One of the best iterations of a marital situation gone wrong is Justine Triet's film Anatomy of a Fall, where Sandra becomes the primary suspect in her husband Samuel's murder. During the trial of her husband, the protagonist realizes that her innocence is not only predicated on the aggregated evidence but on her relationship with her deceased husband. With no witnesses and inconclusive data, the prosecution spends most of the time contesting Sandra's character: was she a faithful partner, or did she spend too much time on her writing career? In the eyes of the court, not only was their marriage falling apart, but Sandra's ambition was a mark of its demise and possibly Samuel's death.
One winter evening, at a house party in Berlin, I told two male writers I was sympathetic with Sandra, highlighting that she was being erroneously judged for her successful writing career. One of the men I called her selfish, arguing that she should have done more to help Samuel with his writer's block. The other writer admitted that he would find it challenging to be in a relationship with a woman writer who was more successful than him. I asked if Sandra's discipline and dedication to her work were distinct from what most male writers have done for generations. One of the men furrowed his eyebrows and retorted, "It doesn't make it right." But he probably meant to say, "This isn't how it should be." The conversation was a flippant exchange that never resolved. But it revealed something deeper--another ingredient for a bad, or potentially fatal marriage, was a zealous woman who was attached to an insecure and unproductive man.
Fiction or fact, writers love to gossip about other writers, and siding with a scribe might have more to do with one's anxieties about relationships than the craft itself. And yet, something is enthralling and audacious about the domestic realities that some women writers face during and after their marital bliss. Writer or not, many of these moments are acutely palpable. Whether in film or text, popular culture reveals the agony and poison that seeps into a failing marriage--a woman's confidence.
I visited Sylvia Plath's tombstone in the summer of 2023 in Heptonstall church in West Yorkshire with my husband and father-in-law. Like Plath, I am an American writer who married a British writer. Like many women of her generation who were writing and partnered with an egotistical man, the relationship was shrouded in resentment, an imbalance of domestic responsibility, and his non-consensual affair with another woman. Although her suicide was part of her lifelong battle with depression, I could not help but think that her suicide felt like a premonition for any woman writer who gave too much to her family and not enough to herself. If people choose marriage or motherhood, the option to refuse and resume one's life is more possible now than then.
The wrenching reality of gender, class, and racial imbalance in writing careers is incredibly profound when it comes to one's educational pedigree and social network, but somehow, these accounts reveal that something is hindering heterosexual marriage and parenting to one's writing career. Refusal is part of the solution, as is learning from our literary elders. But hopefully, no one has to murder their partner to get the freedom to write.
A Read
I wrote an exhibition review for Frieze Magazine about the latest Caspar David Friedrich Show, which marks the 250th anniversary of his birth. I take my time to think about his reception by contemporary artists such as Kehinde Wiley, Hiroyuki Masuyama, and Ulrike Rosenbach, who reinterpreted Friedrich’s meditation on nature in their own image. I write:
As part of the exhibition, Wiley’s arresting six-screen installation, Prelude (2021), draws the viewer in to an ecstatic event: Black people frolicking in a glacial fjord, smiling while surrounded by a thicket of snow. The setting is elevated by a languorous orchestral score arranged by composer and cellist Niles Luther. The overture, and occasional recitations from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophical essay, Nature (1836), complement the cast’s reflective play. In Prelude, Black people’s presence in a tundra-like environment is an unbounded promise of freedom and joy. Serenity on display. What it reveals is a radical contingency, one what white hegemony would not care to admit: Black people, when given the chance to exist, are majestic.
But more importantly, I contemplate the philosophical dilemmas that surface from living as modern subjects.
Some Recommendations
Andrea Long Chu tells the New York Review of Books that she wants a critic
Marzio G. Mian discuses caviar, counterculture, and Stalinism in his Harper's article, Behind the New Iron Curtain
The Nation Magazine asks the Question: What does it Mean to be Palestinian Now
Laurie Anderson Withdraw from a German University that probes in her political views
Socialists tackle Artificial Intelligence in Jacobin Magazine
A new poem by Jericho Brown
Closing Thoughts
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