I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.
Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.
The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” – or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.
I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.
She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking, behind the hedge of spiked flowers, Nosferatu’s sanguinary rosebud.
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories: The Lady of the House of Love
I don’t remember if this was in the book or if I heard her tell a story in an interview, but I learned somewhere years ago that when Allison Bechdel sent her mother a draft copy of Are You My Mother? (Bechdel’s frankly very exposing graphic memoir about her relationship with her mother), asking for, I don’t know? Feedback? Permission? Absolution? her mother’s whole and entire response was “It coheres.” Two words and a period. And it’s absolutely true about that book and the most impressive thing about it, actually. The book collages an enormous amount of time and space and thought into a coherent piece of art. It could so easily have failed to do so, but it succeeded. I think about this all the time both because of the efficiency of Bechdel’s mother’s commentary and the myriad conclusions I find myself itching to leap to about her personality based on that single anecdote, but also because it got my thinking about coherence as an artistic value. As perhaps the final artistic value. So, you had something to say. Did you say it?
If I remember correctly it was an email, too, without a greeting or salutation, which is so white christian northeasterner it makes me want to scream. Not the point.
Like. Ms Helen Bechdel did not choose to share whether she considered her daughter’s work truthful, or necessary, or kind. She did not corroborate or contradict Allison Bechdel’s story about her. She only acknowledged that the story cohered. Which like, point one, master stroke, because it means she’s interacting with the work as a reader rather than as a character, but point two, maybe a story doesn’t actually have to be truthful or necessary or kind. Maybe that isn’t what storytelling is. Maybe a story just has to cohere. Certainly someone being told a story from the outside doesn’t have the tools to know if a story was honest. When you’re told a story you only know if it coheres. How much of what we think of as honesty and courage in storytelling is really just coherence. I’ve been a little crazy about this anecdote since I was roughly fifteen.
