| |  | | | | July 25, 2017 | Letter No. 96 | | | | | | | | | | | | Dear Lennys,
"Every time you wake up, you choose the world." That's a line from Amy Rose Spiegel's Daily Affirmations in this week's Lenny that I'm keeping at the top of my mind. If you're finding yourself, like I am, with a case of summertime blues, this could be your ticket out.
We also have some other great pieces in store for you:
—Novelist Danzy Senna writes a very funny essay on that one time Doug E. Fresh invited Danzy and her friends back to his hotel room after a concert. While I'm too young to actually know who Doug E. Fresh is (sorry!), it brought back fond memories of the hardly suspect things I would get up to on the rare times my mother let me stay out past 10 p.m. in high school. She definitely thought I was up to much worse than watching Rush Hour 2 in someone's living room, and I usually let her think that.
—Next, Felicity Rubinstein pays tribute to Sybille Bedford's novel Jigsaw. If you've ever imagined yourself living in a different era — the French Riviera of the 1920s, to be exact — this one's for you.
—The aforementioned Amy Rose Spiegel is back with more Daily Affirmations to keep you going through the summer. "Fucking up is how you go pro" is one that particularly resonated with me, because if I live by any motto, it's definitely "Fake it till you make it."
—Lenny's historian at large, Alexis Coe, brings us the second edition of her column focusing on one primary source. This time around, she goes in on a new book, Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth, with author Holger Hoock; they discuss the rarely spoken-about violence against women that took place during the Revolutionary War.
—Finally, Ellen O'Connell Whittet writes with bravery about testing positive for the BRCA1 mutation, which puts carriers at a high risk of developing breast cancer. As someone with family members who carry and carried this gene, I can't express how fraught Ellen's decision is.
I hope you'll find that this week's issue resonates with you as much as it did with me, and that you're choosing your own beautiful worlds. Until next week, Lennys!
Xo
Molly, Lenny assistant editor | | | | | | | | | | | | Perfect | | | | By Danzy Senna | | |
Nineteen eighty-four. That was the year my mother discovered she'd given birth to a two-headed monster. Me and my sister. That was the year we turned fourteen and fifteen. We were only one year apart, Irish twins. Like real twins, we moved through the world as one entity. We spoke in code. We dressed in each other's clothes. My mother referred to us as "the girls." We didn't look very much alike, but our voices were remarkably similar. When my father called the house, he couldn't tell which of us was on the other line. He confused our names so regularly that it became a kind of new, conjoined name. D'anlucien. Or Lu'anzy.
We hadn't always been that monster. For my mother, an experimental poet, an unreconstructed socialist who had raised us on the poetry of Bernadette Mayer and the music of Patti Smith, what we became in 1984 was a particularly pointed bad joke. As a white woman raising black children, she'd been righteous and conscious, trying to raise two strong black women. She'd surrounded her daughters with powerful black women, godmothers and aunts, womanist trailblazers. She gave me a copy of The Bluest Eye to read when I was ten.
We weren't coming out the way she'd planned. At those readings she dragged us to at St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York all the way from our home base in Boston, we spent our time not listening and instead twisting our Barbie dolls into increasingly pornographic positions, using our little brother's GI Joe as their soul mate. We found the poetry readings weird as fuck — what kind of gibberish were they spewing up there? All her poet friends seemed drunk to us. We sat side by side in at a dark table at the Ear Inn, sipping our Shirley Temples, giving my mother's bohemian friends the stank-eye.
My mother looked at us across a table and said, "I don't think I've ever encountered two meaner girls."
Nineteen eighty-four was the year we discovered we could use Jolen facial hair bleach to put gold highlights in our hair. My sister had worn her hair in an Afro when she was young and beaded cornrows for a few years in the early 1980s, but now she used a Revlon five-minute relaxer. In our mind, Afros were for transracially adopted black kids and tragic mulattos (the ones whose white mothers didn't know how to do their hair).
We fancied ourselves amateur psychics and started our own two-member club called the Prediction Club. We liked to predict the future. We predicted we would be rich someday and leave all this behind.
The things we rejected: whiteness and poverty. We associated whiteness with stringy hair, "tore up" fingernails, high-water, no-name jeans, ripped sweaters, weird poetry, lack of style. We associated blackness with wealth, rap music, gold chains, high-priced sneakers, Polo by Ralph Lauren. Blackness was capitalism. We wore our gold hoops in our ears, nameplates on chains around our necks, sweaters with the price tags still hanging off.
Nineteen eighty-four was the first year we watched a lot of BET: Soul Train and Video Soul, where we were mesmerized by the host, Donnie Simpson with the light eyes. Fuck the hippie shit. We wanted to be like the girls in the rap videos, the ones hanging off the rich rapper's arm. We wanted to languish in a Jacuzzi, drink Moët, wear bikinis, and writhe around, our bodies on full display.
My sister's best friend that year lived in the city — a big-boned white girl who became the source of our wildest escapades. We'd known that white girl all our lives. Her parents were friends of my mother's who had been part of the early gentrification of Boston's South End, andin the liberal spirit of the times, they had enrolled their daughter in the local all-black public school.
The social experiment had been, depending on who was looking at it, either a terrible failure or a wild success. Their daughter had adjusted perfectly well to being the only white girl in her school. So well her parents didn't quite know what to do with her. Though the neighborhood around them had grown wealthier and whiter as it gentrified, their youngest daughter had grown more — ahem — culturally alienated from her origins.
Her parents had given her a highbrow, androgynous, literary name, but her school friends pronounced it "Orten." Orten could cornrow hair with the best of them. Orten liked five-finger discounts. Orten said she could never imagine kissing a white man. Orten always had something on layaway.
Once we'd realized our mother — with her poet salary and her Che Guevara dreams — wasn't going to buy us all the merchandise we wanted, we developed an impressive work ethic. We clocked hours every week bagging groceries, scooping ice cream, handling fruit, and, in the summers, working as secretaries. We lied about our ages. We changed jobs with the seasons, looking for the best hourly rate. We spent our money exactly as we made it. We needed to pay for all those clothes we had on layaway.
My mother eyed us with increasing horror. She sighed and turned back to her Olivetti, where she banged out poems and chain-smoked Marlboro Lights. She set us loose on the world. What else could she do?
Winter of 1985. I was fifteen. Hip-hop was exploding. Doug E. Fresh and the Get Fresh Crew were on constant play on the city's black radio station, WILD. They came to town that winter for a much-anticipated concert at the Lansdowne. A little bit of New York City was coming to our second-tier city. It was our kind of poetry reading.
Four of us went together that night: Me and my sister, Orten, and P, a pretty brown-skinned girl who always wore red lipstick. I don't really remember much about the performance itself. It has since faded into the backdrop for what came later, when we were walking to the subway station through the dark cold night.
It was just like in the music videos — a black stretch limousine pulled up beside us and the window rolled slowly down. The star of the show, Doug E. looked out at us while the others inside behind him nodded their heads in approval.
It was strange to see Doug E. Fresh up close, without the distance of stage or screen. He looked ordinary, baby-faced, kind of goofy — like the Herb you'd be friends with in math class but would not consider dating. He asked if we lovely ladies wanted to party. We didn't hesitate and climbed inside their limo. They were all there — Slick Rick and the Get Fresh Crew.
The driver cruised back past the club, where the concertgoers were still filing out of the club, loitering in clusters outside. Somebody, maybe it was Orten, asked the driver to slow down. Then each of us girls took turns standing up and sticking our heads through the sunroof, waving at the people who stood out in the cold. When it was my turn, I felt the freezing wind on my face. We were almost past the crowd. I caught the startled eyes of a boy I knew, the light-skinned kid named Rae who all the girls thought looked like El DeBarge. He was standing on the curb, bundled up in a parka. He looked suddenly small and young to me as he lifted his hand to wave at me moving past.
We drove through downtown Boston. The rappers asked if we were hungry. Yes, we were hungry. Doug E. Fresh said he'd take us out to dinner. It sounded grown-up and glamorous — a celebrity wanted to take us out to dinner. He brought us to McDonald's. We stood around in the bright lights waiting for our order number to be called. Some of the employees recognized him, and he gave them his autograph on a napkin. We didn't eat there. We carried our bags of food across the street to the Park Plaza Hotel, where the rappers were staying, and followed them into the elevator. Up on their floor, Slick Rick said he was going to his own private room to do his business. He bid us farewell. We followed the others into their suite. We spread our McDonald's food on the bed, and we all sat down to eat.
The boys seemed shy. One of them picked up the remote control and turned on the TV. He chose a movie from a list. Perfect, starring John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis — the one where Travolta plays a magazine reporter from Rolling Stone who travels to Los Angeles to write an exposé; he's trying to show that fitness clubs are the new singles bars. We watched the whole movie together, chewing our burgers and fries, sipping our milkshakes, occasionally making wisecracks about what was happening on screen.
Somebody took a Polaroid of us that night sitting with Doug E. Fresh and the Get Fresh Crew on the hotel bed. I don't have the picture. One of the other girls took it home with her, maybe Orten, and we don't know Orten anymore, so I am left to imagine the photo: a group of baby-faced boys sitting on a flowered comforter in a brightly lit hotel room surrounded by McDonald's wrappers and a group of underage groupies.
After the movie was over, my sister asked Doug E. Fresh if he wanted her to read his palm. She said she could tell him his future. He said OK. She held his hand in hers and gently touched the web of lines, frowning, nodding, while the rest of us, the boys and the girls, watched in a strange, fraught silence. It was as if we all believed she held special powers. Doug E. Fresh looked nervous. But when she spoke, she told him that he would live a long life, that he would have many children and find love and God and wealth. He seemed pleased, relieved, to hear her prediction — and then the others wanted her to read their palms too. She went around the room and read each of their futures. And then it was over. We thanked them for the food and the Travolta flick, and then one of them, not Doug E., led us downstairs and helped us catch a cab out front.
My mother was still awake when we got home. It was after midnight. The orange tip of her Marlboro Light glowed in the darkened kitchen. She stared at us when we came in the door, her two-headed monster — her socialist dream-crashers, Lu'anzy and D'anlucien. She asked us where the fuck we'd been. She wanted to know, at fifteen and sixteen, how bad we'd been. We were too excited to lie. We told her the truth: that after the show we'd been picked up by the most famous rapper in America. That we'd gone for a ride in their limousine and then they'd taken us back to their hotel room, where we'd sat around on their bed with them, eating McDonald's and watching Perfect.
My mother stared at us for a moment, trying to decide whether to believe us. Then she snubbed out her cigarette and laughed a little and said, "Wow, wow." She seemed strangely impressed by the limo detail.
At school the next week, I offered up none of the details. The rumor had already spread about what had gone down. Everyone claimed to have seen us looking out of the limo's sunroof. I let them imagine another story — the one where the rappers got freaky in the back of the limousine, where the underage girls got drunk on Moët in a hotel Jacuzzi, the one where they'd been nasty boys and we'd been nasty girls and there had been cash and gold for miles. Nobody knew the difference.
Danzy Senna's most recent novel is New People. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Seductive Pleasures of Sybille Bedford | | | | By Felicity Rubinstein | | |
Half a lifetime ago, on holiday in the south of France, my new boyfriend gave me Sybille Bedford's "biographical novel" Jigsaw to read. Much of the book is set in the French Riviera of the 1920s, a generation earlier than the Hemingway/Fitzgerald/Murphy iteration. The pages seem to exude the scent of pine trees and the chic of the early Riviera adopters in their sailor trousers and chalk-white espadrilles. I loved it at once, quite inordinately, and it has held a permanent position on my desert-island-books list. It is a reliable litmus test for friendship, an immediate shortcut with other Bedford devotees, and the perfect present for the carefully chosen uninitiated.
As a well-structured novel, Jigsaw falls at the first hurdle and deliciously proves that the best books can break all the rules. Subtitled An Unsentimental Education, it is the story of Bedford's first twenty years, which go roughly as follows: the only child of an elderly father and his much younger bride, Sybille (or Billi, as she is called) spends her early childhood in the ruined gothic splendor of a German castle, living in genteel poverty with her father and an old retainer.
Her beautiful, love-crazed mother has long since fled for a series of amorous adventures. Heirlooms are periodically sold in order to keep the castle's occupants fed, and Billi has no formal education. The library, wine cellar, and a dusty roulette wheel provide her only instruction. Eventually her mother sends for Billi, who is dispatched at age ten to Italy to meet the latest fiancé, a wealthy older man. By the time Billi arrives, the silver suitor has been supplanted by Alessandro, fifteen years her mother's junior. The lovers go on the run, leaving Billi at her mother's hotel in the care of Doris, a teenager who is herself called away for a film test.
Alone in the hotel, Billi adopts a lifestyle somewhere between Eloise at the Plaza and Death in Venice. "Living in an hotel was a fascinating experience," she writes gamely. Back in Germany, Billi's father has been operated on for appendicitis and dies from an asthma attack; "I knew that he had been much afraid of death," writes Bedford bluntly — we are not yet on page 50.
Billi is retrieved by her mother and Alessandro, and the next couple of sections describe how the mismatched threesome ricochet around Europe, beset with money troubles and the complications of Billi's guardianship. Billi's mother (never named in the book) casually sends her off to England to be educated in the care of a rackety couple she met once on a beach somewhere. Eventually, Alessandro and her mother marry and settle in France, while Billi finds herself a makeshift family in England with Toni and Rosie, German-refugee sisters, Toni's kindly English husband, Jamie, and Rosie's mysterious lover, known only as "the judge."
Billi's summers are spent in her mother's ménage in Sanary Sur Mer; a sensual world of fêtes champêtres, vintage cars, vivid Mediterranean food, and late-night sorties to Toulon for the cinema and cassoulet on the harbor. She is befriended by a gallery of local characters. The painter Moïse Kisling appears, as does the Brave New World author Aldous Huxley. Already Billi's literary hero when they meet, Huxley encourages her nascent writing ambitions ("As soon as I could speak, I wanted to be a writer").
But it is another couple, the wealthy, feckless, peerlessly glamorous Desmirails, or "heavenly twins," swanning around in their matching French-worker clothes, who capture Billi's heart as she moves out of spectator mode and takes her first faltering steps into the world of adult emotions.
So far, so picaresque. The story of the German sisters and their English men works brilliantly as a short story winched into the narrative jigsaw and provides a counterpoint to the French episodes. But Doris, the errant babysitter from Italy, reenters the picture with electrifying consequences, and this meandering, semi-fictional memoir changes gear with a cataclysmic final section before crashing into an abrupt and heart-stopping ending.
Bedford found her writing voice (which turned out to be English) and — thanks to "the judge" — she started attending the law courts and reported on some of the most important criminal trials of the day for, among others, Life magazine. Her first book, A Visit to Don Otavio, a timeless travel memoir published when she was 42, was followed by Jigsaw's companion piece, A Legacy, the fictionalized background to her father's Prussian ancestry.She wrote a couple of novels that drew on her childhood-abandonment trauma and a two-volume biography of Huxley, which was described by poet Stephen Spender as "one of the masterpieces of biography."
Her output was idiosyncratic and erratic. She had her literary admirers — Bruce Chatwin described her as "one of the most dazzling practitioners of modern English prose" — but it took the publication of Jigsaw in 1989 and its short-listing for that year's Booker Prize to catapult her to a new level of recognition. By then, Bedford, at 78, was all but done with writing, although she lived another seventeen years, which gave us her memoir Quicksands. In it, that childhood story is told yet again, but Bedford was now able to write a little more frankly about her friendships and love affairs.
I came to know her a bit in her last decade. I met her through her great friend the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard, and when Bedford's agent died, our agency took over representing her. She was a seductive figure in her man's striped shirts, cuff links, cravat, and green visor (she was partially blind by then), and she would whisper in the precise sibilant Germanic phrasings characteristic of her written sentences. She was kind, interested, unsentimental, courteously flirtatious, and morally stern; "self-deception," she declared, "is an enemy of life, a spoiler."
It felt like an immense privilege to accompany her to the eye hospital. She admitted to "dabbling in high cuisine." No meal together could be attempted without very serious discussion of the accompanying wine. She was enjoying a passionate new love affair. All these pleasures lasted her up until days before her death at 94.
The man who introduced me to Jigsaw has been my husband for more than a quarter of a century. Every summer, I buy myself a brand-new pair of chalk-white espadrilles.
Felicity Rubinstein is a London based literary agent and bookseller. | | | | | | | | | | | | Daily Affirmations | | | | By Amy Rose Spiegel with illustrations by Kat Kon | | |
Amy Rose Spiegel is a writer, the editor in chief of Talkhouse Music, and the author of Action: A Book About Sex. She likes irises, the Chicago Manual of Style, and meatloaf. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram. | | | | | | | | | | | | "Run a Bayonet Through Their Hearts" | | | | By Alexis Coe | | | |
In this column, Alexis Coe, Lenny's historian at large, will conduct Q&As with specialists in archives across the country, focusing on one primary source. For this post, Alexis spoke with Holger Hoock, author of Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth, about the deposition of Abigail Palmer, a teenager who, alongside two friends and a pregnant relative, was sexually assaulted by British soldiers during the Revolutionary War. (Read Alexis's first column, about a letter from Coretta Scott King, here.)
Alexis Coe: I recently heard you discuss your new book, Scars of Independence, in which you "write the violence back into the [American] Revolution." That includes violence against women, which isn't the narrative we normally hear about this war. Since then, I've thought about Abigail Palmer, a teenage girl who was, along with two friends and a pregnant relative, raped by soldiers. What happened to her?
Holger Hoock: Abigail Palmer was a thirteen-year-old girl. One day in December 1776, she had been at the house of her grandfather, Edmund Palmer, a farmer near Pennington, New Jersey. British soldiers straying from a nearby camp took control of the premises. For three days, several soldiers raped Abigail, her teenage friends, Elizabeth and Sarah Cain, and her aunt, Mary Phillips. In a war not short of atrocities on all sides, this stands out as a horrific, harrowing ordeal endured by girls and women who, as far as we know, played no active part in the conflict.
AC: So there's no evidence to suggest that any of the women were Revolutionary spies? Was Abigail's grandfather involved with the Patriot cause, or sympathetic?
HH: There's no evidence that these particular women were spies, or couriers, or otherwise actively aided the American war effort. The family does not seem to have been targeted for their allegiances. This was a crime of opportunity: soldiers roaming the environs of their camp came across the women at the Palmer residence and then abused them systematically.
AC: Were there any male relatives on the farm, or were the women alone?
HH: Abigail's grandfather was at the house at the time and attempted to shield her and Elizabeth Cain when several soldiers "pull'd them both into a Room" –– but, ignoring their screams, they "Ravishd them both." The families of raped American women often pointed out that British soldiers maximized the humiliating and demoralizing impact of their attacks by assaulting women in front of their fathers, husbands, and other close relatives. Assaults on the honor of American men who failed to protect their vulnerable women seemed as critical as defeat on the battlefield.
AC: Did the women or Abigail's grandfather go to the authorities on their own, or was she encouraged to do so?
HH: Neither, actually. Like most women raped by soldiers, Abigail had no chance to charge her assailants or seek justice in an American court. A few rape victims courageously visited the HQ of the occupying British forces to demand that their attackers be identified and tried. And at a time when tolerance of sexual violence was very high in the British army, officers did actually prosecute some rape cases: courts-martial sentenced several soldiers to execution by hanging. Abigail was in fact sought out by America's new leaders to tell her story. These men –– and they were all men, of course –– would deploy Abigail's story of personal suffering in their moral and propaganda war against the tyrannical British Empire.
AC: Who took Abigail's deposition, and why?
HH: That winter, of 1776 to 1777, the Continental Congress had appointed a committee to investigate British war crimes. They were asked to document not just battlefield atrocities and prisoner abuse, but also the "lust and brutality of the soldiers in abusing of women." America's new leaders were acutely aware that rape would be "more difficult to prove than any of the rest as the person abused, as well as the Relations are generally reluctant against bringing matters of this kind into public Notice." But George Washington identified specific New Jersey citizens who knew about rape cases, and a local justice of the peace was able to depose six girls and women in the area –– including Abigail.
AC: Can you quote some of Abigail's deposition? What's stayed with you?
HH: Like all such depositions, Abigail's testimony comes to us through the questioning and notation of a male official; Abigail signed with her mark: "x." Abigail's and her friends' depositions detail both the physical assaults and the threats they endured. The British soldiers told Abigail "they would knock her Eyes out if she did not hold her Tongue." They threatened to poison the girls, to run a bayonet through their hearts, and "to blow their brains out." In the one-page document, several days of intermittent sexual violence by individual and groups of soldiers are summarized in a couple of sentences and matter-of-fact language. When two of the girls were eventually carried off to the British camp on the third day of their ordeal, Elizabeth remembered, "they was both Treated by some others of the Soldiers in the same Cruel manner."
AC: And how did Patriots react to this kind of story versus, say, stories of prison atrocities? Was it a powerful tool?
HH: American reports on British atrocities powerfully turned the violated bodies of American men and women into moral assets for the Revolutionary cause. But one key difference between stories of rape on the one hand and atrocities against military men on the other was how the actual bodies were the focus of the investigation and description –– or not. The Revolutionaries documented in great forensic detail the specific number and nature of wounds in the bodies of dead and injured soldiers in the aftermath of a massacre. Similarly, they evoked the malnourished, diseased bodies of surviving POWs.
By contrast, investigations and propagandistic publications about rape downplayed physical details, unlike in civilian courts at the time, which gathered evidence of bruises, cuts, and other signs of resistance, and indications of recent sexual intercourse. And if a raped American woman testified at a British court-martial, she was asked whether her alleged assailant had penetrated her and ejaculated, to test the veracity of her accusations.
AC: The Revolutionary War is my era, too. My next book is on George Washington, so we've no doubt mined many of the same sources, but so much of what you've written about in Scars of Independence is new, or has never been emphasized. We learn that this was a bloody, long battle, of course, but mostly it's a heroic tale of patriots who bravely rebelled against an oppressive empire in order to create what was considered, at the time, a utopia of sorts. What do you think that story says about our country, and how do you hope your work changes the conversation around the Revolution?
HH: Abigail Palmer's story is just one of myriad examples of how the Revolution was a profoundly violent civil war in America and the British Empire that impacted not just combatants and captives but also civilians of all ages and sexes, free, enslaved, and indigenous. Conventional narratives, focused on the era's ideals, fail to capture their ordeals. And the selective remembering, the whitewashing of violence, had set in right after the Revolution itself, as the Patriots wrote the American-on-American violence of America's first civil war out of the story. Over time, even the Revolutionary-era emphasis on the blood that the Patriots themselves had shed in defense of their new nation –– and the sexual violation of their women –– yielded to a strangely bloodless narrative of the war.
Today, in our age of armed conflicts worldwide, of genocide, and debates about the nature of patriotism, Americans seem to cling to the Revolution as their last great romance with war. But, I would argue, it is precisely because we face an uncertain world of insurgencies, civil wars, and failed states that Americans should confront their own tumultuous origins and be alert to the potential pitfalls of pursuing moral objectives by violent means.
Alexis Coe is the author of Alice+Freda Forever and is writing a biography on George Washington. Follow her. | | | | | | | | | | | | I Have a Decent Chance of Getting Breast Cancer, But I'm Keeping My Breasts | | | | By Ellen O'Connell Whittet | | |
By the time I find out the future written in my body, my mother has already lost her hair in chemo, so she sits next to me in a wig in the waiting room. The walk from the waiting room to the office seems long. The genetic counselor is asking about the snowfall in New England, where Justin, my husband, and I visited his family over Christmas. I don't want to talk about the snowfall, though; I want to scream. My mother and I are walking into the caverns of the Cancer Center, where she gets weekly treatment for breast cancer.
Before I left for Christmas, I got three vials of blood drawn to send to a lab that would test it for the same BRCA1 mutation my mother has. The mutation causes up to a 90 percent chance of developing breast cancer and up to a 40 percent chance of ovarian cancer. Today, we are walking to the same room where we learned my mother's results, with Hannah, the same counselor. She had made a family tree for us both, branches and circles looking more like a biology midterm than the manzanitas and oaks I grew up climbing.
Hannah, mercifully, tells me as soon as we're sitting down that my fears are confirmed. "We found the same mutation that we found in your mother," she says, pushing a stack of papers toward me to confirm, although it's my body we're talking about, which feels fine.
She is business-like and sympathetic, and for a brief moment I think how awful it would be to give people bad news for a living when you can do so little to help them. "I know it's not what we were hoping for," Hannah says impotently. My mom holds my hand; she is the only person who knows exactly how I feel, and she is sorry for this thing she could not help. Later, she even apologizes, but an apology implies intent, and I know she would get breast cancer every year to keep her child from having to go through it. She is that sort of mother, the sort who loves me beyond my own understanding.
"If you're interested in having children but don't want to pass on the mutation, you have a number of options," Hannah tells me immediately. "You can do IVF and only implant the embryo that didn't inherit the mutation, or test a fetus you conceive naturally with the intention of terminating it if it has inherited your gene." The chances are 50 percent, a flip of the coin.
"Can we just take our chances?" I ask. After all, medicine moves at the speed of light. I seem to have too much control over some choices and not enough over others.
Hannah explains that a sentence written in our bodies is misspelled. The sentence should read "The big black dog sees the ball." Instead, my mother's and mine say "Pig big ball black sees." All of our bodies have our futures written. My mother and I just got to read ours sooner. But because I can elect to get prophylactic surgeries now, while I'm still healthy, I have a chance to rewrite the ending of my story. It's not an easy choice even if I'm happily childless, because it requires making a decision in this moment that will impact the rest of my life.
When I go to the bathroom a few minutes later to text Justin my results, I see a sign that says, "Sometimes all you can do is laugh." I told Justin not to take the morning off work to come with me, because I was confident I would be fine. After all, I felt fine. I have no symptoms of illness. He replies that he's so sorry, we'll figure this out, call him when I leave. We both know the only way to cut the risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer is simply to remove any organs or tissues — ovaries, fallopian tubes, and breast tissue — by age 35. I am 31. The small window I have to conceive, carry, and deliver a baby feels like it's closing on us as we stick our heads out for air.
As a BRCA1 carrier, I need breast exams every three months. This is done through mammograms, MRIs, and ultrasounds, some of which I'm expected to pay for out of pocket. For now, I decide I will take my chances and continue getting my breast tissue checked rather than removed. It's much easier to screen than ovaries.
When I first see the breast surgeon, she walks in the room, sits down, and asks, "Kids or no kids?"
"We want children," I tell her, "but not right now."
"Well, sooner rather than later," she tells me. She has the same advice as the ob-gyn, as my primary-care doctor, as the Internet, and as my mother's oncologist. "Every year you wait, your chances go up."
When I remove my shirt for her to take a picture of my breasts with the hospital iPad, she tells me, "You get really splotchy when you're nervous." I look down and see my neck and chest are bright red.
"You'd be a great candidate for a full mastectomy now," she tells me as she snaps her picture. "You're petite, so I'd make the incisions here and put in implants." She points to the bottom of my breast.
"But what about breastfeeding?" I ask.
"It's up to you," she shrugs, "but it would be much more convenient. No more screening." More convenient for whom, I want to ask.
"Come back in September for a mammogram and full-breast ultrasound," she instructs. "Unless you're pregnant by September, in which case we'll cancel the mammogram."
"Should I be?" I ask her, the alarm in my voice rising.
"Sooner is better than later," she says.
My primary-care doctor explains that taking birth-control pills for fifteen years greatly reduces my risk of developing ovarian cancer. So for now, I take the oral birth control to prevent the children the doctors urge me to hurry up and have. I'm lucky to have health insurance through my job. Because paying for women's birth control was one of the most hotly debated additions to the Affordable Care Act, it is one of the most vulnerable provisions now that Congress is working to dismantle the ACA. I take it to save my life, like people take a pill for cholesterol or heart disease. For me, it's not a luxury. Women's reproductive rights are not one-size-fits-all. We have lots of bodies and circumstances and should have lots of options. Justin and I take to the streets of LA for the Women's March for women who don't have the options I do.
My choice is between waiting until I'm ready for children, and increasing my risk for cancer each year I wait. I dream of traveling with Justin to Paris and Morocco, publishing my book, taking our time. We wish we could have children on our own terms, without feeling pressured by doctors or politicians.
In many ways, it feels like my mother's body made a decision for me before I was born, just as I am taking my chances on passing on a genetic mutation for cancer to my own future children. Sometimes it feels like I have a ticking time bomb inside me, and by waiting until I am ready to have a baby, I am endangering myself just to prove a point about my bodily autonomy.
The decisions I will make over the coming years wake me up in the morning, sneak up behind me during the day, overtake so many of the quiet conversations I have with Justin in the evenings. Everyone has advice for me, projections of the choices they've made over the years: the babies they have had or not had, the careers they've secured or given up on, the books they've written or regretted leaving unfinished. It surprises me that I knew what I wanted to do — wait and see, rather than remove my breasts — as soon as I first learned of this diagnosis, and how strong my resolve has remained. For now, I'm not getting any surgery, but I give myself full permission to change my mind at any point.
In some ways, we all know the end of our stories, although we don't know how they unfold. The agency I have in my decision uses those misspelled sentences to make something deliberate, carefully crafted, and beautiful. The shape of the story written within me can be rewritten by me.
Ellen O'Connell Whittet lives in California, where she is writing a memoir about ballet and the forces that control female bodies. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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