Perhaps because the universe knows I got engaged to be married, I have randomly read and come across so many things on the topic of marriage recently. In a mad plan to read all of Nancy Pearl's recommendations, I ordered a copy of The Nowhere City by Alison Lurie from the NYPL (I have one hour and fifteen minutes commute EACH WAY to work at the moment, so I find that between this length of time per day allotted to delicious reading plus my cultivated nerd speed-reading tendency, growing up in a house without tv, means I have trouble staying "in books" like some women have trouble staying "in shoes"). Pearl guaranteed me a novel about California, so I picked up Lurie with interest, encouraged further by the sticker on the cover notifying me that she won the Pulitzer Prize (for another book, of course, but still...it's a Pulitzer!).
The Nowhere City is in fact the story of a marriage that goes sideways when the East Coast couple, Harvard intellectuals, unable to find work in the small, closed circle of East Coast academia, turn to California and work at a research firm in order to get a paycheck. The Harvard man is immediately lured away from his shy, depressed brunette wife - who is, in the first half of the book, always described in bed suffering from headaches - by a beatnik blonde artist/waitress. He becomes obsessed with her laidback attitude, her California slang, her daring, sensual lifestyle and her voracious West Coast sexuality, so opposite of his wife's closed, muted life and personality. The Harvard man eventually returns to the East Coast (for him, and Lurie, clearly, California is after all so unnatural in its lack of seasons, desert colors, blunt sexuality, its blondeness). His wife, who first hated Los Angeles and suffered from psychosomatic headaches that prevented her from exploring the city for what it truly is, eventually turns into a California girl, abandoning her husband when he returns to the green summers and white winters of Boston. Unrecognizable to him now, she is blonde, she wears colorful clothing, she has an affair with a Hollywood starlet's husband. The book is a chronicle of a failed marriage, and an East Coaster's likewise failed attempt to make sense of California.
I'm sorry to relate I was disappointed with my first stab at conquering Nancy Pearl's recommendations (I will give her a few more chances!) but I think part of it is that its bleak portrait of marriage and failure to fully give the West Coast a chance influenced my negative opinion. After all, as a West Coast person, I feel Lurie did not weigh heavily enough the freedom and opportunity of the West Coast (see pictures of this very freedom above), of California - the freedom to redefine oneself, the freedom of the sky that goes for miles and miles uninterrupted, unconstrained...there is no pressure, no social constraint, there is space for exploration, which just does not exist on the East Coast. All one's effort on the East Coast is concentrated on trying to break into a circle of power long consolidated and designed to exclude others.
Reading a story about a failed marriage, too, is not the best thing for a newly engaged person. It is easy to recognize the small miscommunications inherent in any relationship, and see how they conflated and escalated to become unavoidable, unmistakable, capable of breaking the relationship. Then I read a delightful piece of infectious inventice on McSweeney's, here. Guest columnist Susan Schorn writes about women - the women who become mistresses of married men, and the women who are wives, left behind, forgotten, scorned. Schorn writes against these women who betray their fellow women, advocating the bitchslap despite various nuanced understandings of what it means to be a woman, a wife, a person in today's society. I found I agreed with her violent anger towards the women who so callously disregard their fellow women and don't stand beside them to end men's infidelity (we could, as women, after all, make it impossible if we chose.
Still a bit disillusioned and sad, divine intervention then sent me to Elizabeth Gilbert's website, where I found her Q & A discussing her new book, Committed. Here she discusses the negatives of marriage (it benefits men financially, socially and healthwise more than women; marriage actually makes women unhappier, increases their workload, and punishes them socially and financially, according to averaged statistics). She talks about how marriage is practical, and not romantic; it is, in her opinion, not a game for young people, either. These things I agree with, I can see. But then she went on to discuss how marriage was a revolution, instituted by families who wanted their connections to mean something, and found against the governments and powers that be to keep marriage around. I appreciate and support her call to honesty, to small "acts of household tolerance," to being individuals responsible for their own state of being at the end of every day. She writes about how gay marriage can rejuvenate the institution of marriage, and it reminded me of why I believe so fervently in the legalization of gay marriage. It's because I am, at the end of everything and despite experiences to the contrary, a hopeless romantic and believe fully in the restorative, beautiful, peace-giving power of love. I believe we should be free to bind ourselves to the person of our choosing. I believe that we can become better people in a monogamous domestic partnership - I know this because I have been shaped and honed by my relationship with E. I believe that with real love, it is the opposite of an anchor, the weight of this love pulls me up, pulls me toward my better self. And that journey is the only one worth making.
You can read Gilbert's extended Q & A here.
The Nowhere City is in fact the story of a marriage that goes sideways when the East Coast couple, Harvard intellectuals, unable to find work in the small, closed circle of East Coast academia, turn to California and work at a research firm in order to get a paycheck. The Harvard man is immediately lured away from his shy, depressed brunette wife - who is, in the first half of the book, always described in bed suffering from headaches - by a beatnik blonde artist/waitress. He becomes obsessed with her laidback attitude, her California slang, her daring, sensual lifestyle and her voracious West Coast sexuality, so opposite of his wife's closed, muted life and personality. The Harvard man eventually returns to the East Coast (for him, and Lurie, clearly, California is after all so unnatural in its lack of seasons, desert colors, blunt sexuality, its blondeness). His wife, who first hated Los Angeles and suffered from psychosomatic headaches that prevented her from exploring the city for what it truly is, eventually turns into a California girl, abandoning her husband when he returns to the green summers and white winters of Boston. Unrecognizable to him now, she is blonde, she wears colorful clothing, she has an affair with a Hollywood starlet's husband. The book is a chronicle of a failed marriage, and an East Coaster's likewise failed attempt to make sense of California.
I'm sorry to relate I was disappointed with my first stab at conquering Nancy Pearl's recommendations (I will give her a few more chances!) but I think part of it is that its bleak portrait of marriage and failure to fully give the West Coast a chance influenced my negative opinion. After all, as a West Coast person, I feel Lurie did not weigh heavily enough the freedom and opportunity of the West Coast (see pictures of this very freedom above), of California - the freedom to redefine oneself, the freedom of the sky that goes for miles and miles uninterrupted, unconstrained...there is no pressure, no social constraint, there is space for exploration, which just does not exist on the East Coast. All one's effort on the East Coast is concentrated on trying to break into a circle of power long consolidated and designed to exclude others.
Reading a story about a failed marriage, too, is not the best thing for a newly engaged person. It is easy to recognize the small miscommunications inherent in any relationship, and see how they conflated and escalated to become unavoidable, unmistakable, capable of breaking the relationship. Then I read a delightful piece of infectious inventice on McSweeney's, here. Guest columnist Susan Schorn writes about women - the women who become mistresses of married men, and the women who are wives, left behind, forgotten, scorned. Schorn writes against these women who betray their fellow women, advocating the bitchslap despite various nuanced understandings of what it means to be a woman, a wife, a person in today's society. I found I agreed with her violent anger towards the women who so callously disregard their fellow women and don't stand beside them to end men's infidelity (we could, as women, after all, make it impossible if we chose.
Still a bit disillusioned and sad, divine intervention then sent me to Elizabeth Gilbert's website, where I found her Q & A discussing her new book, Committed. Here she discusses the negatives of marriage (it benefits men financially, socially and healthwise more than women; marriage actually makes women unhappier, increases their workload, and punishes them socially and financially, according to averaged statistics). She talks about how marriage is practical, and not romantic; it is, in her opinion, not a game for young people, either. These things I agree with, I can see. But then she went on to discuss how marriage was a revolution, instituted by families who wanted their connections to mean something, and found against the governments and powers that be to keep marriage around. I appreciate and support her call to honesty, to small "acts of household tolerance," to being individuals responsible for their own state of being at the end of every day. She writes about how gay marriage can rejuvenate the institution of marriage, and it reminded me of why I believe so fervently in the legalization of gay marriage. It's because I am, at the end of everything and despite experiences to the contrary, a hopeless romantic and believe fully in the restorative, beautiful, peace-giving power of love. I believe we should be free to bind ourselves to the person of our choosing. I believe that we can become better people in a monogamous domestic partnership - I know this because I have been shaped and honed by my relationship with E. I believe that with real love, it is the opposite of an anchor, the weight of this love pulls me up, pulls me toward my better self. And that journey is the only one worth making.
You can read Gilbert's extended Q & A here.
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