| |  | | | | August 15, 2017 | Letter No. 99 | | | | | | | | | | | | Dear Lennys,
I'm not great at goodbyes. I either overdo it (tears, promises of eternal friendship after a day of working together) or underdo it (slipping out of my own birthday party without acknowledging anyone). But this is a goodbye I really want to get right: one to our deputy editor, Laia Garcia.
Laia was the second employee of Lenny, right after editor in chief Jess "super girl a Plus" Grose, as she's saved in my phone. I'll never forget our first meeting with Laia. She walked into the restaurant where Jenni, Jess, and I were sitting, her artful tattoos on display, wearing sandals and socks and a perfect pencil skirt (and with even more perfect bangs). I'm pretty sure we all had the same thought: Damn, she's way cooler than us.
She turned out to be as talented, passionate, and funny as she is cool. So much of what you (and I) love about Lenny is Laia: her eye for whimsical yet emotive illustration, her to-the-left sense of visual space and style, and her belief that fashion can be political, emotional, and freaking funny. Laia made our newsletter beautiful but never at the expense of its core values. In fact, when it comes to core values, nobody fights harder than Laia: whether it's against a piece she thinks isn't up to par, for an idea we don't all fully "get," or with a dick shouting sexist crap at the Women's March.
A few months into her time at Lenny, Laia got a new tattoo: bubble letters in a rainbow gradient that read CONTENT. It was sort of a joke — after all, she's worked on the web for ten years, where that word is thrown around like rice at a wedding — but it was also her truth. Laia lives to fill our lives with bright, brilliant content. She's never "content" to settle for something on trend or just good enough. And somehow she manages to get all this done AND fully zone out on a beach more than anyone I know. I want her secrets, and I'm gonna keep begging for them, even when she moves on from Lenny this week. Laia, we are grateful. We are proud. We still need your help understanding denim.
Love always,
Lena and the Lennys
In this week's issue:
—Leigh Flayton interviews our perma-crushes Janeane Garofalo and Lili Taylor, who are costarring in the Broadway revival of Marvin's Room.
—The comedian Carmen Lynch writes about how her teenage bout with scoliosis led to her career in stand-up.
—Margaret Wilkerson Sexton writes a gorgeous essay about her favorite cousin, whose life was irrevocably changed by Hurricane Katrina, and how she ended up in law school while he ended up entangled in the justice system.
—Brilliant novelist Meg Wolitzer reveals what makes her feel powerful.
—Our international correspondent, Lauren Bohn, covers how the Trump administration's anti-choice budget cuts affect a program that helps girls get bikes in Guatemala and Malawi. | | | | | | | | | | | | Lili Taylor and Janeane Garofalo | | | | By Leigh Flayton | | |
Lili Taylor and Janeane Garofalo had similar career beginnings — each inspired a slew of Gen-X crushes and had a star turn playing a cool best friend, in the cult-classic films Say Anything and Reality Bites, respectively. In the ensuing decades, each worked steadily but with different trajectories: Taylor starred in TV shows (Six Feet Under, American Crime), plays (The Three Sisters, Mourning Becomes Electra), and movies (High Fidelity, The Notorious Bettie Page) and became active in bird conservation, while Garofalo, primarily a comic, went on to star in Romy & Michele's High School Reunion and Wet Hot American Summer before hosting a radio show on the short-lived progressive station Air America.
Now they are first-time costars, in the play Marvin's Room, playing long-estranged sisters grappling with each other, their troubled family, and a life-threatening illness. Marvin's Room debuted in Chicago in 1990 and was produced in theaters around the country and London's West End before being made into a 1996 film starring a young Leonardo DiCaprio; Meryl Streep as Lee, currently portrayed by Garofalo; and Diane Keaton as Bessie, Taylor's role. Keaton was nominated for an Oscar for her performance.
The current production marks Garofalo's Broadway debut, and, in addition to forming an inspired theatrical pairing, she and Taylor have become fast friends. We spoke on the phone just after the play's opening. Garofalo, a self-proclaimed "neo-Luddite," dialed a moment late into the conference line, while Taylor cheered her ability to join — their unfettered admiration for each other and joyful camaraderie made them seem more like longtime pals than newly introduced costars.
Leigh Flayton: What was your reaction when you found out you would be each other's costar?
Lili Taylor: I said, "Perfect." I feel like she's familiar to me. Familial.
Janeane Garofalo: Without even having read the play, I knew I wanted to work with Lili. I auditioned for it, never thinking I would get it, and then I actually got the part somehow. It was Lili that was the motivating force.
LF: Why didn't you think you would get it?
JG: Because I don't get 90 percent of the things I audition for. I'm not a particularly good auditioner. It's a very unnatural, unsettling situation. My low self-esteem does not serve me well in that type of situation, so I just assumed I wasn't going to get it, which I think actually worked in my favor. I went into it with, "I'm just happy that they would even ask me to do it."
LF: This is Janeane's and the play's Broadway debut. Why is now a good time to revive this show?
LT: I think any time would be an OK time, because it's about family. It has all the stuff that any good story has, which is the specificity with a certain family, the conflicts within it — dying, loving, what's important.
JG: There are — out of necessity in the last, I would say, ten years, because of the economy — multigenerational families living together again. Growing up, my mother's mother lived with us for most of my life, and it was extremely difficult. Especially since my father did not get along with my mother's mother. And so I am a huge advocate, just from personal experience, of nursing homes — if it's a nice nursing home … These are very difficult issues, and people sometimes think I'm very, very cold and somewhat crass about my sort of straightforward opinion on this, and I certainly don't mean to be.
LF: Speaking of straightforward, Janeane, you got a lot of flak for raising a political voice against George W. Bush and the Iraq War. What did that do to your career, and to you?
JG: Well, I'm sure it wasn't helpful, but that's OK. If there are certain types of people that wouldn't have worked with me back then because of my political stance, that's fine, because obviously I wouldn't have wanted to work with them.
I did not enjoy that period, believe me. That was a very, very bad time. Criticism hurts me deeply, and I felt very unjustly singled out — as lots of people in entertainment often are — because they're easy to mock and marginalize. That's why the mainstream media tends to pick on them more than people from the Pentagon who were against the war.
But I was working at Air America with Rachel Maddow and Al Franken, and that was one of the most fulfilling times of my life, though I would say that taking two years off to work at Air America doesn't really give your career a huge shot in the arm. Especially when you come back to acting over the age of 40, saying, "Hey guys, can I come back again?"
LF: I thought of you recently with the Kathy Griffin situation.
JG: See, that's ridiculous. There is no reason in the world to take the time to pick on a person who has said something that hurts no one, whereas the person that she's lampooning hurts many people. But that just tells me that those people aren't serious and that they have problems maybe with her for whatever reason.
LF: As actors, by definition, your lives are unconventional, but you both grew up in fairly traditional, middle-class, suburban households. Was it a struggle to choose a creative over a conventional life?
LT: No. Even though I was in suburbia, my family was pretty weird. My dad did not want me to have a nine-to-five, so I didn't have any problem with that. My thing would be, thank God I didn't have a problem with that, I can't imagine if I had, and what kind of gusto that would have taken on my part to push through that. My advice is just to thine own self be true.
JG: It wasn't hard for me either. My father would have much, much rather that I had what he would refer to as a "secure job." He is "Carmine the Conservative," but he didn't vote for Trump. That's a plus. But he was the first to get past the eighth grade in his family. Actually, he was the first to go to college, and my mother did not go to college. So they were of the opinion that one must go to college. It just was vitally important to them. So I did. I didn't want to; I had had fantasies about maybe going to Toronto or Chicago to join Second City.
LF: When you think of your early career, what do you recall about yourself?
LT: In my 20s, that's when the indies were happening, and there wasn't really that pressure on hiring stars, which was great, so freeing, because I wouldn't have gotten the things I got. In some ways, I probably was somewhat disassociated, but I think in one's 20s, you kind of are, because that's appropriate. It's appropriate not to be fully conscious, and that's OK. Now I'm here at 50, and I'm having an interesting time, just going through each age ... so I wouldn't want to go back to my 20s, but I feel like, yeah, I was appropriately in my 20s.
JG: I wish I'd been more like Lili. I wish I had the maturity and the wisdom that I am certain she had at that young age.
LT: I didn't. No.
JG: I have always watched Lili with great admiration.
LT: You're comedy; I was drama.
JG: No, but you were ... I felt like I was just standing in the right place at the right time, and I was lucky enough to be friends with Garry Shandling and Ben Stiller. Honestly, because I have no idea how that happened. But then as I got opportunities from being on The Larry Sanders Show and The Ben Stiller Show, I didn't take them seriously. I didn't understand; I didn't focus. I was just so thrilled to be seemingly popular. As a kid who was not particularly popular, I was so emotionally immature and so thrilled to be getting these jobs that I mostly didn't take it seriously, didn't focus, didn't try and become a better actor. In fact, I had no foundational skills, and still don't, unfortunately.
But Lili has actually helped me a great deal with that. I wish I had had the wisdom Lili has been imparting to me now, then, and I'm being totally honest about this. I actually would love to go back to my 20s. I would love it, not only because it's wonderful to be young, but I would study the way Lili is, and apply that to the good luck I was given. Because you get this opportunity, and you shouldn't squander it, which is what I think I did. I was a heavy, heavy drinker, and I wish, wish, wish I had not done that. And I wish I had been like Lili.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Leigh Flayton is a New York City–based writer, editor, and playwright. | | | | | | | | | | | | Coming Out of My Plastic Shell | | | | By Carmen Lynch | | |
If you had asked me when I was a kid what I wanted to be when I grew up, I probably would have said a forensic pathologist. It was a good fit, because I was so shy, I walked behind the other kids in school so I wouldn't have to interact with them. I grew up Catholic, so death was a constant in my thoughts, and you don't have to talk to dead people.
On top of that, although I had been born in the United States, I spent most of my childhood in Spain, so my English was full of errors. I translated everything from Spanish literally: Instead of "Please turn on the light," I would say, "Please open the light." And a phrase like "Me too" became "Same thing I say." I sounded like a grade-school Yoda.
I quickly became aware of the endless ways I could say or do something stupid. And I watched my Spanish mother deal with it constantly, in a country that wasn't her own. This was northern Virginia, and in our town it seemed like everyone spoke perfect English, so I understood why my mother would sometimes ask me to answer our landline or call her doctor's office to confirm her appointments.
But then there'd be other moments where she'd forget herself, and those times it would be in public. Like when she'd get excited in the middle of JC Penney and yell out at me: "CARMEN, ¿TE GUSTA ESTE VESTIDO? ¿QUE TAL ESTE? ¿¿O ESTE??¿¿CARMEN?? CARMEN, ¿¿DONDE ESTAS??" I would hide behind racks of clothes, waiting for her to stop blabbing in Spanish, because anyone in hearing distance was staring at the weird foreign lady talking to herself. Of course, the fact that she couldn't find me only made her shout louder.
If there was ever the perfect opportunity to hide from anything embarrassing, it came in the seventh grade, when I was diagnosed with scoliosis. Dr. Esposito, my orthopedic doctor, said: "we need to fit you into a back brace," and I started to cry. Like I needed another reason to stick out! Half-Spanish, the tallest girl in my class, and now I'd have a shell of hard plastic on my back. Dr. Esposito said, "Don't worry, you'll STILL date." Who did he think I was dating? It's not like I was talking to other kids even with my spine straight.
I started middle school with a back brace on, and only one thing made sense: to never tell a soul. I grew up with the idea that you're supposed to hide your flaws. I didn't even tell my best friend Alison or her boyfriend, Houston, with whom I spent so much time they were basically my second set of parents. But one day at school, Houston tapped my back, and I must've felt like the man of steel. "What's this?" he said. I replied, nonchalantly, "Oh, it's just a back brace I have to wear … what's up with you guys?," trying to change the subject.
After that, Houston would knock on my brace as if it were a door while endearingly saying: "Knock-knock!," and although it made me feel like maybe they accepted me, something about it still felt off. I couldn't let it go — I couldn't accept the brace because that would somehow mean I was OK with it. And then I might let my guard down! And then what? Bend over and reveal my plastic shell? Let the world discover it and decide it wanted nothing to do with me? I couldn't take that chance.
The more I made myself feel invisible, the more I thought I could convince myself it wasn't happening. In the mornings before school, I would squeeze the Velcro straps as tight as I could: it was time to face the world again. I lived in thick sweaters and baggy jeans and spent all my nights at home watching TV, waiting for it to come off. After a while, I didn't even think about it; holding back just became a part of me. I became like an old person, always saying, "Go ahead without me, I'll catch up." I walked to class quickly so I'd be the first to find a seat in the back of the room. If I dropped something on the floor, like a pencil or a ruler, it stayed there, and I just kept walking.
Three months after my fourteenth birthday, I got my period. According to Dr. Esposito, this meant I had "approached maturity," and after going through two braces (I had outgrown the first one), it was time to go without my shell. I was in shock. I never thought this day would get here. In fact, Dr. Esposito seemed more excited about it than I did.
I started easing myself into this brace-less life by taking it off for a few hours a day. I felt un-sturdy, like I might collapse. I wasn't used to holding myself up. I sat down a lot. A light breeze gave me a chill. A hand on my back was intense. Being tickled felt like torture. I felt weak, as if tightening my brace as much as I could for fear that someone might notice had actually shrunk me.
I started looking at myself in the mirror again. I had a waistline! I wore pants and tops that showed off my figure. I exercised. I could feel a pillow against my back. A hug. I got my body back but just didn't know how to use it. Was I supposed to be dating? Flirting? How do you do that? Where do I begin?
There was no rule book. I just had to get out there. And it happened slowly. I went to college. I got drunk (which helps a lot with the shyness). I had many panic attacks. I went to therapy. And then one day, in New York City, I went to my very first stand-up-comedy show.
I loved acting, but this was a different kind of performance. These comics onstage, they were just regular people, talking, doing things their way. It was refreshing, but it wasn't something I thought I could ever do. Performing in front of others seemed thrilling, but it was also terrifying. So I went for the next best thing: becoming a comedy writer. I signed up for a stand-up-comedy class so I could learn how to write jokes. For the very last class, we went to a comedy club and performed what we'd learned. I told the teacher I would absolutely not perform, but that I would still attend to support the class. I was just there to learn the structure of a joke. That's it.
The night of the performance, I wrote a few joke ideas on a tiny sheet of paper — you know, to participate. And then, in the middle of the show, I felt a tap on my shoulder: It was my teacher. "You're next," he said. Surprisingly, I was thrilled that he asked. The next five minutes onstage were going to be mine, to say whatever I wanted. I glanced at those joke ideas on my little piece of paper. I got onstage.
People laughed.
People laughed more than once.
It was thrilling to be onstage, all eyes on me, everyone listening to what I had to say. Eventually, after two or three minutes, I ran out of material. But that had been enough. A gate had opened, and I knew I'd be back.
I started going to open mics regularly. I'd never done that many drugs, but I knew this was way better than any high, and I became addicted. It was clear I'd been depriving myself of attention I craved, and now it was like I was eating a gallon of ice cream after a long diet.
My favorite part of stand-up comedy (besides coming up with a new joke) is that feeling of sharing. It's not so much "Please like me" but more "Hear what I have to say." And that's something you feel whether there are six people in the audience or 600 (you're probably getting more money for 600). I get to do what I missed out on for years. And that part hasn't gotten old. It still keeps feeling better and better.
I look at those days and I wish I hadn't excluded myself from life so much. But then maybe today I'd be an accountant.
Carmen Lynch is a stand-up comedian currently living in NYC. She is currently performing her latest hour of stand-up ("Lynched") at the Edinburgh Festival in August. For her schedule, please visit carmenlynch.com or follow her on Twitter at @lynchcarmen. | | | | | | | | | | | | The System Failed My Cousin | | | | By Margaret Wilkerson Sexton | | |
A month before I turned five, my little cousin was born. Before that day, I was the youngest in a tight-knit family of cousins, and I felt relieved that there was now someone to come behind me, to revere my words, to defer to my television and fast-food selections. We spent most days together, playing Mario Brothers, singing along to the Tiny Toon theme song, walking to the Winn Dixie around the corner from our houses for pints of Blue Bell ice cream. When I was twelve and he was seven, my mother moved me from New Orleans to Connecticut. It was a terrible culture shock, but mostly I missed my cousin. I was excited for my first visit back primarily so I could see him. We sat on the floral couch in my grandmother's living room, and I told him about the hill we lived on back east, so steep I could ride my bike only halfway up before I was winded. I told him that I could look into the sky and actually see the stars; I told him I missed him. He didn't talk, just sat on the sofa and stared in the opposite direction. His father took me aside that evening, told me my cousin talked about me all the time, but he couldn't say a word while I was there because he still hadn't gotten over my leaving in the first place.
Later when I'd come to visit, my cousin had less and less time for me. He was always more popular than I was. He wasn't far into elementary school before his house became a revolving door of friends: the twins down the block, the older boy across the street. It had been a fairly integrated neighborhood when I left it, but in just a few short years the white families had moved out. My cousin struggled academically, and Schaumberg Elementary was no longer equipped to address his needs. One night at my grandparents' house, my grandfather called him into the den, held up his recent report card, said he needed to do better, that there were no dummies in our family. My cousin's eyes reddened and watered.
I knew what my grandfather meant, that my cousin couldn't be a dummy by virtue of the fact that he was in our family, but my cousin had taken it a different way. I didn't correct him. Like my old neighborhood, I had changed some too. I was one of six black children in a school of 800, and I had started dressing in hooded sweatshirts and baggy jeans like the white girls; I'd lost my New Orleans accent. If it had been years before, I might have taken my cousin aside, explained away the confusion, but I didn't feel connected enough to him to make the awkward effort.
My cousin moved in with my mother halfway through his eighth-grade year. His grades had reached an all-time low; he was staying away from home all hours of the night, and his mother feared for his safety. So my mother took him in, set up a study schedule for him, paid for a tutor. He became the king of Jackie Robinson Middle School. I was away in college, but I called my mother to check on him. She would talk about how her ordinarily quiet house had begun to bustle with my cousin's new friends, eighth graders who wanted to dress like him, talk like him, become him.
One night, she told me my cousin had taken on the cause of a girl who was being bullied. The girl had been attacked so badly that half her hair had been ripped out of her scalp and she'd had to start wearing wigs to cover the empty space. Since then, my cousin walked her to school each morning and waited for her outside her classroom each afternoon. He was 6'1", but it was more than that; the other kids adored him, and his just standing next to the girl deterred anyone from bothering her further.
Still, when summer came he was on the first flight back to New Orleans. He was supposed to return to my mother's at the end of August, but he refused. My relatives asked me to intervene, to lecture him about his choices, but that had never been the nature of our playful relationship, and I didn't want to disrupt our dynamic. Later, when I came home for winter break, I found some notebooks he'd left in my room. One was filled with the same sentence written over and over. I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home. I read the identical sentences like one of them might contain new information. I told myself that not challenging him to stay had been the right thing.
He was a senior in high school when Katrina hit. By then I was out of college, out of the country, trying to save a pocket of the world thousands of miles away. I heard updates from my mother. My cousin and his parents had evacuated to Alabama in time, but their house was ruined; they'd rent something temporary until they could go back; my cousin had had to leave everyone he knew behind. One friend in particular they still couldn't locate.
And then there was his girlfriend. They'd hung out every day for two years, but she'd been bused to the Astrodome in Houston, and he didn't know when he'd see her next. One night, in a fit of rage, he threw all the FEMA-funded furniture around their apartment. My extended family's narrative was the same as it had always been: he had an incorrigible streak, and his parents didn't tame it, and I'm afraid I didn't delve past the surface of that story. I'm afraid that the holistic loss of a city distracted me from his personal grief.
After the storm, it was hard for him to graduate. I went on to law school. The same year I was sworn into the California bar, my cousin was arrested for the first time. At my wedding, he held the video camera and dominated the dance floor. I'd been nervous that he and other members of my family might clash with my husband's polished guests, but he blended into the crowd, making jokes with my in-laws' fancy friends. "Who was the tall guy?" they'd ask for months after. "He really made the party." He took me aside at some point that night and showed me his arm. There were so many tattoos on it I didn't know what I should be looking for, but then I saw it, my name scrolled in cursive across the bicep. I was honored, but I was also ashamed. I'd assumed he'd forgotten me, everything we'd had, and I'd gone on and forgotten him, too, but he'd remembered.
I was the only black associate in my law firm's San Francisco office. By then, I'd grown semi-comfortable answering questions about whether I tanned or how often I washed my dreadlocks. But there began to be professional complications: mentors I hoped to snag chose the white associates; mistakes I made were magnified when others' mistakes were treated as part of the learning process. I wasn't given much work. And I'll never be certain that had anything to do with race. Maybe I wasn't a great lawyer, but the burden of feeling like I was being treated as if I didn't belong because I was black became harder to tolerate than the treatment itself. I had the luxury of being able to quit, so I did.
The idea to write a novel about a young man entangled in the criminal-justice system stemmed from what I knew of my cousin. We worked together for months, and every conversation I had with him sharpened my novel's character. Otherwise, there wasn't much to say. He'd talk about his child, who was a year younger than my twins, insist that the three would have to get together to play, but to this day that hasn't happened.
The book, A Kind of Freedom, is out now, and early readers typically identified T.C., the character my cousin helped me to refine, as their favorite. T.C. is my favorite character too. He's charming, he's generous, he's handsome, he's charismatic, he's wise, he's deep — he's cool. But none of those qualities could compete with discriminatory housing practices, white flight, and under-resourced public schools. In those ways, the system failed T.C. And in those ways, the system failed my cousin too.
Not that it was only the system that failed him. And not that he was the only one who was hit. Because moving in the opposite direction of my cousin, dropping my accent, old mannerisms, and habits, to fit into a world that will never want me, didn't make me feel as safe as I'd hoped.
No, the further I've traveled from my childhood self, the more precarious I feel my standing is, the way arguing a fact can emphasize its tenuous nature. The safest I've ever felt, in fact, was with my cousin, walking down the street to the Winn Dixie, the moments uncluttered by idle talk, the route perfect in my mind.
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton is the author of A Kind of Freedom. | | | | | | | | | | | | Learning to Feel Powerful | | | | By Meg Wolitzer | | | |
The first time I ever felt powerful, I was five years old and had a mouthful of magnets. I had seen an older kid in the neighborhood wearing braces, and for some misguided reason I decided that if I, too, wore braces, I would be special and metallic and, somehow, powerful. So I took a handful of small magnets from my toy box and stuffed them into my mouth and proudly went up to my mother, saying in a garbled voice, "Look, look, braces!" She told me to spit them out right away, afraid that I would swallow them.
Fade to my next childhood power moment. It was first grade, and my teacher called me up to her desk to have me dictate stories to her, which she wrote down far more quickly and neatly than my handwriting (which was generally billboard-sized) would allow. I remember standing at her desk free-associating a long, winding story about a child astronaut while she recorded it all with a very sharp No. 2 Ticonderoga. I stared at that pencil as it ran so rapidly and thrillingly across the page.
That same year, I was eating cherry cheesecake in a suburban diner with my father, and I took note of the woman sitting behind the cash register, which happened to be up a couple of steps, so that she seemed practically monarchical as she looked down upon everyone in the room.
"That's what I want to do for a job," I told my father.
"What?" he asked, looking up from his Sanka.
"What she does." I pointed to the cashier, imagining a life spent behind the shiny curved hump of a cash register. What authority I would wield; what small, individually wrapped toothpicks in a basket I would offer to all who appeared before me.
Children are generally on a dedicated quest for power. They stew in their powerlessness, being told what to eat, when to sleep, what to wear. (That denim jumper with the many little buckles? My mother's choice, not mine.) Looking back on some of the moments when I felt a ripple or outright surge of power — whether these were moments of fantasy or ones that were grounded in actual accomplishment — I see that what they all had in common was the significant presence of equipment, props, things. It's as if kids innately understand that because they're small and untried and don't get much say, they need things around to help fortify them, perhaps filling their mouths with metal and their heads with excitement or even grandiosity.
Another power moment came when I was eight. I posed for a photograph holding a guitar and pretending to be a male teen idol. I honestly do look cute and androgynous in the photo; my hair is in my eyes, as if I were posing for Tiger Beat magazine ("In this issue: Meg's fave foods — and hint, one of them is chocolate!"), and my hand is poised over the strings of the guitar, as if I knew how to play.
But the only person in our house who played the guitar was my mother, whose specialty was The Joan Baez Songbook. Sometimes, from my bedroom at night, I could hear her in the living room, fingerpicking as she sang: "The water is wide … I cannot get o'er." My own fantasy of power, at least according to that photo of me, involved being not Joan Baez but a hot young boy playing the Westbury Music Fair (perhaps along with his slightly less photogenic brothers). The teen idol holding his guitar in mid-laugh, as if he were sharing a private joke with his fans, seemed more exciting at the time than the grave melancholy I saw in Joan Baez, at least as channeled by my nearly-40-year-old mother.
Then, inevitably, I got a taste of a darker kind of power. In seventh grade, I very briefly fell in with a (relatively) "bad" crowd. They were consistently mean to everyone, and yet sitting among them at the table for the week we spent together, I felt a kind of ambivalent, cruel, reflected power. In that short time, our shared lunch table became my equipment, my prop. (My tenure with them ended after one of them sent me a note that read "You'd better give me a surprise party, you bitch" and the lunch lady intercepted it.)
I was thinking about all of this recently, having just completed a new novel, The Female Persuasion, that tries to examine ideas about power, in particular female power. My protagonist, a shy young woman who becomes the protégée of a powerful older one, is frustrated by her own inability to ask for what she needs, the way so many people around her seem to be able to do. As she gets older, she wonders what it will take to make her feel she has the right to assert herself and feel strong.
For me, leaving childhood and growing older, the moments that resembled power started to come more frequently and easily. They happened when I felt I was most like myself: when I was lost in writing, when I was deeply reading a book I loved, when I was giving a lecture. (Even when I was playing the guitar, which I finally learned to do, and Joan Baez songs were part of my repertoire.) The power I felt then came from mastery, and any objects that happened to be in my midst didn't feel as consequential.
But I did experience an exception to this recently. In January at the Women's March in DC, there were all those signs, and of course all those pink hats. When you master something, you may not need objects front and center; you feel like you already have everything you need. But when you're part of a common fight, a common urgency, you need all the help you can get. Our hats were objects, symbols, shields, and they remain inextricable from everyone's memory of that day. Things, when they're needed, resonate. Every once in a while, even now, I can occasionally still taste a metallic trace of magnets in my mouth.
Meg Wolitzer is a novelist whose books include The Interestings and The Wife. She recently edited The Best American Short Stories 2017.
| | | | | | | | | | | | How Trump's Anti-Abortion Policies Could Keep Girls Around the World Out of School | | | | By Lauren Bohn | | |
One blistering Guatemalan afternoon in February, 86-year-old Candelaria gathered with three generations of women in her family to watch her great-granddaughters, Rosalina and Elvira, receive bicycles. The indigenous women, their skin wizened from decades of cocoa farming, were dressed in colorful huipils, a traditional square-cut blouse made with an embroidered design — a nod to their ancient-Mayan heritage, shared by 40 percent of the population. These simple hot-pink bicycles, unremarkable for many American teenagers, transform their three-mile walks to school, through unpaved stretches of bumpy terrain, into short rides — and will hopefully break the cycle of poverty in their family.
"I've only ever seen men ride bicycles," she said, fondling her great-granddaughters' helmets and laughing like a schoolgirl. "Girls riding them — and to schools? Never!"
Indeed, it's only recently that girls in Chisec, a disenfranchised municipality in the north, have attended school regularly. Facing severe poverty, indigenous families like Candelaria's often raise girls to farm and grow cocoa on nearby fields.
Last February, SchoolCycle (my initiative with the UN Foundation's Girl Up campaign) distributed hundreds of bicycles to indigenous schoolgirls like Rosalina and Elvira. Around the world, prohibitively long distances to school keep many young girls at home. While a bicycle is no silver bullet to endemic poverty, it's a tangible piece of a complex puzzle that gives girls autonomy and more ownership of their futures.
By age fifteen, six out of ten indigenous girls are out of school. By age eighteen, almost 40 percent of Mayan girls are married — nearly twice the percentage of nonindigenous girls. While Guatemala's population is one of the youngest and fastest-growing in Latin America, it's also the least educated: only 39 percent of indigenous women are literate, compared to 77 percent of nonindigenous women. In isolated indigenous regions, one can go miles without seeing a school or hospital, especially one with speakers in their local language.
"Long walks everywhere in this country is just one reminder that you don't have a place in society," says 24-year-old Elvira Cuc Choc, a mentor with a group called Abriendo Oportunidades ("Opening Opportunities"). Funded by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the energetic group of young indigenous women mentor girls ages eight to eighteen. Since launching in 2004, they've reached thousands of girls, providing reproductive-health education and free tutoring.
"This bike means that not only can we go places, but we can get there ourselves," Cuc Choc says while showing her mentees how to ride. "Girls will be more motivated to go and stay in school because they know they're more in control of their destinies."
But if Donald Trump has his way, groups like Abriendo Oportunidades may have to significantly reduce their activities. And programs like SchoolCycle, which UNFPA also administers in Malawi — one of the poorest countries in the world — will likely be the first to shutter.
In April, the State Department informed the Senate that the Trump administration would cut all U.S. funding to UNFPA, which received about $69 million from the U.S. last year. This decision follows his reinstatement of the so-called Mexico City Policy, also known as the "Global Gag Rule," which prohibits federal appropriations for organizations that provide information about abortion or abortion services. Trump's administration subsequently moved to defund UNFPA by claiming the UN organization provided abortion services in China — a claim the UNFPA vehemently denies. Now programs which have little to do with abortion access, like maternal-health and counseling services in Jordan's Syrian refugee camps and in Iraq, are imperiled.
United Nations Foundation president and CEO Kathy Calvin called the action to "cut vital U.S. support to UNFPA unacceptable and in stark contrast to American values."
In Guatemala, Abriendo Oportunidades is struggling to figure out how a decision made in Washington's male-dominated corridors could prevent them from helping disenfranchised girls stay in school.
"When we heard the news, we didn't immediately understand what was happening. We still don't," says Cuc Choc. "Will we have to stop our program? We teach girls to stay in school, we teach them about their bodies, their menstrual cycles … how can this be bad?"
For girls like twelve-year-old Evelyn, who received a bike, finishing secondary school and going to university seemed like a pipe dream before meeting their Abriendo Oportunidades mentors.
"You don't think you can go to school because you don't see any girls going to schools," says Evelyn, who dreams of being a teacher. "But we see these girls and we realize we can be them, too."
Because Evelyn has no brothers, her father, an evangelical pastor in the community, is often asked by others — if not reprimanded — about why he's not making Evelyn and her younger sister work. After all, instead of studying, they could be fetching water from the closest source, three miles away.
"Changing the mind-set here is hard, especially when everyone is poor and trying to get by," he says. "But if Evelyn can get a scholarship and go to university, she will improve all our lives. That's how I try to convince other fathers. They're slowly beginning to believe me."
Evelyn stares at the ground as her father talks. At first she seems shy, though her father explains her silence: if she speaks, everyone will see her newly toothless smile. Dental care is practically nonexistent for the indigenous community, and even youth are frequently forced to have their cavity-filled permanent teeth removed.
When asked about her new bicycle at her school, Evelyn finally lifts her eyes from the dirt floor and smiles.
"Now when people in the village see my bike, they'll know that girls can go places, too," she says, looking at her father proudly. "Maybe I can even teach them all one day."
Lauren Bohn is the GroundTruth Project's Middle East correspondent, based in Istanbul. She cofounded SchoolCycle in 2014 after a reporting trip to Malawi, where dozens of schoolgirls requested bicycles. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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