literary diet pt. 4: lessons in heterosexuality
This Week in Reading
Any Day Now by Robyn Carr
I needed something to read, so I wandered down to the grocery store and picked up this book, Any Day Now by Robyn Carr. My fridge was pretty full but Annie’s were 4 for $5, so I stocked up.
Any Day Now is a romance novel set in a campground in Colorado, which seemed too on brand to pass up. This is what I have learned about heterosexuality from this primary source document I discovered at the Vons on Sunset:
Women are complicated and damaged
Men are simple
Men have baggage too, but whereas a woman’s baggage might be I Am a Recovering Alcoholic Who Was Stalked and Sexually Assaulted by a Psychopath Who May or May Not have Followed Me Across the Country, men’s baggage is more along the lines of Even Though Now I am Enormous and Attractive Now, I Was Short When I Was a Kid and I Feel Weird About It
Women like it when men tote them around on their back and will then kiss them
Asking for a woman’s family for permission to propose to her, while she is sitting there, before you have discussed the possibility of marriage, is still considered romantic
The book is about a woman named Sierra, straight out of rehab and looking for a fresh start in a small town in Colorado. She works part time in at a local diner, and does maintenance work for a privately owned campground, where she lives. Throughout the novel, she meets a variety of small town characters including Sully, the gruff but empathetic campground owner, Moody, another recovering alcoholic, and a hot firefighter named Conrad (yikes) who is exclusively referred to as Connie (double yikes). Sierra has a dark and messy past, and is afraid to get involved with Connie, for fear of scaring him away with her tortured backstory. Connie is patient and gentle and deeply boring, constantly assuring her that he can handle whatever secrets she is keeping from him.
Their dynamic reminded of this essay about Joan Didion by Patricia Lockwood (thank you Claire, for the rec). “I thought of her essay about John Wayne – she loved him, and not just because he gathered the whole American West in a man. It was also because, as Katharine Hepburn observed, it was so thrilling to lean against him. Great like a tree, a place to rest. And didn’t she want to rest? Weren’t her burdens so heavy?”
There is something alluring about steadiness, consistency. So much of the time I feel like a floating, spiraling brain, moving at warp speed, a spigot of thoughts and opinions spewing everywhere. I understand the compulsion to find someone that grounds me, someone who can take all of the bits of me floating around and balance it with something solid. I briefly dated a girl I could only describe as normal. She was just a normal person with a normal job and normal interests. It was refreshing, how normal she was. Don’t fetishize her normalcy a friend warned me. Of course, predictably, I grew bored of normalcy, of being the more interesting half of the conversation. But I get it, I get the draw of someone who seems solid and stable and reliable. We all just want to lean. Maybe that is why so many of my female friends are dating such impossibly mediocre dudes. There is nothing wrong with these men, they are nice and friendly and inoffensive, but they aren’t interesting. Your boyfriend is probably fine, but please don’t expect me to care too much about what he has to say.
I find men to be baffling for the most part. What is happening inside of their brains? The only possibilities seem to be a. not much or b. a completely foreign form of logic, written in a language I will never be able to decipher. I don’t hate men, I just, for the most part, find them incomprehensible and fairly boring. Of course, it is impossible to fully understand anyone, but I imagine loving a man is like accepting a small chasm of misunderstanding into the most intimate area of your life. (Another amazing sentence from the Lockwood essay, about Joan talking about meeting her husband: "Here her face becomes heavy with the curse of heterosexuality.") Having given up on the premise of being known completely, straight women settle for something solid to lean on.
Don’t correct me if I’m wrong; everything I know about love, I learned from the Vons Reading Center.
Further Reading:
My favorite lowbrow chick lit (and chick flick, for that matter), is Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding. I watch this movie at least once a year, and have read the book multiple times. The sequels for both aren’t nearly as good, but I will read/watch them anyways.
And with that, I’m done with my grocery store reading challenge. I am honestly very excited to read a book that didn’t come from Vons.