Just Between Us
writing about how women talk to women
This novella came out of a certain swampy period of my life. My own marriage was clearly over, I had an eleven year old and a two year old, and I had no idea how to move forward. I had an unsold book, film and some poetry under my belt and that was about it, we had moved to the States for my husband’s interests and I had stayed home full-time with my kids. Concurrently, I had just watched the Dylan film, and was struck by how terrible he was to Sara (his former wife and mother of his children) I thought about how the music industry is one of the last stronghold of toxic masculinity that not only allows but encourages this type of “good woman at home” sort of thing. One woman at home, one for the road. I thought about how hard it has been historically to not only have a career as a mother, but how difficult when that career is in the arts. I thought about all the ways we judge each other as women, how we internalize and continue these patterns of misogyny that we’ve inherited. Lana Del Ray had just had massive success and was getting just ripped on by the press, Chan Marshall publicly went through a very tough time, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth had a very messy and public breakup of not just her marriage but her band, and I looked at interviews with Lou Doillon who also has had a lot of criticism, as an artist, single mother, and daughter of famous parents. It was also the beginning of the rise of Trump, he was beginning to campaign and float on the high tide of misogyny into presidency of the United States of America.
We do talk to each other differently when men are not around, and I was also curious about that. At first my intent was to flip the script and write Sara as the most famous musician in the world (the film A Bigger Splash starring Tilda Swinton came out just after I’d written this) but as I edited and reworked the piece another character emerged. A rock journalist who I imagined a little like Annie Leibovitz, a reporter Frankie Reeve (Francesca) entered the story. She was a slightly jaded, Hunter S. Thompson-esque lesbian who had just been dumped by her girlfriend. Sara herself, proved more difficult. Who was she exactly? She was immensely powerful, famous, but also an artist, and sensitive. She was all of the above mentioned women, able to reinvent herself time and time again, to be fragile, someone who got through the breaking point to ride the wave, someone intellectual, creative, empowered and self-aware. The framework of the interview seemed to be a natural form for this kind of conversation, how much we reveal, how much we trust, how we speak to each other when no one else is around, what will be on record, or off record, and became a very interesting canvas to layer on.
I was also interested in using the form of cut-ups to create this piece of work. Most famously used by William Burroughs, I thought it entirely fitting because of how jagged our thoughts and conversations often are. I pulled several interviews with Chan, Lana, and Kim and Lou - printed them out, cut them into to quarters and repasted them together at random. I then went through and circled paragraphs and sentences that were working or popped out to me, and I then went ahead and cut those out in strips, shuffled, chose at random and patched those together. I then began to weave a framework in which these could sit. This is the result.
You can read the next few chapters in the next post (members only) but here’s a brief taste below.
Obviously I was confused. Laying on my hotel balcony, unable to choose between them earlier, I had a mai-tai in one hand, and an aggressively healthy green cucumber concoction in the other. I was in this between state of certain comfortable failure or hope for either a smaller ass or a bigger one. The call came that she was ready. I’d already given up, due to her being notoriously elusive and prone to positioning interviews, I was already in my bathing suit, a drink in hand, sitting on my balcony half in my robe.
As I said I was between states. I was between being grown-up and professional and reveling in a lost weekend. Shenanigans to ensue and never to be spoken of again, or an article for Thunder Mountain Revue. I was in that odd frame of mind you find yourself in when you have unexpected waiting time and you’re in a different time zone and your girlfriend has just left you and taken your dog, and you’re thirty-nine so no bars to go pick up chicks because that makes you feel sad and old and that’s the last thing you want to feel right now. Plus the last Lesbian bars have shut their doors. It’s a wasteland.
I had flown out from Los Angeles, to interview Sara, and was supposed to have met up with her this afternoon. I’d let her team know I’d arrived and was en route to the hotel, and they uttered the dooming words “she’ll let you know.” But the call hadn’t come, and as the afternoon had waned so had I. Staving off the sadness of a break up. And the loss of my dog, I’d opened my suitcase but not unpacked. I’d started a shower but changed my mind, and put on a bathing suit and then after ordering room service, put on a robe. I’d ordered the aforementioned fun-size mai-tai, and then embarrassed at just ordering that, the green juice, and then on further thought steak and eggs from room service. If you are a sensitive and attuned person these things would be your first clue to my unravelling inner state of affairs.
After hearing myself agree to meet Sara in an hour, I hung up the phone and looked at the drink I’d set down on the side table, looked down, at my bare feet with chipped polish, puzzled at the one egg and half a steak looking back up at me from an unnecessarily big silver tray and looked out at the pool. At the hypnotic rounds of people doing water aerobics in the shallow end of the pool over the hibiscus vines. Who were these people? Who feels a sudden need to do water aerobics in a hotel as the sun sets? Come to think of it who does water aerobics while on holiday? I feel out of place and unsure of myself. Actually, as I take a sip of my mai-tai, I have that odd sensation of something, something in my mind sliding sideways, The hotels nostalgia makes me feel odd, unsure. It’s a strange inversion of time and space. Are they serious or joking, or is it a strange mixture of both? It’s how I feel about hipsters. I take a sip of the green juice that smells strongly of cucumber. It’s delicious. It’s confusing and annoying and I like it and that in itself is annoying.