How the World Works

And how I work.

A tall girl writes a book.

Something I didn’t mention in the previous post, my review of 1974, a memoir by Francine Prose. She’s landed a contact for her first book at 26, and she’s floating in the air of I can’t believe this is happening to me and also this is really happening. Harry Ford at Atheneum, an editor she likes and respects, has accepted the book and believes in her ability. She’s teaching herself to realize it’s true, that her talents are appreciated, when she goes to the office to meet the publisher she doesn’t name, I’m guessing Alfred A. Knopf Jr., who founded Atheneum with partners in 1959.

Prose writes on page 91: Harry “introduced me to the publisher, the head of the firm, a handsome, imposing, elegantly dressed older man. Every gesture, every point of his pocket handkerchief, signaled how sure of himself he was, how comfortable in his perfectly suntanned skin. I am tall, but he was taller.

“He came around his desk to shake my hand. He looked down at me and smiled. I looked up at him and smiled back. He said, ‘You didn’t write this whole book all by yourself, did you’?

“I felt woozy with insult and rage, shocked that this stranger’s first impulse had been to insult me just because he could. Just because I was young and female and he was publishing my novel, he couldn’t resist cutting me down to the size he thought I should be.”

How I learned to think.

Kate Millett was my teacher at Barnard College in the 1960s. Kate Millett liked my mind. Kate Millett gave me my life.

I was a girl who was always with a boy, it struck other feminists, and they told me. I was looking for sex as a way to know what life was about and because I was that kind of animal. Also, who knows.

Very early on, but maybe not as early as I like to think, I learned that the way into the world was not by being the only girl at the boys' table. I can't remember, really, wanting the approval of male humans as a way to know something about myself or how life could go for me.

Men helped me along the way. Many individual people who were men, but I didn't experience their help as male approval, and somewhere along the line, and I think it was early, I understood that male approval for a person like me was meaningless and worthless, and I didn't give a shit about it. That, too, gave me my life. 

And yet.

I still over ride red flags. If I didn’t, I would have no life, I tell myself. Neither would you, I’m guessing. Our brains, or maybe it’s our minds—I’ll say our brains since brain makes mind—in any case the default setting in our brains is oops, that doesn’t look like a mushroom I should eat, or oops, that guy always leaves me feeling like I’ve eaten a bad mushroom. So why do you think something different will happen the next time you meet him? Why can’t you see what is right in front of your eyes, waving brightly with the warning, or is it the allure, of oh, this shit again?

I'm interested in moments people have let me know how they see me. Most of the time, people don't go out of their way to make me feel bad. They are just being themselves, without giving a thought to how their words will land. The same way I am being myself right now, with you. In these moments, we aren't unhappy in a lasting way. We're just alive—poor little chicks and poor baby wolves.

A year ago or so a man swam back into my thoughts when I found something I’d written about him in an old notebook. We’d been friends when we were starting out as writers. After I read the entry in the notebook, I sent him an email, and he said he was happy to catch up, and he called.

Quickly, our voices were warm and friendly, and at first I was glad you could be out of touch with someone for many years and on a whim resume your connection. The name of this friend-in-common came up, and the name of that one came up. We revisited our first meeting, in a Cuban-Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side, and we fondly recalled an editor we'd both worked worth I’d introduced him to.

Somewhere, early in the conversation, he told me he’d bought my most recent book. Then he made it sound like one of those bite-sized novelty items stacked near the cash register you carry in your pocket and randomly open to a light-weight anecdote. He said he never read my Substack, although he received the emails.

Why didn’t I end the conversation there? Do I wish I had? At first, I wasn’t aware what I was feeling. Maybe Francine wasn’t instantly aware what she was feeling when the publisher talked down to her. The man on the phone talked at length about a writing project he was planning and another book he’d written in the past. He talked about this relationship he wanted to repair and that one, on and on.

He can write an arresting sentence, even sometimes a sentence that curls up at the corners of its mouth, but I’m bored by his stance of Male Intellectual. This man has pressed his mind almost entirely against the minds of other men I would be happy never to hear another word about for the rest of my life.

As the conversation stretched on, I remembered he’d always been like this. It was a reason I’d preferred having sex with him than talking to him. When I felt cast in the role of the girl—the one who listens supportively—my life felt forlorn to me. That's the magic trick. All this from a lack of generosity toward me by this what, what should I call him? How could I have imagined I was something other to him than the girl? Every disappointment holds a secret. That’s why I’m telling you this.

A thing I notice happens a lot.

People don’t like to stay with the subject of what I’m writing about if the subject is a woman. They will displace the subject with a man, and they will do this without realizing it.

Let me give you an example. The other day I wrote a post about women who are in relationships with men (or other women) that are basically a Bob Dylan song. The woman prompts a feeling in the singer—say erotic interest or contempt—but the singer doesn’t make the woman visible. He’s not interested in who she is apart from how she makes him feel. People right and left, both women and men, wanted to talk NOT about the woman who gets into this situation but about Bob Dylan. They put a man in the center of their contemplation. They wanted to beat up Bob Dylan, the human, and Bob Dylan’s songs. Fine, great. But now, again, the man was the focus and not the woman.

I was writing about the attraction these women feel to take on the role of the listener, or the muse, or the one who stirs the man to feel things, or who the fuck knows what. Maybe, more than anything, I was writing about the way, sometimes, when we are thrown a scrap from a person we want to think is interested in us—like the man in the previous chunk of text!—when clearly their interest is in our interest in them, sometimes when we are thrown a scrap, we pretend there is something tasty there. I was writing about that. Not Bob for fuck's sake Dylan. Also, personally, I do the scrap-taking thing with women as well as with men.

A case in point, after I posted the story about Francine Prose and the publisher on Facebook.

A current high echelon man in the literary world made a comment on the post that was only about the publisher in the anecdote, explaining the man's psychology and how his mommy didn’t pay that much attention to him. He wasn’t excusing what the publisher said to Francine, but, you know, when you explain a person's psychology you are asking the reader to pay more attention to the man than to the woman, who speaks in detail about the experience from her side.

I asked the high echelon literary man if he was aware he had moved the focus of the post away from the women to the man. He justified his comment and called me a sexist pig. The pig was silent. Truly, he said, "You're the sexist." I deleted our exchange and blocked him. He will miss nothing on my posts he would value.

It feels good to have done a service for a woman author I admire.

The women’s movement set in motion the possibility of women bonding with each other. And when I look back on my life, one of the most satisfying feelings is to know that something you've written has helped another person. I used to feel this strongly when I wrote pieces in the Village Voice that made people feel seen and appreciated for their efforts. My column "Laughing in the Dark" was devoted to comedy that prompted me to laugh, sometimes by performers who were famous but more often by people not many had yet heard of. The Voice was the pie set in the window that writers from uptown would smell and follow. This help for artists directly as well as by spreading the word is different from giving pleasure, which is my main goal. It's tangible help for others, and it’s thrilling when you can give it.

When I was young and with Gardner, I wondered if I would be lucky the way he had been lucky and meet someone in my later years the way he had met me, and I did. At sixty, I met Richard, and it looks like we will carry each other to shore as we tumble along.

During the years I found it difficult to earn a living from writing, I wondered if there would ever be a time when I could depend on it again. Entropy is supposed to be a thing to believe in, but entropy is not relevant to the human heart. It does not wear down. Then suddenly, two years ago, Lucian Truscott, a colleague from the Voice, suggested I start a Substack publication, as he had done. As soon as Everything is Personal was launched, people began signing on as paid subscribers.

Part of the joy is in changing your life at an age the commonplace understanding is you don’t get new jolts. The other day Richard and I streamed a documentary about gay comedians, and Lily Tomlin looked out and said, at age 82, she was looking forward to another eighteen years, imagining she would make it to 100. Then she crinkled her eyes and said, “Maybe I’ll live til 110.” I thought if she can do it, maybe I can, too.

I itch. I have one of those rounds of poison ivy where it takes over your body. I just started my third day of prednisone. New blisters are still swelled with fluid, and the tightness hurts. The blisters look the way your age registers on people who are younger than you. I thought this way about the bodies of older people when I was younger. You find compassion in yourself on a need-to-use basis, and today, mostly, my compassion is for myself and for all the women who get bumped from the center of a contemplation to the margins.

Also for Biden, running a campaign to preserve democracy and stem hate. I think we have to be for him to get this done, and the money raised for his campaign can be used only by him or Harris, and I think she stands a far weaker chance of beating Trump.

Last night we were invited to dinner at the home upstate of women we are becoming friends with. One of the women in the couple is a writer of enormous accomplishment and equally enormous warmth, as is her partner. When I first met the writer, she told me she had read me in the Voice before beginning to write herself, and I couldn’t believe I’d had a part in a life like hers. She meant she’d formed a bond with my mind without knowing me, and since we’ve met I’m forming a bond with the off-road leaps of her thoughts and the individuality of her physical aesthetic that brings to mind a magical garden with paths leading everywhere as well as the tiered white cake prepared for Miss Havisham before she was jilted at the altar. We sat outside with other quests, listening to frogs and other creatures floating on the couple’s nearby pond. We were surrounded by beauty as we breathed together and told each other stories while we still could.

Lily Tomlin.

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