If you sleep at our house, you may find yourself holding Richard’s computer on your lap, sandwiched between us on the couch, as we stream something. You get a cocktail or a wine, and you get to say, “May I please be excused?” The time we are living in is sad and terrifying. Here is some cake.
There are three buttons at the bottom of every post: “like,” “share,” and “comment.” Keep it coming, baby.
Lessons in “Kinder, Küche, Kirche”
We’re watching Lessons in Chemistry (Apple TV). So far, 4 episodes have aired, and I love it. I love it even though it’s a bit plodding and didactic. It tells you what you’re supposed to understand about the sexual politics of postwar America in the early 1950s. The sexual politics of that period are so for-shit you can’t believe it, unless you lived it, as I did as a kid.
Brie Larson plays Elizabeth Zott, a brilliant chemist who is raped by her mentor at a university. She’s then prevented from finishing her doctorate and sidelined as a lab assistant at a different pig-run institution. While she’s being raped, she stabs the rapist in the abdomen with a pencil, and in the next scene she’s sitting opposite the provost, a woman, who says she’s lucky the man isn’t pressing charges against her for assault.
You think this kind of thing didn’t happen? This kind of thing happened all the time. And probably still happens in many parts of the world. This kind of thing is what transformed the inert matter of how things work into the living, breathing women’s movement. Call it political bio-genesis.
Elizabeth, at her new institution, meets a chemist stuck in his research. His name is Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman), and he shares with Elizabeth a slightly Vulcan, slightly spectrumy, socially diffident vibe. They fall in love and become a research team, and even though she’s his assistant, he insists her name be first in their publication. Then he’s weirdly killed, their research is stolen, she discovers she's pregnant, and she has to figure out life without support.
She gains support, crucially, from a friendship she forms with Harriet Sloane (Aja Naomi King), a neighbor, who is Black and who, too, has been sidelined from finishing her law degree. The thing that Harriet, who has two kids, gives Elizabeth is the truth women were beginning to share—that nothing that was happening to them was inevitable or natural. It was a giant consensus that women existed for emotional defeat at the service of men, and it could be changed.
Elizabeth is also a dazzling cook. Brie Larson weighs like 10 pounds and obviously eats not one bite of what Elizabeth cooks, but hey, no offense to Brie. It’s bizarre to see a foodie that thin, although come to think of it Tony Bourdain was whippet thin most of his life and he was eating his head off. I think I’m just jealous. Forget I said anything about how thin Brie is. Why is she named after a cheese? You know you have had that thought. Forget I said anything about her name, too.
I love her in this part. Her performance is super compelling and moving. How can it be moving if the script is didactic? It can be. That’s what surprising acting can crack through.
In the next episode, I guess—and hope for damned sake, I would never have told this story chronologically, but hey—Elizabeth finally begins a new career as the star of a TV cooking show for a fledgling TV station. She’s going to become a huge success the way Julia Child did in a similar setting, except with Elizabeth’s robotic appeal instead of Julia’s champagne effervescence.
We’ll come back to the cooking thing after it airs. By the way, I love watching people prepare food who know what they’re doing. I learned to cook watching Julia. This has nothing to do with what I want to tell you.
The reason the show is so compelling to me is the way it punches out cookie after cookie of the roles women were expected to embody and that other women enforced. You know, colonels in the patriarchy. Hitler lost the war, but his motto for women: children, kitchen, and church was exactly the ethos of postwar America.
It was so abysmally depressing to be a little girl in this climate. I could feel it seeping into me, even while, in Long Beach, LI, I lived a breathless, physically free childhood, charging around the dunes and cruising the beach in every season. Few things are as beautiful as a blizzard on white sand and white, churning surf. (Turner thought so, too.) Never mind little Laurie on her bike, riding anywhere she pleased. She knew she was supposed to ride, ultimately, to a house with a tall hedge and a life of what am I doing here that her mother was living in the suburbs.
Lessons in Chemistry is a sudden dreamscape of that social expectation you didn’t see even the slightest door out of if you were a girl like me. And guess what, “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” is right now, again, dancing on the grave of women’s freedom.
Le Monde
I milked my birthday this year. I said, “Laurie, what is going on in that Laurie suit?” I think it was about my sister Ellen, who died in 2017 at age 76. I think it's about outliving her by one year and being unable to fathom it. I’ve outlived my father, too, who died when he was nearing 75. When Ellen was dying, she said, “Keep me in your pocket when you walk.” I do.
For my birthday, I scheduled a gig at Columbia University, so we’d be in the city. The class where we spoke was a ride on the 7 subway train, where you see faces from every country in the world. The faces are all different and all beautiful.
Our time in the classroom flew by. We'd never met a group more open and receptive. The vibe was, “Let us love you” rather than, “Prove yourself to us.” Ahead of time, they’d read some stories from the stack, and they liked not knowing what the readings exactly meant. Among the countries they were from were Saudi Arabia, Egypt, China, and Ukraine. At one point I said, “It’s not the job of a person in a body to relieve the anxieties in others produced by that body.” Everyone in the room nodded and sat up straighter, as if they’d been freed from a weight.
Afterward, Richard and I went to Le Monde on Broadway to see who would show up for drinks. Some of the students and faculty came as well, and a group formed, combining people I’d known for decades and others I was meeting for the first time. We were a party of all ages and lots of other far-flung origins, and again the beauty and mystery of 7-train energy rose off the tables and made me miss my old life. At one point, sitting beside Ru Marshall, I told them I had two main regrets that were not in order of importance. The first was the pain and annoyance I’d caused other people with the inattentiveness of my temperament. The second was all the jewelry I’d been too cheap to buy and had left behind in shops without ever forgetting them.
It was a perfect birthday, topped by a visit to Diane, whom I’d become friends with at Woodmere Academy when I was sixteen. We’d prowled Manhattan together, two city kids who reverse commuted to Long Island on the train. Diane and I still have the same sense of humor, and when we hugged goodbye, I said, “Nothing is more important than laughing at the same joke.” She tilted her head and said, “Nothing.”
Rez Dogs (FX)
Aho, young warriors. Last night, we finished the final season of Reservation Dogs, a show, created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, that slips you into its world and when it’s over you’re like, “Damn, don’t leave me.” Has there ever been a series that loved its characters so much? The Good Place comes to mind, also Ted Lasso. This is huge in a work of art. It's a first principle in my book, not that I have a book.
The show establishes a rez pace of slow, and watch, and gloom. The episodes aren’t so much short stories as little essays on the mindscape of rez life. An episode can be teen-aged Cheese, pulled out of a depression by three elder men. They all piss together in the woods and wind up crying as they hold a stick. Anyone can talk to anyone, and the characters want this exchange. There are no reservations between the generations in rez head space.
I love the braid of comedy and spirits no one questions as real. It’s an idealized world, sure, but one touched as well by a past of violence, including Indian boarding school violence that amounted to the mass kidnapping of indigenous children by whites. In its lighter moods, Rez Dogs gives off a Northern Exposure vibe, also a High Maintenance vibe—where we’re thrust into a world that doesn’t explain itself, you have to figure it out—although potland in Brooklyn turns out, by comparison, to feel harsher and more lost. The magic in Rez Dogs is love pulling against the desire to leave. There's no love without tension.
It’s a society in which no one gets left out, even white people who attach themselves to the collective. What a fantasy. What a joy, glowing with a sheen of sadness, the lostness of people braided together large and small. Where are they? Where are their parents? Where is money? Well, you know, where is anyone? What happens to the imagination in the presence of love? Where are my deer feet? Thank you, brother-cousin-nephew-sister-uncle-grandmother. Aho.
Sister Cousin
Last week, we visited the planet of a friend. Time travel means you weren’t home when a sad feeling ended. A gray cat is scratching at the window. Before reading my Tarot, my friend asked point blank what I wanted, and I thought about walking in rain. Once you’re wet, you can’t really get wetter. The cat loves my friend as much as a cat can love a human. All we saw for three days was everyone loving my friend. One night, she stood by the stove and said, “I’m going to make you a chicken pot pie. I’m really good at it.” You see what I mean.
A memory from Scottsdale
Rupa is moving and has a rug to sell. It’s 4 o’clock, 115 degrees in the shade. There is no shade. When I arrive at her complex, there’s no way to find her building. I ask a maintenance worker driving a golf cart. He says he’s just started working there. I call Rupa, and she says, “Park at the rental office. My building is just behind it.” I do what she says and walk in the sun with an umbrella. I walk and walk. I pass a pool. A woman is drying herself, and I ask if she knows where the building is. She says, “No.”
I return to the rental office and call Rupa again. She says she will come to the rental office and lead me to her place. Her speaking voice sounds like singing. It takes her a long time to arrive. While I wait, I’m reminded I don’t know what I’m doing here or anywhere. Finally I see Rupa, a small young woman with long black hair and dark brown skin, carrying a little girl with long dark hair. The child’s arms are draped loosely around her mother’s neck, and her cheek is resting drowsily on her mother’s chest.
They get in my car, and Rupa directs me to her building that is far from the rental office. She says she’s from Kolkata and she is moving back to her country after four years in Scottsdale. I wonder about her sense of direction, her sense of dislocation. I feel so in tune with it. The child is pretty and stares at me mildly with giant brown eyes as if I’m an aunt she’s meeting for the first time. The apartment we enter is a fist of cluttered rooms. When I see the rug, I don’t want it. I say I’ll take it. Rupa rolls it up, wishing me the best of days. We ask each other questions, lingering as long as we can. I would stay longer if I could figure out how.
Saturday’s ZOOM WRITING CLINIC was a joy.
Thanks to everyone who attended.
Clinic 2 is scheduled for DECEMBER 16, and on NOVEMBER 25, we'll do an interactive Zoom conversation on starting and sustaining a Substack publication. What are the benefits of this way of reaching readers and earning a living as a writer?
Here are some questions asked by the writers who attended Saturday’s CLINIC. We'll be extending the conversation going forward, and all PAID subscribers are invited to all the Zooms at no extra cost.
1. “Many teachers advise beginning in media res——with an action scene or at least lively dialogue. And they also advise no backstory. Just forward movement. What to do, then, with the draft where you, the writer, have begun with several paragraphs of scene setting … So thoughts on 'scene setting' and 'back story'.” What are your views on these issues, particularly, at the beginning of a piece?
2. “Is it good to treat writing by following that maxim about dressing to go out: look at yourself in the mirror and remove one thing. The necklace, maybe the scarf, the one thing without which you look better. Do I/you regard your first-draft words sort of the same way?” This is a question about editing and when when/how to use it.
3. “Readers often conflate the author with their writing, especially when their work is written in the first person. I totally get why you’d want to correct them when they attribute a motive that’s really anathema to you (in this case, self-therapy). What type of misreadings would you consider more benign, that you could let go?”
4. “How do you decide when to use dialogue? Or is it a matter of when it just feels right? At times, one of your stories is just dialogue.”
5. “Can you talk a little bit more about working at the level of the sentence and how that process plays out when you are honing the structure of a piece? Do you see working at the level of the sentence and developing a structure as two different processes? And if yes, when writing your pieces for the stack are you constantly switching back and forth or is your process something else entirely?”
6. “Can you address beginnings and endings in essays. You have an ability to take the reader right in and keep you there and leave us wanting more. How do you come up with beginnings and endings? "
To sign up for a place in either or both of the next two, please RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com. ❤️
I adore you, Laurie Stone. Is that weird? It's just your writing make me want to be a better writer and a worse person and I say that with all the affection someone drained of their Estrogen can manage. Upgrading to paid.
Loved your views on "Chemistry" and "Reservation Dogs". Haven't read or watched Chemistry. That time is filled with dark ghost memories for me. As you said, a girl who grew up then had to fit. And it was perilous if you were not protected. Much like today, again.