constellations #98: libertine
Hi again.
There’s regular constellations fare below, but first, I wanted to invite you to some IRL events if you are in the New York City area:
On Oct. 1 at The Strand, there will be a celebration for the launch of the NPR Music book How Women Made Music, which I (and many, many, many amazing writers) contributed to. I’ll be there (on the panel!) and I’d love to see you. Even if you aren’t in New York, consider buying the book.
Also! The 100th edition of this newsletter is fast approaching—an exciting milestone for me! I figured it occasions a celebration of some sort. If you’re free (and in the Brooklyn area) on Nov. 24 and you’re reading this, you’re invited. Details to come ♡
***
I didn’t mean to read two different books about middle-aged women having queer midlife crises this month, but I did, accidentally, coincidentally.
To be clear they are both popular books, both relatively recently released and well-reviewed. I read one because friends had read it and their endorsements intrigued me—most convincingly, a friend who turned to me last month as we waited between the opener and the headliner at a show and said, with an enthusiasm with which I have rarely ever received a book recommendation: Marissa, oh my god, you actually really have to read this book; you really have to read it. Who could say no?!)
And then I read the other because my number came up at the library. I guess I had put myself on a waitlist to read this book some number of weeks ago; when I got the email that said, you can check out this book now!, I didn’t even remember having asked for it. A delightful surprise.
I mean, in general, I’d say: yes, of course, there should be more novels by women about women’s midlife crises, more queer midlife crisis novels, etc.! In the spirit I extend to any domain of art dominated by heteronormative masculinity! But the topic wasn’t something I sought out.
Anyway. All Fours, the first one I read, by Miranda July, is a book about a mid-40s woman—a self-described “semi-famous” artist who is also a wife and a mother—whose plan to drive cross-country takes an immediate detour that kicks off a sort of process of self-reinvention fueled by a lot of longing and intimacy and not-quite-sex (and then, also, a lot of sex). I liked it a great deal for the generosity of spirit it gave its narrator, a kind of compassion I find instructive to witness up close. I found it funny, and strange, and occasionally transcendently wise, and I liked the questions it posed about creativity and domesticity and normativity.
(I also liked talking with my friend Courtney about All Fours, which she liked a lot less than I did, and which she wrote about wonderfully in her newsletter. I will say Courtney and I share a distaste for the narrator’s seemingly uninterrogated preoccupation with thinness?! Ugh.)
The other book was Playboy by Constance Debré. Recently translated from French, it’s the first in a trilogy of autobiographical novels about a lawyer from an aristocratic family who quits her job, leaves her husband, comes out as a lesbian, and has affairs with a series of women.
Playboy’s language is so stark and spare I told myself I could probably read the trilogy’s other parts in their original language. (Flattering myself; I’m actually like a decade removed from any semblance of fluency.) That is to say, the whole thing struck me as rather brutal; its depictions of sapphic love had a certain ruthlessness to them, echoes of a curious relationship to patriarchy. The book is, in many ways, about eschewing convention, about abandoning the strictures of class and traditional femininity no matter the cost. It’s all very French.
Each book brings up many interesting ideas about gender and age and queerness and commitment—but what struck me most, in reading them back to back, was just how much they are about desire, and how it felt as a reader to spend time with narrators so innately and completely guided by it.
It reminded me of this essay I read years ago, by Alexandra Molotkow, about limerence: the state of heightened obsession that can accompany intense infatuation. A psychologist named Dorothy Tennov coined the term in the ’70s; she wrote a book about it. Molotkow describes hearing the word for the first time and feeling a flash of recognition: “Crushes map life over with meaning and joy, and I’d always choose heartbreak over boredom,” she writes. “They can also gain on me like a frightening, unpredictable force that lifts me out of my life and drops me back, months later, with a lot of mess to clean.” She describes Tennov’s book about limerence as “an anatomy of the hopeless crush, a syndrome ‘both extreme and banal.’”
I remember when I read Molotkow’s essay I sent it immediately to a friend; we were always talking about crushes back then. Eventually, later, she’d recommend I read Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, which perhaps captures the feeling of being entirely emotionally consumed by longing better than anything else I’ve read.
Around the same time that I was learning about limerence, a friend happened to describe her boyfriend’s chic, Parisian pal as a libertine, a word I hadn’t heard before. She didn’t mean it pejoratively but the way she said it—not quite judgmentally; sort of curiously—seemed to put distance between herself and the word, and thus between her and this other girl. I said, I know what you mean, though I didn’t, really.
(Debré’s narrator doesn’t identify this way, I don’t think, but the word feels relevant—someone willing to reject social codes in pursuit of pleasure.)
(And of course I was thinking about limerence when reading All Fours, whose narrator wallows in impossible romantic obsession, detailing it in all its humiliating glory.)
Back at that time I was writing songs that were obsessed with desire; needy and coy, pathetic and slightly bitchy, they considered the feeling from up close and far away. I wrote them, not always but often, by looking around me, stealing snatches of conversation from my friends and certain strangers, filtering their limerent or crush-worthy perspectives through my own. “Your music makes it seem like you have a very active love life,” a friend remarked back then, which was not precisely true, at least not the way she meant it. Her love life was, by nearly every definition, considerably more active than mine. She was a libertine. But I liked what her comment revealed: that I had an active imagination; that the truth of biography, in those songs, seemed murky and mutable. That felt powerful.
But anyway, all that was a while ago, and that’s not what these books are about: not the fluid strangeness of post-grad years but a greater, later rupture—what it means to let yourself be guided by desire when you’re also tethered to a career and a marriage and parenthood. Even in their wildly divergent perspectives these narrators evince a certain fearlessness, a commitment to believing their desire matters; this is true even when their desire is unruly, confusing, queer, or threatening, and perhaps because of those very qualities especially. They ask whether anyone, but especially women and queer people, deserves to let themselves be guided by that force, and then I think they both answer, categorically, emphatically: yes. What a thrill to watch their pursuit.
Here are some other things I have been consuming lately: in addition to the books above, House Rules by Heather Lewis—very hard to track down and among the most depressing books I have ever read; Viewfinder by Wendy Eisenberg; Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine by Allegra Krieger; two new (and excellent) releases from friends of mine: BOO BOO by Boo Boo Spoiler and Wearing Out The Refrain by Bad Moves; Some Like It Hot; The Green Ray; this lovely podcast interview with Hanif Abdurraqib; one day upstate at a horse show where my sister was competing—she did great; Charly Bliss and Perfume Genius at Music Hall of Williamsburg (on different nights! but what a bill that would be…); Tasha live at Baby’s; my friends in Tendrills live in Bushwick; the play Job; this profile of the artist Camille Henrot; one perfect, free apple from the pick-your-own place in my hometown
***
This time last year I was: in love (!); and before that: spiraling out, lacking intuition, and looking at wall drawings
***
Thanks for reading. Good luck with all your crushes this month.
xo,
M