"friendship"
This Week in Reading:
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
I worked on a Shirley Jackson movie for like, one day, last month (I feel tempted to tell you that my life is not as cool as it sounds, but quite frankly my life is exactly as bizarre and cool as it seems on paper), and after spending 12 hours digging through vintage photos of her house, I decided it was high time that I read The Haunting of Hill House.
Like most of her books, The Haunting of Hill House is unnerving without being terrifying, eerie-- but not scary. Shirley Jackson, a bit of a domestic witch herself, writes books about homes that don’t quite sit right, shows us how sinister it can be when our most intimate, domestic spaces become hostile. Hill House is a mansion designed to be slightly askew. Every angle is just a few degrees off, every door the tiniest bit off center, the minuscule shifts compounding into an optical illusion of a blueprint, so that guests end up turned backwards when they think they have been walking in a straight line. Intrigued by the legends that the house is haunted, Dr. Montague invites a number of research assistants to spend the summer there in hopes of encountering the supernatural. Of all of the people he contacts, only Eleanor and Theodora accept. The Haunting of Hill House is not really a horror book, but it is a kind of ghost story. It is also maybe the gayest book I have ever read.
Eleanor and Theodora seem to spend the entire book smiling “breathlessly” at each other and playfully teasing one another. They wear each other’s clothes and hold hands in bed. Eleanor spends pages and pages pondering just how lovely Theodora is, fretting that Theodora might grow to dislike her. At one point, Jackson writes: “Nothing irrevocable had yet been spoken, but there was only the barest margin of safety left them; each of them moving delicately along the outskirts of an open question, and, once spoken, such a question—as “Do you love me?” — could never be answered or forgotten. They walked slowly, meditating, wondering, and the path sloped down from their feet and they followed, walking side by side in the most extreme intimacy of expectation; their feinting and hesitation done with, they could only await passively for resolution. Each knew, almost within a breath, what the other was thinking and wanting to say; each of them almost wept for the other.” Gaygaygaygaygay.
Except, of course, it isn’t gay. Published in 1959, The Haunting of Hill House is ostensibly a story about two friends. Friends that seem to touch each others’ arms a lot and “walked side by side in the most extreme intimacy of expectation.” You know, the way super chill platonic friends do.
Female friendship is having a moment right now. As it should be! Female friendship is amazing. Abbi and Ilana, Leslie and Ann—platonic female friendship is finally being celebrated in mainstream media. There are podcasts about female friendship, and books. And I am glad, really, that we are finally making room for friendship in society. For so long, female friendship has been relegated behind romantic (heterosexual) love. In elementary school your best friend is someone to share snacks with, someone to hold the other end of the jump rope. In high school your best friend is the girl you sit next to in the 7-11 parking lot on a Friday night, splitting a coke slurpee until curfew. As an adult, it is the girl you text all day long, about dumb shit and important shit, about your career crisis and about articles you read on the internet. And then, she falls in love (with a man!) and gets engaged and posts on instagram how lucky she is that she gets to marry her best friend. And suddenly, you are demoted to second chair. Female friends, the ones that have been there the entire time, get to be bridesmaids at the wedding, but it is the groom that now gets the title of best friend. So yes, I am glad female friendship is finally getting the credit it deserves.
And yet— I whisper, in size 6 font— why do we have to settle for friendship. Female friendship is perfect! Completely untouchable! Platonic love can be just as deep and important as romantic love. But—the tiny voice in my head whispers-- why can’t we have more? How much better would Friends be if Rachel dated Monica, her endlessly reliable and supportive best friend, instead of Ross, a total drip who spent 9 seasons undermining all of her life choices? If we are finally finally finally acknowledging the intensity of female friendship, the extent to which female friends provide each other with emotional support, why can’t we just take the next half step and have them be in love? Michelle Williams takes her best friend Busy Phillips as her red carpet date to award shows and it is cute, but it would be cuter if they were married. My real dream is to do a remake of Gossip Girl that is exactly the same as the original, but Blair and Serena are in love. Girl crushes are a fake concept, they are just crushes, you are gay. So Theodora and Eleanor are “friends” in this book. Okay, whatever you say.
I’ve had several intense romantic friendships, with both men and women, over the course of my life. Friendships where we didn’t date, and didn’t sleep together, but for all intents and purposes, were in love. There is only the smallest gap between romantic and platonic love. When done correctly, they both demand commitment, intensity, generosity, tenderness. Platonic love is supposed to be free of the expectations and stakes that can make romantic love so fraught, but in reality friendship carries just as much emotional entanglement, it is just that most of it goes unacknowledged. And because these expectations are never verbalized, when commitments are violated in a friendship, it is much more difficult to address than it is in a romantic relationship.
The wonder of platonic love, of course is the lack of romantic entanglement. But this trend of platonic female friendships in the media feels like a privilege of straightness. The purity of Sex and the City-style gal pals seems to rely on the unthinkingness of heterosexuality, the unawareness of how close friendship is to love. Straight women like to call each other “wifey” and say that they are getting brunch with their “girlfriends,” terminology that is both incredibly confusing and willfully ignorant of the fact that there are many women that do in fact marry other women.
Happy pride, this book is gay, everyone should be gay.
Studio-ing
This project is also a little bit of a ghost story. For the most part when I make art, I know completely what I am going to make and why I am going to make it before I even begin. I often say that I sort of become an artist by accident-- that I have always secretly been a writer that just happens to make art. I’m not a visual thinker: my sketchbook is entirely writing, I have always found writing wall text to be the most enjoyable part of making art. As I’ve delved further into writing in the past few years, I realized that many of the ideas that I would typically turn into projects would function just as well as an essay, and I am letting them live in that form instead.
In response, my art practice has gotten a little bit more intangible. I am making things that seem like they can’t exist simply as words on a page, things that demand to occupy physical space. This image has lived in the back of my brain for years: two Vietnamese ao-dais cut down to their seams, conjoined together like a pair of Siamese twins. A line drawing that floats in space, two ghosts holding hands. For years, I waited to understand what it meant, to have the flash of concept that has always driven my practice. I’ve made a project like this before, a project whose title and image burned so brightly in my mind but whose meaning seemed every so slightly beyond my grasp. It took me months and months to finish this, and for the vast majority of the time I wasn’t sure it would work at all. Now that it is done, I still can’t tell you exactly what it means. It evokes something, a folktale or a ghost story, but one that I have forgotten the plot of. It is an unsatisfying artist statement, but I am trying to be okay with not having a tidy answer for everything.
Further Reading:
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is my favorite Shirley Jackson book. Life Among the Savages is fairly light in plot and not spooky in the slightest, but is a delightful read for Shirley Jackson fans as it is clearly a description of her own life in Bennington Vermont.
P.S. I’m having my annual couch sale where I sell off old work to make more room under my couch to store new art, check it out.