Women in Love

On clothes, crabs, and coppers

Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada

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Flashpoint Fridays

Tomorrow “Everything is Personal” launches a new feature. We’ll experiment and see if you like it. I want to give paid subscribers extra benefits for their support and to entice you, maybe, to upgrade from free to paid.

Every Friday, I’ll be sending out a writing prompt, and paid subscribers will be invited to post a short paragraph from their “writes” on the CHAT platform within Substack. Other paid subscribers will be able to read and comment on your posts.

Most mornings, Richard and I write together for 20 or 30 minutes, and then we read the pieces we've produced. I'll have more to say about getting started with this practice, what to focus on, and perhaps what to veer away from as you write to your prompts.

All the work I produce in longer pieces and eventually in books begins with this form of writing that is, itself, a flaneur, roaming around with its senses alert. This process is different from a free write or an entry in a diary or a journal. It's what I call producing a writer's notebook.

The next ZOOM CONVERSATION on writing craft is this Saturday, January 20 from 3 to 4pm EST. to RSVP, please write to me at: lauriestone@substack.com

Among other topics, we’ll talk about where a piece of writing can begin. Even in your mind as you sift through things that might happen, it can begin with the most dramatic moment you can think of as you turn on your engine to write.

I saw my first dead person. The cat followed me home and kept jumping against the glass door. I still think about the mouth of the man in the subway.

The idea is to forget what really happened. Forget it entirely and make it up now, from sentence one and where it takes you.

Paid subscribers have access to the entire archive of “Everything is Personal.” Free subscribers are welcome to read the archive of the previous year. To read earlier posts, go to lauriestone.substack.com.

The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

Every so often, Meryl Streep, as Miranda Priestly, will catch herself in a moment of human feeling. You can see it in a tiny squinting of her eyes or a small movement of her lips on the mask she presents to the world. Almost as quickly as she has felt amusement, or compassion, or wonder, she will recoil from the sensation and smooth her expression, so the feeling is erased in her mind as well as on her face.

These tiny moments of connection are trap doors that the Anne Hathaway character, Andy, falls into, and the movie, although highly enjoyable to watch multiple times, isn’t exactly aware, in a conscious way, it’s more interested in the romance between the women than in their antagonism. At the end, after Andy extracts herself from Miranda’s high-fashion magazine, she tells herself she’s given herself away so fully for the clothes and the chance of meeting an editor who will offer her a writing job. She doesn’t admit to herself or to her friends she was thrilled to be chosen by Miranda and to have pleased her.

Andy changes the way she looks to attract Miranda. The clothes and makeup and hairstyles she adopts don’t interest her boyfriend or her other friends, who disapprove of her involvement. She’s left them behind. No one likes being left behind and seeing their friend seduced into a different world. Everyone wants, as Andy does, to be led blindfolded to a party you have only imagined existed.

The complexity of Andy’s love for Miranda is a lost opportunity in the film, although we see her bewitchment and the way it excites her to pass Miranda’s tests. In themselves, the tests are ridiculous, like obtaining galley copies of an unpublished Harry Potter book for Miranda’s twin daughters. Never mind. It’s an apprenticeship, showing the way we take pleasure in looking up to something larger than us rather than only looking across at our peers. You thrill to the level of expertise in someone older than you and marvel at how they put themselves together to gain their status.

The position of the acolyte and apprentice, yearning for the approval of the task master, is an under explored emotional state, especially as it exists between an older woman and a younger woman. This relationship, if even noticed, isn’t supposed to be important in the stories written by men, but the book the movie is based on was written by a woman, Lauren Weisberger, and the film is only, really, about the intensity between the two women.

The feelings of the one who dominates aren’t explored at all, because Miranda isn’t interested in what drives her. She’s interested in slicing open the world, so she can eat the best food and determine what everyone else will consider beautiful. She will be the arbitrary force that adjusts people’s emotions and sets their desires on a course. Who even thought such a thing was possible? The movie shows it is, and in fact it shows this is how every taste maker remakes the world according to their sense of urgency and what will sell. The taste maker has to figure out a formula that is partly eccentric enough to be at first thought by others, what is this new thing?—and therefore distinct—but has the potential to bend the wills of other people to its forms of arousal, enticing a public willing to surrender itself, while believing they are fulfilling their own wishes all along.

The reason the film is so enjoyable to watch is that the inner lives of both Miranda and Andy remain shadowy in the dialogue and therefore, in a sense, weirder to imagine. Each actress brings much more ambivalence in her performances than is probably in the script or direction by David Frankel. Andy finally breaks ranks when Miranda disappoints her by behaving in a way she can’t admire. Miranda’s glamor has a chink in it, and it’s that she’s ruthless and will sacrifice anyone to maintain her sense of dominance.

When Miranda sacrifices the future plans of Nigel, her loyal deputy at her magazine—touchingly and cleverly played by Stanley Tucci—Andy understands that Miranda can’t feel love. Miranda doesn’t love anyone or anything, not even herself. She’s not in control of anything, really. She’s at the mercy of herself, even if she wanted to treat people better. Andy is turned off. The erotic envelop is emptied. She doesn’t make a moral judgment. The movie shows this, even if it doesn’t mean to, and that is its fine accomplishment.

The Canals

There were four canals carved into the suburban streets of Long beach, where I lived as a child. The canals extended from the Long Island Sound that bordered Long Beach on the north side and that we called “the bay.” The air smelled of low tide and high tide all the time, and it made you feel marine life was part of your body.

I would walk by myself, even as a young kid, along the street where the canals ended, in order to reach a row of shops that sold groceries, magazine, and toys. In the window of the toy store, I would look at the dresses and accessories sold for dolls. I never had a Barbie doll, myself. The thing about Barbies is that they were sexy. You could see that immediately, the long legs and glamorous look of them, and I think Barbie struck me as an impossible ideal.

What I remember most vividly about the canals are the horse shoe crabs that assembled on the muddy sand when the tide went out. They were waiting for the water to return like commuters on the platforms of trains. They crowded together. For companionship? They horrified me with their ugly shells and long tails I thought were stingers. They were the most hideous and frightening part of the canals, and sometimes with other children I would go down to the beaches and poke at them with a stick. To scare ourselves? To confront our fears and to wonder about things that are terrifying and ugly at the same time, things whose ugliness is part of their terror?

In that sense, the horseshoe crabs were the opposite of the Barbies, whose terror was their sexiness and beauty. The living Barbie in my imagination was Audrey Hepburn, whose image in a slinky black dress, holding a long cigarette holder, faced out on the piano because I was learning to play “Moon River,” the song from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Audrey was the feminine ideal of my time, and I stared at her without knowing that idealizing her was a form of hatred.

Criminal Record

Cush Jumbo

The new crime thriller Criminal Record (Apple TV) stars Peter Capaldi as a crusty, boys’ club detective in the London police force and Cush Jumbo as a hardworking relative newcomer. Capaldi is a white man. Jumbo is a Black woman. And everything in the way they angle their ships sails from these factors, not because these markers of identity tell us who these people are inside but because these markers of identity have determined what each person has seen in the world, the range of motion each has been granted, and the sense of value each feels when they look at other people.

In one sense, the show—based on the three episodes that have aired so far—presents an unsubtle opposition of values and of the resistance each side feels they must exert against the other side. It feels to each like a matter of personal survival and of preserving a sense of how each wants to think the world should work.

I love the unsubtle opposition because I think it’s real. Right now, the London Metropolitan Police force is failing miserably in ways that are well publicized to address its entrenched policies of racism and sexism. Quickly. as Criminal Record was unfolding, I started to think about where Jumbo’s character fits in the progress of female detectives in British copper shows, and I loved where this portrayal has arrived.

Several decades ago, Helen Mirren’s brilliant portrayal of DCI Jane Tennison in the Prime Suspect series showed the ambient sexism a woman police boss was always up against. But by making Jane a figure isolated from other women who charges around on her own, and by making her a glittering exception—the only girl at the boys’ table—who is also made to suffer in her personal life, as a lonely alcoholic, the show enjoyed its own version of sexism in cutting her down.

The rural copper played by Sarah Lancaster in Happy Valley is similarly tough and tender, practicing a type of policing that flows from her personality. Again, though, she’s pretty much alone in her pursuit of an especially bad guy, who has brought about the death of her daughter. Just recently on Shetland, two women detectives are now tripping over bodies on the island, where the tiny population is continually thinned in order to keep the police employed. It was lovely to see the women, played beautifully by Ashley Jensen and Alison O'Donnell, team up as lead investigators.

Criminal Record advances the female copper genre to new ground, where, finally, we’re in a world where all kinds of different women help each other establish who is guilty of individual crimes and also work to subvert larger corrupt forces in seats of established power. Jumbo’s cop has to rely on other women—and in the show so far they are all women of color—to survive and to get anywhere in her investigations, because she’s so thwarted by men. She needs other women to see what’s wrong in every layer of her life, because these things are wrong in their lives as well. All of these women hate, just hate beyond measure, what they are pressured to keep quiet about.

The brilliance of the show is in this community of women. Jumbo is married to a white shrink. She has a Black son with a former husband, and in an early scene, the shrink husband treats her with a kind of dim-witted condescension about what she’s up against in her job. The script has him seeing his gaffe and kind of apologizing with one of those sentences that begins, “If I did anything . . . “ And we know from this sentence and the way he holds onto his superiority he’ll remain limited in his understanding of his wife’s experience, including her experience with him.

This layering is true and complex. The case that gets Jumbo’s character going involves an incident of domestic violence that ends in a woman’s murder and turns out to be tied to an earlier murder case Capaldi’s detective has run. Capaldi’s case involves the false conviction of a Black man accused of murdering a white woman. “A poor man’s OJ Simpson,” is the way he describes it to Jumbo, and we see every wire in her brain light up.

On her own, no individual woman could take on the combination of sexism and racism in this environment—the belittling of domestic violence and the railroading of Black suspects. All of the women on the show who help Jumbo’s character, from the phone dispatcher who receives calls from women for help, to other female coppers on the force, to the wrongly convicted man’s mother and his layer, a fantastic character played by Aysha Kala—all of them are necessary the way, in real life, the alliances of women and not their antagonisms clear more space in the world and usher in fresher air.

New York City Peeps

Please come to this free event and hear a galvanizing conversation with activist, author, and feminist healthcare innovator Merle Hoffman. Her 53 years of experience running one of the largest abortion clinics in the US inform her vision for organizing in the post-Roe world.

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