Bingo square rage. I think this completes my bingo row, along with fanfic, fiasco, earth day, golden
Content note for the book: suicidal ideation, eating disorders, self harm, mental health
“Now I’m furious, so angry my whole body feels hot, and I can tell I’m about to cry.” (p. 211)
I’m (still) a fan of Tendler’s ex-husband–and I love that this isn’t about him. Well, it’s about him in the sense that he’s the ‘unfaithful husband’ of the narrative, presumably, the shadow that lurks behind the fractured moment captured in the story, but he’s not the subject. He’s the object of anxiety, the joker in the house of cards that makes up the life that falls apart–but he’s not the subject.
This is Tendler reclaiming her life, confronting her demons–and these are the demons that have haunted women since before another John insisted that his wife live in the nursery with the yellow wallpaper, and before Edward Fairfax Rochester locked his first wife up in the attic. And these demons live in medicine and law and psychiatry and in the highest offices of political power and the guys down the street who don’t really think women deserve to be people and sometimes the person sleeping on the other pillow. And troublingly, these demons are aided and abetted by women, both in the stories and Tendler’s memoir and in all of our lives. And she’s really fucking angry about it all, to the point where she’s trying not to implode with rage.
In the first year of Covid, in the middle of a global crisis that still isn’t fully over, Tendler and her husband split up, and he dealt with his relapse into addiction in his way, which he documented in his Netflix special, and she dealt with a resurgence of self-destructive impulses and general sense of precarity in her own way, staying at a psychiatric institute which is kind of a rehab centre. She also created a number of darkly evocative and quite beautiful Instagram posts and wrote this memoir, which goes back beyond the ending of the marriage to Tendler’s childhood and relationship with her divorced parents and her first romantic and sexual relationships, and crucially, does not end when she leaves the place–this memoir by no means offers easy answers to anything.
Tendler was a lot too young when she got together with a guy in a band who inevitably cheated on her; she drifted between jobs for a long time, she was an older student when she went back to college, she was too old for kids to be an easy or uncomplicated choice when the marriage fell apart; she documents feeling out of place and out of time with forthrightness and unflinching self-reflection; she’s wry, and funny at times.
The depth and detail here stuck with me:
“I take a seat on a shallow settee upholstered in green chintz fabric–the historical accuracy is impressive. I recently renovated the interior of my own home–the one I just moved into in Connecticut–from a neutral Restoration Hardware advertisement to a sort of haunted Victorian dollhouse. I wallpapered every wall. I painted every ceiling. One of them I even tiled, an ode to Rafael Gustavino, the famous Spaniard who tiled the ceilings of Ellis Island and Grand Central’s Whispering Gallery. Each piece of furniture I own is an antique carefully chosen from a dealer or rehired from my grandparents’ house. There is no overhead lighting in most of the living spaces, as was custom in old houses. Instead, low, warm, light glows from sconces and lamps, may of which I have made. I took inspiration from the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements of the nineteenth century. The Arts and Crafts movement, spearheaded by designer William Morris in England, embodied the ethos that rooms should be entire environments, every inch considered. If a wall was white it was purposeful, not the default as it is today. There is not a single room in my house that does not feel like its own cocoon. Settees are plentiful.” (p. 56)
This is a woman who knows things, this is a woman who is putting herself in place rather than being put in her place, this is a woman taking herself out of the attic, out of the wallpaper, out of the margins and footnotes of someone else’s story, who is creating her self a home. She’s making her own fucking lamps, for crying out loud. It might look like a haunted Victorian dollhouse, but she is very much flesh and blood, raging against the dying of the light. I hope she has a long and happy life there or wherever else she chooses.