First, a point of business: I turn the manuscript of my next book over to my editor in just over a month, so March will sadly be a No Proust month. I’m going to try to put out some sort of letter or conversation in those weeks, but we’ll resume our Proust reading schedule with volume IV, Sodom and Gomorrah, in April. Thanks for bearing with me!
A note on the dispatch below: there’s some not-particularly-graphic discussions of sexual and domestic violence, as well as spoilers for the seventh episode of the most recent season of Fargo (“Linda”).
Lastly, I published two essays I’m v proud of in the past few weeks: first, an essay on the ethics of memoir and Blake Butler’s Molly, in the latest issue of Bookforum; and also, a sequel of sorts to my 2020 essay “Fucking Like a Housewife” for The New Inquiry, where I returned to my old housewife fantasy, Mad Men’s Betty Draper, and the politics and humiliations of desire. It’s called “Housewife Demonology,” and you can find it here.
Now, a confession: I’ve been thinking little about Proust lately, although much about memory. In my last dispatch, I wrote of attention: what commands our notice, what we turn away from, and how the gauzy membrane between these zones brushes against a question, too, of historical memory—of “bearing witness.” About three weeks ago, an essay—which I won’t cite here, because it’s conspiracy-minded, bullshit rape apologism—on the E. Jean Carroll decision was pasted all over my substack feed. NOT, as it turned out, because people were disputing it, but because the author, I’m meant to believe, has 300k subscribers here and (one assumes) the algorithm had become somehow beholden to promoting her.
The long and short of it was this: the author argues that Carroll (and this is her exact word) “seduced” the former president and, afterward, claimed the encounter to have been rape, in an effort to cash in on the apparently endless and self-perpetuating “false accusations” authorized by the #metoo movement. The author’s “proof” to hand was functionally threefold: (1) the bare fact of the financial reward pursuant to settlement, where capital, in itself, is invariably understood as a stain against one’s testimonial credibility; (2) Carroll’s previous accounts of experiencing sexual violence unrelated to the case against the former president; and (3) the “holes” in her memory of the event, which mainly concerned matters of scenographic detail.
My tendency is to see such claims as below my regard, but there are moments in life when the bud must be nipped. Briefly: (1) accusations of women “cashing in” on our rapes are so common and superficial as to be dull, not to say utterly illogical when even a cursory glance is given to the treatment of women who do report1—by the justice system, by our families and communities, and by the culture at large, which needless to say is built on a bedrock of sexed inequity and the facilitation of systemic sexual violence. (2) The idea that having been raped before consequently undercuts further allegations relies on one of two lines of thought: that all of the allegations are lies, and so the more a woman claims to have been violated, the more obvious her pattern of unbelievability becomes; OR that rape somehow inoculates you from further rape, which flies in the face of sociological studies of repeat and multiple victimization2. In actuality, being raped renders a person more vulnerable to additional assaults and other experiences of intimate violence (particularly domestic). Finally, this author claims that experiencing rape would be so shocking to the person who’d endured it that nothing about their recollection would ever slip, falter, or leak away, even in the span of 30 intervening years. Sure, Jan. I guess she never saw that meme about depression causing memory loss…
Now, on the legal particulars of the case I’m no expert, and it’s probably obvious by now that my politics are further left than “Orange Man Bad,” but what snagged a thread in my mind was this author’s third proposition—an old one, an obvious one—that people who experience trauma (“survivors,” that loaded gun of a word) are only credible witnesses to our lives if our memory of the traumatic event is imperturbable, and utterly objective; that our stories are believable only if we are the minor but omniscient gods overseeing our own violation.
So I began to think about the pesky porousness of memory, its lapses, absences, and shifting intensities, and the way these apertures and fault-lines are subsequently, relentlessly leveraged against us. Enduring degradation, of course, is never enough—especially should you have the gall to speak publicly about survival or the desire for an end to such violence—but what appears increasingly untenable about offering such accounts in the post-#metoo era is the way the victim-survivor has become chained to a collective cultural delusion of cognitive infallibility: the dream, or really the nightmare, of Total Recall.
There’s an obvious reason why I’m snared by these presumptive obligations: I’m nearing the finish line of my own manuscript on rape, which is a memoir, yes, but also an experimental attempt to circumvent the narrative conventions of The Rape Memoir, to wrestle, as a matter of form, with the way sexual violence is made assimilable both in the psyche and through the stories we tell about ourselves to others. The book is also, urgently, about how rape disorders the usual functioning of the mind; how trauma unmoors the subject from her self and so instantiates a kind of unavoidable chaos in the storytelling apparatus. Contra the party line notion of things, I do not see rape as “unspeakable,” but I do believe, as an experience of profound abjection and horror, it is prone to resist and exceed the containers with which we try to tidy it.
Rape is a mess, in short, and it’s the fact of this wreckage that renders it—anyhow to my mind—a wildly fascinating and disturbing narrative field.
Lately I’ve been listening to the audiobooks of celebrity memoirs, partly for relief from the difficulty of my own work, but also to tease out unexpected formal strategies as I finish revising my M.S., perhaps, even, to allow myself to imagine what my book’s shape might have been if I’d taken a different path, tried another tack. As an escape, the three memoirs I chose proved poor havens. I listened to Britney Spears, Pam Anderson, and Julia Fox, and let’s face it: none of these women have had easy lives, and experiences of sexual, domestic, and psychological violence are threaded through each of their accounts. I was nonetheless engrossed in all three, although I really never read in the genre. There was something, I think, about actually listening to the books that made them immediate to me, that allowed me to surrender the snobbish need that my reading be Literary.3
There was a commonality I noticed, though, at least between two of these: Spears and Anderson both deliberately step apart from their narratives to describe the quality of their memory as “photographic,” an overlap I summon here not to dispute the factuality of their remarks, but only to think about how, as women, it’s come to seem impossible we might be trusted to give an account of ourselves without leaning on rhetorical disclosures such as these.4 In the Age of Conspiracy, the idea a woman could be telling the truth of her life has been chipped and chipped at until it’s come to feel impossible to grasp.
I should say my memory of my rapes is not perfect. I was drugged during two of them, for one thing, which is to say I understood them in the context of assault but wasn’t capable, after, of having an immaculate or transparent recollection of the details crowding the scenes. Some wisps remain: I remember the underwear I’d been wearing in one, for example; I remember a pack of cigarettes on a nightstand beside me during the other: my mother’s brand; I remember the gray curtains in one of the rooms, the smell of that man’s sweat, but these are minor details that don’t offer a full account. The events on the whole were vague outlines even as they happened. Now they are hauntings.
I was also, and this must be said, not a perfect victim, which is a shame I’ve spent a great deal of time parsing, both in the writing and (now, that insurance has finally agreed to cover it) in therapy. It seemed to me these two “troubles”—the fallibility of my memory, as well as my “failure” to have been the right sort of woman—were why I needed to finally publish this fucking book, as opposed to deterrents to its completion. This shift in perspective felt transformative, in its way, although not Healing5—I arrived at the knowledge, I suppose, that I’d been internalizing the rather obvious logic of rape culture. I was blaming myself for being a poor fit within the usual stories, rather than asking why the usual stories kept failing to treat a vast majority of survivors6 with complexity or dignity. I saw I needed to blow up the form.
I’ve been lately watching the most recent season of Fargo, and while I hadn’t known it would hinge on a narrative of domestic violence, I’ve found its representation of intimate trauma sensitive and illuminating. In episode seven, “Linda,” Dot Lyon7 (fka Nadine Tillman, who once fled, and is again in flight from, the man who raped, wed, and nearly killed her) sets off on a journey to Camp Utopia, the place where she believes her husband’s first wife, Linda Tillman, escaped to. There she finds “Saint” Linda, who in the meantime has founded a woodland refuge / community for women (all now called Linda8) who’ve left abusive partners. In Camp Utopia, they are compelled to tell one another the histories of their experience with violence—crucially, by way of puppet theater.
Dot’s come to Camp Utopia to put things to rights—she asks for Linda’s help with providing testimony that will lock Roy Tillman away forever. But Dot also accuses Linda of complicity in her abuse, leading Linda to demand a trial before the camp. There, Dot will have the opportunity to offer her version of events (to “speak her truth,” in our common parlance) before the women of the camp come together to ferret out what Linda calls the True Truth. Dot, she tells her audience, was a teenage runaway when Linda found her shoplifting in the supermarket, and Roy was Linda’s abuser when she “fed” Dot to him to get out from under her husband’s tyrannical rule. I recommend watching the sequence, a surrealist, puppeteered fable of Dot’s traumatic history—not only because of the unnerving and slantwise fashion by which Dot at last remembers (or in any case, confesses to) what happened to her, but also for its visual and narratalogical oddness, emblematic of Fargo’s abiding fixation—across five brilliant seasons of television—with revising and upending conventional storytelling modes.
Here be the largest spoiler:
After Dot and Linda ride away from the refuge, we discover the encounter at Camp Utopia was a dream. Linda never got out—she’s dead, murdered by Roy and buried back at the farm beneath a creaking windmill. Dot was only nodding off in a diner after a long drive. Solidarity in sisterhood, the True Truth, this vision of liberation from her tormentor—it was all in Dot’s head. The narrative relief of Dot’s bearing witness to her displaced memories—after ten years of hiding from and suppressing them—summons no material change to her exterior circumstance. She’s still alone, still on the run, and no amount of storytelling is going to change that. Perhaps it’s strange I found this nihilistic twist so resonant, even as I am (ostensibly) putting some weight of faith in the importance of publishing my own trauma narrative, but the revelation moved me, in fact, to the point of weeping. It felt more honest, in a way, sharper on the collapse of #metoo than many stories of the backlash have been. If the outcome is obvious, if she ends up back in Roy’s hands, Dot’s confession nonetheless shifts something for her. It’s no surprise the world that tried to kill her will go on trying, but her life is once again her own. There’s a beauty I have known in this.
A few brief, easily google-able sources: Sarah Harsey and Jennifer Freyd, Deny, Attack, Blame: The Prosecution of Women Reporting Rape; I’m thinking also of the fuzziness of statistics in rape reporting: some accounts suggest 63% of sexual assaults go unreported, others argue the number may be as high as 80%. This study is old but well-cited, and I’d also recommend recent book-length works by Jacqueline Rose and Kate Manne, although, in my feeling, both under-serve sexual violence against trans women.
See Outlaw, Ruback, and Britt for one such study.
I should say Michelle Williams reads The Woman in Me, but frankly, she does a fabulous job of summoning Britney’s voice without cheaply impersonating it. I loved her narration, but then, I love pretty much everything Michelle Williams does, even Halloween H2O: 20 Years Later.
I realized I too had been erecting an edifice of reliability in my book—citing old diaries, wondering who of the people in my life will corroborate my stories, combing through old social media posts, etc.
Often, of course, the lesson of the Rape Memoir…
After 80k words I still haven’t solved this trouble of naming. Survivor? Victim? Victim-Survivor? Know when I’m using any of these terms I am using them provisionally—they are strategies and shorthand, not categoricals.
Played with a feral sharpness by Juno Temple—I hadn’t seen her in anything before this, but have been just astounded by the performance.
Importantly, the women can “earn” new letters in their time at the camp, which are subsequently used to re-rename themselves.