especially, is characterized mostly by the deafening silence it emits from the canon. To read the historical record without context suggests that female self-awareness was a genetic anomaly that emerged in the eighteenth century and remained exceedingly rare until the second half of the twentieth century. Those who dare to document their lived experience as worthwhile are brave new girls indeed. As brightly as these girls shine, there remain wet blankets around every corner attempting to extinguish the flames in their hearts. They are dismissed as excessively feminine and juvenile, two words that mean the same thing in the hearts and minds of critics who would sooner praise a six-volume gaze at a Norwegian man’s navel than consider the possibility that there are treasures in the hearts of girls. There is no girl that such critics have tried to extinguish more diligently than young Sylvia herself. In the years following her death, she has been accused of culpability in suicides that took place fifty years after her own, along with single-handedly ushering in the idea of suicide as glamorous by people who have apparently never heard of Ernest Hemingway or Jesus Christ. The fact of the matter remains that young women are easy to destroy and doubly easy to destroy if they are already dead. Fortunately, it is also historically the habit of young girls to practice witchcraft, and so the girls keep bringing Sylvia back to life.

Young girls are smarter than they’re given credit for, and more resilient, too. They like what they like for good reason. They seek to build kingdoms out of their favorite people and things, and there is a certain subset of girls, even today, who have made Sylvia their icon-elect. The reputation of young girls for “wearing their hearts on their sleeves” is one that is discussed more often as unwittingly sharing too much information, rather than framing them as active agents making decisions on how best to publicly express themselves. Public derision is directed at girls wearing T-shirts of boy bands or one half of a best-friend-necklace pairing because we assume that such unsubtle devotion is the result of juvenile obliviousness, rather than bold and certain admiration. There is intention behind both the words and the images these girls share in their modes of self-expression, intention that we overlook at the peril of our own understanding of how affections operate throughout a lifetime.