My Book
My Book
Thank you for clicking on My Book. Either you would genuinely like to read it or you’re at least morbidly curious about it. Maybe you even want to hate read it! I know I would. I’m sorry to tell you, though, that you can’t yet, because it’s not finished.
What I’m going for is something like if Shirley Jackson was in the writers’ room at My So-Called Life. Please stick around if that sounds good to you. If that sounds awful, stick around anyway because I’m still working on my elevator pitch.
Here is a little bit about this story.
These characters have lived in my head for about 25 years but I’d never figured out what to do with them, they just lived in this loose story world I called Junkmail. Then last spring two things happened at once.
First, a much younger classmate in my MPH program asked: why does Gen X seem so hostile towards Gen Z for wanting to take care of our mental health?
Second, I was reading an essay where the young woman wrote about watching Buffy with her mom, and how viewing her mom’s contemporary teenage pop culture made her understand her mother better. After I finished feeling about 10,000 years old, Junkmail shapeshifted into what I hope is its final form.
First things first: I answered my classmate’s question with “because you have something we didn’t - mental health resources, period, and an increasing openness to talking about about mental health.”
Take these examples:
Girls with ADD. As a kid, I was away with the fairies or a “temperamental artist” or just “a stuck up bitch” when through today’s lens of course I had inattentive ADD, although I recall Time Magazine in 1994 running a story like “Is ADHD even real?” And that was just for boys - for girls, the idea you had ADD was completely off the table.
Anxiety and panic attacks. Life might have been different for both of us if I’d been able to Google “my boyfriend has panic attacks how do I help him.” Those weren’t even words most people knew - in a lot of people’s eyes he was a burnout or a truant instead of a brilliant and wonderful kid who, in retrospect, probably felt too paralyzed by anxiety to come to school.
Suicide. I think a lot of Gen X probably is still really hurting that suicide warning signs just were not discussed because they lost someone they cared about. I did.
So there’s all that baggage that’s still raw and unhealed because it’s unacknowledged, because we still don’t have the emotional vocabulary to talk about it. And Gen X is jealous that you do but we can’t talk about that either. A lot of us are a bunch of middle-aged diaper babbies who can’t say what we mean so we retreat to the comfort zone of a little light bullying.
I’m going to thwack a reasonably hefty caveat on that because obviously there is a teen mental health crisis now, and Gen Z is experiencing a great deal of stuff that’s absolutely worse than what we had to deal with 30 years ago. You’ve probably seen the headlines recently about how badly girls are doing and what’s behind that. That is part of why I’m writing this story now, I think, and takes me to the second part.
Uh, I am not saying anything groundbreaking here but: the mother–daughter relationship is fraught. Remember last year when everyone went whoa, you can say that? at Olivia Colman’s depiction of an ambivalent mother in The Lost Daughter? I want there to be women from my generation who can read this book and understand their own origin story, and I want their daughters to be able to read this to understand their moms better because things have changed so fast for women over the last generations and even within generations . My husband and I are the same age, but my mom could have been fired for being pregnant, while his mom couldn’t have, because of when the Pregnancy Discrimination Act took effect. Like, your mom’s sense of self as a person rather than “just a girl” might’ve died a death by a thousand cuts due to types of sexism that aren’t even on your radar because they largely don’t happen anymore (like getting BC if you’re not married or being allowed to wear pants - although the way things are going now I might have to walk that back). And I think understanding these generational differences can help humanize a mom who seems resentful and monstrous because you get to have nicer things than she did, even if the things you have aren’t very nice either.
In conclusion
Look. I am a woman in my 40s from Cleveland who wore all black and dyed my hair that raspberry Kool Aid color everyone was doing in 1994. Date night was veggie burgers at Tommy’s on Coventry and then buying incense at High Tide Rock Bottom, then home for mass market paperbacks, Red Dwarf, and chill.
I cannot tell a lie. I am a Demographic. Obviously the Haserot Angel is in this book.
