sadreads #9: behaving badly
“‘I admit,’ Miss Helen said, ‘I behaved badly towards you, Vance. I accept that. But then I behaved badly towards myself, towards everybody. You mustn’t feel singled out. My awfulness was universally distributed.’” Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
“So intensely nostalgic, that throat infection. I used to get them all the time. Being a toxic girl in my twenties and showing boys at bars my massive pus pockets in the back of my throat, like a parlor trick, while I smoked menthols and jammed popsicles down my throat as my medicine. Remembering what it was like to be unsafe and unhygienic and uninsured, almost radiantly fucked up.” Kate Zambreno, Screen Tests
“to hate yourself AND let yourself live
to hate AND let live
that is the goal”
Ursula Andkjaer Olsen, Outgoing Vessel
--
“Why does your voice sound like that?” asked the guy in front of me in the lounge area of West Palm Beach’s only goth bar, which was dank and smokey and, with its basic aroma of bleach and beer, somehow always redolent of the morning after, even while you were still firmly floundering in the evening’s festivities. This guy had approached me as a distant second choice after my hotter and more conversationally generous friend became engaged in pleasantries with the guy’s own more outgoing companion. I don’t remember anything about him other than I think he was wearing a beige hat? To a goth bar. Anyway, I was smoking a Salem Light I’d bummed--you could still smoke in bars then--and inexplicably finishing a large pour of Jägermeister. I had laryngitis, which of course is famously helped by Jäger and menthols; I sounded like Harvey Fierstein as I attempted to answer the perfunctory questions he shouted at me over the sweet synthpop of "Kathy's Song" by Apoptygma Berzerk. “I had a cold, but I feel fine now,” I said in my out-of-place voice, downing the last half inch of my drink. “Don’t worry about it.” I was soon alone, and it was fine. This was just a Saturday night. I didn’t go into any of them with a plan. I just lived them, taking one step after another. Like predictive text, as a totality, the sequence rarely made sense. It also let me live from day to day without really considering the effects of any of the things I did.
Is “finding yourself” a real thing, or does it just get easier to see the trajectory of your choices when you become older? I have been avoiding writing about my twenties, because I was terrible in them. I was not a nice person. I was selfish and secretive, and it gave me an appealing gravity that made people interested in being around me. I had good intentions, but invariably, I let people down with my bad behavior. It’s not that I was reveling in my own awfulness, but I didn’t want to change, either. And even if I had wanted to change, I had no idea what it might take to do so, and found it tiring to think too hard about it, the way the young often do. The actions I took didn’t benefit me, either--I ended up with the life I have, and the companions I have, only once I finally began to make real choices.
The part I quoted in Klara is not the main plot; it’s the B story, and super not the focus, so don’t get the wrong idea if you haven’t read it yet--the book is, in the grand Ishiguro way, a meditation on what it means to be human, and a quiet near-future soft sci-fi with a creeping sense of unease about it. But I loved this moment so I’m going to focus on it a bit. The character Miss Helen is addressing Vance, a former lover from whom she wants a favor. Vance feels that Helen wronged him terribly in the past, and desires a moment of reckoning from her in return for his magnanimity. I loved this line from Helen where she basically says Yes, I was bad to you, but I was bad to everyone so don’t feel special. Helen is, by all standards, a caring mother and a competent person, but she has this past self that harmed someone else, and that other person thinks of her as an antagonist, but nobody is an antagonist to themselves, are they? Helen, because she loves her child, acquiesces to the other person’s requests to own up to her badness, but she refuses to own up to being an intentional villain, which is what he wants to hear her admit. These are complicated concepts to think through, especially now. But I loved how this character did not go with the obligatory narrative that was requested of her.
Zambreno’s Screen Tests is a series of pieces organized under the wonderfully vague subtitle “Stories and other writing.” I don’t think any of the collection is fiction, per se; the stories are more like the stories you would tell a friend: sometimes they land with a punch, and sometimes they meander a bit, and sometimes they just drift off altogether at the end, and you stop talking because you need to go to the bathroom or something. I absolutely loved this book, though it must be said that I am a Zambreno stan in general. She has her preoccupations, and those recur in this book: she writes about women who suffer from mental illness, and girlhood/young womanhood, and aging, and being a writer. These are all things I love to read about. She is funny, too, like when she writes sentiments like this: “He broke up with me because he thought I was too mean, or too young. I wish we had stayed in touch. He must be much older now.” And certain of Zambreno’s passages, like the one I quote at the top of this note, made me feel a pang of tenderness toward my past self, even though she objectively kind of sucked.
And speaking of past selves, I won’t go too far into talking about Olsen’s amazing Outgoing Vessel here because I am reviewing it for a real outlet, but it is a book about experiencing your past selves in the present, among other things. “To hate yourself AND let yourself live.”
I wish I’d written that line.