Master flatplan singles

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“Beginnings are my favorite, Everything is conjecture, fantasy, and full of feeling.

You don’t know what’s coming yet.”

-Brit Marling, filmmaker & actress

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Violet We are Violet Issue One “...That’s the best part of any story—not what is happening at present, but what might be about to happen.”

-Brit Marling

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Editor In Chief Leith Clark Art Director Christopher Miller Managing Editor Sophie Carruthers Deputy Editor Luella Bartley Features Director Stephanie Lacava Editor At Large Amanda De Cadenet Features Editor Ellen Burney Senior Editor Sarah Sophie Flicker Fashion Editor Valentine Fillol Cordier Beauty Editor Kay Montano French Editor Clémence Poésy Contributing Editors Davina Catt, Zoe Kazan, Keira Knightley, Charlotte Sanders Photo Editor Jessie Lily Adams Artist Mercedes Helnwein Junior Editor Rosalind Jana Assistant Fashion Editor & Assistant to the Editor in Chief Kristina Golightly Copy Editor Nazanin Mondschein, Editorial Assistant Alexandra Rhodes Contributing Writers for this Issue Hadley Freeman, Meghan Kenny, Sara Moralioglu, Sasha Sagan Contributing Photographers for this Issue Erik MadigAn Heck, Jane Mcleish-Kelsey, Jenny Gage & Tom Betterton, Laura Sciacovelli, Liz Collins, Mary Mccartney, Nicole Nodland, Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello, Susannah Baker-Smith Contributing Stylists For This Issue Lucy Ewing, Samuel François, Kusum Lynn

publishers Stephen White & Calum Richardson WWW.VIOLETBOOK.CO.UK, +44 (0) 207 250 1483 distribution consultant Stuart White stuart@whitecirc.com For Press enquiries please contact Sara Byworth at RMO Sara@rmo-comms.com ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED IN WHOLE OR IN PART WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM THE PUBLISHERS. THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN VIOLET BOOK ARE THOSE OF THE RESPECTIVE CONTRIBUTORS AND ARE NOT NECESSARILY SHARED BY THE PUBLISHERS. ISSN-2054-4111 ©2014 VIOLET PUBLISHING LTD

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part y of special things to do

Violet ’s keepsakes.

Photogr aphy by j e s s i e l i ly a d a m s Styling by k r i s t i n a g o l i g h t ly

All rings by DAVID MORRIS, cheese from JUMI LONDON BOROUGH MARKET, all vegetables from TED’S VEG BOROUGH MARKET, flowers by JAM JAR FLOWERS, plate and bowl from V & A Shop.

Dress by HONOR.

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Shoes LOUIS VUITTON.

Test tubes and daisies JAM JAR FLOWERS.

From top: Socks JONATHAN ASTON, shoes BIONDA CASTANA, tights MIU MIU, shoes EMPORIO ARMANI.

Left to right: Coat by EMPORIO ARMANI, coat by CHRISTIAN DIOR.

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Chinese porcelain lotus cup from the National Palace Museum Collection V & A SHOP test tubes and daisies JAM JAR FLOWERS.

Dress TOPSHOP earrings, bracelet and rings DIOR FINE JOAILLERIE.

Suit HUGO BOSS, necklace LOUIS VUITTON FINE JEWELLERY, shoes CARVELA.

Jug and sprig JAM JAR FLOWERS glasses LEITH CLARK FOR WARBY PARKER.

Coat MIU MIU, socks FALKE, shoes CHURCHES.

Left: Coat and dress ORLA KIELY. Right: Dress EMPORIO ARMANI.

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Swimsuits by MOSCHINO.

Shoe by SONIA RYKIEL, vase by JAM JAR FLOWERS, leaves from TED’S VEG BOROUGH MARKET.

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Jewellery box JORDAN ASKILL jars JAM JAR FLOWERS.

Bracelet DE BEERS.

Dress SAINT LAURENT.

Top and coat SESSÙN, jeans AG JEANS, shoes CARVELA.

Shirt and shorts MARGARET HOWELL, shoes CARVELA.

Dress RALPH LAUREN, sunglasses CUTLER AND GROSS, shoes JIMMY CHOO.

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Bag and scarf HERMÈS.

Clockwise from top left: Dress by LOUIS VUITTON, dress and tie by RALPH LAUREN, dress by BOTTEGA VENETA, necklace by DE BEERS.

All clothing by CARVEN, ring by DIOR FINE JOAILLERIE, shoes by BIONDA CASTANA.

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Left to right: Hat HERMÈS, hat MAISON MICHEL.

Necklaces LOUIS VUITTON FINE JEWELLERY.

Glasses LEITH CLARK FOR WARBY PARKER.

Dress by HERMÈS.

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From left: Dress by CHANEL, socks by FALKE, shoes by BIONDA CASTANA, Dress by SIMONE ROCHA, socks by FALKE, shoes by CHURCHES.

Aubergines TED’S VEG BOROUGH MARKET, jewellery CHANEL FINE JEWELLERY.

Top M MISSONI.

Purple cabbage TED’S VEG BOROUGH MARKET, earrings DE BEERS.

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Coat, trousers, shirt CHLOÉ, shoes JIMMY CHOO.

Hair: Louis Ghewy at The Book Agency using Bumble and bumble.

Make-up: Nami Yoshida at The Book Agency using MAC Cosmetics.

Set Design: Morning Sets. Fashion Assistants: Stephanie Dale, Sabine Hutchinson and Elizabeth Ramos de Freitas. Models: Stephanie Hall and Daphne Selfe at Models 1, Wanessa Milhomem at Select Model Management and Sophie Kelly at Next Model Management.

Casting: Ben Grimes.

All clothes by BOTTEGA VENETA.

Teapot by HERMÈS, all flowers by JAM JAR FLOWERS, lettuce from TED’S VEG BOROUGH MARKET, cheese from JUMI LONDON BOROUGH MARKET, plate from V & A SHOP, earrings DE BEERS.

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Kingdom Come Traditional views on women’s and men’s gender roles continue to inform our day to day lives despite our best feminist efforts.

Is this the natural order?

ILLUSTRATIONS by j a s m i n l ü n s t r o t h WORDS by S a r a M o r a l i o g lu

Fig. 1 Killer Whale

killer Whales Killer whales, also known as orcas, are one of the most intelligent and magical species on earth. Travelling together in pods of three to fifty whales, they cover as much as 100 miles a day, led by one—the matriarch.

She is the eldest and uses her wisdom and knowledge to guide her family over vast distances. The males hang back on the wings whilst the calves stick close to the matriarch, and the other females stay in the centre of the pod. They use clicks and tail slams to communicate with each other in a language that is unique to each individual pod.

The bond between mother and child is so strong that the young stay with their mothers for life, who nurture and teach them to fend for themselves.

Aside from us humans, female orcas are the only animals that live up to 50 years after their reproducing life span is over. Most other female animals die soon after their reproductive life ends.

Male orcas only ever leave the pod to mate. According to biologists, the female life-span is an evolutionary response designed to protect their sons. Females mate with outsiders and stay in the pods with their calves.

The males head out to search for females in other pods, spreading the gene pool, reducing the chances of disease and ensuring the survival of the species. When a mother dies however, problems arise for males; they are so dependent on their mothers that their chance of survival falls 30 fold, whereas for females, their chances of dying after a mother’s death increases only three-fold.

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P Fig. 2 Peacock

PEACOCKs

In peacock society it is the male who preens his wonderful fan-like tail. The females’ colouring is a dull grey or brown that looks nothing like the jewel-toned male’s. Darwin became fascinated by peacocks and used them to explain sexual selection. The males use their ink spot tails to attract females. The more handsome a male peacock is, the more tail spots he has, making him more successful in mating. The female peacock loves a male with many tail spots, so much so, that studies tested the theory by cutting out males’ tail spots to see how popular they are with females. Sadly, those left without spots were noticeably less successful on the peacock dating scene than those who kept their beautiful markings.

Not only do a male’s tail spots make him more successful with the ladies, but these markings also indicate his strength. Studies have shown the more tail spots he has, the stronger he is, and the less vulnerable he will be to predators. Even more interestingly, studies have also shown that the offspring of peacocks with more tail spots are often stronger than those with less.

B Fig. 3 Bonobo

bonobos

Bonobos live in a matriarchal society. The females love one another’s company so much, they often completely ignore the males. They share their food, hug, kiss and often have sex to reinforce these bonds. Sex, in bonobo society, is used to resolve conflicts rather than violence. They band together and take care of their young; they hunt and distribute their food amongst these groups.

It is the females who, in adolescence, venture off outside their group to join others. When one enters a new group she will suss out which females are more popular and powerful and befriend them—through sex. Once she is ‘in’, her position is further secured when she has offspring of her own.

Meanwhile, the males stick by their mothers’ sides for life. They follow her through the forest and rely on her to defend them if they ever have an aggressive encounter with another male. It is for this reason that the most powerful males within a group are often the sons of powerful mothers.

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M Fig. 4 Meerkats

MEERKATS

To survive in the harsh Kalahari desert, meerkats have had to develop a sophisticated social structure. A dominant female leads meerkat groups, which can consist of as many as 50 individuals. The dominant female is the only female allowed to reproduce—the other females in the group are her subordinates and are relegated to babysitting pups, teaching them how to forage for food, and even nursing the young ones.

The dominant female maintains her position by viciously attacking any other female she sees as a threat. She will evict a subordinate female who accidentally falls pregnant. If a subordinate female does have pups, she will try to hide them in the burrow alongside the dominant female pups.

Sadly, more often than not, a dominant female will realise which pups are not hers and kill them. The subordinate females become so afraid of the dominant female that they forego reproduction out of fear of being abandoned by the group and left to fend for themselves in the harsh and vast desert.

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Fig. 5 Lions

LIONS

Lions have a complex and often confusing social structure. One minute it is loving and caring, the next, bloody and violent. The females take charge in providing for the family through hunting and child-rearing. The males serve merely to protect the pride from any outside threats, like hyenas or rogue males who only have one interest: sex. When the males are old enough, they leave the pride to roam on their own or in coalitions of up to seven male lions.

Their mother raises cubs for two to three years; in that time, she is solely dedicated to her cubs and doesn’t mate. This proves to be a problem for the male lions—they only have a small window of two years to spread their genes. Their goal is to have sex with as many lionesses as possible. The way in which this situation is resolved is horrific: the male will murder the male cubs of the female he wishes to bed. He is under a huge amount of selective pressure; the infanticide of the cubs induces the females to go into heat. Within days of losing her cubs, the lioness is mating with the very male who killed her young! This enables him to spread his genes. Without any other cubs to care for, the lioness can focus all of her attention on caring for his cubs without any competition.

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E Fig. 6 Elephant

ELEPHANTS

Elephants are one of the most loving, caring and altruistic animals on earth. The eldest female in the herd leads them—she is the matriarch of the group and is treated with the utmost respect. The family looks to her for guidance. She remains the leader of the group until her death when her eldest daughter takes her place.

The males, known as bulls, usually stay with the herd for about eight years, though in some cases it can take up to 17 years for them to leave. At nine years old adolescence begins and bulls start to form their own identity on how to hunt and fend for themselves; most importantly, they learn about sex. It is at this point that most bulls will venture off, sometimes with other bulls, in a ‘bachelor band’, looking for food and water and searching for receptive females. They spend about three days mating and then buzz off again looking for another female. Totally polygamous, adult males roam looking for sex and treat all elephants they encounter in the same way— with no distinction from their own family to other groups.

Despite male elephants’ non-committal approach to life, elephants do demonstrate deep bonds and care for each other. They have been seen slowing their pace if a family member is injured, as well as caring for dying elephants, even those outside of their herd. They visibly express happiness at births of baby calves, as well as reunions with family members. When struck by grief, elephants will stand over the remains of a deceased elephant, touch its bones, or even try to lift or feed it.

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Fig. 7 Emperor Penguin

EMPEROR PENGUINs One species whose gender roles seem to be on an even playing field is the emperor penguin. When it comes to caring for their young, the male and female both take turns looking after the offspring until they are old enough to cope on their own. When mating, the males perform a courtship dance and it is left to the female to decide whom she will mate with.

Once she makes her decision, the pair remain monogamous for life—unless one of them goes missing.

The male penguin is a romantic creature and demonstrates his undying love by fasting throughout courtship, mating and the entire incubation period of his offspring. In doing so, he loses nearly a third of his body weight. When the female lays her single egg it is the male who takes over. He incubates the egg for the full 64-day period, whilst she goes off roaming around Antarctica. With a small patch of fur used to the cover the egg, called the ‘brood patch’, the egg and patch are both balanced on his feet. He does nothing during this whole period but patiently wait. The female returns only when the egg is ready to hatch. After the hatching, the female gives more of her time, sharing the role of caring for their baby chick with her mate.

Sara Moralioglu is a filmmaker who’s work has taken her from reindeer herding in Siberia to discussing Darwin with David Attenborough to talking perception of the Arctic wilderness with Margaret Atwood. She is currently developing a documentary about second wave feminism.

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The Beginners A debutante (from the French for “female beginner�) is a young woman from an upper class family who is introduced to society as an adult through a coming out ball. Often this is a means to announce her arrival as a candidate for potential suitors.

This all seems sort of arcane, out of touch nowadays.

Violet presents portraits to celebrate girls coming of age as women by way of achievement.

The rite need not be grandiose, just brave, kind or curious.

by k ay m o n ta n a Photogr aphy by n i c o l e n o d l a n d Styling by va l e n t i n e f i l l o l c o r d i e r words by ro s a l i n d j a n a

Yrsa Daley-Ward

Dress MOSCHINO, earring DE BEERS.

The tools she wields are words and sounds. A debut collection of short stories published by 3:AM Press; a TED talk on the importance of narrative; long-legged tales of modelling; performance work in London; and poetry festivals in Johannesburg are just some of the ways in which Yrsa uses language to connect and create.

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Coat ISA ARFEN, earring ATELIER MAYER.

Alyusha Chagrin

Smoky backing vocals for Pulp and Jarvis Cocker; beat-boxing with the all-female group The Boxettes; a solo career poised to take off—Alyusha’s multifaceted voice is looping down many avenues. Her musical heritage stretches back to her grandfather, who was disowned by his family for moving from Romania to Paris to study music. Once there, he changed his name to Francis Chagrin—the sad French man. Now she wears the name with a changed meaning.

Rachel Boardman

Dress ALAïA from a selection at matchesfashion.com, earring VICKI SARGE.

Breaking away from tight constraints can bring new possibilities. Former (and occasional) model, Rachel’s career stretches from naturopathy to yoga for children with learning disabilities, with a dynamic new business in the pipeline. Her recent marriage continues to yield exciting developments—this portrait was taken two weeks before the due date of her third child.

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Dress MAX MARA from a selection at matchesfashion.com, pearls CHANEL.

Rosalind Jana

Violet’s junior editor, freelance writer and Oxford student, Rosalind’s hours are spent typing up essays and articles, as well as posts for her blog, ‘Clothes, Cameras and Coffee’. Rosalind won the Vogue Talent Contest at age sixteen and has since written for a range of publications on topics from body image to sustainable fashion to her own experiences of spinal surgery.

She is currently working on her debut book.

Vanessa Fenton

Shirt A.P.C., tiara MOSCHINO, brooch ATELIER MAYER.

Whether it’s delicate footwork on stage or heavy footfalls whilst protesting Russia’s detaining of Greenpeace activists, Vanessa is always on her toes. An ex-ballerina, she still dances occasionally but is more likely to be found teaching or choreographing. Awards, tours and a BA in English literature have added momentum to her various leaps forward.

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Dress ATELIER MAYER, earring VICKI SARGE.

Moon Bedeaux

Currently fascinated by the potential of invention, Zoe’s daughter Moon is studying a diverse range of subjects at sixth-form: classics, sociology, English literature, and design and technology. She also has a keen interest in interior design, with Maison Baguès being a particular favourite.

Zoe Bedeaux

All clothes Zoe’s own. Make-up: Kay Montano using Chanel. Hair: Anna Cofone using Oribe & Elchim.

Using clothes to chronicle her own identity and create new characters for others, this stylist, designer and singer attracts stories wherever she goes (and with whatever she wears). As well as being a conversation-starter, contributor to various publications, and collaborator with Juergen Teller, Zoe is also studying critical theory.

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Jacket M MISSONI, ring MOGG’S OWN.

The Wonder Years Meet Mogg.

Photogr aphy by m a ry mcc a rt n e y Styling by va l e n t i n e f i l l o l c o r d i e r interview by lu e l l a b a rt l e y

When Mogg Hercules, head teacher of Dallington School in Clerkenwell, where my three children go to school, says that every child has a hidden talent, it makes me cry...

It shouldn’t. It is a matter-offact statement, which should be obvious to all adults and children.

But I think that’s why it makes me cry. My experience of the education system [pre-Dallington] did not make me feel like this. My children were judged on a simplistic academic scale of average, below average or above average. All my kids have different talents and different ways of learning and at Dallington, these talents, whatever they may be, have been valued and nurtured.

Before Dallington, my children went to a sweet local school that was maybe forced by the needs of the system, maybe not, to think only in terms of academic achievement and results. I may, admittedly, have a naïve and very personal view of the education system, but I have first-hand experience of how such thinking made me and my children feel. Some children love school just as it is—those who find it easy to learn, or rather, with good memories for facts that are written down or spoken to them at onepace-fits-all. But others, who don’t fit into this box, are made to feel worthless and end up hiding and wanting to be invisible for fear of failure and embarrassment [from four years of age].

Education is a very emotive subject for parents—God knows I’ve shed tears over the seven years since my family and I started on the learning journey. And it doesn’t escape my sense of societal guilt that I am in a fortunate enough position to be able to afford to send my kids to a paying school that gives autonomy: A school where the teachers and the headmistress have an opportunity to teach the children to think for themselves as opposed to teaching the strict confines of the national curriculum where targets must be met and tests must be taken far too regularly.

Until I met Mogg, education just didn’t make sense. The term ‘sausage factory’ springs to mind, churning out obedient office workers where most creative thinkers are made to feel like they are a nuisance. Then I met Mogg. I found her by looking on the internet for ‘non-selective school in London’.

One came up. It was Dallington.

Two weeks after my kids started at the school, I found out that my nine-year-old son was dyslexic [not difficult or stupid, simply dyslexic].

A few more months down the line, I realised that my son could be happy at school and wanted to learn, but hadn’t really been given the time or care in order for this to happen. A

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year or so later, my son has made up the two years of learning he lost out on by trying to become invisible to teachers, plus the year he has just completed there and managed to pass entrance exams and be offered places at two schools. And, along with his brother and sister, is happy and thriving, both socially and intellectually, without pressure or worry. This is all thanks to Mogg and the teachers at Dallington. I just wish everyone had a Mogg to nurture and inspire their children through primary school. She is a very special woman, which is what this magazine is all about, with ideas that should be heard. I just wish she would shout them a bit louder, but I guess that I can do that for her here. Visionaries are not always great at marketing themselves. I do hope Michael Gove can hear her polite but strident dissent and isn’t too proud to see just how wrong he is!

Shirt MARGARET HOWELL

LUELLA: Let’s start on a simple thing, like how this little magical school resides quietly off the radar.

Because I’m amazed about how I landed here, I don’t quite know how it happened, how I even found such a special place. You know, it’s a very incredible place.

MOGG: You don’t when you’re inside it.

Maybe not.

MOGG: You don’t.

I found it purely by chance on the Internet after a period of feeling really down about how difficult and competitive London schools were.

But here, it’s all very subtle and you just seem to do your thing, you don’t shout about it, and that’s why I guess you’re slightly nervous about doing an interview because you don’t shout about it.

MOGG: This is the sweat I get when I go to the dentist!

ABI [Mogg’s daughter Abigail Hercules]: It’s not that bad!

But I wanted to do this interview because I feel it’s important for people to know that there is another way of educating children and what you do here feels sadly unique. A unique child-centred education that’s dynamic and inspiring.

MOGG: I think you can write the article without me then!

But I want you to explain it because it saddens me that such teaching methods aren’t more prolific.

I’m sure there are others, but schools with this kind of teaching philosophy seem very few and far between—privately or within the state system.

MOGG: You see I find that hard to

believe. I just wanted to set up an environment where every child was valued and if that meant educating the parents because they hurry them through childhood, so be it.

And we work a great deal with the parents, some of whom love us to bits, others who hate us. But they have choices. We would also say, if a child is born in a uniform, we would say this is the wrong setting; it’s never going to become a selfregulated autonomous learner if it’s still saying, ‘Where are the pencils?’ when they’re in the same place as where they were yesterday. We want children to be independent thinkers, challengers, and valued, really. And every child¬—I was saying to the people who visited this morning—every child has a hidden talent. And you can only do that by understanding the individual and the journey that they’re going though. And you have to be honest and you have to level with them and you have to get them to look back at where they were and how far they’ve come so they value that journey, they understand why they’ve made that journey— that it’s for them.

Because this term [preparation for entrance exams], most of the parents are in meltdown and I’ll say to the children, ‘Leave the parents to go into meltdown; its your exam and you know what you’re doing and you’re the one who’s going to get the results, so just leave them to chill out!’ And every single child has said, ‘Aah my mum’s a nightmare at the moment! She’s so anxious! She thinks she’s got to do an interview as well!’ [Laughs] Well… some do.

But I guess for parents it’s very, very stressful because there isn’t much choice so you become rather desperate.

MOGG: And also children have to reflect parental ambition, academic ambition so that the parents can boast about their child’s success, but they’re actually saying, ‘aren’t

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I clever? I have given birth to this really clever child.’ And I know: ‘So how many times can you boast about it? Once?’ you know? And, ‘This is your child’s success. It’s great that you’re happy about it but, however, your child has worked hard to be successful. But also some parents are very reluctant to believe that there is a variety of schools out there—you just have to keep looking.

And the child knows. They go into that school, they feel comfortable, they’re happy to be left there. Even though the mother wants them to do [some other school] or whatever.

The school that chooses the child is usually the right school because they’re also creating a community. I mean, if it’s academic, so be it; if it’s sporting, so be it; if it’s creative….

ABI: And could you speak a little about the value of creativity perhaps. And how we value creativity as much as we value academic achievements, so that children who perhaps don’t have the academic ability can absorb all the creative arts. Can you say something about that?

MOGG: It’s a lack of fear. It’s also experimental. It doesn’t matter how it looks at the moment, we’ll find areas that you can develop and you can work on. Those areas are good.

You said something as well that I was reading, about how you can’t separate creative and academic thinking because they are intertwined. But I see, it’s obvious, the academic is much more valued in most schools than the creative.

But in order to get the best out of both, you kind of need both.

ABI: But the whole notion is that creativity is not as easily graded.

MOGG: Which you can with a maths test. And I am thrilled with our children who, even though they find it difficult—because some of them

even have difficulty manipulating a pair of scissors—they have to keep challenging themselves until they’re successful. And to me that’s part of the reward, that they’ve looked at the problem, they’ve overcome the fears of failure, and they’ve achieved success.

Which is huge, isn’t it?

MOGG: It’s enormous. I mean, the boost to self-esteem is significant.

Right from an early stage. From early mark-making, it’s important.

However, they have to have a reason for doing it. Even if at that time, we’re the ones who know the reason for doing it. And after they’ve done it, you can say, ‘that’s exactly what was in my mind. And you took up that challenge and look at what you’ve done, it’s brilliant.’ So it is challenging the whole way along, but we do it surreptitiously.

ABI: But you do also teach us all to challenge.

That’s what I was thinking because you’re certainly not a ‘softly, softly, whatever you want’ kind of person. I mean, you’re direct and the children grow to respect that.

ABI: And painfully honest. There is a strange misconception that because of the atmosphere at Dallington, there is this relaxed atmosphere that means there are no boundaries.

MOGG: Or assuming that each child comes with a ready-made box. And can be put on a conveyor belt and experience the same journey. They don’t.

ABI: And also I suppose it’s easier to see the boundaries in the classroom if you walk into a classroom which has desks in rows and all the children are sitting there. Because it’s immediately presenting some kind of structure. But when you see

children sitting around who look like they’re in a social club but they’re actually doing their maths, or writing a story, that they’re all hanging out together doing it, people jump to the wrong conclusion.

I remember coming back after my visiting day going, ‘Dave! They sit on the floor!’

MOGG: But there are boundaries that they really understand by the time they reach middle school. They have to be accountable to how they spend their time. You know, it’s a very loose-timed framework. This morning for instance, I really felt that they had to draw the daffodils before the flowers died. But drawing is mathematical because they have to look at the paper and proportion exactly.

ABI: It is maths. They’re not sat there doing a test paper for an hour, but they’re painting daffodils, and it’s incorporating maths and so many other things.

MOGG: And the careful choices of the medium. So when they’d finished those pastel drawings, I said, ‘I’ve had an idea’—and they always go, ‘Oh God!’ —‘I’ve had a brilliant idea, let us use all the wallpapers. We were given some amazing handmade paper from the photographer up the road. Beautiful papers.

You create fantasy flowers and a beautiful container.’ And they’re off doing it. Nothing to do with what I should be doing this morning.

But you have the luxury of that I suppose...

MOGG: We have. It’s wonderful because we can—we’ve got two groups in year one at the moment and quite a big year two but we’ve got that flexibility. I mean, upper nursery is going to be well subscribed in September.

So will you have to start getting selective?

MOGG: No, no. Do you know, I think it is wonderful for children to actually see differences in other children and to value those differences as well as valuing themselves. Understanding themselves is the most important thing, and then to value what somebody else is bringing... And not everyone is a brilliant swimmer, or a brilliant athlete or a brilliant mathematician. There’s something there to value. And parents do tend to see it as an academic passage.

ABI: Well it’s very difficult when that’s ‘the system’.

That’s what I’m saying, that luxury, you get to choose that they can learn maths through daffodils.

Because before my kids came here, they were in a primary school in Cornwall and I received the same photocopied homework year after year after year. And it’s not their fault. I don’t blame anyone. I was angry when I left… and this is the frustrating thing about education.

MOGG: We have to challenge Ofsted all the time because my paperwork is chaotic or non-existent. Likewise, when I was being observed and interviewed for that teaching award, I’d had chemotherapy on the Tuesday. They came in on the Friday and I was bold as a coot and fat on steroids. It was quite funny.

[Mogg was awarded the Ted Wragg Lifetime Achievement Award, with Distinction, in 2009 by The National Teaching Awards.]

Doesn’t sound very funny!

MOGG: It was funny, wasn’t it funny?

ABI: Yeah well I found you a nice turban on the Internet.

MOGG: Ah the turbans were amazing. You know these women who wear wigs and you feel as

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though you could go over and flip the back! However expensive they all come off.

ABI: You weren’t wearing a wig.

interested

It’s insane, isn’t it?

ABI: Well there are three-year-olds doing exams for South Hampstead.

in

MOGG: The only person I really frightened was the postman when I forgot to put it on when I went to the door.

Tell me about the Ofsted. On the Friday they came in…

MOGG: Yes and I say to them, ‘I actually know what I’m doing.

There’s absolutely no evidence on paper, but there is with the children.

You go and ask them what they’ve learnt or what they understand that they didn’t understand this morning.

That’s what it’s about.’

And were they willing to do that?

MOGG: Oh they were brilliant, they were the best people ever, and they were so nice. I wish we had Ofsted inspectors all the time like that.

ABI: Well do you know it makes me think that maybe we should be keeping video records of what we achieve here? What the children are doing, because you ain’t going to write anything down in that respect for Ofsted.

MOGG: No. But you’ve been doing this for so long. Do you ever get frustrated that the system never changes?

MOGG: No, I’m quite prepared to stand up and challenge. And I don’t care if I haven’t done the paperwork.

I am delighted that we helped make lovely young adults. We do. And successful young adults. And it is developmental. Some people are not prepared to wait. They have to be ready by the age of ten or by the age of seven to enter a different setting.

MOGG: Three?!

because they can think for themselves and have confidence.

What they lack in years of manic prep they make up for with common sense. I couldn’t believe how calm Kip was through his exams. So how did it all begin?

That’s just so upsetting.

ABI: It really brings tears to my eyes.

Have we got it wrong in this country? In lots of European countries they learn to read at seven and do very well.

MOGG: Probably the only criticism I would make of that is that children with differences, with difficulties, are not identified early on enough.

So strategies can’t be put in place.

Because we can look at these threeyear-olds. Can they walk up the stairs? What’s their physical level?

Are they centred? All those elements have to be looked at in the child that somebody’s handed over. Usually trusting that we’ll get it right but still prepared to probably have the child tutored because they’ve still got this academic outcome in mind.

Because you sort of have to conform; in here you don’t have to do that thing, and you feel very lucky, but it still exists. And when they move on, you panic because you’re up against children that have been prepped since the day they were born.

MOGG: Of course. We have to compete with the outside world. We also have to compete when the ten/ eleven-year-olds are taking an exam for year seven; we’re competing against the existing schools. It is very tough for them and they have to have self-belief.

But that’s what I find incredible, that these kids have a happy, relaxed learning journey and when the dreaded 11+ time comes, they all buckle down and sail through

MOGG: It all began because Fabian [Hercules—Mogg’s son] is severely dyslexic. I mean, really severely. You would never know now.

ABI: No—he’s got so many strategies.

MOGG: He’s got wonderful strategies in place. He’s got a master’s; he lectured at Glasgow School of Art doing support for students with dyslexia who’d never been identified.

And I sent him to the local state school because politically I actually thought it should work.

Totally, it’s a tough decision to make.

MOGG: This was; he was born in ‘66.

So it was the early seventies and every day, Fabien would build with Lego—this was even after year two— and do drawings from them and I’d go in at the end of the day and say, ‘That’s a lovely drawing. Where’s the model? Have you taken a photograph or kept it somewhere?’

Oh no, it had to be broken up and put back in the box so after a while, no one could recognise that he had… he couldn’t write his name when he was eight. And I rang the local divisional district inspector’s office and I said, ‘Look, I’m going to take him out of school. I’ll teach him to read and write and I’ll send him back again.’ Which I did. The only thing is, he learnt to read from The Observer’s Book of Trains! The Observer’s Book of Planes and The Observer’s Book of Ships, which I hated.

Why did you hate them?

MOGG: I hated them all! Not a story

in sight. Facts, give me the facts!

And he learnt to read from those little tiny Observer’s books. So he went back to school when he was in year six. They had the grading then.

You were a ‘one’, ‘two’, or ‘three’.

And he came out as ‘one’ because he could do the verbal and non-verbal reasoning—by then he was quite literate. And he went to the local school that was just converting to a grammar school. And one evening, he was hung upside-down by his feet over the big… there was a huge sort of area in the roundabout.

MOGG: I ask all of them, ‘Are you a stay-at-home mum? Are you parental?

There’s not many.

ABI: Well you say you have sleepless nights trying to balance the idea of what is essentially a fee-paying school. The only way you can create the environment you want to create means that it has to be fee-paying, which means that parents have to go and work in order to pay the fees, which means the parents aren’t with their children. So it’s catch-22.

What?

It’s all catch-22.

MOGG: And these boys were hanging him over the edge.

ABI: You see but the thing is, in the education system that we have, they would say, ‘Oh well that’s an obnoxious child.’

ABI: That’s why we try to maintain a low fee structure, but it’s hard.

And they kind of shame all of that out of you. I don’t want to get negative but when Kip got here, he had been shamed out of having any opinions, but it has been built back up again.

ABI: That’s what happens.

MOGG: No whatsoever.

self-esteem.

None

And it’s the same for any little square peg, which is so sad. It must drive you mad because it does me and I’m not even in the industry.

ABI: Within the school grounds?

So Abi was a refuser!

MOGG: Outside.

ABI: In the roundabout, literally?

MOGG: Yeah. And he said to me, ‘I don’t think I can go back there.’

I said, ‘Well I don’t either! I said, ‘How about doing an exam?’ So he did an exam, and one part of the exam was French, and I said, he’s just going to write his name on this paper, but hey, he hasn’t done any French and he was offered a place at the City [of London School for] Boys, which surprised me. So he stayed at the City Boys and then he went to Newcastle and then he went to Glasgow and then he went to Goldsmiths [College], so he’s now teaching in a girls’catholic secondary school.

Art? MOGG: He’s teaching art, yeah. And Abigail, she was a school refuser.

Happily, I was a stay-at-home mum because I believe passionately in parents parenting.

That’s really interesting; we’ll go back to that in a minute.

MOGG: She went to the local nursery and part of the school was along a very busy road and I’d hear the doorbell ringing at about 12.10pm and Abi would be on the doorstep having crossed a busy road and walked home.

ABI: On part of the A1!

MOGG: They have to own their own learning. What’s the point of having it laid on them so they can just forget it? Or practice just for an exam?

Have you ever thought about continuing after 11 [Dallington is primary only]?

MOGG: Well, I’m too old now; Abi could.

Oh my god!

ABI: Having a secondary school?

MOGG: Aged four. And I’d ring the school and I’d say, ‘Abigail’s come home again.’

Over the A1!

MOGG: A lot of people have asked that.

It’s possible though!

MOGG: I’d say, ‘Would you like me to bring her back?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh no, leave her at home!’ I remember twice in front of an Ofsted inspector, the teacher was drawing ducks on the board and she said, ‘How many ducks are there?’ And you said, ‘None.’ And she said, ‘Oh come on, you can count those ducks, let me hear you count!’ Abs said, ‘They’re not ducks, they’re geese.’

Taught to challenge from a young age!

ABI: It is possible and I’d always like to involve people who are practising.

So practicing artists working with children; practising creatives who have a career but teach because it’s great when people are really in touch, isn’t it. Certainly when the children are at the stage where they’re going to go on to being in a profession.

Absolutely.

ABI: So that’s all about resources,

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but I see that happening in the future. I’d love for that to happen.

Stick around mum!

I know, you’ve got so much more work to do! And I think your mother/daughter relationship is really interesting as well. It’s a passionate family business; no, more than business—a passionate philosophy for education.

MOGG: Why? Because Abigail is very committed to...

ABI: Completely committed.

To Mogg’s way of educating.

MOGG: Because she experienced it.

ABI: Exactly that. It’s because I experienced it that I know that it’s a gift. Honestly. I feel really emotional when I speak about it because I feel so empowered and centred by the upbringing that I had from my mum, at home, and also at Dallington and it continues. And it continues because she continues to educate me, and do I ever teach you anything mum?

MOGG: No, you just nag! [Laughs] ABI: Anyway, I continue to learn and I continue to challenge, but it’s really not challenging to speak about Dallington because it’s in my bones, and also if you experience it, and as I watch other people experience it, it just continues to enthuse me, and to speak with you about it and to see how enthused you are about Dallington is just wonderful.

Everyone I speak to is like that.

MOGG: Not all of them! Some really hate me; no, seriously.

But you’re going to have haters when you have such a strong opinion.

ABI: Exactly; you put yourself out there.

MOGG: No, I’m just telling the truth.

“...that luxury, you get to choose that they can learn maths through daffodils.”

-Luella

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Love Is No Small ThinG

by Meghan Kenny

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IT WAS HALLOWEEN night and I was dressed as a 1980’s prom queen – white satiny dress with a diagonal hem, bangs sprayed hard as a rock and feathered like a tidal wave, light blue eyeliner and Zink Pink lipstick.

I didn’t look hot. Val was Jimmy Connors in tight white terrycloth shorts and an Izod tee, terrycloth wristbands, a black bowl-cut wig, and a cheap Prince racket he found at the Youth Ranch. We drank Peach Schnapps and Vodka and were fuzzy warm from the booze and from jumping around to Men At Work in honor of my costume. We were waiting for our friend Tim to call to let us know where to meet for the night.

“Jenni,” Val said, “Do the construction sweep, darlin’.” This was my dance move, where I stopped traffic with one hand and redirected in a grand sweep with the other.

We did the construction sweep for minutes and then Val started swatting my ass with his racket.

“Lob,” he said, “this Prince and your sweet butt make for a good lob.”

Val and me had fun together. I loved him, and hoped we’d get married and have a baby and live our lives together in his little bungalow house in Boise’s North End. But after three years of dating, I was getting anxious of waiting for him to decide if I was someone he wanted. I was thirty-five and he was thirty-eight. How long did we have to wait? What is it in us that keeps hope? That makes us think maybe, just maybe something will change?

I taught fourth graders about reading and writing at a rural public school in southern Idaho. Most of the kids were first generation Mexicans and South Americans. Their parents came to the land of opportunity, they came to plant and harvest and haul onions and sugar beets and soybeans in this part of the country.

They lived in migrant camps and were poor, but didn’t know they were poor. Not in Wilder, Idaho. Some of them had come from California, some were born in Idaho. Some had been to California or Mexico to visit, but hardly any place else. Sometimes

they didn’t leave town. They didn’t even know what was outside of Wilder, beyond the three blocks of crumbling whitewashed buildings that housed a Mexican restaurant, a hardware store, a barber shop, and a post office. Boise, 45 minutes to the east, was far. It was bright lights, big city. Boise was the shit, and every time they asked, “Miss Lopedi, did you come from Boise today?”

“I did,” I’d say.

“You live in Boise?”

“I do.”

“You married, Miss Lopedi?”

“No.”

“You’re too pretty to not be married,” they would say. “How old are you?”

“That’s a secret,” I told them.

I’d given them my age before, but they always forgot, which was a good thing. To them, I could have been sixteen or forty, and it wouldn’t have mattered, I was older and older was old enough to be married.

“Miss Lopedi, do you have a house in the Boise city?”

“I have an apartment, and a cat who lives with me.”

“That’s cool,” they’d say. “That is so cool. We want to visit you in Boise someday.”

The phone rang. When Val answered his voice went suddenly high and soft, and I knew it was a woman. I felt like a big wind entered me. He cradled the cordless between his neck and shoulder, and walked into the basement. I shuffled to the edge of the stairs. He laughed as if he and whoever was on the other end were old friends and my head felt light with anger and I shook, like my arms and legs were wires, a pulse of electric cords gone haywire.

I opened up his refrigerator. There was a jar of mayonnaise, a jar of dill pickles, a pitcher of pink guava drink he made from a frozen can, two eggs, and a block of molding Gouda. He had half a bottle of Absolute in the freezer.

down in numbers, down into the valley for food, down from the mountains and sharp rock ridge lines and canyon cliffs. They came down every year and always made a safe trip, but last year was different.

They walked out onto the reservoir where the ice wasn’t thick enough to hold them, fell through, and kept coming and falling into the water and dying. They froze and the ice froze back up around them.

Their bodies were half submerged, visible through the thin new layer of ice, and from a distance they looked like seals lying curled on a beach. Their antlers were above the ice, sticking out like tree branches.

The forest service tried to block them. They set up alternate routes, but it didn’t take. They tried to scare them away, and that didn’t work either. What drew them to the reservoir? The elk were dying and stuck and we all wondered what would happen come spring, come the quick thaw from a strong sun in late February.

I imagined swimming in summer, elk laying at the bottom of the reservoir under the dark of the cool water, like giant sleeping fish. I imagined them still there, bodies turning into bones in the quiet, the cold coming back, and the water getting ready for another freeze – the ice like a lid, keeping the world and the sun from reaching them. I hoped the elk knew better this year. I hoped they’d take a different path.

Val’s footsteps came up the basement stairs. A block of light entered the yard as the door opened and he peeked out.

“Who is she?” I asked.

He took small, slow steps like a tiptoe toward me, and then stood and looked up at the sky with his hands in his pockets. “I met her last night. I didn’t expect she’d call.”

“What the fuck is your problem?”

“I don’t have a problem. I can do whatever I want.”

“You know, Val, I think I saw your face in one of the carved pumpkins smashed

“Don’t mind if I do,” I said, and pointed my glass toward the floor, toward him in the basement. “This is a great party. Do I want to dance? I’d love to dance,” I said to the refrigerator. I turned on some music, this time Ah Ha, but instead I leaned against the wall and sipped vodka.

I felt sad and old. I was only thirty-five, but I felt I’d missed something along the way – necessary information on dating my friends seemed to know – when to stay, when to leave, how to get what you wanted, how to get your man to commit. I was honest and naively hopeful about love yet there I was dating a thirty-eight year old man with secrets and lies. A man in his basement talking to another woman on the phone while I stood in my stupid outfit in his kitchen, waiting for him to choose me.

I walked down into the basement. He held the phone away from his face, his palm clamped over the receiver. “What?” He brushed his hand in the air for me to leave, and walked into the laundry room.

I wasn’t a desperate woman. I wanted my life to be noticed by someone, I wanted a witness, I wanted to be a witness.

It was simple – I wanted love. I wanted to thread my life with another’s and make something for ourselves. Love is no small thing.

I smoked cigarettes in the backyard. It was a clear cold night and the stars were shiny blue dots hanging above me. Our carved pumpkins glowed and flickered by the back door. My pumpkin had long slender curved cuts like peony petals falling all over, and Val’s was a work of art – he was a painter for starters, and had special blades and exacto knives and knew how to use them. He’d carved the head of a dragon and its body and tail swept around the orange globe. With the candle lit, the dragon looked like it was swimming in the dark. The doorbell rang from kids coming for candy, but I stayed outside, my silly white dress reflecting the candlelight like a big moon.

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alongside the road earlier.”

There was a party at the house behind us, across the ally, where women threw fire.

They tossed and waved batons of flames in the air. They danced around in shiny black flapper dresses to music that sounded like it was being broadcast over a loudspeaker from Morocco – flutes and drums and brass instruments that sounded hot, dusty and exotic – music that charmed snakes and animals in trees and brought birds down from the sky. Their yard was packed with friends looking on while drinking beers and standing in groups, some shoulders touching for the first time, others long in love. You could always tell.

A car screeched and revved through the alley. The driver wore a rainbow wig and a red clown nose, and beeped and waved as he passed by.

“A tragic comedy, this is,” I said aloud, to no one in particular. “A sad sad string of foolish events.”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Jenni. You’re so goddamn serious about everything.”

The phone rang again. The cordless was in the basement. I moved to stand in the doorway. He stood in front of me. The pumpkins’ light flickered against the grass and the side of the house.

“This is serious,” I said.

“Move,” he said. “You’re in my way.” He raised his hand and I flinched. He wiped his mouth on his wristband.

“Don’t say that,” I said. “Don’t ever say that again. What are you doing?”

He folded his lips in tight and shook his head back and forth. “I’m going out. I’m getting out of here.” He shoved past me into the house. I heard him clinking glass in the kitchen, moving plates around in the sink, and then the front door slamming shut.

I stood in the back yard and waited for Val to return. I waited for him to explain all of this, or tell me something, anything.

I thought maybe he’d say, I shouldn’t have talked to her or I love you or even It’s over for us, and I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry or I’m a liar and a sneak and I wish

you’d figured out sooner. I wanted any tiny explanation or apology.

I should have seen this coming, but I didn’t. I should have left him when he started playing poker games in secret basements until 4am, when he began falling into a debt he couldn’t get out of and drinking more steadily than ever, but I was naïve. I’d never met someone like him before. I didn’t know these things were problems until they’d already happened over and over again and I was already in love and in too deep. He was a man on the edge, rocking on the precipice, which was exactly where he wanted to be. He loved his dark secret life more than anything, more than he ever loved or would love me. I couldn’t save him because he didn’t want to be saved. He was exactly where he wanted to be.

I wasn’t the kind of person to make a scene. I was a teacher. I had a reputation to watch. I had to be someone who could take care of fourth graders for a day. Someone who didn’t drink by themselves four nights a week, and drive around until three in the morning to see whether their boyfriend came home or not.

Who does that? I did that. I’d lost my sense of normal.

Every day I went to school I thought that if these kids’ parents knew who I was, what I did in my personal time, and how I was not in a good place, they wouldn’t want their kid near me. But I was a pretty and pleasant young woman. I dressed well, was articulate, was gentle with the children, and the kids got away with much more when I had a hangover. Some days they thought I had a cold and didn’t feel well and they hushed each other, acted like little adults, putting their index fingers over their lips and whispering, “Ms. Lodepi’s not feeling good. Hush it up.”

It was those days I wished for the kids to not ever know what I knew about how twisted and irrational love can make us, or how sick we can make ourselves over love, or losing love. I hoped they wouldn’t find themselves in a place like mine. It

Val’s bedroom and lay on his bed. I turned on the bedside lamp. It was an old lamp and had a small metal cylindrical shade.

Val had a taste for vintage, and the1950’s was his favorite for clothes, furniture, everything. His room had a musty smell of things old and used, a smell that didn’t come out with hot water and soap.

Val shopped at every Salvation Army, every Youth Ranch and every second-hand store he could find. I loved old things and the search for treasures too, but I hated doing it with Val, because it was about his image and his image was vintage and his image was anti-new, anti-corporate, antinormalcy, which included marriage, babies, owning a house or car or anything over thirty dollars, and perhaps having sex with one woman at a time. It would have been one thing if he was twenty and going through a phase, but he was thirty-eight.

He was a grown man still fighting for his image, still holding on to his cool, afraid to be known. What he saw as his freedom I saw as him moving closer and closer toward the loneliest place in the world.

I opened his desk drawer. My heart beat fast and hard. This is bad, I told myself, you shouldn’t do this. I touched things, delicately, making sure everything I picked up went back in its place. Matchbooks, pens, no.2 pencils, small scraps of paper with over twenty phone numbers: Bridget, Noel, Katy, Lisa, Annie, Amy, Mary, Angela.

A list of names right in front of me of who he’d fucked or would fuck.

He had a giant map of the United States on the wall next to his bed. It was an old scroll-style school map with the states colored bright yellows, pinks, oranges, greens, and a pleasing bright blue for oceans and lakes. The R was missing from Harbor, and it read Harbo. I ran my foot over the thick paper, and pointed my big toe at Idaho, “You are here,” I said, and dragged my foot across the map to California. “But maybe you belong here in the sunshine.” Then I slid my toe to Montana. “Or here you could work on a horse ranch, which you’ve always wanted to

was strange how I could guess what kind of adults the children might become, and guess at the decisions they’d make and the lives they’d lead. Julio would be a middle manager at Best Buy and wear cheap button-down shirts, Isobel would be a veterinarian, Brett would be a Meth dealer, but there were always surprises.

I never thought I’d end up being this kind of person. I don’t think anyone did: midthirites, unmarried, childless, living in a small apartment, in debt and barely scraping by. Did my third grade teacher, Mrs. Rubin, look at me all those years ago and think, Jenni’s going to be unlucky in love and date men who are unstable and unreliable, and she’ll be a teacher wearing worn out clothes. Did she think, poor Jenni?

People clapped and whistled in the firethrowers’ back yard. I walked through the alley and up to their fence. I didn’t feel strange standing there watching because it was a sight and everyone was watching. The batons of fire traced circles of orange in the dark, they were beautiful serpents of light flying through the air. The women were young, their dresses sparkling, their faces shining. I used to be like those women. I wanted to be like them again. That night, I ached for youth. I didn’t want to be young as much as have the feeling of hope and possibility in front of me again. I’d tucked it away someplace, and I couldn’t remember where.

The yard glowed and looked as warm as a cozy living room. I wanted to step in, thaw out, be among the happy others. There were three women with fire, and the one in the middle, Starr was her name, looked my way. She looped a large circle of fire around the crown of her head, a halo, and winked.

I was freezing and my fingers were numb. I went inside and held my hands under warm water in the kitchen sink to get some feeling back. All the lights were on in the house and I went through and turned them off. I locked the doors, went into

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do.”

I slid my toe and circled it around New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts.

“Or here you could be close to family and friends. People who know you. People who give a shit.”

When I asked my mother for advice, which was often, she told me you could love someone, and love them fiercely, but that that didn’t mean you should carve out a life together. She said, “Jenni, you can love all sorts of people, but just because you love them doesn’t mean they’re good for you.” And now I understood what she meant. Now I knew that love wasn’t all you needed, love didn’t conquer all, and that bad love could make you crazy and lonely and a lesser version of yourself. It could almost make you drown and never resurface.

It could make you disappear.

I slid my big toe down toward Connecticut and New York and felt lonely and far away from everyone and everything that mattered, from people who understood where I came from and who knew a better, happier version of me. A me before I began circling in this stuck place, with a stuck man, whose problems I couldn’t fix and had no business trying to fix.

The doorbell rang. I walked through the dark house to the front door and peeked through the side window. Two kids stood on the stoop: one wore a sheet with cut-out eyeholes and the words I AM A GHOST written across the chest, and a girl wore a black leotard, cat-ear headband, and had black whiskers painted on her cheeks and a pink circle painted on her nose.

The ghost opened the screen door and its hinges squeaked and creaked.

“No one’s home,” the girl said.

“Worth a try,” he said and knocked three heavy knocks. “Their pumpkins are lit.”

The girl moved toward the window where I stood in the dark, looking out at them.

She looked in, right at my face. We were nose to nose. She looked into my eyes and her breath fogged up the glass but she didn’t see me. She was young, had so much to discover, and for a moment, I remembered being that girl and imagining all the

lives I might lead: adventure, romance, glamour, greatness, Paris, Vietnam, Wife, Mother. I had been excited for my life, and to see who I’d become, and I felt all I had become was a woman-in-waiting, afraid to ask for the things I wanted. The girl pressed her nose to the glass and backed away, proud of her print on the window.

“Maybe they’re asleep,” she said, “but I’ve left my mark.”

“I’m not asleep,” I whispered and then said more loudly, “I’m not asleep.”

“Hello?” The boy said from the other side of the door. “Did I hear someone in there?”

“Yes,” I pushed my body up against the locked door with a thud. “But who am I? What am I? Hoooo ha ha ha ha!”

“I don’t know,” the boy said. The girl giggled a high rolling giggle like a twittering bird in a tree. “Why don’t you open the door so we can find out? This ghost could use a Snickers or Mars bar.”

A cheer rose from the backyard firethrowing crowd – hooting, hollering, and clapping. Val didn’t have any candy for trick-or-treaters, because Val was that kind of guy, the kind of guy who didn’t like to give anything away – a cheap, selfish, lying sonofabitch. What did it say about me that I’d loved him all this time and what did that make me? Blind? Stupid?

A woman willing to be treated badly for a scrap of affection? I walked back to Val’s room, opened his desk drawer, and took the pieces of paper with the women’s’ names and phone numbers on them.

“Come on,” the boy said and knocked on the door. “We can’t wait on this doorstep forever.”

I slid the chain off its groove, and unlocked the bolt with a click.

“Ooooh, I’m scared,” the girl said.

The door sucked open. “Nothing to be scared of,” I said, and flicked on the porch light. They squinted at the brightness. “No more waiting.”

“Trick or treat,” the boy said.

“Nice dress,” the girl said. “What are you supposed to be?”

“That’s Jenni, she’s a nice girl. Hey Jenni, you’re a nice girl, aren’t you?”

Old Man Dan yelled over, his voice muffled under his mask. “ I’m the best girl,” I said. “I’m the best girl this two-bit piece of shit will ever meet and he never even knew it.”

The pumpkin lay splayed on the cement. I dug my heels into its heart and fucked up the slimy center until it looked like something else entirely, something unrecognizable and something I could walk away from.

“I’m a prom queen,” I said. “Listen, I ran out of candy, but I have something else for you.” I held out the pieces of paper in the palms of my hands, like offerings. “These are secret numbers.

These women have special powers and have the answers to the universe.”

“Like witches?” The girl asked.

“Something like that,” I said.

“Cool,” the boy said. “Like psychics or seers. I’ll take one.”

“You can have them all,” I said.

They opened up their pillowcases in front of me and waited. I held the pieces of paper above each pillowcase and let them fall like feathers – the weightless names of strange women drifting into their lives –women they might call and ask about the galaxy or their parents’ divorce or Geometry or if their crush will ask them to the winter formal. Women who might hang up on them or who might give them the answer they’ve been looking for all their young lives.

You never know what will happen. That’s the strangeness of life.

You can’t know what, when, how or why any one thing will happen. You can’t predict a thing.

“Thanks, lady,” the ghost said.

“Go find the answers to the universe for me,” I said.

They walked down the sidewalk to the house next door and I stepped outside into the night and shut the door behind me. I bent down and lifted the tops off of the pumpkins and blew out the candles.

I picked up the smaller pumpkin first and threw it at the side of the stucco house. It smashed into bits and stringy orange pumpkin insides stuck to the white wall. The kids turned and watched me from next door and Old Man Dan, the neighbor, poked his head out and waved. He wore a Frankenstein mask. I picked up the bigger pumpkin and placed it firmly in the middle of the porch. I stood on top of it until it caved in, and then I stomped and kicked until it was flat and broken.

“I think the prom queen’s crazy,” the catgirl said.

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Ring DAVID MORRIS

For Her Own Good.

Photogr aphy by LI Z C OLLINS Styling by LEITH C LAR K

Earring CARTIER

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Ring DIOR FINE JOAILLERIE

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Necklace DAVID MORRIS

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Hair: Mark Hampton at Julian Watson Make-up: Kay Montano at D+V Management Manicurist: Steph Mediola at Caren Photography Assistants: Tom Weatherill and James Perry Hair Assistant: Tuesday-Rose Mullings Make-up Assistant: Anna Payne Fashion Assistant: Kristina Golightly Digital Operator: Claire Fulton at Spring Digital Model: Rosie Tapner at Storm Models

Rings BVLGARI

Earring CHANEL FINE JEWELLERY

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reflecting glory Photogr aphy by b r a d l e y ru s t g r ay interview by z o e k a z a n

“Watching these films—shot on video, with untrained actors and sometimes poorly recorded sound—I felt that rare moment of recognition: Without knowing me, these artists were speaking directly to me.” -Zoe June 2006, my agent called me about an audition: ‘Bradley Rust Gray and So Yong Kim. They’re a couple, both directors, they produce each other’s work.’ To prepare, I watched their first films— Salt (2003) and In Between Days (2006). Watching these films—shot on video, with untrained actors and sometimes poorly recorded sound—I felt that rare moment of recognition: Without knowing me, these artists were speaking directly to me. I wanted to give them something in return. Later that night, with zero artistic skill, I constructed a tiny book, a collage that corresponded with their current script, Jack and Diane.

I glued together pictures from magazines, postcards, crushed eggshells, snippets of my hair.

The next day, I handed them this rubber-cement-redolent craft bomb, hopeful that they would see, even in its clumsiness, my heart reaching out in kinship.

Instead, they seemed bewildered, nonplussed. I auditioned and left, mortified at how weird I must have seemed to these strangers.

Seven months later, Brad and So contacted my agent. Turns out, sometimes weirdness pays off, or at least piques some curiosity.

Brad asked if we could go for a walk. This was January in New York; we trudged for hours through icy lower-Manhattan, winding our way to the South Street Seaport, where So met us for coffee, their infant daughter strapped to her chest. That meeting started a conversation that ultimately birthed The Exploding Girl (2009), a film Brad wrote and directed, So produced, and in which I starred.

So and Brad have become some of my closest friends. We read each other’s scripts and stay in each other’s homes; my boyfriend and I have watched their daughters

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grow up. In this time, So has become a role model for me—a woman pursuing her artistic vision, balancing domestic and business partnerships with her husband, while supporting her family and raising her children. Yet, she is disarmingly self-effacing when it comes to talking about her own work. This is part of the reason I find So inspiring: she comes across as human, fallible, even as she deftly juggles all these aspects of her life. Also, she has an extraordinary life story. In February, I asked her to sit down and talk about the peripatetic, unconventional path she has taken to become a director, writer, producer, professor, wife and mother. These are excerpts from that conversation, conducted at 11 am in a booth in the near-empty restaurant of the Paramount Hotel in New York City.

B u s a n , So u th K o r e a .

Zoe Kazan:

Tell me about where you were born.

So Yong Kim:

I was born in Korea, South Korea— Busan, which is the second [largest] city. And then I grew up about two hours in the countryside… because my parents divorced and my mom went to the States, and so we were living with our grandparents. They were farmers.

And it was you and…

My sister and my brother. I think I was five or six, my sister four and my brother seven or eight.

How did you end up leaving your grandparents’ house?

Well, my mom came [to the United States], she emigrated first, in ’73, when she got divorced. She came to the States, on her visa, to be a nursing student… Then she was able to bring us in after that, as she got a job as a nurse. It took her about five or six years.

You didn’t see your mother in all that time?

She was able to come and see us once.

Do you remember flying to the United States?

Oh yeah! We were living in the countryside on a farm and so it was like going from the middle of nowhere—rice paddies—to… Well, we took a bus to Busan, and from there we took a train to Seoul, and from there we took a bus to the airport and then we got on an airplane and we flew to L.A. I think the whole trip probably took three days or something… My grandfather took us. He put us on the plane. By that time I was eleven, my brother was thirteen and my sister was nine.

Was this the first time you’d been on an airplane?

Ever, ever. I mean, I can’t even tell you. On the farm that we lived with our grandparents, we didn’t even have running water. We had to go to a well to pump the water. So to go from that to getting on a plane to LAX was, like, shocking.

What did you do on the plane?

Nothing. I think we were kind of, like, holding onto our seats.

Lo s A n g e l e s , C a l i fo r n i a .

When you came to Los Angeles, where did you live?

Korea Town. [The apartment] was a studio. It had a little bedroom. My mom had a nightshift and so she would sleep there in the daytime and we would sleep there at night.

The three of you in one bed?

Yeah, well, my sister [and I] in the bed and my brother on the couch.

How did you learn English?

We didn’t learn any English the first year because we were in Korea Town, so all our friends were Koreans and all the kids in the class were Koreans. Then my mom realised that we weren’t learning anything, so she moved us out of Korea Town to—very far east, like Inland Empire… San Bernadino, you know? She found a small house and moved us there and put us in the school that had no Koreans. Just Hispanics. [Laughs] So you were doing all your schoolwork in English, while simultaneously trying to learn the language. How did you manage that? I mean, that’s a huge challenge.

The way I passed my exams at school and was able to take better classes was to memorise, like, visually, what the words were. That’s how I took tests. I would put patterns on words… and then I would translate

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everything into Korean and memorise. That’s how I did it. It’s crazy. That’s all I could do. I did that until, I think, my sophomore year in high school, because I didn’t pick up on English until then. Except math, because math was, like, so easy for me.

What gave you confidence during that time?

Well, my mom was basically—my mom was very much like this: she would never tell us, ‘You have to do good at school.’ It’s just expected.

And if you bring home a B, then you’re dead.

Where did you end up going to college?

I went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo…

When I was applying to college, I asked my mom if I could go and study art and my mom said, ‘No, because you’re a woman. You have to learn about money, and you’re going to go study business. You can go to any college you want, but you’re going to study business and learn about money, and then I’ll pay for your college. And afterwards you can do whatever you want.

Why did she think that?

You know, I think she thought I needed to know how to support myself. And that translated in her mind to learning about accounting and business and economics.

Do you think that was because of her experience with your dad?

Yes, totally. She was like, ‘You have to go and do something practical, you cannot do art.’ And my brother had already gone to art school…

So she didn’t have that attitude with him?

No, totally double standard. [To my brother] she was [puts on cooing voice] ‘Ooh you want to go to Parsons Art School? Okay, go

ahead!’ I really didn’t enjoy studying business at all, and was like, ‘Okay, I just have to put my time in, cram exams and pass through it.’ And, you know, I’m glad she made me do it, actually.

Why are you glad?

Because… After I graduated, I worked for a bank for a year and then I saved money and I applied to go to [the] Art Institute [of Chicago]. I was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna start over. I’ll show you Mom! I’m going to do this on my own.’ So I went there and I realised it was good that I’d gotten this very basic college education… [Now] I always think ‘Oh that’s like common sense,’ but I probably picked that up when I was snoozing through classes. If I’d gone to art school when I was 17 I don’t think I’d be doing what I’m doing now, because I would have just spent four years being like, ‘I’m an artist!’ and then after that it’s like, oh, you can’t really do anything with it.

What happened to your grandparents in Korea? Did you see them again?

Well, yeah, they emigrated in ‘86 to LA… But my grandfather did not want to live with us. It’s a really complicated relationship, my grandfather and my mom. They do not like each other. It’s really complex… My grandfather had problems with women, with girls, he didn’t treat his daughters very well. He didn’t let my mom go to school. He thought she should stay home and help out on the farm. So she kind of rebelled against him and ran away from home to go to school.

How old was she when she did that?

She went for junior high. So she was about 11 or 12 or something.

Wow. No wonder it was so important to your mother that you and your sister get a serious education.

Yeah, she was like, ‘You’d better go!’

C h i c a go , I l l i n o i s .

You went to the Art Institute on a scholarship. Do you think you were interested in visual art partially because of the language barrier you experienced?

Yeah, because I think that’s how I learned, all those patterns and visual references, you know, to take tests and stuff. I was never a good drawer.

But you must have been good enough to get into the Art Institute?

I was okay, but they let anybody in.

No, they kind of do. So I studied there and I did fine ink drawing and stuff.

And then my figure painting teacher was like, ‘So, your colours, your palette, it’s not working.’ Like, my paintings had no depth. I couldn’t mix the colours, it didn’t work. I had this hippy painting teacher, she was really nice, and she was like, ‘Why don’t you try something else?’ So I got into experimental filmmaking and performance art. Which was perfect, just right.

You met your husband, Bradley Rust Gray, the summer before you went to grad school. Tell me about that.

Well it’s really funny. Our friends were getting together to do this project, taking over an abandoned building in Chicago. They asked Brad and myself to join the group, as they needed more people. That [was] where Brad and I met… He was like, ‘Hey, I deliver muffins and yogurt. Do you want to come with me on my round?’ I was like, ‘Okay.’

And that was our first date—really, an unofficial first date—at about six in the morning, delivering muffins to [the] west side [of] Chicago, to a super-dangerous ghetto.

Why was he delivering muffins in the super-dangerous ghetto?

That was his job for the summer! I swear to god, there were flippedover, burnt–out cars on the side streets and stuff and the owner of

the store would have to come out with a gun to escort Brad into the store. And I was like, ‘You’re the only white person here, I’m the only Asian person and there’s abandoned burnt-out buildings around… and who’s eating the muffins and having yogurt?!’ It was crazy. That was our first date.

N e w Yo r k , N e w Yo r k .

While So was at the Art Institute, Brad went to the British Film Institute in London, and then to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, for film school.

They maintained a long distance relationship through most of their twenties. After graduating from the Art Institute, So taught for a year at the University of Virginia before moving to New York.

By this time, did you know what you wanted to do with your life?

No. I had no idea.

But Brad knew what he wanted to do, right?

Yeah. I’m glad he went through [USC], no matter what he says, because I feel like we got a really solid foundation in traditional filmmaking, which became really valuable for both of us. Because I learned through him. So if he didn’t have that education, then I wouldn’t have gotten it either.

So, you moved to New York…

I applied for a MFA program at NYU in performance studies, and they were like, ‘Okay, you can come.’

So I moved from Charlottesville to New York. I went to the first day of classes and it was truly awful. I was so depressed and afterwards I was like, ‘No way, I can’t do this, this is not for me.’ I just went to the registrar and I withdrew all my stuff and I got a refund and then I went and circled for a job.

What job did you get?

I got a job at an Internet company, as an office manager. They were like,

‘You’re really overqualified, but do you want to be our office manager?’

I was like, ‘Yes! I need a job!’ [The] Internet was booming at that time.

So I started as an office manager, but I became a producer, and then I was running the company for a little bit. They were giving me a lot of money. I moved from that company to a bigger company, [Razorfish] in Soho. Then Brad finished and we were going to move to L.A, but we thought, ‘That doesn’t feel right…’

[Uncle Willy’s] wife. We picked a flower from the parking lot.

Because you were making so much money?

Exactly. Razorfish wanted to open an office in Japan and so I was like, ‘Brad, should I apply for this?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah.’

When we were [in Iceland], we were like, ‘It’s really nice. Why don’t we move here and just make this film?’

So I went back to Tokyo to work and Brad stayed in Iceland and looked for a place for us to rent or buy.

And then—this bit happened superfast—my contract in Japan ran out so I came back to the New York office and then at that time Brad found a place for us to buy that had two apartments, so we could rent out the basement—that would cover the mortgage. So then we both came back to New York, sold everything, packed everything up and then we moved to Iceland.

How old were you at that point?

I was about 32 or something.

Brad hadn’t made a film yet?

No, not yet. He was still working on his script and we were just living in Brooklyn. And it was so like, why not?

And you had not written a script either?

Not at all. It’s not even in my brain at all.

I love that. So, you move to Japan?

Yes, to Tokyo. I didn’t speak any Japanese and neither did Brad.

Were you married at this point?

Yeah, we got married on the way from USC. After [Brad] graduated, we were driving his stuff from LA to New York and we stopped off at his uncle’s house and he married us.

Had you planned on this?

No! We were drinking some whiskey and his uncle [Willy] was a minister, and he was like, ‘I can marry you guys tomorrow,’ and then the next morning we, like, put some dress and a shirt on and got married.

Yeah, it was great.

Who else was there?

The janitor [of the church] and

S a l t : F r o m T oyko , J a pa n to R e ykj av í k , Ic e l a n d .

After a year of ‘a crazy cycle of work’ in Japan, Brad and So flew to Iceland for vacation. This trip served a double purpose: Brad had written a script called Salt, set in Reykjavík, and they wanted to see how feasible it would be to make.

Oh my god. Was there any part of you that was like, ‘I’m 32 years old and I am throwing away my career’?

No. I didn’t care. I think the best thing that we did was to move to Japan for that year, as I realised at that moment: it’s just Internet.

You know? And people are like killing themselves and I’m killing myself working like a dog. They were paying us very well, but it’s like— it’s just a website, it’s just a video game! It didn’t mean anything to me. I realised that anything is up for grabs. So let’s go to Iceland and make your film.

How did you become a producer on Salt? Explain that to me.

SYK: Because we couldn’t get money from anybody [to make the movie]. And then we were like, ‘Okay, we have a little bit of money that we saved, so why don’t we just

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make it on our own?’ We bought our video camera in New York, before we went to Iceland, and we went there to shoot it ourselves.

You put all your own money into the movie? Did you ever get any of it back?

Yeah, I think so. [Brad] won an award, I think in New Zealand or Australia or something, that paid back for the budget that we spent.

What was the budget?

Well, we had to buy the cameras, and then I think the budget on that film was in total $22,000 or $25,000 at that time, in total.

It seems like, over and over again, you have jumped into new situations and learned as you went.

Do you think you have a special ability to do that?

I think a lot of people do. It’s just a part of your brain or muscles. If you don’t practice that—thinking on your feet or being challenged or rising to the challenge—if you don’t practice those kind of muscles, then [they] kind of stay dormant. The way we were raised—I mean my sister also has that ability. But because we moved around so much when we were little and we were going from house to house, and finally to our grandparents’, and [then] emigrating to the States… I think she went the opposite way, where she just wants to stay in one place and have that stability. Whereas for me, I enjoy being challenged and learning something.

I n B e tw e e n D ay s : fro m N e w Pa l t z , N e w Y o r k to T o r o n to , O n ta r i o .

After travelling the world bringing Salt to various film festivals, So and Brad sold their house in Iceland.

With the proceeds, they bought a cabin in the countryside of New Paltz, New York, where they lived until 2006. During this time, So wrote her first movie, In Between Days—an intimate portrait of Aimie,

a Korean girl, newly emigrated to Toronto, who is secretly in love with her best friend, Tran.

I’m going to ask you a really personal question: at this point, were you thinking about wanting to be a mother? Had it occurred to you?

Yeah, we’d been trying to have a baby since the last year we were in Iceland. We were trying all this stuff. We did all the treatments, all the tests and stuff, and it wasn’t working. And we were like, ‘Oh man, we missed the boat.’

I’m just wondering because, in your thirties, that’s when people start to say things about fertility...

Oh my god, I went for a checkup with my gynecologist between Iceland and New Paltz, and the nurse was like, giving me that look and saying, ‘Well, you’re [over] 30. If you’re thinking of having a family…’

I was like, ‘Don’t give me that lip. I haven’t figured out what I’m doing with my life yet…’

Let’s talk about In Between Days.

Having produced a movie, what made you turn to writing?

I think I thought, ‘Heeeey, making that film was really easy! I could do that!’ Like, ‘Hey, I’m going to write a script, actually.’

You shot the film in Toronto. How did you find Jiseon Kim, who plays Aimie, and Taegu Andy Kang, who plays Tran? Did you audition them?

No, I just picked them out of the crowd. I met Tran at a nightclub in Toronto, like an Asian nightclub. I was like, ‘That’s the kid!’ I asked him to be in it and he was like, ‘Okay.’

He was totally wasted and he didn’t remember, but I got his number and I called him the next day.

And Jiseon Kim? I was putting flyers up in Korea Town in New Jersey, and she was working in this café where I was putting

a flyer up. She was a cashier and I thought, ‘Oh, there she is.’

They’re both non-actors?

Yeah, yeah. They were the best things about the film. I kind of thought, instinctively, that I had to make sure I had this connection with them and that they feel safe, no matter what scene they were doing. And then if that was there, everything else would fall into place. And that was really true. Because I didn’t know how to do anything really, you know? Like, what coverage you’re supposed to have, what shots… The only thing I knew was what I learned in performance art, which is [that] you have to create an environment or setting where this performance can take place, where people can concentrate on their performance…

What was the budget of the movie?

Can’t tell you.

Tell me.

It was like, much less than $50,000.

Much less.

You returned to New Paltz to finish the movie. I know that you and Brad often help edit each other’s movies. Did he help you on In Between Days?

Oh no no no no! I was like, ‘Can’t you just, like, fix this?’ And he was like, ‘I could… but then you’re not going to learn anything and so you better do it. It’s your film, you shot it.’ The main thing Brad said about [In Between Days] was, ‘You know what, it’s going to be difficult. It’s okay if it’s a short film. You know, we shot it ourselves and we made it ourselves. You can make it like ten minutes, like the best ten minute film, if that’s what it is. Don’t worry if it’s not a feature. Just edit it however you want it, make the film that you want to make.’

So Y o n g K i m at 4 5 .

Over the last seven years, Brad and

So have made four films together: The Exploding Girl and Jack and Diane, which Brad directed; and Treeless Mountain and For Ellen, which So directed.

Lyrical and starkly unsentimental, Treeless Mountain follows two very young sisters in South Korea, whose mother leaves them with relatives while she searches for their father.

Undeniably autobiographical, the movie feels hyper-real and the performances So coaxed from the two child actresses is nothing short of miraculous. After the film’s debut at the Toronto Film Festival, A.O. Scott of The New York Times wrote, ‘I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a movie that goes so deeply into the world of childhood… So Yong Kim’s lens seems to be absorbing life rather than just recording it.’

For Ellen is set far from the world of So’s childhood, but traffics in similar themes of love and parental abandonment: a failed rocker (Paul Dano) returns to a small town to sign divorce papers and see his estranged six-year-old daughter again, before giving up legal rights to her guardianship. Kenneth Turan of The LA Times wrote of the film, ‘Kim is a gifted minimalist, someone whose mastery of emotional and psychological mood is complete and discreet.’

So and Brad now live in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania with their two daughters—Sky Ok Grey, born January 29, 2007, and Jessie Ok Grey, born February 1, 2011. In addition to writing her next script, So currently teaches at Bard College.

Will you talk a little about working with Brad? For women who are thinking about working with their partner… Like, I have worked with my boyfriend and sometimes I have real misgivings about it.

Other times, I feel like it’s one of the things that bonds us. What

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do you think the advantages and disadvantages are?

Oh, I think [the] advantages far outweigh [the] disadvantages.

How can we have a life together, if you’re passionate about something and I’m not passionate about it? I think it’s really, really great working with someone where you constantly share a discussion about it. I mean,

that’s all [that] me and Brad do.

There’s something about sharing what you’re passionate about together, as you get older, working on that together…

Are there any times that you think it’s not a good idea?

Oh it’s a horrible idea, yeah. It’s a horrible idea! I’m like, ‘God, there’s

no boundaries, there’s no stop, it’s crazy, it’s insanity.’ It’s a horrible idea. Make sure your readers know this. But—it’s totally worth it. It’s worth the effort. It takes a LOT of effort. I think people might think it’s easy, but it’s not. It’s actually extremely difficult. Every other fight Brad and I are like, ‘I’m not going to work with you again!’

Was Brad ever at all threatened, when you started directing?

No, he was never. He’s not, and I don’t think he is ever, to this day. At least I don’t feel like he is.

Do you think that the way that you need support from Brad is different than how he needs support from you?

Yeah. I think it’s a human thing— we both need, ‘You’re doing great.’

We need that positive support. The [difference] is that I kind of need somebody to make me feel—I mean particularly on set—someone who is very calm, and who can make peace with my anxiety. I need that. On set for Brad, he needs somebody who comes up and gives him a different push or ideas.

Will you talk a little about being a mother and being a filmmaker?

It’s really challenging. Just recently, we were shooting in Iceland for this [Miu Miu commissioned] project, which is only a short. We were shooting only for three days, but I realised, ‘Wow.’ It was such a wakeup call. Because after the shoot I’d come home and I’d have to do laundry and cooking and cleaning.

And so it was, like, never-stop, you know? And I realised that the next film, we need a really, really great helper, who can cook and stuff, because being a mother didn’t stop.

And I didn’t realise the difference between being in production with two kids versus one kid. I thought it would be the same thing.

What’s the difference?

It’s just so much more hard work.

Because Sky is seven, and she needs guidance and education. She needs more structure. We can’t just have her be with somebody who could take her to playgrounds anymore.

You need someone who [can] give them more food than doughnuts and hotdogs—which is what we had in Iceland, this girl just got her doughnuts and candy, because

she didn’t know how to cook, but we didn’t know. It was just a huge wake-up call. I need more help.

Now I know. Also, directing is such a funny profession in a way. It’s a great privilege, but it’s a profession where you can wait for a long time for your cast to be put together and your finances to come through, so it’s like a three or four year cycle and so in between your films, you’re out of practice, you’re not in shape. It’s like not exercising for four years and then you have to sprint a 1000-metre sprint or something. And you’re in this race with like 30 people. On day one [of filming] you are like, ‘Holy shit!’ You realise how out of shape you are, mentally, physically. It’s crazy!

Do you feel there’s a greater burden on you than on Brad, to do all the housework and cooking and stuff?

Yeah.

Why? You guys split so much of your other work. Why does that land on you?

Oh, I think it’s just tradition maybe.

My mom, even though she’s very strong—breadwinner and a mom— she made me and my sister clean up after my brother, like do his laundry, clean up his room and his bathroom and cook for him, and clean the house, vacuum the living room and stuff like that… and so I just can’t let go of that habit. Brad could just go to sleep fine knowing things are on the floor or the kitchen’s a mess; it doesn’t bother him. But I come home, and if it’s messy after a shoot, at midnight—if the living room’s a mess, or the kitchen’s a mess, I don’t want Sky or Jessie to wake up in the morning with it in that state. So I’m going to clean up and make sure they wake up in a house that’s cleaned up.

Knowing that your mother had different standards for you and your sister than for your brother, do you feel like you’re consciously

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trying to model a certain sort of behavior for your daughters? Like, are there gender things you are conscious of?

Yeah. I don’t want them to think that they just have to be pretty. I keep telling Sky, ‘It’s not the most important [thing] to be pretty. You have to study hard, you have to learn, you have to be smart.’ I want her to be able to explore everything that she wants to explore and not be limited by the fact that she’s a girl.

If she wants to be an astronaut, go ahead, do your best.

I worry so much about being able to be a mother— Why?! You’d be a great mom.

Because—I worry that my work will suffer for it…

No! I think it will get better.

Why? Because you’re going to have richer and bigger context. It’s sooo great.

Surely, your time is going to be shrinking a little bit, but in exchange you have richer and more texture in your life. It’s give and take. It’s balance, you know?

Recently, you’ve been more the bread-earner in your family, commuting twice a week to teach at Bard College. What has that been like for you?

I think it’s a little difficult. In the beginning, we were fighting more than usual, if that’s possible. And we are still fighting a little bit about it.

Is it harder on you or on Brad?

I think physically it’s harder on me, but mentally it’s harder on Brad. It’s hard [on me] because I am away from Sky and Jessie… Although I shouldn’t really say that, as I get one really good night of sleep a week, because I stay on campus at Bard. So I get one night of, like, oh my gosh, seven hours straight, no screaming kids… But I have

to say, I have learned so much about screenwriting [by teaching], because I had to teach myself [as well]. Because I think—I don’t know if I’ve said this previously anywhere else, but my weakest strength as a filmmaker is screenwriting.

That is crazy, So! No, it’s really true. I never really completely enjoyed [writing]. And if you don’t enjoy it, then it feels like it’s taking longer and it’s more painful. But [teaching writing] really trimmed down those emotions. It helped me overcome certain fears.

Now it’s becoming this really kind of joyful thing.

I would say that there’s a real sense of confidence about you as a person, but when you talk about your work, you’re always expressing doubts. Why do you think that is?

That’s how I work. My fear or insecurity about not knowing everything about being a filmmaker and not being good enough as a filmmaker always makes me prepare more, research more, think about what I could do better with the next film, or the next day… I just have to do it, because I feel like if I don’t have those nerves, then maybe I will get lazy.

Who are some of the filmmakers that you really look up to?

I look up to Claire Denis, she’s a fantastic filmmaker. Andrea Arnold… I love [Ingmar] Bergman and [Yasujiro] Ozu. And then I love the fact that Paul [Dano] gave me Make Way for Tomorrow, the film. I think [Leo] McCarey did a fantastic job of conveying these two elderly people and the relationship to their children, which I am trying to mimic in my next film. So I feel like those [are the] films now that I am completely obsessed with.

As a woman, how do you feel about getting older?

Oh, I do worry about getting older.

That’s why I’m doing my next film about an old mom. I think it’s terrifying and that’s why I’m making that film.

Why do you think it’s scary?

I don’t know. Because I’ve never really cared about how I looked, or my image or like, my face or something, but recently, as I get older, I’m like, ‘Oh my godddd, I’m getting so many wrinkles!’ And suddenly I’m like a teenager, trying to cover up my pimples or something.

What else is scary about getting older?

Because I had Jessie when I was 42— Oh my god, afterwards your entire body gets so tired. […And] it took a lot longer [at an older age] for my brain to recover from the baby brain—so that’s worrying. Also, you hit 45 and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, I have to sprint forward! I have maybe ten good films, ten good stories left in me.’ My goody bag has only ten films, you know? So I have to start making them. Your mortality really starts to catch up with you. I have to start thinking about it now a lot more seriously. Seeing Sky and Jessie, I’m like, ‘What’s it going to be like for them when they are in their twenties? Where am I going to be in my life with them? Am I going to be able to see their children?’ It gets much more complex and pressing, in a way.

Do you feel, as you have grown older, like your appreciation or understanding of your mother has changed?

Yes, tremendously. I don’t think I really realised or appreciated everything that she sacrificed for us. I just always kind of took it for granted. Of course, always verbally I’m thankful, but I don’t think complete understanding was there really until I had Sky. When Sky was about two or three, I [was] like, ‘Hey, I have a mom, she went through all of this!’ It’s been really eye opening

for me. You know, my mom packed up her old house, the house that she was living in for 28 years, and she moved to an apartment. We were in Berlin [on an artist’s grant]. I felt like such an inept daughter, because I couldn’t do anything to help her.

Because she’s going through this huge transition of downscaling, on her path to this last phase of her life in a way… It’s this whole area that’s terrifying, but I feel like it’s something I should try to understand now rather than later.

Why? Because I feel like I’m going to learn from it and it’s going to make me a better daughter and a better mother in a way. And it will help me cope with my later stage in life better too.

I just want to understand, in detail, that phase of life. Isn’t that crazy? It doesn’t sound fun at all!

Finally, what is your hope for yourself as a filmmaker?

I hope I get to make those ten films before I’m done. That’s my hope.

Someone asked me what was the best compliment I had ever gotten on a film, and I say: It’s Sundance 2006, and we were at some diner at Utah, after the first day of screening In Between Days. [We] were having breakfast and this couple came up to me. They’re in their mid-60’s, older, very old compared to us at the time, and they were Mid-Western or locals or something. They were like, ‘Excuse me, did you make that film In Between Days? Yeah, we went to see it last night and I just want to tell you that you really made us remember our teenage years and thank you so much.’ And I just thought, oh god that is so amazing, how this couple who are a totally different age group to the main character, and different nationality, drew something very close to their own memory and connected to the story. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s fantastic.’ I think that’s what film can do.

Zoe Kazan is an actress, artist, playwright and screenwriter who lives in Los Angeles.

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Nine Lives.

Having just arrived in London, Anh Duong talks to Violet about her new show, old work and off-kilter beauty. The real deal in a landscape of mediocre multi-hyphenates, Duong has wisdom to share—and no time for jet lag.

Photogr aphy by e r i k m a d i g a n h e ck Styling by l e i t h c l a r k INTERVIEW by DAV INA C ATT

All clothing by HONOR. Hair: Lacy Redway. Make-up: Deanna Melluso at The Magnet Agency.

Fashion Assistants: Hannah Elliott and Kristina Golightly. Production: Jessie Lily Adams.

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If we can start at the beginning: You had a diverse cultural upbringing, your mother Spanish, your father Vietnamese, and you were born in Paris?

Yes, my mother is Spanish; my father is Vietnamese. I was born in Bordeaux and grew up just outside of Paris.

Tell me about living in a place between that kind of divide?

When you come from a background of mixed cultures, especially today, you feel comfortable everywhere and nowhere. At some period of time I was feeling Spanish, then at another period of time, Asian, then French. So it has always been the worst dilemma where you are the most comfortable. When I moved to New York, I definitely felt like this is the place I can feel at home, because it is nobody’s home and there is that

sense everyone is welcome. Europe is more past-oriented. So, growing up, you always have to look for your roots. But I think I am actually in a very lucky position today because the world has changed so much.

The world has become so global, it doesn’t mean anything whether you are from here or there. Now it’s such an advantage that I have all these different roots. I was at dinner and met the ambassador of Spain and he wanted to exhibit some of my work because I was Spanish and then later I was introduced to someone interested in doing a project in China because of my Asian background.

You’ve adapted successfully with the changes in your world…

Yes, exactly; whereas my parents

moved through it in a much more traumatic way. There was the war; my father grew up during [The] Indochine [War], he was sent to French school and then had to find his place being comfortable in France—that was during the late 50s.

Were there any experiences from those early times that have gone on to inform your work and creativity?

Well yes, so much so—it is hard to know how deep and far it goes— but the sense of trying to find your place and expressing yourself has definitely informed my work. One thing is for sure: I found it difficult to express myself and emotions, and it was not something my parents were encouraging either. I felt the world was scary to do that, so I developed an internal life and I think that’s

where all the work is coming from.

And the painting was the place where I could express anything and it was totally safe and permitted there.

Now, do you feel you are still having to fight and break boundaries with the media?

Well, I think a big part of the journey as a human being is to find your voice and to express your feelings and I think as a child it is very challenging.

I think the beauty of getting mature is being more comfortable with yourself and finding the confidence to be you. And I think the struggle, and especially as a woman, is to feel right about how you look, how you are—definitely, in my case, going through different careers that have a very strong impact, and pressure to look a certain way, and ideas on perfection. So I think it’s a very common journey, as a woman, but we all have different ways of expressing it.

Do you think it has worsened for people growing up today?

I think it has; I remember growing up, when I was about 15 years old, I was very concerned as a young woman about politics or being engaged in intellectual discussion.

I wasn’t thinking about which bag I was going to get, which young girls now are. It seems the freedom for women has become for them to buy the bag they want. I am not against fashion—but it’s so odd that that’s become the key to freedom. It is quite scary when you see all these reality shows and you realise that is what they are promoting. I guess it’s a different time so it’s hard to compare. But I don’t think fashion should be the ultimate goal.

You moved to New York in 1988. What was your early career trajectory?

My first love growing up was ballet.

From age six, all I wanted to be was a ballerina. When I saw Swan Lake, I was obsessed. So I studied ballet

but my parents were against it, so it was a struggle. By 18 years, it was a bit late to be trying to do ballet on a serious level and I realised that I didn’t just want to be the big swan behind the curtain! I decided that if I couldn’t be the best, I would quit that idea.

Throughout my life, I’ve always believed it’s important to feel you have the best potential when you start on something creatively. So, I was then looking for a different form of expression and art was always what I was interested in—I felt I could have more flexibility.

No matter how great I think ballet is, it is actually quite contrived, as you are always being taught what to do, always being directed. At that time, I was partying at Le Palace— the equivalent of Studio 54 in Paris—and I met this photographer, David Seidner. He was doing all the campaigns for Yves Saint Laurent then and he asked me if he could do my picture. So I said, ‘Yes’, and that led on to doing the Yves Saint Laurent campaign for Vogue with Tina Chow. I didn’t know who she was at the time—she was the model and fashion icon married to Mr Chow—and we did these beautiful photographs. That’s how I started my modelling career.

What are your memories of your first venture into modelling?

I was terrified—terrified that they would discover I wasn’t right for it!

That they made a mistake! But I was used to it from ballet, my approach was similar; the positions—you had to stand there forever. So I used what I had learnt as a ballerina, but I never felt comfortable as a model.

As much as it was amazing to travel and meet all these interesting people, I never felt like it was enough.

That it wasn’t fulfilling enough?

It wasn’t like I felt I wanted to walk around saying, ‘Take my picture’,

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and I would feel good about it. I was just embarrassed. Looking back, I think to myself, ‘Why?’ I wish I had celebrated it a bit more. So I always saw the modelling thing as an in-between—I was going back and forth to New York during my modelling days—but I decided when I was 26 to quit.

But you were modelling a lot for Galliano and Lacroix—a very colourful time of fashion theatre, something that was generating a mood.

Yes, I feel so lucky; I feel I’ve hit all the right times. I think the 80s (I started in ’83) was one of the most incredible times in fashion.

I did Christian Lacroix for his first fashion show, Galliano for his show, and then Dolce and Gabbana too.

It’s unbelievable; such talent. I met them all when I was young, they were young, and we got on and said, let’s do a show. I remember coming to London; Hamish Bowles is a friend of mine and he was just coming out of St. Martins and so was John [Galliano]; I was doing my first fashion show season in London.

Hamish said, ‘You must meet John.’

We met and John liked me and wanted me to do the show. He was crazy, so creative. He put soap on our eyebrows so it appeared like we had no eyebrows, the hair was so insane—it was fantastic.

The designers were really taking chances then. Now, I am not saying people don’t have talent, because talent is always everywhere, but there is so much pressure to be commercial and make money. Back then, it was more of an art form; if you came out of a show and nothing sold, it was, ‘Who cares because it is beautiful.’ So that’s what was so fun about it. And I met Lacroix just before he opened his own couture house. It was exciting, but after a while, I knew I had to move on. I felt like I was a muse, inspiration to these people, but I wanted to own and make my own creativity.

La Trilogie de l’Absence III Oil on canvas 20” x 15” 2012

La Trilogie de L’Absence I Oil on canvas 16” x 12” 2012

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The idea of clothes as identity and a way to define yourself—do you think that’s something that has stuck with you from those days? Jewels, clothes, your collectibles, even your own Lacroix couture wedding dress are such a compelling part of your portraits. Do you think that is something that has been lost at all in fashion and society at large today?

No; whether you are on the street wearing a pair of jeans and sneakers, or in a nightgown or dressed up in a tuxedo, you are always expressing something. So, if I am painting someone else’s portrait that’s very important. We have a long conversation about what they are going to wear—I always want them to pick out things of different shapes, colour, mood, just instinctively, even though I make the final decision, as it says how the person wants to be portrayed.

How would you describe your relationship with fashion and art?

It’s funny actually because when I was a young girl starting, just coming out of modelling and had moved to New York, I was painting seriously in my own studio [this was in ’89]. I had my first show though in ’91 in the Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York; it was a lot of pressure but an amazing opportunity—but people knew me then as a fashion model. It was a real challenge at the time as I was really young and still looked like a model, and I felt a lot of prejudice against women and that you were criticised because you liked to dress well, or because you were a young woman who looked like a model. I felt angry about it; why do you need to look like a guy to be taken seriously? I thought it was very offensive. It was as if women were ‘free’ but you still couldn’t be all dressed up. But, at that time, the art and fashion world were very separated, looking at each other with contempt—the art world looked down on the fashion world and the

fashion world was intimidated by the art world but saying, ‘Look, we are having much more fun than you are having.’ So it was very competitive. And I remember feeling that I was between two worlds, but I wanted to belong to both. One was really interesting, one was fun, one was serious, one was glamorous and I felt, why am I being given a hard time for liking both? And when I had my first show, I had a piece in American Vogue: A young female artist all dressed up in Prada at the opening—but the art world considered it a bad thing. But now, things have evolved so much; you go to Art Basel and it’s all about promoting Missoni or whatever—I mean, maybe it’s a bit over the top. However, I was one of the first people doing this crossover; it was hard, I was young and I was a woman.

Do you feel the perception of you has changed as you have completely focused on art?

I think it has. I think it helps to get older, unfortunately! It’s so hard to age but the good part of it is there is less distraction; people start to take you more seriously. I am sure you feel that; it’s a challenge. I think it’s much easier now though; the world has come a long way for women.

But for me, that was the interesting part of the journey, standing for not playing that game, saying this is what it means to be a free woman. I’m amused now. With art and fashion so merging I look back and think, you gave me such a hard time, but see what’s happened!

You’ve crossed into film too; did you have a moment of epiphany when you felt like you wanted to try different creative careers?

Well film came from my love of the stage and dancing and from modelling days. Film was like the obvious thing I was going to do next after modelling, but then I came to the art world scene in the late

80s. I loved being around artists and painters—it was so amazing—I realised it was the life I wanted. It wasn’t a career move; it was the type of life I wanted. I realised as an artist I could express myself, do what I want, the way I want, be on my own, have incredible possibility to express. I wasn’t sure I could do that as an actress because it was like modelling—someone directing you, telling you how to dress, what to say… I wanted to direct and I thought the best medium for me to do that was through art. I also found that, in the end, moving into film from modelling wasn’t that helpful because modelling is about projecting to the camera and having a dialogue with it, whereas as an actress, you want to be completely unaware of it.

I think in life you need a mentor, people who open doors for you just by being. You suddenly meet people and see how they live and you are like, ‘Oh my god, I didn’t know this kind of life was possible. This is what I want to do.’

Even if you don’t put it down to one mentor, who do you think has opened your eyes along the way?

When I was a young girl, I was 15 years old, my French teacher at school was an incredible and well-known writer.

I would go to class and he would talk about poetry and writing—he had won the Prix Goncourt [the big French literary award]; he was only 29 years old, so he was a huge star.

I was so fascinated by him; I was mesmerised by seeing someone being so articulate, alive, artistic, and who had so much fantasy. I think that was my first experience of meeting someone who was a great artist, but as a writer. Then when I met Lacroix and John Galliano, these seminal designers—and other great photographers—their visions had a lasting influence on me.

Afterwards, when I landed in the art world, I met Julian Schnabel; he’s

the one who taught me that I had to paint. We fell in love, I was seeing him, he was very extravagant and hugely successful in the art world in the 80s—he still is. So for me that was a big turning point, where I realised what it meant to be an artist, as I had never been close to an artist until then—I was 27 years old at the time. And later, Diane Von Furstenberg has been a big influence on me as a woman.

Do you feel that through your creativity you’ve found better connections with women?

Absolutely; what is amazing with Diane is she’s been like the big sister I’ve never had. She has this incredible gift of really supporting people by believing in them, and

say through someone’s face. I like to paint people when they pose though, not from a photograph, but it’s hard to always be able to get someone there at the time you need it, so that’s how I decided just to paint myself. It was the natural thing to do, because whether I was acting, modelling, dancing, I use my body and my face, so then I thought, I’ll use myself again—as in, I am a tool. It was never with the intention of wanting to do a portrait of myself—I couldn’t care less about that. It was the opposite—using myself so I could express things that were important to me, conveyed through me, but about women in general.

I remember the earlier pictures— you in your Christian Lacroix couture wedding dress, riding the bike to the bay in your down time in the sun hat and flip flops; how do you see the development in the paintings?

One could say they are more painterly now. I think the work has evolved—it’s more open to the outside world. I think at the beginning the self-portraits were more isolated, just me. In this show at Robilant + Voena, it’s the first time I’ve shown the self-portraits and still lifes together. I actually consider the still lifes to be selfportraits too!

I am interested in the viewer having their own experience as they are

You said once that you felt these paintings were the deepest

“I was mesmerised by seeing someone being so articulate, alive, artistic, and who had so much fantasy.”

in this way she really opens doors for you. She sees you can do it and gives incredible confidence to other people—she’s very generous with her support in that way. I believe you don’t want someone to hold your hand as ultimately it could cripple you.

And how did you come to figurative painting and, in particular, focusing on the self-portraits?

I was always interested in painting human faces—it’s what I was always drawn to. I think it’s the best landscape you can find. I am always amazed about how much complexity there is and how much there is to

looking at the portraits, because I think, at the end of the day, we all connect through our human experiences—fears, struggles. We experience the world as we see it, so no matter what my interpretation is, when someone else is looking at it they will respond through their own experiences. I also use myself as I believe the reason I became a painter is because it’s from a need.

I meet young girls and boys today who say, ‘You are so cool, you are an artist, I want to be an artist,’ and I always doubt them. I think art isn’t something you want to do; it is something you have to do. I had to do art.

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connection to yourself; do you think your idea of self-image has changed since you started doing these paintings?

Yes, they reflect on my development.

I have presented a strong image of my life over the years—being photographed, public appearances, on stage… but the paintings to me aren’t how I wish to look, but more about how I feel. So it’s the opposite— there are many representations of me that have been seen, but the paintings…

They are a very private place…

Yes, it’s the most private place.

Things I would never show in public,

although the irony is I am having an exhibition! I feel you have to be slightly embarrassed though, you have to feel exposed, otherwise you haven’t revealed that deep place if it’s too nice and comfortable.

There’s such emotion that comes out of them; the more you look at the paintings, it’s like the subject becomes less important.

Yes, exactly, you start to feel the essence of the person. I always say I’ve never really worried about the likeness, but in my portraits, what happens is that people begin to look like the paintings, not the portrait looks like them! The painting starts to have a life on its own and becomes more powerful, rather than a representation of the person.

I think it’s important to be that way around; if the painting looks like the person, that is boring.

Yes, and I love the still lifes—the Prada bag, the shelf of colourful designer shoes. Is this a comment on our consumer world and objects women need as essential to their self-perception?

Well, it’s more I started still life because I like to paint what I see, what’s around me. As I look at that bag, I see a face. Every object has a human essence—maybe that’s a cartoonish way to look at life [laughs]. That’s how I see the world, everything has a spirit and essence!

I like to paint objects and give life to them and they become like people.

It’s a way to describe and to talk about the attachment we have to things, how close we are to objects and collectibles. My work is a lot about relationships; whether it’s between two humans or two shoes, relationship is the key to the world and to oneself. I am not judging whether it’s sad, good or bad, it’s more an observation and reaction.

It’s a very intuitive process.

Totally, as I want the subconscious to speak; I don’t want to be making

judgement or analysing my own head—I do that enough on a daily basis! I want to be free when I paint, so I translate whatever comes to my subconscious; sometimes it’s from a dream, or I wake up with a feeling… there’s no good reason but desire to want to do it. I had this really strong impulse to paint the bear—there’s two in this London show, Don’t Come Too Close, Don’t Go Too Far and The Art of Marital Bliss—and the first one I did at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York two years ago, which really stayed with me.

The one with the bear wrapped around you in your black lacy underwear—it’s like such innocence meets some kind of sexuality!

I know, you can read that selfportrait in so many ways—it’s the perfect symbol for the relationship with oneself too, as the bear is you, a part of you, your whole you, your inner child, your child, your lover.

So I thought it was a great way to convey all these relationships that I could make.

And conveying a lost childhood?

Yes, that too, remembering how you felt then, whether it was good or bad. As you get older, you realise how important it is, whatever you have experienced as a child, it stays with you for so long. Childhood is a very scary place; for me it was never innocent.

I feel as a society we are meant to shutdown our experiences…

Yes, exactly. I feel as an artist, my job is to help people feel—be moved, see beauty, be inspired. I think that is why art is so important, because we now live in a world where it’s so unacceptable to have any emotions, we have to be 100% on top of everything all the time.

So if somebody can feel something about themselves through the paintings, to me that would be the best compliment.

Do you think that through your different creative work, your perceptions of beauty have changed?

People always ask me, what’s a beautiful face to paint?, but I always say the painting has to be beautiful. It’s not about the person.

Usually what is crooked, uneven, not symmetrical in someone’s face is the most interesting part. Beauty cannot be measured, that’s why I feel plastic surgery is so dangerous.

Beauty lives in what is off-kilter— that’s magical, something nature has created.

I love the portrait with the book, How to Make Love to the Same Person for the Rest of your Life and Still Love it—it’s so pertinent, it feels so applicable to the world now.

It’s a book that’s been written by my shrink! She’s 75 years-old; she’s a genius.

Did you ever fear that marriage meant you could lose your selfidentity as a woman?

Absolutely—that is a struggle.

There’s a phrase by Giacometti, which I love: ‘The adventure, the biggest adventure, is to see something unknown springing out of the same face everyday.’

It sums up this struggle to keep up an interest and desire in the same thing. Whether in yourself, a relationship or a marriage, how can you keep going? We live in a world where we are constantly switching and there is so much choice—you can change your face, if you tire of your boyfriend, find a new one.

In this world, longevity isn’t a good thing. Everything has to be new, quick, fast—but what does that mean? In my work, where I really find beauty, interest and death is by just sitting in front of the same painting, by repetition, but we don’t have time to do that in this world, so it becomes very challenging.

In today’s world of short-lived model and muse how do you feel you’ve maintained longevity as an influential woman? Do you have a particular mantra to live by?

I am not trying to manage anything; I am just trying to be. It’s about staying close to my true self, the most honest with myself, not trying to manipulate or think how I can please. The journey more and more is from within yourself, not outside influences. Yes, I travel more and more, but as I meet more people, see new places, the key is to stay connected to myself – it’s only if I lose that connection that I am lost.

So I always try and listen to that inner voice, and stay authentic to it. Whatever fashion is, whatever people are expecting of you, whoever the new favourite person is—it’s got so crazy! I think you have to find your own self and voice and then things fall into place, and even if they don’t, you have yourself and that is the most important relationship.

You have just starred in a French independent film with director Laetitia Masson…

Yes, I actually met her years ago and she invited me to see her first film, En avoir (ou pas), screening at the MoMA in about 1995. I fell in love with the movie and we became really close friends. Then when she did her second film, she asked me to play myself; I was a nightclub owner based on certain aspects of my life through a different character! And then the third one, we’ve just done.

But most recently, I have been at Sundance for an American film, Appropriate Behavior, I did this year.

It’s written by a woman, Desiree Akhavan, who’s Persian and gay; she’s done this movie about her life—the struggle of coming out as a young girl—and I play her Persian mother who is very close to her traditions and sort of in denial of her daughter, who doesn’t want to deal with it. To relate to my 25 year-old

daughter in the film, I did very much look back to my younger self—those days filled with such insecurity and excitement to find oneself!

Do you find with films now you take as much as an intuitive approach as with your art?

Yes, as it all comes from the same approach and creative place at the end of the day. I mean, approaching a film, I would think about how I dress—not because I am being superficial, but because it indicates how you move, how you are being… it helps you understand what type of character you are portraying, why she would choose those exact shoes, for instance. And also, coming from art has better helped me play film roles; you want as an actor to express personal, private moments, people want to see you breaking down—that makes the best drama.

And in painting too, you want to paint something very intense.

So what did you wear for this role?

Well I did ask Giambattista Valli to dress me and I am lucky to be able to ask for his help. It was an independent film, so they were thrilled to have a big designer. I was playing an elegant, traditional woman, so within reason, she would wear these sorts of clothes.

You have also painted others too; I saw the Susan Sarandon picture in the group show on portraiture.

Can you describe your relationship between artist and sitter?

To me, it is like a love story. You have to fall in love with your subject because you are staring at them, portraying them, guiding them, so, ultimately, you are taking something from them. I suppose I would actually liken it to an act of love that’s not being consumed— they are abandoning themselves to you. I mean, you could fall in love—I did actually have an affair with one of my male subjects! Overall though, I do feel I have a special connection

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with people I’ve painted, even with objects—it’s a history we share. I always say to people who are shy of posing, ‘You don’t want to miss out on this experience!’

What advice would you give to a young person carving out a creative career now?

Well it’s hard to apply to a younger or different generation; generally, though, to stay true to yourself, not always follow other people and their advice. You can be inspired by it, but follow yourself. You can’t doubt yourself if people start pointing fingers at you—as ultimately, I suppose, what I was criticised for became my strength.

If you had one last painting to do, what would it be about, or which of your personal collectibles would you put in it?

Oh my god, I don’t know! I don’t think it would be about objects. It would be about a feeling. I think it would be pretty bare. I suppose if it comes to seeing your last one, it would feel like death, so I suppose painting out what death would be.

Contributing editor Davina Catt is a London-based journalist and the UK editor for Interview.

She has written for publications such as style.com, British Vogue and the Financial Times.

Glasses MOSCHINO

Molly, The Great.

Photogr aphy by S u s a n n a h B a k e r- Sm i t h Styling by Va l e n t i n e F i l l o l C o r d i e r Interview by L u e l l a B a rt l e y

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Earrings VAN CLEEF & ARPELS

Molly Parkin is one of the most charming, unique and ballsy individuals I have ever had the good fortune to encounter.

I expected someone far more intimidating and crass, like those achingly raw, beautiful, old women of 50s bohemian London I have occasionally met before. But she isn’t; she’s warm, soft, impeccably mannered and magically spiritual but with a total disregard for any of the modern day, politically correct, polite fakery.

She is unashamedly Molly: The working class Welsh girl who slept with film stars and aristocrats, drank with Francis Bacon, helped create sixties London, avantgarde fashion, the groundbreaking magazine, Nova, along with her own emotional, fervent art and poetry. She mixes honest, passionate, sometimes brutal language and manner with warmth and love; it oozes from her being and her surroundings, and she is highlighted—like her paintings—in a wild fluorescent pink glow. Her smile is naughty, sparkly, kind and thoroughly experienced.

To get to her home, one must pass through the concrete barrier of the world’s end estate, the sheltered housing she happily finds herself in post alcoholism and bankruptcy, past a long line of generic doors and through another to emerge into a mass of tangled colour and texture and beauty. Small, light, cluttered, every inch of the cramped room that plays host to art studio and living room, decorated with different textures

and bright colours: Curtains, beads, blankets, rugs, sequins, paintings, plants, pots, prints, silks, velvets, pinks, oranges, violets. Beyond the room is her garden, where this mystical old woman with twinkly, smoky eyes and pink lips serves ginger beer and biscuits under a canopy of trees and honeysuckle and roses.

It was not always this way; she used to live in a grand house next to the Chelsea Arts Club, which seems much more her natural, richly bohemian habitat, but it seems the material matters not a jot to her.

Colour, though—colour is the key to her existence, this ‘exotic bird’.

I think I loved her after the first half an hour; her warmth, her vitality, her honesty—you want to feed off it, learn from it, emulate it, bask in the stories that are frequently punctuated with ‘dear’ or ‘darling’ or ‘fuck’, as only those who lived out The Colony Room days under Muriel can say, all in a comical puton Welsh dairy girl accent.

You don’t meet such life and energy very often; she is the stuff of myth, a female character sadly lost to another age—an age of riotous behaviour—and sincerity and passion and an eagerness to squeeze all the juice from life.

It made me nostalgic for drunk geniuses in The Colony Room, for foul mouthed honesty, for visionaries with a couple of sewing machines in a house in Chelsea

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armed with beautiful cloth and no business plans or ambitions to see it on so-and-so, apart from the lovely old lady to whom it, at that moment, gave pleasure.

Molly is exciting and edgy but warm and safe, a strange intoxicating mix of selfish charisma and soft motherliness, who knows the secret of doing and showing no signs of slowing. For me, being a mother, a some-time fashion person and a writer with a painting hobby, she opened my eyes to possibilities. But really mostly just as a woman—a fierce, fun, energetic and creative woman. She kind of imbued me with a new energy to fight against bores and focus on doing what you love.

I’ve left everything in; I have tried not to tidy up her lengthy memories too much and I think it should be read in its entirety to understand the true vitality of this life laid bare and inspiring in front of us.

Get some ginger beer and biscuits, sit in the sunshine surrounded by colourful flowers, smell the roses and honeysuckle and savour this woman like I did in a magical council flat garden for three and a half hours near the King’s Road, London. The last of those mythical London creatures, she is a potent example of the best.

I must apologise for my gushes. I believe I’ve been enchanted.

Molly Parkin:

When people interview me they say they only want 20 minutes and then they are here two hours because I can’t stop talking.

Luella Bartley:

I imagine you’ve got plenty of tales to tell tightly packed into quite a few years.

Plenty. Plenty more, which aren’t even in my memoirs. I’ve just done a foreword for an astrology book that includes all the celebrated men that I turned down, like Cary Grant. I’ve never mentioned it previously, but I didn’t want to seem like I was showing off at the time of my memoirs. Now dear, can I get you a drink? Biscuit? These are my favourites [Molly produces a tin full of ginger biscuits]. It’s so lovely out

here, isn’t it? In my garden? [The garden is like a mini horticultural wonderland—real flowers, bright, fake flowers stuck in pots, a canopy of trees... You half expect the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland to come out and smoke a pipe with you. Instead, a robin, been with her ten years, who she thinks seems to signify the friendly and sweet nature of all her lovers, comes to sit with us and listen to our conversation.

By the time the little robin flees, I genuinely think it might be the spirit of all her ex-lovers, too].

I want to hear about you living in Cornwall because I lived in Cornwall for five years or more in St Ives.

It’s quite magical, isn’t it. I lived in North Cornwall where the witches are. Were you painting in St Ives?

No, I was writing all those novels then—comic erotica—and writing poetry. I was with a painter then, my

second husband; my first husband was an art dealer. Now I’ll go get you a drink, ginger beer? I drink this now because I used to drink a lot of Diet Coke, which makes me feel funny.

And then I had conversations with other former alcoholics, who agreed it affected them too, because I kept getting these migraines.

So now at 81, you have no vices left?

No, although someone said to me this ginger beer has a lot of sugar in it and I said, ‘I don’t give a shit, darling!’

And you have two children?

Yes, two children, but I also had a miscarriage and an abortion, so I have two also in the spirit world. So I’ll be meeting them when I’m up there in the not too distant future [laughs].

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Yes, I have three children here and a few up there in the spirit world, too…

Have you? Wow, no one has ever answered me like that—they’ve always looked a bit shifty!

No, I think it is right, and I think it’s important for women to talk honestly about loss and motherhood and mistakes and the spirit world…

They are still up there, you can really feel them. My miscarriage… I was in awful pain when I had that miscarriage.

That must have rocked you deeply?

Oh yes, it did deeply upset me.

Because at that time I was taking care of five children—my two daughters and Patrick’s—my second husband—three boys from his first marriage, so there were five little people looking forward to this child. But it wasn’t meant to be. I remember at that time I was fashion editor on The Sunday Times [after her Nova days] and my editor asked me what would happen when this baby came? He said, ‘You can’t be fashion editor and have a child’.

I said, ‘Why not?’ The other one, the abortion, was when I split up from my first husband. I had many admirers, but I had been a faithful wife; I was a chapel girl after all. I believed in marriage. I kicked him out because I found out about his infidelities—but a lot of English men thought infidelity was alright at that time. Even now, though, a lot of married men think infidelity is their right. For me, anyone who makes a promise in front of God and then goes against the line, ‘Unto each other, forbidding all else’ is extraordinary—you would have had to have my chapel upbringing to know how pious I was! I found it unbelievable that people would

make that promise to God and then not do it.

So are you religious?

I was very, very religious. Then I thought it was swank to be an atheist; I thought it was very clever as my drinking progressed, when I was in Soho, hanging out with Francis Bacon and influenced by that crew, in The Colony. Now, I think of myself more in spiritual terms.

I have to say, I find that time in London so wonderfully remote, although I’m sure it was harsh and filthy as hell. I remember going there as a 20 year old and being overcome with fear and nostalgia for the debauched romance and sharpness of it’s past.

Oh it wasn’t the same then.

That’s what I find incredible about you—all the most iconic, romantic moments in London’s cultural history, you were integral to. The Colony with Francis Bacon and Muriel Belcher, the sixties fashion scene with Biba, Mary Quant [a fellow student at Goldsmiths art school] and your shop on the King’s Road, then Nova and the new way it spoke to women in the sixties...

You talk about following your heart and I find that really interesting because, although women now have crazy, competitive work goals, I’m not sure how many of us follow our hearts and do what we feel. But there’s something very different about the way you’ve approached work and life. You are a painter, a writer, a poet, a fashion editor, a mother—it seems whatever flows through, flows through, a true, rebellious, free spirit…

Well, I think in my case I was very blessed by my upbringing; I was

growing up during the war, so I was a child through the Blitz. You never knew when a bomb might drop on your house, when you were all under the stairs holding hands, in the next moment you could have been dead.

So you always felt on the brink of death in the Blitz.

So you lived in London through the war?

Mostly, yes, but when I was seven, I left London because the worst of the Blitz was to come and I went to Wales to live more safely with my granny and grandfather. My granny was brought up in a castle but my great-grandfather was a gambler and boozer and he lost it all on the turn of a card; tragic, like a film… and she ended up in a hovel. My granny was very beautiful; all the women in my family have been very beautiful. This was at a time when everyone thought Ingrid Bergman was the definition of natural beauty, and my aunty Lizzy had that mouth and cheekbones and amazing eyes, so I was aware of people being beautiful and having flair with their clothes from a young age.

Two things happened to me there; I remember it was a big house and because my grandmother’s family had lost property, my granny was very keen on owning it. She was very frugal—we had to take the elastic out of our knickers every Saturday, ready for being washed, because the elastic is the first thing to go in the wash. Then after washing and drying, you would thread back in the elastic. It gave me an understanding of clothes, and purpose, that others didn’t have. There was the knitting circle and the sewing circle—so I made all my own clothes.

Also, I was sent off by my granny to collect all the rent from the local miners’ cottages she owned. That

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was my chore, although no one would answer the door as they couldn’t afford to pay, but I could see them hiding behind the lace curtains. It was a community though, so I had to keep going till they paid up. So I wondered to myself, ‘Can I find something else to wear to get their attention?’ I discovered the benefits of looking out of the ordinary early on! It was in my granny’s house that I discovered a massive treasure trove behind a closed door that nobody was ever allowed to enter. If you are frugal, like my granny was, and making your own clothes, you never, ever, throw anything away or any bit of material and all that magical stuff was in this room. There was also a mirror that I could fully see myself in. I knew I wasn’t meant to be looking at myself—vanity was a great sin then! And there were all of her clothes she kept from her youth, so turn-of-century, a dream world of beautiful silks, fabric, lovely things, stuff my mother would have

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worn, all kept beautifully and in perfect condition, so I looked in the mirror and started dressing up when going to collect the rents from the local tenants. They would come to the door to see what I was wearing that particular week and I had put together outfits including dresses with sequins, clog-like shoes, dance outfits, little handbags, hats, and went skipping down the street.

What a lovely image! A seven-yearold rent collector wearing sequins and hats!

Then my granny became ill and died and I was taken off to the seedy suburbs of London. I was devastated. Willesden High Road is the ugliest in Britain. I used to pray to God on my bike to and from school saying, please, please take me away from these surroundings. My reaction wasn’t normal—I needed the beautiful and spiritual to exist; my heart and soul still belongs in the Welsh valley. I remember back

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in Wales, my grandfather used to make me walk to the top of the mountain. He told me there was a gift at the top, I thought he meant there would be sweets, and when we got there, he said, ‘We are as near to God as we can be.’ He also taught me the lesson then to never, ever give up—wherever you are. My mother was a chapel organist, my grandfather was a senior deacon, my uncle a preacher in the Baptist church, and this is also something that made me interested in clothes— everyone looked immaculate. And there was always a particular ritual with the clothes worn on Sunday; like a beauty preparing for the ball, I had a beautiful dress, or smock, beautifully ironed, special Sunday knickers and vests, and socks and shoes, always a hat, little handbags, gloves—all for Sunday only, when you were presenting yourself to the Lord. So, you see, putting together clothes was ingrained in me from young.

What about school?

In London I had a lovely, buxom Australian art teacher who called in my mother and said, ‘I’ll fight for your child to go to art school’— my father wouldn’t have supported it otherwise. I took her tins of chocolates, as we were living in a sweet shop in Streatham at the time. She told my mother how gifted I was: ‘I will fight for her to get a scholarship,’ she said. Otherwise, I might have gone to university or maybe into journalism. I remember this wonderful journalist, played by Lizabeth Scott—an inferior looking Lauren Bacall—in a film, a woman who always tied her mac very tightly at the waist and wore a man’s hat on her head, and I thought, I would like to do a job where I could look like that. So that’s back to clothes— it’s all so interconnected in my story, you see.

It’s funny, as a girl I remember basing my career choices on what you got to wear. I always thought it terribly shallow of me but now I think maybe it is just thinking visually.

Yes. At 12, I queued up and waited in St Martin’s Lane, because I wanted the autograph of Margaret Rutherford—she was my style icon.

She had starred in Blithe Spirit.

When I saw her, something turned inside me and I knew the way I wanted to go with clothes at that age. I had never seen someone wear colour in that way—everything was geranium-toned, russet colours. She wore a cashmere top and a long, long skirt, flowing velvet cape to her feet, four or five strands of amber beads reaching her knees, and she wore a fine velvet turban on her head— everything was covered.

She had made so much effort in the detail. I thought, I would like to be like that; a person who smiled, called unknown little girls ‘darling’ and lit up everyone’s hearts. Her essence influenced me.

So you went off with a scholarship to Goldsmiths? Was it quite unusual for a girl to go to art college at the time? What was it like to be there?

Yes, very unusual—I was unique for doing so. I looked like a Degas ballet girl—long fringe, ponytail...Everyone wanted to paint me because I looked different from everyone else; I was a typical Welsh girl with such thick black hair, worn high up because it was so weighty, not a blonde. I wouldn’t do nudes though, as I was still the chapel girl deep at heart.

I can’t imagine modelling was really for you though?

No, no—but they were paying me for posing, including Clifford Frith [who taught at Goldsmiths]. His grandfather’s painting Derby Day was my father’s favourite painting.

I will say this for my father—he took me to galleries and sat me in front of Constables and Turners from a young age. I loved the spirituality of Turner’s painting—how he treated water, the yellows—but when my father went to the bathroom, I would nip into the other room to get a quick glimpse at Rubens’ flesh—I loved the fullness of it.

After college [Molly won scholarships to both Goldsmiths and Brighton School of Art], I got married; my mother approved of my husband, he was Oxford educated, swish, and ticked boxes. I had two daughters, with a little gap between them. I was teaching— back then a scholarship meant you had to spend time after, teaching— and painting freely for myself. My first husband, Michael, and I were in the centre of an intellectual life happening then in London—we used to go to The Royal Court every week.

He went into a television career— London Weekend Television—and I had paintings in exhibitions. The art critic of The Guardian came to a show and bought one immediately for the Contemporary Art Society, so it went straight into the collections

of The Tate. Now, my piece is in the Pavilion art gallery in Brighton, as that is where I went afterwards to art school. Everything was going brilliantly, until I then found out about my husband’s infidelity. I kicked him out. At that time the lower classes were coming into their own—The Beatles, Albert Finney’s Saturday Night, Sunday Morning were taking off, like my own background, so I didn’t feel I had to be posh anymore, I was coming along in the start of the 60s with scholarship people from RADA [Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] and really enjoying being integrated in it. I went up to my studio at the top of our house on Old Church Street, and I had all these canvases with many commissions—from oil paintings to portraits—to do. Suddenly I had a block; nothing would flow. It was because I was so devastated by my husband’s behaviour. There seemed no reason for it; our sex life was wonderful, he was in love with me, but at the time, I had started to be interviewed and getting attention for my work and he felt sidestepped.

I was the one everyone wanted to know and he couldn’t cope with it.

I was like a trophy wife but it was the time of the swinging sixties and he said he got caught up in it.

But when this creative block came, I was devastated because these people were waiting on me for their paintings. I had an exhibition at Liberty’s, who had put my work in the Regent Street window with the interiors; they put them there in the morning and by lunchtime they had sold out. At that time, people had developed a different attitude to interior décor—they didn’t have heavy curtains, carpets or wallpaper, they were scrubbing and sealing wooden floors, white walls, they liked all this Scandinavian furniture, so my large abstracts fitted the bill. I had a huge income from it but that went because I couldn’t paint anymore—nothing came.

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Feeling down, I went to The Royal Court—my friend was playing Lady Macbeth there. She had a tiny hat in leather, it sat close to her head.

I said, ‘I like that.’ She said, ‘I like what you are wearing.’ I had bought some couture material, found a seamstress, told her what to do and created this outfit, pairing it with a matching hat. So she said, ‘This is what you should be doing, Moll—clothes. You have such a way about you.’ So I thought about the idea a bit more. Then I met a man who made these great hats, which caught my eye, so I asked him around to my studio and said, ‘What can we work out together to go with some of my clothes;’ I’ve always had a creative gay bloke in my life!

He said, ‘I think you should meet someone named Barbara Hulanicki and her husband Fitz. They’ve just started this little shop ‘Biba’ and I am doing pieces for them but we need space to make stuff and you have a big house, so can I use your space to create pieces?’ I agreed: ‘Yes why not.’

I had an aristocrat after me at the time, wanting to marry me and live in his vast country estate. My mother said, ‘Do it’, but I didn’t want to marry again and not for money; now I wanted to be free. However, he kindly said if I needed the space in his house, he would take all my paintings and store them down in the country. So he did that and we had an empty room, which we filled with a lovely, exotic West Indian machinist. She would sew to music and, when it stopped, she stopped.

We were listening to Tom Jones’ first successful record, It’s Not Unusual, having fun, and people were coming around wanting all the pieces. And Maurice—the gay—said to me, ‘Have you thought of getting a shop yourself?’ I said I had thought about it but not put it into words, so that afternoon I walked to the estate agent at the top of the road—you could do that in the 60s— and asked

if they had anything going. By this time I was supplying hats to Biba, so I thought, well, if Barbara can do it, I can do it.

had spread, there was a queue all the way round to the end of the King’s Road and the whole shop was sold out, everything gone.

So that is how I came to own my shop on Radnor Walk, called simply, ‘The Shop’. I’d sold some paintings to Cyril Lord, a carpet magnate, and he always tried to touch me up when I sold him a painting. So I dared to call him up and asked for some black bits of carpet, and he sent me over beautiful deep pile carpets and I painted the whole place black when the kids were in bed asleep at night. I was having a quiet affair with Terence Donovan at the time, who asked to come and look at this shop everyone was talking about it, so he came by. ‘You need lights here’, he said, and he fixed it.

Some chap came over from Newsweek in the States within a week and did the first piece on ‘Swinging London’ where everyone was walking around the King’s Road in the same sort of pieces— flares, hipsters, miniskirts. And they were all my clothes! Completely unbeknownst to me, word was spreading like wildfire about my little clothes shop. I was at a party a few days later and talked all night to a chap who was like a kindred spirit. He asked me if I had heard of a magazine called Nova. I said, ‘No, I don’t read fashion magazines.’ He said, ‘It’s not a fashion magazine, it’s for the modern woman.’ I said, ‘Oh, I won’t be looking at that.’

But he persisted: ‘It’s been on the newsstands for a month and it’s not moving.’ He said directly, ‘You’re creating waves with your little funny shop, maybe you could help.’ I was so against it. He was adamant he wanted to meet me again and hear my thoughts on fashion. I replied, ‘I have no thoughts on fashion. I’ve just done the shop.’ But the next day, Terence Donovan came to me and asked if I wanted him to come in as a partner since I was struggling to manage the shop and the kids. I said, ‘You can buy the business if you want.’ He said yes so I called my lawyer.

I was going to open shop on Sunday and rang up the town hall and asked, ‘Is it illegal to open on Sunday with workers?’ The council said, ‘Not if it’s opened only by the owner themselves.’ So 8 am on Easter Sunday morning, I opened this little shop with the blaring music outside, and this little old aristocrat lady came in and said I had woken her. ‘I love jolly music,’ she said. ‘These clothes are lovely.’ I answered, ‘They come in five colourways: Greens, yellows, blacks, oranges, pinks’ to which she replied, ‘I love these but I couldn’t possibly wear them, I am in my eighties!’ I said, ‘Why not, my aunties in Wales are your age and would wear them.’

So I gave her a size 8 little miniskirt and jacket, which she put on, and a little handbag to go with it. She loved it, she was enchanted and bought the bag. And then I put a pull-on hat on her and trousers too—she loved them more; so I did make-up on her too—a little bit of rouge, pulled the hat down low. This was 8.30 in the morning; she said she felt gorgeous for the first time in a very long time. She was my very first customer. By lunchtime, word

That same week, my friend Mary Holland telephoned me. She said, ‘They want to offer you the fashion editorship of Nova.’ ‘No way,’ I said.

‘You know how I feel about fashion.’

I just wasn’t into it. She said, ‘Moll, you are working your bollocks off with that shop. You’ve got kids and you are spending money now to get new stock in, and you know how to be a fashion editor.’ I asked what it involved. She said, ‘You know, just hurling together an outfit, which

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you can do with your eyes closed.

So he will be giving you a ring, that man from the party, Clive Irving, and asking you out to lunch.’

I remember being so inspired by Nova’s attitude, one that I’ve tried to instil in my own work when I’m writing or designing or even mothering. An honest, questioning, colourful and feisty attitude.

We had Irma Kurtz as literary editor at Nova. She was from one of those academic universities in America, where they already were all about women’s lib—she brought that thought early to Nova.

But in quite a wry, entertaining way—the message was accessible, even fun, but important.

Well we were young, but we’d already had kids, had a life, experiences. I’d been through divorce—the editor of Nova was actually Catholic and he disapproved of me being a divorcee.

When I sold the shop, I had used the money to buy my first car—a Morgan.

It was a four-seater for the kids, too; I was the only woman I saw driving a sports car! I didn’t like the colours on offer though, so I asked if they could spray it yellow! And there are photos of me in outfits in the same colour as my car. My house was also painted yellow, unlike the others on Old Church Street. The council kept sending me letters to change it but I threw them all in the bin! And then the rest of the street copied and painted their houses yellow!

What are your most memorable features and fashion stories from your influential time at Nova?

The very first feature I did for them stands out; it was groundbreaking, establishing both the magazine and myself. As I was a painter and with it brought my eye for colour, they gave me 12 pages of colour—the whole colour quotient. The rest of the magazine was black and white.

That was novel at the time. It was the autumn issue and they always shot diamonds and furs for that issue. I introduced a new graphic element dividing the pages into

colour codes, and the photographer would only hone in on certain parts of the body, so the shoulder, chin, mouth, hand, linked over the series of pages. At the time, all they knew was to shoot the whole body or garment. So the fashion story was in colour zones—white, red, black, russet etc.—all white diamonds and furs on blondes, then dark pages of black furs, heavy black eyeliner, jet jewellery on every finger, and so on.

I wanted to show the variety that could be achieved, then everyone started wearing jewellery on their thumbs and lots of fingers—I couldn’t believe the response. Joanna Lumley was a model on that shoot—always lovely—and I worked consistently with photographer Duffy.

Then I think it was my third issue, which was about reporting on the couture shows. I’d never done anything on couture before, and I didn’t want my stories to be just about the clothes, so I decided to go against all the collections I’d seen.

Instead, I broke global boundaries by featuring Kelly, the first ever black model used in glossies, in that Paco Rabanne dress. At the time, Vidal Sassoon was cutting my own hair—I had met him at a party, and he always cut the hair asymmetrical, straight and sleek. So I asked him to do the hair—everyone had perms at the time, but instead we went for a dragged back and straight look.

It was a statement over a style. It was scandalous at the time. But the shoot was game-changing and made Paco Rabanne’s reputation worldwide, and after that, we never used hair and make-up artists on the Nova shoots. It was about being original and not overly groomed, with nude mouths and tangled fringes! One of my last shoots for the magazine also resonates; I had also been made homes editor at this point, so I could bring in interiors and make the stories into a concept.

I questioned the idea of always shooting models in a studio. Women were now working, had children, so I put together a three-series story with three images of women, which

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I feel really exemplified the 60s.

Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell had just launched a line of disposable clothing made in their signature beautiful patterns. We used a young model in her twenties, the actress, Jane Asher, with the bright red hair and tiny face, who at the time was dating Paul McCartney, and placed her in a setting where everything was disposable. So the student-like bedsit represented disposable living, and there were tubular tables, chairs and cabinets made from cardboard, raffia flooring in a bold African pattern, artificial flowers.

Everything felt bright and young and it was successful in drawing in younger readers to Nova. In the second set of images, everything was transparent. There were two young lesbian models, one in a mini silver dress, the other in shiny silver shoes, all the interiors were shiny and space age-like, even the old telephone was transparent!

The final images were to represent mother earth—we dressed my pregnant friend, actress Sheila Allen, in a heavy suede tunic; all the interiors were russet toned, from the ceramic tiling to the leather armchair, and there were sheaths of corn in the background—everything to represent nature. So the story came together: Disposable, interplanetary, and then mother earth.

And the surroundings became part of the persona—new at that time. Duffy photographed them all—he was the only person who could have got this shoot right.

But beyond the stories I created, my overriding feeling at the time was actually of shame. I had come from a serious art background, spent five years studying sculpture and painting; I ended up choosing to focus on painting. However, during this time, tutors always warned you to be aware of other ‘corrosive’ influences—there was an intellectual snobbery towards the fashion department, where it was seen they were creating for the profit of fashion houses. Some final words from the tutors, which

“I thought, I would like to be like that; a person who smiled, called unknown little girls ‘darling’ and lit up everyone’s hearts.” impressed me very deeply and have stayed with me until today: ‘It isn’t about art for art’s sake; you can’t pay for the heart and soul.’ So during my time at the magazine, I was dubious, left imbued with this idea of fashion as a shallow occupation—I didn’t confess this to anyone but it continuously preyed on my mind.

How did you come to leave?

I left Nova in disgrace, you could say; even amongst all these accolades and prizes I was getting, I wasn’t given a free hand and the quarrelling was getting to me.

About your work—brilliantly contrary…

Avant-garde, yes. Us Aquarians are always like that—know what is right ahead of time! Denis Hackett, the editor, said to me, ‘I’ve worked on many glossies as editor and this is the only one where people ask me what Molly is going to do for the season’s fashion pages and I have nothing to tell them.’ I said that’s because it hasn’t formed in my head yet. He said, ‘We have to work three months in advance for advertising.’

I said, ‘That old cod’s wallop again!’

So he asked what I was going to do, so I looked over at a skyscraper and came up with a story on the spot as I was actually still thinking: ‘I am thinking about blonde albinos from Sweden.’ He said, ‘Albinos, right.’

And wrote it down. ‘Then I can take them to the Arctic and photograph them pale against the ice and snow.’

‘Will we see them?’ he said. ‘Barely,’ I

replied, ‘because everything they are wearing will be white—silk, fox-furs, white satin with shimmer, white sequins, diamonds... they could be so subtle but everything is to do with textures at the moment and it will be great for the maquillage people and your diamond people.’

He said, ‘I’m not buying it.’ I said, ‘Are you not buying it because you don’t think your wife, daughters, sisters, family will find anything on the pages to buy?’ And he said yes. I said, ‘They can buy another magazine for that. This is avantgarde, we are meant to lead the way and you won’t see this on any other page, and he said, ‘Well, you won’t see it on mine either.’ And so I cleared my desk before lunchtime.

I was never crushed by authority, you see. I didn’t feel frightened. And within a few days, I went to Harpers, then The Sunday Times came along.

I never had any breathing space.

And then you went straight from magazines to being a writer?

In fairness, The Sunday Times taught me how to write, they didn’t just limit me to fashion. But Hunter Davis was the editor on the ‘Look’ pages and he said, ‘I love what you’ve done.’ I had put kids clothes on the pages—as all these people had kids but no one put anything for children in these magazines.

I got my children to draw little dresses and shoes and we put their drawings in. Harry Evans called me into his office and said, ‘That’s a brilliant idea. That is what you are hired for—your incredible ideas. No

one would have thought of that.’

Then in 1974, I think it was, I won Fashion Editor of the Year prize for my influential work in fashion, but within a few weeks of that, I walked out of The Sunday Times. I had just had enough. And, ironically, I had to give the big silver cup, which had come to mean so much and I kept in a cabinet at home, back.

We could go on and on. I could sit here for another three hours and listen to her stories of the days she was writing erotic novels in Cornwall or living in the Chelsea Hotel with her great friend Quentin Crisp, or her two autobiography/memoirs, or her struggle with alcoholism and bankruptcy. Or when Molly finally started painting again in 1993 and how now, she is happiest in her final stages of spiritual freedom, spending her time painting every day and writing poetry. Right now, at 81 years, she is working with a Welsh composer to convert her poems into jazz lyrics. She doesn’t give many interviews; she likes “to remain a myth”, but when she does, true to character, boy does she!!

Deputy Editor Luella Bartley is currently Design Director at Marc by Marc Jacobs. Her first book, Luella’s Guide to English Style was published in 2010.

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HOW FAR TO GO

by Meghan Kenny

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IT’S BEEN TWO days since you’ve talked when he comes to your window yelling he has a mango and wants you to come outside and eat it with him. You’ve known him for three years. You’re twenty-six, you think, old enough and ready for something serious, and here he is wanting to eat a mango on a bench. It’s late and you’re tired. You want love, he wants to eat.

You’re two floors up in a brick building, windows street side, large heavy windows in old wood frames. When the light is on inside you can see right in -- can see the woodblock print on the east wall, can see a person in almost clear perfect focus, can see the refrigerator with the bowl of lemons on top. He’s told you he’s seen your silhouette before, your breasts, the curve of your back, when you’re wearing a nightgown and standing in front of the floor lamp.

You leave the windows open for air and noises carry from the narrow street, up the walls of the building. Sometimes at night, when you’re in bed in the dark, talk below sounds as if people are in your apartment, and whispering next to you. His yelling your name to come outside for some mango sounds like an echo moving in from far off, like he’s in one canyon and you’re in the next, or you’re on opposite sides of a quarry. You wonder if when you yell back the effect is the same, or if his name just drops down, hitting hard and flat, hitting him somewhere on the top of his head like something wet and heavy. You think most likely it does. This is Chicago, not Paris. This is your life, not a movie.

Standing on the sidewalk, his arms above his head holding a mango, he looks desperate, small, in need. You know the mango is going to get stuck in your teeth and make a mess, but you’ll go anyway, hoping maybe this will bring you closer together.

“Give me a minute,” you yell down, bent over, head out the window. He turns on his heel and heads for the bench across the street. You take your hair down and put on a sweater. Spring hasn’t moved in

yet and the air is damp and chill, the trees still bare and leggy.

You take the stairs and walk towards him sitting on the bench. He’s wearing the striped blue oxford you gave him for Christmas. He wears it with the sleeves rolled up, and a pair of canvas Carhartt’s.

He looks like a man who belongs in the West, with cattle and horses, and you think, he’s something else, sitting there cutting up the mango with a hunting knife.

He’s someone you could stay with.

You have been talking about taking a trip together, a drive across country and hiking in Utah. But things have been tense between you. Nothing happened in particular; there’s just a gap. A lapse in things. Talk doesn’t come easy. You think he’s looking for someone else, someone different. He doesn’t look at you like he used to, and making love is fast and rough and leaves you lonely. You want things to work out, go back to they way they’ve been.

You love him deeply. You’ve loved him for years.

On the bench across from your apartment he doesn’t sit close, so you keep your distance and he holds out a chunk of mango for you. You live on a quiet street with little traffic, but you hear sirens.

There are always sirens in this city. He doesn’t say anything, just sucks on the mango, juice dripping down his chin. You now know his window thing wasn’t about romance but about being careful. About avoiding your apartment and touching. You don’t know what to say these days because you’ve been careful too, careful not to ask for a touch or a kiss or talk with eye contact. You try not to talk too much because you know yourself, how easily you fall apart. But tonight you think screw it, so you start talking and you talk about anything.

You tell him how you need to have your tires rotated before driving a distance and that you’ve been having muscle spasms in your left thigh before bed, but that you’re sure it’s nothing. You haven’t talked about plain things like this in a

You want his affection. Even though things aren’t good, you want him to claim you, and tell you no one else can have you but him.

“I think my sister could do better,” you say a little loudly, “find someone better.”

“Calm down,” he says, “maybe it’s not your place to worry about it.”

You take a bite of mango and feel it in your teeth in places you can’t reach and you’re not about to stick your finger in your mouth to dig it out. You sit still and looking straight ahead.

“You just get so loud,” he says.

“I’m calm,” you say. “What, are you worried someone might hear me?”

He laughs and says, “Actually,” and doesn’t even look at you. You feel hurt, a tightening in your chest, and breathing doesn’t come easy. You feel your eyes getting full and this isn’t what you wanted, not today, and you’re so tired of this. You’re tired of being an embarrassment. He used to love that you’d talk about anything, get loud and excited, and sometimes swear. But now you’re crass and embarrassing and this isn’t the first time he’s let you know it.

“There’s no one around,” you say.

“That’s not the point.”

“Then forget it.” You drop your piece of mango on the ground.

“Forget what?” He says, now looking at you, still holding the knife in one hand and half a mango in the other.

You stand facing him on the bench.

You’re hands are wet and sticky from the fruit and you don’t know where to put them, so you hold them down at your sides careful they don’t touch your clothes.

“This,” you say, “this whole thing with us and that mango. This is such a mess.”

You hold your hands out towards him, palms up. “I wasn’t an embarrassment before. It’s like being embarrassed of your mother and it’s awful. I think this is it.”

He puts the knife and mango down on the sidewalk and reaches for your hands.

long time and you get on a roll and feel a little full of it. You feel like speaking your mind and saying whatever you want to see how it feels, because you haven’t done it in months.

He puts down the knife. He wipes his hand on his pants, then reaches for your left thigh. You almost drop your piece of mango. You feel nervous, like the first time you touched, like you’re about to explode or cry or collapse.

“Your thigh shouldn’t act up,” he says, “you need to relax, or something must be wrong.”

He’s leaning in to get to your left thigh and you’d like to tell him something.

You’d like to tell him you miss him, but you don’t, because you’re afraid he might stop touching you. He kisses you on the cheek.

“You’re very pretty,” he says.

“We can go inside,” you say.

“Let’s stay out a while,” he says, “I like the cool air.”

You tell him how your sister started dating a fisherman who catches scallops and makes a load of money, but never pays taxes. You get worked up about it, because it’s your sister. You tell him her boyfriend could go to jail for this. He’s twenty-eight, and he could go down, and you wish your sister could just find a nice guy who doesn’t break laws.

“Maybe he’s a nice guy,” he says, still touching your thigh. He’s so close you can smell his hair, deodorant, breath.

He smells like fruit, spices, loose tobacco.

“Maybe for now,” you say.

“What do you mean for now?” He picks up his knife and what’s left of the mango.

“I’m sure he’s nice,” you say, “but my sister’s always getting herself into situations. She just gives too much away.”

“That’s too bad,” he says and is quiet but for the noise of his knife splitting through the mango, like a shovel going into dirt.

You want him to touch you again.

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You let him hold them and he says, “I don’t understand.”

You consider letting him hold your hands and telling him you don’t know what you’re talking about. You consider telling him you’re tired, and then inviting him inside. You don’t want things to end, but they can’t go on this way.

“You don’t understand,” you say, and move your hands from his.

He wants to know if you’re still on for driving across country and hiking in Utah. You tell him maybe, you tell him to call you tomorrow. You go back to your apartment alone to wash your hands and go to sleep. Before you change, you turn out your lights. You peek out from the corner of the window. He’s not on the bench, so you open your window and look down the street. You see him walking in the middle of the road, walking slowly. You feel bad for what you said, but you had to say something. You had to let him know you might not be around forever.

A week later you meet after work and go to a bookstore together to look though travel guides on New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. You talk about going to Anasazi ruins and Valley of the Gods, eating corned beef hash and drinking beer by a campfire.

You want to do this and you think it can’t be too bad. There will be time alone together and time to talk. Maybe you can work on being friends in a way, at least being honest so you don’t have to be too careful with your words.

You look once more at the pictures of Southern Utah, the land spreading wide and dry with red rock canyons and mesas.

You imagine the quiet and the stars at night. You imagine lying side by side in sleeping bags on the land, and him falling in love with you again in the middle of nowhere.

“Let’s go,” you say, almost a whisper.

“Good,” he says patting you on the shoulder, leaving his hand there for a minute, “good.”

“I’ll get food for the drive,” you

say.

“I’ll bring a flask and some bourbon for camping.”

“I think we’ll need it.”

You wonder what you’ll do about hotel rooms and beds. The day after the mango he called and you told him you couldn’t stay physical, that it would drive you crazy and you’d feel cheap. He took it seriously and you regret that. You thought it would make him come to you, but he hasn’t.

The next weekend you meet at his place to load his truck with backpacks, sleeping bags, water bottles and a Coleman camping stove. You bring music for the ride and pretzels and soda and books to read out loud. Books on history and disease and stories of men hunting in the south. He wears his hunting knife on his belt and loans you a Leatherman to wear on yours. You thank him and put it in your backpack. Next thing you know he’s putting on a fur hat with earflaps.

“What the hell is that?” You say.

“You’ve never seen one of these?

It’s Russian, from Siberia.”

You’ve seen them before but never knew he had one. You leave it alone and figure he’s excited for camping and the wilderness.

You’re not an hour into the drive when you move some tapes around and he gets snippy.

“They’re just tapes,” you say.

“They’re my tapes,” he says, “and I want them where they are.”

You sit back and watch out the window, wondering why you thought this would work. You’re driving through rural Illinois and it’s been raining on and off all day. You see it raining from miles away. You see its movement in the sky and the dark above it. The land being mostly flat and farms and fields, you can see a lot of things coming. You wonder if you saw this coming and just ignored it, if this falling out of love was sudden or just feels sudden. You wonder if there was anything you could have done to change

After two days of driving you arrive at his aunt and uncle’s ranch outside Santa Fe. They give you the guest wing with everything you need: a kitchen, bathroom, sitting room, and two bedrooms. They leave you alone and tell you to rest up before dinner. You’ve been to New Mexico before.

You came in college with girlfriends and stayed in a motel in Albuquerque that had a vibrating bed for twenty dollars a night, and no bolt or chain on the door.

But you have never been to New Mexico like this. The ranch is six thousand acres and there is a gate and a mile long driveway that leads up to the white adobe house. The Pecos River cuts through the land and runs alongside the house. You’re glad you came here and that he is of these people. You’re in the bathroom when he yells from the bedroom he’s going to take a walk.

“I’d like to go,” you say.

“Hurry up,” he says.

You come out of the bathroom and he’s sitting on the bed with his boots, coat, hat and gloves on.

“Just a minute,” you say, and go through your bag for wool socks. You sit next to him and put on your socks and lace up your boots. You’re surprised he doesn’t get up to walk around the room. Instead, he hands you your hat and gloves and you thank him. As you walk out the sliding doors you put on your hat.

“You look like an Eskimo,” he says, and pats you on the head.

You think maybe things are turning.

Maybe this trip was what you needed after all.

You walk towards the stables and three horses come to the fence. You take off your glove and run your hand down a horse’s nose and back up between its ears.

It’s warm and soft and the smell reminds you of riding when you were younger and lived in the east. You’ve always loved the smell of hay and leather and dirt.

“I love horses,” you say, but he’s already walking.

You follow on a dirt path through

things, maybe save them from going bad, but you don’t know where to start.

He tells you he wants to drive through to New Mexico to see his aunt and uncle. You ask him what they are like.

His aunt rides her horse in the summer with a pistol to shoot rattlesnakes and wild dogs. She can fly airplanes and used to be a bush pilot in Africa. She breeds horses that come from Norway. Hardy, stocky horses the color of straw. His uncle is a retired architect and designed their house and knows about Pueblo ruins and artifacts, and places to hike in the southwest. You tell him they sound nice and interesting.

But you stay quiet otherwise. You don’t know people like his aunt and uncle.

He tells you he wants to go to downtown Santa Fe too, to buy a silver belt buckle maybe for his father or maybe for himself.

“The Native Americans set out handmade jewelry on the street. Maybe you’ll find something you like,” he says.

“Maybe.”

“Maybe a pretty bracelet or necklace,” he says.

“It’s not jewelry I need,” you say.

“Okay,” he says, and turns up the music.

You keep the Atlas on your side of the truck. You ask him which way you’re going, and as he tells you, you follow the states with your finger on the map. It goes: Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico. The drive goes south and then west, I55 to I44 to I40. You flip to the states and follow along, noting national forests, mountain ranges and rivers. You track the drive on the map to know exactly where you’ll be going and what states to expect. You don’t like surprises and don’t like getting lost.

He’s still wearing the Siberian hat.

People in passing cars slow down and point.

“Isn’t your head getting hot?” You say.

“My head is fine,” he says, “everything is great.”

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silver sagebrush. You keep your eyes on the ground watching your step for rocks and plants you don’t know the names for, all brown, dry and dead. You look up when you can and the hills are tall and round, and you wonder what is beyond them.

You want to talk but can’t think of anything to say. You start to open your mouth and make a noise, but then cough and stay quiet. It’s okay to be quiet, you think, there’s nothing wrong with that. So you keep walking and concentrate on the sound of your feet moving over the land.

Sounds of leaves crackling like breaking sticks, and the ground smelling dusty and wet at the same time. You make it to the top and you both stand there and look around. The sky is flat and solid white and your face is cold and feels tight.

“This is nice,” he says, smiling.

“It is,” you say.

“I’d take this place any day.”

“So would I.”

It starts to snow so you turn around and walk back to the house. He walks ahead of you and you don’t say anything about it.

You just watch the snow fall around him and wish he would walk by your side without having to ask.

At the house he tells you he is going into Santa Fe and will be back soon.

He leaves and you stay in the guesthouse with a book reading in a rocking chair.

You can’t concentrate on the words so you walk around and look at paintings and a coffee table book on New Mexico and a book on Pueblo Indians and birds and petroglyphs. You look through the book and it’s about bird myths. You can’t sit still and wish you were tired enough for a nap, tired enough to shut your eyes and forget this feeling of want, this feeling of reaching into a dark space for something solid to hold onto. You make yourself sit in the chair, and you stare at a painting of a red barn in winter. Everything white but the barn, and two pine trees.

Everything so quiet and still.

Two hours go by and he’s still not back. You feel like you’re hiding

out so you walk over to the main house.

Everything is white adobe with wood beams and the floors are deep red Mexican tiles.

You feel uncomfortable being alone, being among strangers, but you go anyway telling yourself to grow up. You find his aunt in the living room reading by the fire.

She doesn’t hear you come in so you stand there and say hello.

She turns around and says, “How was Santa Fe?”

“I didn’t go.”

“Have you eaten lunch?” She closes her book and keeps it in her lap.

“No, but I’m fine thank you.”

You sit in a chair on the other side of the coffee table, not sure if you’re intruding.

“Are you having a good time?” She says.

“Yes. Very nice.”

You look out of the window and rub your hands on your thighs.

“You have a beautiful ranch,” you say.

She’s looking out the window too and doesn’t say anything. You wonder if you weren’t supposed to say that, or if maybe she just didn’t hear you. It is quiet and all you hear is the fire crackling and popping.

“How did you get into breeding horses?” You say.

She sighs and takes off her reading glasses. You’re sitting with your hands between your legs. You want her to tell you a story filled with passion for horses, that she’s always loved them and wanted to raise them. That this is a dream come true. That she goes out to feed them, brush them, and ride them everyday just because she can.

“We had all this land and thought we should have horses on it,” she says.

“Did you ride when you were younger?”

“A little,” she says, “because my mother thought I should.”

“I used to ride,” you say, “I love horses.

He’s always loved the way wine gives color to your face. It’s almost as if he’s sad for how things are and he’s watching you as if he’s wanting you back. You look at the turquoise bracelet on your wrist and it slides a little to the side, almost big enough to fall off. He looks at the bracelet too and reaches across the table, pushing it upright and says, “With a little bending it will be a perfect fit.”

You’re leaving the next morning for southern Utah to hike and camp for four days so you ask his uncle for suggestions.

His uncle brings out topographical maps and describes the geography of places. You choose Comb Ridge because it is closer to the Four Corners and Valley of the Gods. Then he goes outside with his aunt to smoke. Through the window you see the orange embers of two cigarettes burning, and watch them move away down towards the river.

You help his uncle clear the table, and the two of you stand at the sink. He’s tall with a white beard. You rinse and he waits for you to hand him the next dish to dry off.

“I think you’re alright,” his uncle says.

You smile.

“He’s just got his head in his ass.”

“Something’s got his head, and it’s not me,” you say.

“Money hasn’t helped. It’s made the kids lose touch, forget how to treat people.”

“Whatever it is,” you say, “it sucks.”

“It does suck,” he says. Then he lifts a dish up high, and drops it on the tile. It hits with a loud clap and breaks into pieces. He jumps back and laughs, “By god, that felt good.” He points at the dish scattered on the floor. “But don’t make it your business to try to fix him.”

Then you pick up a dish and hold it high too. You’re not sure you should do it, it’s not your dish or your house. But his uncle’s smiling at you, so you let go, let it fall. He whoops like a cowboy.

She smiles a fake smile and blinks slowly. She doesn’t ask you anything about what you like or where you come from and you wonder if it runs in the family.

“I’ll let you get back to your reading,” you say.

“We’ll have dinner at seven,” she says.

You go back to the guesthouse and wish you had stayed there all along.

You hear a car pull up and pretend you’ve been reading this whole time. You don’t want to appear as if you’ve been waiting. But he doesn’t come in so you go to the other house and hear him talking to his aunt. He has bags and is saying how he found a great burrito place to eat lunch.

“How was Santa Fe?” You say.

“Look at this,” he says smiling, and pulls a silver and turquoise belt buckle out of its wrapping.

“It’s nice, is it for your Dad?” You say.

“I also got this bracelet for my sister,” he says, holding a silver band embedded with stones in reds and blues and purples.

“She’ll like that,” his aunt says.

You wonder if he knows he does this.

You wonder if he actually listens but chooses not to answer.

Before dinner you take a shower.

When you come out of the bathroom a turquoise bracelet is on top of your clothes. He pretends to read in the armchair. You pick it up and touch the stones.

“Put it on,” he says.

“Thank you,” you say, and you mean it.

At dinner you drink red wine and eat lamb. You talk about books and films and places you have visited in Europe. He is nice at dinner and listens when you talk, and laughs at your jokes. You feel charming. You’re thankful for the wine and the distraction of other people. He looks at you across the table in a way he hasn’t for months, gentle and steady, and you feel beautiful and hopeful in the candlelight.

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“There you go,” he says. “Plate slipped, shit happens.”

You laugh and double over. You laugh so hard you cry.

You step over the shards of porcelain toward his uncle, and they make a crunching noise under your shoes.

“Careful now,” he says. “Where’re you headed?”

You give his uncle a hug. He’s still for a moment, and then hugs you, wraps his arms around you and pulls your head to his chest.

“Oh,” he says, “I miss my girls. Girls have such a sense about them.”

He rests his chin on your head, and pats you on the back. He reminds you of your grandfather, not breaking the hug until he’s ready. But that’s alright, because you feel safe.

“Thank you for that,” he says.

“Let me help clean this mess.” You step back and bend down to pick up pieces of dish.

“Nonsense,” he says, and knocks on your back like a door. “Go get some sleep.”

You stand outside of the guesthouse in the snow watching the Pecos River. There’s a full moon and shadows on the ground and light coming off the water. You wish for something like this someday: an adobe house in the middle of nowhere and land covered with sagebrush, yucca plants, and pinion trees, horses in stables, and a river. But none of it will matter unless you have someone to love. You want someone to grow old with. You know no matter how much you love him, he is not yours to piece together. This man you love like no other is not yours to have. You go inside without turning on any lights. He’s in the bedroom building a fire in the fireplace.

“I’ve always wanted a bedroom with a fireplace.” You feel your cheeks getting warm. The bed’s a double.

“Your lucky night,” he says.

“I just want to sit and watch the fire a while.”

The window is open and the room smells like cold and wood smoke. The air

feels smaller. He undresses and gets under the covers and says, “You can stay.”

You take off your shoes and coat, and sit on the bed next to him to watch the fire. He’s laying down facing you. You know you won’t go with him to Utah, sleep under stars or drink beer in a canyon. You won’t go with him anywhere again. You look at his neck and shoulders, the smoothness of his skin, and you feel something deep inside you falling. You touch his hair and he closes his eyes. His fine, brown hair is so soft. It’s grown, and comes down over his forehead. He doesn’t push you away, but shakes as if there is some current going through him, sneaking up his spine and into his head, settling him still and quiet. You touch his face, and trace his eyes, nose, and mouth with your fingers. They are lines and curves you want to remember. You lean down and kiss him, and he kisses you back. You feel it in your bones, in the back of your head, in your feet. Your arms feel numb. You kiss so slowly, lips brushing and pressing, it feels like you’re both mouthing words.

Words too sad for either of you to speak.

Meghan Kenny is a writer and teacher living in Baltimore. These stories are part of her short story collection titled Love is No Small Thing. She recently finished a novel titled Away Toward Home.

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ALL THESE LOVELY BOYS

by Meghan Kenny

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WHEN KIRK FOUND out last week I might be camera man at the River Festival he called, so I invited him over in the morning, since I worked afternoons. I was up early, juicing oranges and humming a tune.

“I love that song,” Kirk said, walking into the kitchen. I turned and there he was, my grown son with two days stubble in a skirt and blouse, and a black curly-haired wig. He even penciled himself a mole above the left side of his lip.

“For Chrissakes,” I said.

“Relax,” Kirk said, and smoothed out his blouse a little. It was silky and cream-colored, like something his mother had worn. I stuck the last orange on the juicer and placed the glass under the opening.

“We’re just here Kirk, you and me, no big deal for getting dressed up.”

Kirk stood there and then reached under his blouse and adjusted a bra strap, “It’s not dress-up.”

He had a deep voice and it scratched a little. I felt uneasy, and had the impulse to punch him, almost to see if he could fight back, as if that made him a man, but I couldn’t take a swing with him looking like a woman.

The dryer beeped so I held out a glass of orange juice for him and he took it. I came back to the kitchen with a mound of towels and started folding them on the table.

“Coffee too?” I said.

He nodded yes, drank his juice in one shot like he did as a kid, and then finished the towels while I poured some coffee.

The thing to understand here was that Kirk had grown up in my house. It was his house too, so there was no reason he couldn’t come and do as he pleased. He still had a room with clothes in the closet. But Hagerman Valley was small and remote and mostly cattle ranchers and land owners, hunters, and corn and alfalfa farmers. The land around town ran thousands of acres into the valleys and gorges, along creeks, along the Snake River, and fields full of lava rocks like

they’d been delivered by truck and rolled off. A man in a skirt didn’t fit in.

His mother left me five years ago, when Kirk came home saying he had this thing he did, and he wanted to do it all the time.

Doris cried at first, and then told him she thought he’d make a fine looking woman. I needed more time with it, but Doris didn’t have the patience. She told me I either loved my son or didn’t, and said she couldn’t stay with a man who didn’t love his son on instinct, no matter what he’d done.

I set Kirk’s coffee on the table, and said, “Let’s go outside.”

We went out back where I kept a small garden along the fence that lined the yard. There were rocks of all sizes laying around that I planned to use as a border between grass and flowers. I’d already started laying them near the peonies, delphinium, and Asiatic lilies. I put my coffee down and started moving rocks.

“You dating?” I asked. I was never sure if Kirk was a gay man or a straight man, and instead of asking outright, I asked about his dating status, as any parent might ask their kid.

Kirk sat on the patio, his legs crossed.

“I am.”

I pulled up weeds and threw them on the lawn.

“A woman named Nina,” he said.

“A woman with all the right parts?”

“A biological woman.”

“How’s that work?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, is she butch? Does she look like a man?”

“She’s looks like a woman, because she’s a woman.”

Don’t get defensive, son. You look like a woman but you’re a man. I don’t know how it all works and who likes what.”

There was this big rock, one I found in a field by a vineyard that Hank helped me lift into my flatbed and unload into my yard. It sat by the gate of the fence, but it was a sitting type rock, and I wanted it by the irrigation ditch that was like a creek, my

like a ballerina and jumped out of planes.

Not the male type ballerina -- strong and catching thin, graceful women in midair, but a female looking ballerina with a black curly wig, a little lacy cardigan and a frilly tutu. He even wore those silky shoes with the hard square toe, and he wore this silver sparkly cat-eye mask for goggles like he was at some masquerade ball.

I hummed a tune again, one I’d heard on the radio that morning, and said, “I love that song.” I didn’t know the name of the song, or even the words for it, but I loved it, something about its melody and the way the woman singing had a low twang in her voice, and it reminded me of dust, sage brush and dried yellow foothills, and driving through it with the car windows down.

“It’s a good song,” Kirk said, “you might like the song we use for our ballet.”

“If it’s something classical, I might not, I don’t have the ear for it.”

“The ear doesn’t matter,” he said, “It’s beautiful and easy to like.”

Then Kirk put his heels back on, picked up our coffee mugs, and took them inside. “I have to get to rehearsal in an hour.”

I followed him in and said, “Just leave them.” But he rinsed them off and put them in the dishwasher. I thought of saying something about being domestic, or being a mother, something like he’d make a good mother, and I wondered if he’d marry this Nina girl and if they’d have kids, and if then he’d go back to jeans and teeshirts, but I kept my mouth shut. He didn’t need it from me.

Kirk got his purse and was ready to leave. He placed it over his shoulder and seemed natural at it, like he’d been carrying a purse all his life. I walked him to the door and didn’t mention one way or the other if I’d be there with a camera at the River Festival.

“Maybe I’ll see you there,” he said, buttoning his silky sleeves at the wrists.

I flicked a shiny beetle off the screened

own waterway, moving through my yard. I looked at it, surveyed the thing, tried to figure how to move it.

“You might do camera for the sky diving show?” Kirk asked.

“Thinking about it.”

“I’d like you to see what I do,” he said, and walked over to where I was.

“Haven’t made up my mind.” I leaned into the rock, but it didn’t budge.

“It’s not a faggy thing, if you’re worried,” he said, and took off his heels.

Then he unbuttoned the cuffs of his blouse, and rolled them up above his elbows. I was surprised to see the hair on his forearms, a real dark hair.

I looked at Kirk. He had lines, almost deep grooves of wrinkle around his mouth.

His brown eyes were the same, his face was the same, really, because he didn’t have the makeup on that morning, just the clothes, and he looked like Kirk in the face, except for the penciled-in mole above his lip.

“Move over,” he said, and positioned himself in front of the rock, his hands on it, him leaning in like a football player ready to charge. “Where you want it?”

“Over there,” I said, and pointed toward the ditch. “Right in front of those rose bushes.”

Then Kirk moved the rock, rolled it on over in place, and sat on it, looked down at the ditch, and he leaned over and smelled a rose. He plucked off one of the petals, rubbed it between his fingers, and then threw it in the water.

“Good place for a rock,” he said.

Kirk had come to be part of a skydiving show, but he made a living giving lessons.

He helped people jump out of planes, and made sure they didn’t die anywhere along the way. I always thought Kirk had talent, always thought it took courage to jump out into air, the world below him, and hope the parachute would open every time, hope nothing would be defective or stuck as the ground got closer.

Everyone in Hagerman Valley knew about Kirk, it wasn’t a secret. My son dressed

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part of the door and then opened it. He leaned in and kissed me goodbye on the cheek. I let him do it. I watched him walk down the brick walkway to his car, his skirt swishing back and forth, and his legs long and lean and taut with muscle.

From behind you’d never know it was a man, you’d never know it was Kirk.

I wanted to meet this Nina. See what she looked like, see what kind of woman chose my son. I thought about love coming from the same places for everyone. I took the folded towels and put them in the closet and went into Kirk’s bedroom. He had trophies on his bookshelf from running track in high school, mini parachutes hanging from the ceiling, and a poster of Marilyn Monroe tacked on the wall.

I’d looked through his room before for clues as to how he got to be the way he was. In his dresser there were old teeshirts, pants, and clothes he wore through high school and college. In the top drawer there was a box of make-up and lacy underwear. What I would have thought to be sexy looked small and uncomfortable. Some clothes and shoes Doris left behind were in his closet. She gave him dresses and heels she no longer wore. But none of it ever pointed me in a direction. None of it told me why my son dressed like a woman.

Hank was standing but didn’t need his lights until the cheerleaders came on.

There was no way to light men falling from the sky. So I got my camera up and on my shoulder and then Hank said, “You want me to do it so you can watch?”

“I got this one,” I said.

“You got it.”

“Drop it Hank.”

“It’s dropped.”

Hank stood next to me. I felt the nerves in my body. I was tight and unsettled. I tried to be an honest man – to say what was on my mind and do what I thought was right. My father always said there wasn’t time in life for pretending.

He said pretending to like something when you don’t doesn’t make you polite, it makes

you a liar. I’d stuck to that, but I loved my boy and we weren’t getting any younger.

When it comes to your children, it doesn’t always matter what you like and don’t like.

That said, it wasn’t something I needed to have a conversation about with Hank.

The announcer came on loud over the open park space, announcing the Flying Ballerinas. People cheered and screamed and clapped, as if the men weren’t somewhere in a plane trying to find the spot to jump, but were close by and could hear and know we were all waiting for them. It wasn’t your usual green park with trees, but a flat stretch of land along the Snake River covered in sage brush and junipers and sand. There was nothing between us and the sky, and then some music came on loud, echoing off the river’s canyoned walls nearby, and people hushed.

I kept my camera up, on nothing but a blue sky, and waited. Waited to see my son from somewhere up above.

“This is a nice song,” Hank said, it seemed to himself. I knew it was classical with string instruments, violins maybe, and cellos, and it was nice. It sounded like floating, something like moving through air, although I’d never done it before, not like Kirk, but the music seemed right. “Do you know this song?” Hank asked.

“Negative.”

“It’s fancy.”

“Is there something you need to get off your chest?”

“Nada,” Hank said, and pointed up to the sky.

What a sight it was to see these men come into view in white tutus, like big white snowflakes falling from the sky. There were eight ballerinas, all men, all trained skydivers. The camera wasn’t catching any of it, so I set it down. I’d get them on the ground. They made circles, diamonds, and star shaped formations. They twirled and did plies. They goddamn danced on the air until their parachutes puffed up and out – tents of white and glitter.

The sun lit up the tulle of their tutus and I thought, all these glowing

ballerinas, I thought, all these lovely boys twirling to earth. The violin sang out over the river and Kirk’s arms were out in front of him like he was hugging someone. I held my breath. “There he is,” I said. “Look at that.”

“I’ll never, ever bring this up again,” Hank said, “But that is something else.

I hate to say the word, but it’s real pretty.”

“Isn’t it?” My lips got tight and shaky and I felt my chin get bunched up. Kirk’s toes were in a perfect point, his goggles sparkled from the sun, and I wondered if he spotted me, my boy, all bright and pretty and lovely, falling from the sky.

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Manifest Destiny Photogr aphy by a m a n da d e c a d e n e t Styling by l e i t h c l a r k

At thirty years old, Brit Marling’s starred in not one, but three critically acclaimed films, which she also co-wrote and produced...

Out of college, she refused a job at an investment bank to travel and work in documentary filmmaking. When she decided to pursue acting, she didn’t wait for the Hollywood machine to turn her into a wide-eyed starlet; instead, she wrote the roles she wanted to play and created the movies she wanted to see.

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Amanda de Cadenet: Hi Brit, what are you doing in London?

Brit Marling: I’m doing this Danny Boyle miniseries that we shot part of in the Fall and we’re doing the second half now, and I’m going to be here for about two months. A big chunk of time, but I love being in London.

I hadn’t spent a lot of time in the city before, at least not in the sense that you’re living and working and you actually get to know it, so that’s been cool. I am really liking getting to know London and of course working with Danny is amazing.

He’s just so smart. I’ve just been working on the show so much and I don’t really know anybody outside of that, so I’ve either been working on the show or in my place.

Well that’s what happens, isn’t it, when you work and you’re away from your home and your home is somewhere else for a while.

It definitely requires a certain mentality to be able to do that.

Do you like travelling and going to different places?

I mean, it’s interesting. It’s starting to change a bit. I think in the beginning, I felt very excited to travel and sometimes these things come together so fast or they are coming together and falling apart and coming together that you’re getting on the plane very lastminute and you’re in Berlin shooting or in Bucharest or in London and that can be really fun; it feels like these little mini adventures you go on but

at the same time, I’ve started to feel recently like I need to put some roots down because, also given what I’m doing, which is playing pretend and make believe and taking on these other characters and these lives, you start to do that and stop living your own. You come back to L.A. and realize there’s not actually that much to come back to, so I think lately I’ve been like, I’ve got to keep developing my life because that’s where actually all the inspiration and energy comes from.

I relate to that transition that you’re talking about and I remember when it was first happening for me where one of my first jobs was interviewing people on a live TV show STARTING when I was 16 and I would get on a plane every week and go from London to L.A., it was crazy. I cannot imagine doing that now but that’s what I did and it was not a big deal. I remember getting to the point where I realised the same thing–that I wasn’t anywhere long enough to really form a community or deep bonds in friendships, and also with myself, because there’s something about always getting up and going that you don’t get into your real routine of living in the same space with yourself in the same place every day.

No totally, because you have to face yourself and really deal with you to get to a kind of stillness and lack of motion where the only thing left to confront is yourself and your own ambition. And you can really spend a good chunk of your life moving around so much that you never actually have to deal with that, but you know that will sneak up on you later, all the unresolved, all the magma beneath the tectonic plates of your personality. You’ve kind of

just got to go there every once in a while and sit with it.

I was thinking the other day that it’s such an illusion to think that you can outwit yourself. You know, if I keep this, whatever your dance is, whatever your game is—it’s different for every woman, what the self-avoidance tactics are—but if I keep this tap dance going on over here, then I will not have to fill in the blanks, you know, address my chronic abandonment issues or whatever the issue is, but there is just no way around it because you are who you are and it’s just going to come out in any way to get your attention.

Yeah and eventually that stuff creeps up on you. It’s fascinating too; I think initially I was really drawn to acting because it was actually something I wanted to work on in myself which is like, as I had felt like a lot of your formal education, or upbringing, or growing up, is about developing your analytical mind and your logic and your reason and problem-solving ability, all of which is really important, but I felt like my imaginative capacity, my emotion, my ability to empathise— those things sort of deteriorate.

The education system is sort of butchering all this stuff up, and for me, in the beginning, acting was really a way to get closer to the kind of person I had been as a child and the person I wanted to return to be, which was like a more naturally empathic, deeply imaginative, emotional being, and so in the beginning of this journey, a lot of playing pretend and make-believe and being more authentic and never getting caught acting as an actor was making me a better person in my life. And I think that’s still true but I also think there’s just a certain

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Pullquote Sitates utat fugiae eaquam illabo. Id quam simpore pratempore qui nosam, ommod molor modis et velitium vendunt amount of running around, job-tojob, that you can wholly lose yourself in the imaginative space and forget to keep developing who you are in the interim and having adventures and falling in and out of love and fucking up and failing and making some bad choices and learning from that bone marrow of life. It’s like, if you stop doing that and keep just going lily-padding from one fantasy land to another, you’re really missing out on something.

It’s great you have that awareness of knowing and observing what it can be, because I think it’s true that with the make-believe—crossed with the education system—does tend to iron out a lot of creative minds, because it tends to put people into a certain configuration so that they can go out into a corporate world. And that’s the beauty of education for a certain kind of mind but also detrimental to a certain kind of mind, so it’s interesting that you knew what it was that you needed and that playing and make-believe—which

is actually a very therapeutic process—for people that connect with their authentic… I mean, I joke and I call her ‘Little Amanda,’ but that Little Amanda is the Amanda who was sweet and spontaneous and curious, emotional… you know, that was my authentic self before I got shut down by life.

Yeah I love what you’re saying. Yeah keep going.

But I mean I am really impressed by your observation of knowing that, okay, you can also just take that to the extreme where you are now avoiding dealing with yourself, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed this with yourself, but I have friends whose work—you can see on screen— just didn’t develop for years, just kept on doing the same kind of role; it was the same. I was like, you’re not bringing anything new here. And what it was, was they weren’t living life! They got really successful. They went from one film to another and they suddenly had, like you said, no heartbreak, no mistakes, no fuck-

ups. Their life, well, was empty and they had to go out and live life to bring something back to their work again.

I know, my god it’s so true because, especially this work, it can kind of become so inflating? Your feet literally never touch the ground. It’s like, you’re on a flight and you’re in a car and you’re straight to set and to the hotel and then you’re back to set and then you’re on a flight to something else and it’s this weird ethospace that’s not real, and often you’re surrounded by people who are just trying to figure out how to monetize whatever it is that you’re doing, and you can reach a place where you stop living a reality. And I think the really great artists fight against that and they get very defensive about protecting that space that is the private space that you create from, and continuing to live dangerously there and to take really big risks that may mean a lot of the time, people don’t really understand what you’re doing or why, because it doesn’t make sense to them. And something you were

saying about Little Amanda, it was making me think too—I think this is a particularly interesting question for women because it’s like, the moment that they are going through the education system, it’s like little girls in elementary school are the first to raise their hands and to answer and to be outgoing and very sure of themselves and then suddenly, they reach the age where boys start looking at them and then it all sort of falls apart and they don’t want to be too smart or ambitious because they think that that’s not what’s attractive to boys.

They think that their primary value is how attractive they are to men and that an ambitious, strong, smart girl isn’t attractive or is threatening.

Culturally, that’s the message they are given, but it is actually their experience, because I don’t know about you, but certainly me and certainly so many of my girlfriends who are brilliant, smart, creative, sensual, foxy, bright— really women who I would want to marry—I have so many girlfriends who men are afraid of because they do have all of that, so it’s also their experience in the world that then gets validates the negative belief system.

That’s funny because I used to think that when I got out of college. I always thought, well, everything is very fair and equal, and then I entered the working world outside of college and I was like, oh no actually, everything is still radically in favour of like… the domain is run by men and women are still trying to find their place in that. But it’s interesting because I think what I realised is that the real crisis isn’t actually a crisis about women, it’s actually a crisis of masculinity and the question of men defining

themselves in this being the first generation of men that have really been raised with mothers who were breadwinners and possibly the bigger income towards the family, and so we are just sort of starting to see men who were raised in those households, and then the crisis for them of like, okay, so now what does it mean to be a man? If so much of being a man was like, I’m the provider, I set the agenda, I’m the one who’s going to protect— if all that is being renegotiated, I think it’s like, the real crisis is how men are going to define their space or what it means to be a man. It’s a more complex thing that just being the provider.

This is a conversation that is one of my favourite topics because I actually just wrote a chapter on my book about it, about gender role confusion, called, ‘Who’s Wearing the Pants?’ and it’s because of exactly what you’re saying. My take on this is that this generation of boys is being raised by a mother who, as you said, is maybe the main breadwinner—who’s working, who has an equal opinion, who has a different role within the family. I think that my seven-year-old boy, his generation of boys is going to be way more able to manage women like us. Right?

Yeah because his mom was that way.

Right, and because there are hundreds of thousands of women like me raising sons, so I think that his generation is going to have an easier time. It is the older generation that are really having a hard time with it.

I had a guy friend of mine say to me, ‘Well what exactly would you need a man for? Because you have children, you earn your own living, you have your own social life, you qualify for your own mortgage…’

And I really had to think about it.

I really did, I was like, err, I don’t know, partnership, conversation… and then I thought, wait a second, I get that from my girlfriends; they provide my intellectual, emotional stimulation. So I thought, I don’t know, penis? I mean, just dick— is that it? But I love men, so I’m hoping there’s more to discover.

Yeah, it’s true. I think that is what is so interesting about navigating relationships right now—it’s forcing I think this kind of authenticity because everybody has to come to the table with something…

Because we can see what we’re getting a lot more; we know what it looks like.

Yeah, exactly. And if women aren’t coming from a place of need, if it’s just about want, then that’s a whole new conversation: What do you actually want out of a relationship— and that’s just getting interesting in dynamic because nobody’s in it because they need financial security or a place to live or whatever, it’s all about how, much do our conversations push me? Are you really a partner who will grow and support me in growing and are we going to grow in the same direction, like can we actually be useful partners to one another because all the artifice I guess has fallen away and so now it becomes about really negotiating the relationship and the power dynamic and all of that stuff in between.

Totally.

In bed, out of bed… But also,

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I think it’s what you said just now—it’s about negotiating the partnership, but to that point.

It’s about redefining partnership so we’re in a time where, not only are men trying to work out what their role is and what we need from them, and our needs are way less because we’re meeting our own needs in many areas, but because of that, we’re renegotiating what a partnership is. I have a lot of women friends who are like, I am not actually sure what I need you for or want you for. I mean, I think we’re all a bit confused now. What do you find in your own life? Do you go on dates?

Yeah, it’s been hard in the sense that, for a while I was just travelling around so much that it was just literally impossible for me to have anything other than a virtual relationship, and that’s not a real relationship. And so for a while it was just difficult that way, but then I think now it’s like, if I think about what I’m really interested in… I think the world itself is suffering a little from the lack of feminine influence and I think it’s because men have been so encouraged to be radically masculinised that they don’t have a proper, male/female, yin/yang balance in themselves and the whole world plays out from that stage, and we’re just like, everything is a more testosterone-driven, aggressive approach. And that’s sometimes good—you sometimes need that approach but it’s just that you also sometimes need the, ‘I’m going to listen, I’m going to hear you out,’ I think on my multiple different levels far into the future instead of the more linear, you know, trajectory.

It’s like, you need both, and I think we’re in a time period where the masculine—both in men themselves and the world at large—has been so

put into hyper-drive and I think it just has to come back and balance out a bit more with the feminine and then I think that solves the problem of what you were saying, which is like, what do I need from a guy? I think guys would be better able to give women what they want and need if the masculine/feminine balance were more aligned in themselves— then there is more value to the partnership. How that happens, I don’t know. I mean, I find that usually I’m dating guys that are older than me because they seem to reach a place where they’re comfortable in themselves, comfortable with what they’ve achieved; it’s less of a competitive thing and more of a, ‘I know who I am and I’m attracted to you because you definitely know who you are.’ But I don’t know how it actually gets there on the whole; I don’t know, maybe it’s moving in that direction but sometimes it’s hard to tell, sometimes I’m just like, oh my god, who am I going to date?

But I have to say that my strongest relationships are with women.

I mean they just are. The most significant relationships for me are my women friends and I think that, over time, it’s got more and more like that, and I’m hoping that as time goes on, I will meet more men who I could have friendships with that I can then set my girlfriends up with. Occasionally I’ll meet a guy and I’ll be like, ‘Oh my god, I cannot do anything about this because I’m married, but you must meet my friend!’

I’ve never met your husband before but do you feel like, I don’t know… sometimes I feel like, oh, it’s really nice to be around a masculine energy because it reminds me of what is feminine in me. It’s almost as if by juxtaposition… I wondered if

it was like that with your husband?

Well, not with him interestingly enough, because he’s actually an interesting case, because he was raised in a predominantly female house. So he’s very feminised. He’s incredibly hands-on; he’ll be pretty happy to just stay at home and take care of the kids and I’ll go out and work. And I think that’s very unusual because normally that is not the case, so I don’t have that feeling with him because I’m definitely more in my masculine energy. And again, you were talking about the male needing to be more in the feminine; I feel like myself and a lot of other women I know need to know how to go more into their feminine because, with the assertiveness that we’ve developed from really being able to take control of our own lives over the last 20 years, to manage, we’ve also gone into a more masculine place. How do you maintain your femininity in a career? I mean, how do you do that, because you’re really a pioneer. I mean, obviously there are other women that create their own work at the level you do, but there aren’t many of you— who make films, who write, who contribute as much as you do. You make your own film and how do you keep your femininity within a very male-dominated workplace?

I’ve long been feeling that women, in order to succeed, have deinvested themselves a lot of their feminine qualities which they see as not advantageous to the workplace, so they continue to strip away their feminine instincts in favour of developing a more masculine style to succeed in, and it’s funny, because I saw that in the banking world. When I briefly was working at a bank, I was like, oh wow, the

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women that do well here have basically become men. They dress like men, they talk like men, they sort of think like men—that’s the way to succeed in that bank and once they succeed at this bank, then they are the token girl-in-theboys-club and they turn around and shut other women out because they want to be the token girl. And what I think is afoot now, which is sort of exciting, is I think a lot of women are being like, no, actually, the trick is to infiltrate and be successful, but have maintained a lot of your feminine qualities, because that’s actually what the world needs. The world doesn’t need another banker, or politician or artist to be totally on the side of masculinity; the world needs more of a balance. So I think I have at least been trying to remember and cultivate in myself things that are from a prospective point of view, a way of thinking that is inherently feminine. I even see that in the writing; I’m constantly reading screenwriting books and I remember reading this book on mythology—like, the mythropes in writing—and it blew my mind that all of that mythology is basically men writing about men and great myths for men, of which there are so many.

And then there are only a handful of myths about women and they’re also written by men, so you start to realise that so much of storytelling has been lost in male perspective and you’re either Persephone— innocent, naïve, and kidnapped

by Hades into the underworld and has to be rescued; or you’re like Athena—unapproachable, vicious and there’s no gradient.

And for me, it’s an amazing thing to begin to think about what it means to tell feminine mythology because it needs to be invented, it doesn’t exist; and also, what does inherently feminine storytelling

and structure look like? I mean, the closest I’ve found is I remember reading A Visit from the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan… I mean, oh my god—her structure and the way she’s approaching this is not linear, it’s a circle, then she’s doing a closer circle and it’s getting to this centre and it’s inherently feminine and it’s so provocative. And I’ve never read a story told that way and it’s because she is a woman, groundbreaking the territory of what it means to tell a story in a truly feminine way. And that’s hard to do because it means you’re inventing it as you go; there is no model.

Right, and that’s what is so interesting to me about women like yourself who are recreating the wheel. I think as a writer, certainly with what you’re talking about, with what you write, does it mean that when you write from a female perspective that only a female is going to understand what you’re on about? That’s what I want to know.

I want to know that too, because I would like to think that the answer to that is no, as women have long been going to the movies with male protagonists, written and directed by men. I’m very interested in the male perspective. I love to know what men think and how they view things, but are they as interested in how women think and see things? I want to say yes, in the sense that I want to say that every husband and brother and son wants to know what the women in his life are actually like and what they’re thinking and there should be as much as a male audience for your show. I loved that interview you did with Jane Fonda and that was such a provocative conversation and so interesting— these two bright women with all

these ideas and they’re so excited and you want to think that, I mean I got so much out of that. I’d love to think that my male peers would also watch that and be as fascinated and not need it to be about them as much as understanding the women around them.

Interestingly enough, so many men watch my show, The Conversation, which I was so surprised about.

I’ve had husbands come to me and say, ‘Ugh, you know, usually my wife watches things on TV and I just tune out, but whenever she watches your show, I’ll be in the other room and I’ll hear some great sentence and I’ll come in and be like, what’s that? And then I end up watching your show.’ It made me so happy and I feel like maybe it’s also to do with how things are presented to men, because my work is really about the female perspective—whether photographing or interviewing or whatever, I’m inherently female and I’m thinking, how can I communicate this idea or image, or whatever it is, to women? I think that, going back to the beginning of our conversation, of what you said about men and what they’re going through—I think we have to include men, and you may do this in your work way more than I do, but I’m just saying it for myself too: my goal here is to create work that is more inclusive of men and more considerate of men so that we can bring them into our world in a way that is welcoming and not threatening and allows men to be men within our female world.

I think that that is actually the most important thing, which I think feminists have not necessarily…

I love that feminism is such a polarising word, but what I mean

is it shouldn’t be. It should just be… the agenda should still be, how do women find their place in the world, then navigate it. Well, but it’s even more now; I think about, how do women make men understand better and be comfortable with the feminine in themselves? That, I think, is the more important agenda, and if you can make that happen, then you really start to change things. If the feminine/masculine balance is even in both genders on some level, I just think everything changes from there, like politics changes, how we handle the environment changes…

I think there’d be a big ripple effect of women bringing men in rather than being like, oh no, you’re ‘other,’ you’re a separate gender, you’re never going to understand. No, it should be an invitation to come in, come get comfortable…

I’m so curious—do you think about all of this when you’re writing your male characters? Because again, I think that men don’t have the role models in their media to look to; there are very few in a very testosterone-driven media that just reinforces that that is how they should be. But you have an opportunity to write male characters that can speak to another kind of man.

I was just saying this to somebody the other day, that when I first started writing scripts, it was because there were no great roles for women and I thought, forget even me as an actress, there are a lot of great, talented actresses out there and there’s not enough work for them, so I’m going to write work that puts women in the light that we see women in and then put that out into the world. And as I started doing that, I started to realise, oh my gosh, no; really, alongside that

goal, there’s an equally important one, which is giving men the space to be who men really are, which is layered and complicated and emotional. I was just reading this action script the other day and it was just like some really great male actor was going to do the part, and I was reading the part and I was like, really? It was just so mind-numbing— violence and appropriation of women—and it seemed so empty, and also it’s funny, as when we were writing The East, one of the things Alex Skarsgård said, when he took on the part, was he was so excited to read this male character that was driven and ambitious, but also sensitive and a thinker and quiet and contemplative, and that he was all these things, and that he often defaulted to the woman in the group and her opinion, and there were all these layers and nuances to who he was and it didn’t have to be that he was going in guns blazing, shirt off, to win the hearts and minds of the audience.

Do you think that that man that you wrote in The East really exists in real life?

I would say that, yes, I have encountered men who, for whatever reason—maybe it’s because they had a really interesting mother or because they had sisters or because they had children early, or maybe because they were always packed into it—that they have a more balanced perspective and they haven’t had their ego so inherently drawn to the more testosteronedriven version of how a man should be. But they are fewer and farther between than you would like them to be, and I think that there is a really unfair pressure that a man only looks like one thing and that one thing I think is actually… I

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think that the crisis of masculinity is that most men are actually really uncomfortable there. They don’t want to be the vision of what Hollywood or everyone is telling them a man is. They want for something different.

They hate that pressure. Honestly, the more I talk about the issue with over-Photoshopping, and the women I know who are on magazine covers that get Photoshopped to shit can’t live up to their Photoshopped images.

When I talk about it to guy friends of mine, they go, ‘Yeah, how do you think we feel? Every guy that we see has an airbrushed six-pack.’

There’s a male ideal being pushed out there, not only aesthetically, but intellectually and financially, and they have it, I don’t know as much as we do, but they have their own version.

Totally, and it’s just so beastly, and it’s just self-destructive and just as painful because, not only can nobody reach these ideals, but the truth is, nobody wants to; they’re empty, they’re shells, and I think that’s why art and creativity are more important than ever because somehow, we have to navigate our way out of a culture that has become increasingly about the surface of things. I mean, I like pop music just as much as the next person, but…

What do you like, what are you listening to?

I love Beyonce’s new album. I love it.

Me too! I’m obsessed with it. Oh my god, that song, ‘I woke up like this’ [‘Flawless’] and, what about ‘Pretty Hurts’?

Pullquote Sitates utat fugiae eaquam illabo. Id quam simpore pratempore qui nosam, ommod molor modis et velitium vendunt Yeah. Sooo beautiful. Oh my word.

I got teary-eyed when I heard that one the first time. But yeah, sometimes some of the stuff around that culture of fast and popular and quick can end up being surfacelayer, and it’s just like, everyone is living their life on the surface; everyone is about the presentation of themselves rather than the interior.

Like, everything is about, how does the event look on Instagram? Like, how does the event photograph rather than what happened at the event or the real experience, and that stuff scares me.

It scares me too because, honestly, sometimes I will look at Instagram and I’ll think, all my friends are having such a good time and all I do is work or I’m with my kids, I have no social life. And then I’ll talk to my friends and be like, ‘So how was that thing the other night?’ And they will say, ‘Oh, it was terrible.

You didn’t miss anything. It was so lame.’ And I think, really? It didn’t look like that from the pictures!

Yeah, the picture looked amazing!

Exactly. And the point of it is we have somehow all gotten into this and I do not subscribe to this, and I refuse to subscribe to it—to

presenting this front that life is all fun and it’s all easy all the time, and I’m not that person and I refuse to be. And I think that, people who are telling truthful stories—you are one of them—we need more people to speak up and say, hey, actually, this is what I feel, this is what I hear, or this is what I want to talk about, because it gives everybody else permission to say, oh thank god, me too.

Maybe there will be some sort of rebellion against all of this, the pressure of self-promotion, which has gotten a little weird.

It’s exhausting.

It’s exhausting and what happened to ideas that are good? It feels like that has all evaporated and the thought that you might care more about your community or other people or doing things that will be a benefit to everyone. A: Well, we are in the age of narcissism, no doubt. I think social media has done that and encouraged that, and the great thing with social media is it’s given everyone a voice, which I love, because it means everyone gets to speak up, everyone gets to say what they’re thinking; but it has also become incredibly narcissistic.

But I do think that there are huge communities of people who really are about social good and we just have to highlight them more; they’re not as easily found, they’re not as visible as whoever’s on TV, so I feel like it’s our job as people who do have a voice and care about whatever it is that we care about—it’s our job to use our voice wisely to highlight those issues or those statements or those people, or whatever it is. B: That’s really true, because you’re in a really profound place of privilege to have a voice at all, and I feel like, you should constantly be earning it, because I know from my experience that for every person that breaks through and gets to make a movie and to act in it, there are 40 other girls right behind you that are as talented, as committed, work as hard… they just haven’t gotten their lucky break yet. And so you really feel this responsibility that if you’re going to be given the great gift of getting to communicate, then, well fuck, you better make sure you have something of value to say, of value to everyone or that provokes an interesting conversation, or is an idea of merit, or adds something to the conversation, because it can’t be empty.

This is what I believe in my heart—

that there is no business, there is no success that is sustainable that is not rooted in service. If you are not providing something that enriches people’s lives in some way—I mean, it could be a shallow thing to something incredibly profound—but if you are not meeting a fundamental need that people have, your thing cannot sustain, because otherwise it doesn’t stick. We’re all fed so much information with so much stuff, so much consumerism, so much of everything, that for anything to stick and be worthwhile, I think it has to be meeting a need for people in their lives in some way.

This has sort of come full circle from what we were saying earlier about travel and stuff, and the life of an artist on the road or whatever—that it is lonely. And I have found that, if I thought at the beginning, oh I’m really good at alone time, and I mean, preparing for roles I spend a lot of time alone—I don’t know how other people do it but I spend a lot of time just shut up in a room, making the conditions and circumstances of this second reality real to me so that I believe it, so I can convince other people of it, and that’s a lonely part of it, and often in some farflung part of the world that you’re not at home in, and all of that has made me realise that human beings inherently need one another; we really aren’t solo creatures. We’re pack animals. We need community, yet we’re behaving in this weird way where we’re allowing that new road of bigger, more important things we feel, like travel, because you need to for your career, and I think that there’s this movement that is happening that is so essential that is getting back to a kind of local living and developing community and building on it and then doing

work that is a part of enriching that, and then that may not necessarily be at a worldwide level—it may just be about the town that you live in and with a meaningful life there, and I don’t know what that means yet but I… Well I think that’s a very valid point—I say that to people, and I believe that too. And there are people—and I commend them— that are saving people all around the world, and thank god for them but, for me personally, I’ve always felt that it’s my immediate responsibility to BE THERE in my house with my children, with my family, with my friends, and then it goes out into my community, then it goes out to my city, then it goes out to my country. I haven’t gotten further than the country I live in; in fact, I pretty much focus on the cities that I spend time in because that’s where I can really be the most effective, and if I’m busy doing charitable work around the world but I’m neglecting the streets that I’m walking, I’m not an asset to my community. I mean, look, you and I are very aligned on a lot of our thinking, and it’s probably another reason why the more time I talk to you, the more I just adore you.

Oh I feel the same way. Every time we talk it feels just like fireworks going off, you know what I mean?

Even what you’ve been saying just now—I sort of have a lot of these thoughts in my head but I haven’t really articulated them, nor talked with someone who, like what you just said to me distilled something that I’ve been struggling with, which is this thought that, oh, a lot of… Back when there was a real inequality, a woman had to be at home and the domestic world was

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her space; there, women couldn’t prove themselves in the real world, so they were doing it for free in their communities: they were on hospital wards, they were taking care of the parks, and it was free labour for specific good. And communities were held together by the efforts of women who were not allowed to go work and so were doing their work and sort of competing with one another in that space. And now that women are in the working world, it’s like there’s been this huge vacuum, people are like, brain-drained from taking care of the community. And I love what you’re saying because you’re like, we have to go back there and we have to make our careers and our work—men and women—inherently connected to improving our household and our neighbourhood and the community around there, because if we let go of that…

But it’s not easy.

No, not at all, because there’s also just not a lot of time in the day. And it is really tricky because it becomes like, this thing that’s just about time, and you want to do everything and be everywhere, but it’s hard. I mean, I can’t remember where I read this recently, I think it was this great article in the New York Review of Books called, ‘Women At the Top’ or something, and was talking about a lot of these ideas, and one of the things that they were saying was like, yes, men have become more equal partners on household duties, but it’s not 50:50; it’s more like 70:30 in a lot of households, and so women are then impossibly taxed. It’s like, you have to just do everything, and that super-humanness is hard. And I’m so curious, I really feel that I want to have children at some point and I think about that and I’m like,

okay, what will that mean? Like breastfeeding every two hours?

Yeah, that will mean exactly that.

As long as I’ve known you, you’ve taken big chunks of time to go into isolation, right?

Yeah, and you can’t do that with a baby.

No. You cannot. You just cannot because there is someone that has needs that is requiring your attention, so it is a whole different scenario. It just is.

Yeah. Then how do you not sacrifice your work so that you aren’t resentful of your child? Like, oh, I suddenly had to stop devoting all of my time to writing and thinking, because I haven’t read a book in the last three years because I’ve been breastfeeding, and there’s this cleaning-up and trying to make you this somewhat self-sufficient human-being…

Well, that’s very difficult, and I think again, there is the very concept of motherhood that is out there in the world and it’s very dishonest. The reality of motherhood is getting more openly discussed, but there is a lot of kind of mother-shaming that goes on, and I am so against it. I speak openly about my challenges with managing a career and taking care of children, I talk about it a lot, and some people are kind of offended by it but I say, there are days I would rather go to work than take care of my kids because it fulfills me, it gives me self-esteem and makes me feel good about myself.

Which in turn makes me a happier mother. So I think you’ve got to kind of go with who you are and not fit into a stereotype.

It’s so true, this idea of like, onefits-all motherhood and the total impossibility of that. Everybody has to navigate it in their own way and that truly nobody knows exactly what it looks like right now, in terms of who your partner is in it, their understanding of their roles and responsibilities versus yours… it’s sort of all wildly up for negotiation.

Everything is. Everything is. Our gender roles are shifting and moving and it’s up to us to define them. It’s a very definitive time, and we are creating the template for the generations that are going to come behind us now, which is exciting but, as you said, when you are a pioneer of any kind, it has not been done before; therefore, you are creating it, and it is hard and uncomfortable. It does fuck up and you have to go back to the drawing board, and we’re in that time, I feel.

You’re making me think right now— there’s this film I did called The Keeping Room that is written by a young woman called Julia Hart, who was an English teacher for many years and wrote two things and they sold right away, and now she is a screenwriter. And I remember reading the screenplay and being so moved by it, I couldn’t put it down, because it was about being a pioneer. It was about two sisters and their former slave in the Civil War in the South, trying to defend their home from invasion from the Union soldiers who were on Sherman’s March [to the Sea], and it was so provocative to read; the script just like, crackled with electricity because you had never read or imagined a story about war from the feminine civilian point of view. And so when you watch this

film, I mean, I just saw the final cut of it the other day, it blew me away because the thought I had when I walked out of the cinema was, holy shit, no one had really shown how women would use violence in a way that is inherently feminine.

Because no one would associate those two things together—of violence and women.

Yeah. At all. And this film, because of that, is so shocking. And I remember walking out of the screening room thinking, wow, people say that they want the feminine perspective but, oh my gosh, are they really ready for it? Because when it hits you, it hits you hard with how little you know about what women would do in these situations because you’ve never seen it before. I mean, I loved that movie and I love watching her kick ass and do it in a very masculine way, but what if the girl holding the gun is really profoundly a woman and operating on feminine instincts and intuition and is she able to pull the trigger the same way that a man would? I haven’t really watched something exploring that before.

I need to see this.

Oh, I am so excited for you to see this. It’s so the things that we are talking about, in a radical way.

I feel women’s anger is, socially, incredibly unacceptable. You get called crazy…

Or a bitch.

Or a bitch, as opposed to… I’m entitled to feel angry because this is what occurred; anyone would feel angry but women’s anger has to be tied up in a nice little box with a bow on it because, here’s my anger, it cannot be anger as we

“Pullquote Sitates utat fugiae eaquam illabo. Id quam simpore pratempore qui nosam.” know male anger to be.

It’s the same with female sexuality, which has long been boxed-in. I mean, women were literally being burned at the stake for being capable of creating and just the awesomeness of their sexual power and women can have like, ten orgasms in a night, you know?

That’s overwhelming.

I have to say I am not one of those. I have not experienced the multiple orgasm, and I have many girlfriends that have and I feel like, I don’t know if I am ever going to but I would really like to. I mean, I don’t know what I have to do to have ten orgasms in a night but I have girlfriends that do.

Maybe not—but I think it’s still possible; I think it’s just that like, as you were saying before, women have been taught to be ashamed of their anger, ashamed of their sexuality.

It’s like, all of this stuff is so boxedin where, as you know, guys are figuring out how to masturbate pretty early all over culture; it’s like women are shamed away from that, like, oh no, don’t touch yourself, don’t pleasure yourself, that’s not okay. And it’s like, everything comes late, the sexual blooming comes late because…

Well, not only that, but also because there’s so much shame about female sexuality and specifically masturbation, I mean I talked about this a lot with Jane

Fonda actually—you can’t get to know your own body, it puts girls in the weaker power position within a sexual encounter because they don’t have a language to describe what they want, they don’t know what feels good, they don’t know what they like, they don’t know how their body works because they haven’t spent days, hours, weeks, months, years, learning it themselves.

control either…

The girl can’t hope to teach the guy what to do until she knows, so until you know how your body works or what turns you on and how and where, you certainly can’t get your partner to that place.

That phrase, ‘I am responsible for my orgasm’, applies to everything though, you know—to your creative work, to your life; you are responsible for the orgasm to life. You’re here for a brief period of time and you’re the one who is going to make yourself come, and you can have partners and collaborators on that and all these sorts of things but it’s on you, you know. And if you don’t do the homework on yourself and if you don’t sit still with yourself, then the chances that you are going to be able to get there and get there with somebody else are slim to none.

I just thought of something. So if your first experience of an orgasm is with another person, you then could potentially endow that person with the power to give you the orgasm. You think it’s because of them, therefore, you keep going to them because they hold that power, that key, as opposed to knowing, you know what, I can do this for myself, I hold the key, you were just the facilitator. I mean, I just thought about this.

Which is so amazing and so true because it’s like, once you become aware of that, it sort of levels the playing field, you know? It’s not like, I need this person to do this to me; I can do this to me, it’s more fun with another person if you’re both in a place where you’re both allowed to be out of control but nobody is in

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Or in control of the other person, because I don’t know about you but, certainly for me, I have gone back to situations with men because of a sexual connection I have with them; where as, if I had known I’m responsible for my orgasm, you are not responsible for my orgasm, I probably would have been less hooked into them.

…You and I are always picking up the same conversation we had the first night we met each other, so we could keep going on and on and on…

I know, I love it.

Hair: Sascha Breuer at Starworks Artists.

Make-up: Darlene Jacobs at Starworks Artists.

Manicurist: Stephanie Stone at Nailing Hollywood.

Photography Assistant: Steven Perilloux. Fashion Assistants: Kristina Golightly, Nicole Deutch and Sami Miro. Set Design: Din Morris at The Magnet Agency. Digital Technician: Ty Watkins

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“It’s extraordinary how little some things have changed over the past thirty-five years since Faye Dunaway refused to stop working, thereby driving her exasperated lover away in the film Network. If Hollywood were to make a film of Hillary Clinton’s recent few years, they would have Bill leave her during her presidential campaign because she loses sight of what really matters in life, i.e. him. She would then proceed to lose the election, move to the countryside in ignominy, get together with a hot plumber who lives down the road and rediscover the important things, like making apple sauce.”

—Hadley Freeman

HOW TO BE A FEMININST

by Hadley Freeman

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By all means ask men about their achievements but then tell them about yours, too: An addendum to Self-Deprecating Tourettes There is a theory that men are threatened by high-achieving, confident women and that the best way to please one is simply to ask him about his achievements, nod encouragingly and never use the first person pronoun except when saying a phrase like, ‘I don’t understand, could you please explain that to me again, o smart, manly man you?’

This is undoubtedly true – of some men.

The question is, why would you really want to hang around such a silly specimen for any length of time at all?

I’m going to say something quite maverick here so hold on to your fascinators: not all men are self-centred jerks beset by egos more fragile than a fourteenth-century porcelain collection.

In fact, there are – it’s true! – quite a few nice ones.* A good way of sorting the promising wheat from the time-wasting chaff is, when you meet them, to ask what they’ve been up to and what they do, and then wait to see if they reciprocate.

And if they do, look to see if they then actually listen or if they stare over your head in the hope that a waitress from Hooters will appear in their line of vision. It’s a fun party game! * This, incidentally, is an addendum to an addendum.

True feminists do not make tired sweeping statements about men because feminists know that jokes like ‘What do you call the useless bit of skin at the end of a penis?’ are just as unacceptable as jokes like ‘How many women does it take to screw in a lightbulb?’ Some women might be tempted to think otherwise and see it as a form of revenge for the centuries of sexist jokes their gender has had to endure, but gender stereotyping is not a particularly helpful tactic in attempting to achieve gender equality.

Accept that you don’t have to be liked by everyone – and that’s OK This is definitely part of the tendency behind Self-Deprecating Tourettes problem.

All too many women feel that, in order to fulfil their feminine criteria, they must ensure they are liked by everyone, from the handyman who just ripped them off (‘I’m so sorry to bother you but that pipe you just fixed yesterday which you charged me a grand for, well, I don’t know if I’ve done something wrong but it’s exploded. Oh no, I’m sure it’s not your fault ...’) to the stranger who just jumped them in the bus queue. I have a friend who was so concerned about making her weed dealer like her she used to send birthday cards to his kids, much to his bemusement. Obviously, this is, to a certain degree, a nice instinct, wanting to be kind to people. But all too often it is a self-stifling one, something that is holding you back from standing up for yourself and avoiding confrontation, and it is a needlessly distracting concern.

Be polite to people, sure, but stop trying to make everyone your friend. They won’t be. And that’s just fine.

Be kind to yourself To be a feminist means to live up to one’s full potential, personally, professionally, mentally, morally. But it is impossible to do this if you can barely stand up straight from beating yourself up all the time and hobbling your own strength. This is not meant literally (I hope), but rather refers to the bruises one suffers from self-hatred. ‘How could I be so stupid?’ KA-POW! ‘I’m so hungry but carbs will make me fat so I won’t eat the bread and I’ll be tired and hungry all afternoon.’ THUNK! ‘Hmm, I wonder what’s happening on the Daily Mail website.’ BOOM! Self-Deprecating Tourettes we already talked about but another element to it, one arguably more damaging than when the self-deprecation is merely outwardly to other people, is when it is expressed inwardly and you are horrid about yourself, to yourself. Never talk to yourself in a way that you wouldn’t put up with from other people and – if that is an unhelpful

Never be afraid of getting into an argument about abortion

analogy because you have let people say some horrid things to you – never talk to yourself in a way that someone who loves you very, very much would not allow. In other words, stop calling yourself stupid when you forget to buy washing-up liquid on your way home and stop calling yourself fat because your jeans are chafing a tad.

It’s just bad manners.

In a lovely article about eating on one’s own by Daisy Garnett that ran in the Observer newspaper in 2010, Garnett wrote: ‘Eating sensibly and well when alone is a mark of self-respect.’ This is goddamn true. But it is also true that eating sensibly and well full-stop is a sign of self-respect. The causes of eating disorders are myriad and complicated but one element that unites them all is selfhatred. Only someone who has no respect for themselves whatsoever can so wholly ignore their body’s normal and increasingly desperate physical needs.

It is impossible to live up to your full potential if you are eating in a way that deprives you of energy, whether it is eating too much or too little. It is also impossible to accomplish anything if you are mentally engaged pondering whether calories or carbs are more fattening.

There is no such thing as a perfect body type or perfect diet, no matter what any magazine or breakfast TV show might tell you: the only real goal is to have the energy to do the things you want to do, and enjoy them. It takes a lot of energy, physical and mental, to be a plucky feminist so it is your responsibility, not just to yourself but feminism in general, to eat well. So every time you catch yourself starting to obsess about food and weight, go have a massage or – if there is a person in the near vicinity worthy of such a privilege – some sexy time. Your body does great things for you every day and it deserves to be treated nicely.

Look, there’s nothing to be frightened of here. Yes, abortion remains, 40 years after Roe v Wade, a deeply fraught issue, more so in America (where I’m from) than in the UK (where I live), and that is just one of the reasons why I, personally, find living in the UK a far more pleasant experience. I can only take listening to ignorant and opportunistic politicians talk about what a woman is allowed to do with her body for their own political gain for so long. And yes, some of those anti-choice people do look and sound pretty scary and they are fond of using impassioned, even gruesome arguments.

But this isn’t complicated. It doesn’t even have to be emotional. It simply comes down to the following question: whose needs and emotions are more important – those of the pregnant woman or those of the foetus inside her? That’s it. The grown-up who actually exists as a human, or the bunch of cells inside her that do not.

To be anti-choice is to be anti-women.

It is to see women as baby-carriers, not human beings. No woman should have to justify why she wants an abortion (which is why rape and incest exceptions in the US regarding tax payer assisted abortions are, in fact, red herrings. As Irin Carmon wrote, this idea suggests some ‘abortions are worthier than others ... either you believe a woman has the right to decide not to be pregnant anymore, or you think you should get a say in her decision’*). An abortion is not a pleasant procedure but its existence is inevitable and necessary and even if it’s made illegal women will still find ways to have it, just in less safe ways.

So stand up for women and stand up yourself: if you believe that it is your body, your life, fight this fight. * ‘Rape exceptions aren’t legitimate’, Irin Carmon, Salon, 20 August 2012.

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Be a feminist, not a faux feminist When women of Gaga’s mindset claim not to be feminists, they often explain this by saying that they don’t want special treatment or to be defined by their gender (‘I’m not a feminist. I consider my position in the business world not as a woman but as a person, and I don’t think, “Did that happen because I’m a woman?”’).* They always say this with a snap of pride in their voice, as though they are making not just the definitive, argument-closing point, but one that has not been said a kajillion times before, which does raise some questions about whether they are really as well read as they invariably claim to be, but that’s a different issue.

What they don’t quite seem to get, though, is that is precisely the point of feminism: not to be limited or defined by one’s gender.

For a woman to say that she doesn’t call herself a feminist is like a black person announcing he’s racist. And yet, it’s astonishing how often one comes across interviews with female celebrities who refuse to define themselves as feminists.

Despite playing in a film one of the most famous feminists of all time, Gloria Steinem, Sarah Jessica Parker insists, ‘I’m not a feminist, I’m a humanist.’

Similarly, Gwyneth Paltrow recounted in one interview about how she recently gave advice to a friend in a new relationship: ‘I said this may not be feminist, but you have to compromise ... Gloria Steinem may string me up by my toes.’ Fortunately for Paltrow and her toes it is unlikely Steinem would do any such thing because, contrary to what Paltrow seems to believe, feminism is not about selfishness, lack of compromise, hating men, special treatment or tokenism: it’s about equality. Nor does it mean a woman should wear boiler suits and obliterate all traces of her natural femaleness, but rather that she should expect to be seen as the strong, intelligent and capable person that she

is, with a voice worth listening to and a brain deserving of respect. If you ever meet a woman – or anyone, for that matter – who says they’re not a feminist, ask them if they believe women are human beings who deserve all the same opportunities as other human beings. Because, honestly, that’s all it is. Not favouritism – equality. You don’t need to have a vagina to be a feminist, although if you do have one and are not a feminist, you don’t deserve the privilege of possessing that vagina.

Maybe it’s because I have a name that makes me sound less like a person and more like an investment bank but I have always been interested in the subject of nomenclature and, specifically, how, when poorly executed, it can lead to wrong impressions.

Feminism can be a somewhat misleading term, like ‘global warming’. ‘Global warming’ encourages climate change deniers and anyone else whose comprehension of science is less than that of a fifteen-yearold to snicker triumphantly every time a snowflake falls, which they probably burn on a phosphate pyre in celebration.

Feminism’s name is to gender equality what global warming is to climate change: the same idea but with a name that can cause some confusions and make it an unnecessary target for the dull-witted sceptics. Just as ‘global warming’ doesn’t mean that the world is actually heating up but rather is being inexorably altered, feminism doesn’t mean women should take precedence over men but rather that they are equal.

To take a woman’s side automatically because she is a woman is not real feminism – that is faux feminism and faux feminism is as toxic to the cause as subtle misogyny because both make a mockery out of the real ambition here and obscure it; the difference is that faux feminism

opposed to thinking you should because that is the accepted norm, then there is nothing treacherous about that.

doesn’t even know it is doing it.

Thus for Harriet Harman to claim that Lehman Brothers would not have collapsed had women been in charge, or for Lynne Featherstone – the Equalities Minister, for heaven’s sake! – to say that ‘you get terrible decisions’ when men are in charge is as reductive as the late Christopher Hitchens’s too-often repeated comment about women not having a sense of humour. All men may have penises, but not all men are the same. You have more to offer than your gender and don’t want to be reduced to it.

Don’t do it to others, either.

Complications come in with the question of whether women need the lifting hand of positive discrimination quotas even to get to the level of equality. There are, unquestionably, still some rather anti-female playing fields out there that need levelling, circumstances in which women remain hobbled by everything from difficulties with childcare to straight-out chauvinism and both of these factors lead to a distinct under-representation of women in various industries. My personal feeling is that instead of having all-female book prizes, say, practical long-term solutions might be more effective, such as lobbying for all places of employment to offer free childcare facilities and tackling the actual issues that hold women back. But I am an idealist. * Entrepreneur Deborah Meaden, Guardian, 9 September 2009.

Accept that the things you feel and/ or do occasionally that you worry aren’t feminist are, in fact, unfeminist Wanting to be with someone and have a family is not unfeminist. What is unfeminist is believing that the only truly satisfying life for a woman to have is to be married and have children and to try to convince other women of your viewpoint. But if being without a partner in your life makes you feel lonely because you genuinely want to be with someone as

Similarly, a woman who enjoys fashion is not any less of a feminist than a man who is interested in cars is misogynistic.

Unfortunately, both of these subjects get covered by magazines and TV shows in a manner that does cause some problems. Car aficionados, for example, must suffer the indignity of being associated with racist jokes and terrible metaphors thanks to Top Gear, while fashion fans are forced to squint past the anorexia, the celebrities, the shameless adoration of wealth and the frankly atrocious gush that fill most fashion magazines in order to see the clothes that they love.

It is hard to see how spending money you earn on clothes that you like and make you feel good about yourself is unfeminist.

Clothes are a particularly enjoyable form of self-expression available more to women than to men. Take advantage of this. Men have to channel their longing for such fun into such sad and limiting channels as cufflinks and watches out of fear that anything more adventurous than a T-shirt and jeans will result in people questioning their sexuality.

This is why so many men often make fun of women’s fashion and, particularly, women who enjoy fashion: because they’re jealous.

There is absolutely no intellectual difference between enjoying fashion and enjoying, say, sport, other than that the dress you buy from a fashion designer will last a lot longer than a ticket to a football game.

Moreover, some men get cross about fashion because, as they repeatedly claim, fashion isn’t sexy: the models are too skinny, the clothes are often weird and, goddamnit, where are the boobs? In other words, they feel that their desires are being ignored, poor babies.

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But what they don’t understand is that fashion isn’t about looking sexy, it’s about looking different, and that’s why it’s so awesome. Or rather, it should be.

Unfortunately, much of the coverage of fashion does not help you in arguing that fashion is a feminist pursuit because it focuses on how it can make you look slimmer, sexier, most of all, like everybody else for the next six months.

This season green is de rigueur, you know.

None of this is feminist because, of course, all of it is nonsense. Wear what you like because it’s you who will be looking back at your outfit from the mirror, not Anna Wintour. And if Wintour does see your daringly not-on- trend outfit, she will doubtless applaud your courage and originality. Maybe.

And to be honest, who cares? You are a feminist and you will wear purple even when everyone else is wearing green. It’s what your sisters fought for.

Speaking of purple and green and all shades of the rainbow, let’s talk about make-up and beauty in general. Oh where, asks Elizabeth Bennet in the middle of Pride and Prejudice, does discretion end and avarice begin? And where, I ask myself at the end of this book, does taking pleasure in one’s appearance end and kowtowing to some evil commercialised and masochistic ideal begin?

Lizzy Bennet eventually masters the issue of avarice and discretion, or at least masters it enough to marry her grumpy but wealthy neighbour which, in the world of marriage plot novels, is the important issue anyway.

The question about whether following various beauty regimes is a betrayal of one’s feminist principles is, however, as yet unresolved and the resolution does not guarantee marriage to Mr Darcy (thank the Lord – honestly, of all the Austen heroes,

sour-faced Fitzwilliam Darcy remains the pin-up? Captain Wentworth any day of the week for me and Sundays, too). Various writers have expended an extraordinary amount of energy debating this subject, energy that occasionally feels very misdirected.

‘You work on your appearance in order to create a marketable image that can be bought and sold. Women are willingly turning themselves into commodities we can trade for our own and others’ gain,’* wrote one journalist, making a fairly hefty, presumptuous and common gender generalisation. ‘Today, I pledge I will go and pick up my daughter without changing out of my husband’s cat-hair- covered fleece, proud to be seen as someone with something better to do than de-lint,’ she continued, thus getting right to the nub of the real problem with these kinds of articles. Judging women by their appearance is precisely the opposite of one of feminism’s most central tenets and so to argue that to look dishevelled is the only acceptably feminist look is just as shallow and judgemental as to insist that feminine beauty is dependent on rouged cheeks and pinked lips.

A common plaint in every article arguing against make-up and beauty regimes (and fashion, come to that) is that they are so evil and addictive that poor little women become helpless to the compulsion.

‘Looking good,’ according to the aforementioned article, ‘is a tedious fulltime job,’ while Julie Burchill, never one to let subtleties or facts trip her up on the road to a good rant, describes a strange world in which a woman is expected to ‘spend three-quarters of my time and money turning myself into a hairless, poreless living doll’.* Maybe some women are indeed so in thrall to their own neuroses and believe everything they read in the Sunday Times Style magazine to the letter so that they structure their lives around eyebrow threading appointments

and facials, but to claim that all do drips heavily of condescension and tips swiftly over into misogyny.* It is at least partly because of limiting nonsense like this that many young women today hesitate before describing themselves as feminists: because they think feminism is about selfimposed limitations, female in-fighting, joylessness and homogeneity when it is, of course, about precisely the opposite.

is any more accurate than the ones she makes about women is another issue; the point is, contrary to what Burchill seems to believe, she is not the only woman out there who knows that men don’t give a damn if a woman has moisturised skin or polished nails. However, what other women do know that she apparently does not is that not everything a woman does is for the benefit of men.****

There are many, many things one can and should object to about the beauty industry: the creepy plastic surgery, the hair extensions that rip out pieces of one’s scalp, the nonsensical yet ubiquitous term ‘anti-ageing’. Truly, there is much about today’s beauty industry that makes eighteenth-century treatments such as ribbreaking corsets and lead-poisoning face powder look like pampering.

Journalists have a most unfortunate tendency to assume that members of the public are a great deal stupider than themselves and nowhere is this tendency more pronounced than in articles by female journalists raging against the tyranny of the beauty industry for women.

Feminism gives women choice and freedom and while this can be and sometimes is turned in on itself to be used against women (‘Women! You have the freedom to dress as Playboy bunnies! It’s a feminist thing!’), here is a quick checklist to ascertain if something is not feminist:

But make-up and beauty treatments of the kind Burchill so objects to (massages, facials, pedicures, etc.) are not among those things. They are among the increasingly rare offerings by the beauty industry that are, in fact, just for the women themselves as opposed to some imagined gaze of others.

1. Does it hurt women?

2. Does it reduce women to a stereotype and/or her sexuality?

3. Does it encourage women to damage themselves physically?

4. Does it stop women from living their lives to the fullest of their capabilities?

5. Does it suggest that only a very particular kind of woman (under thirty/ thin/a mother) is an acceptable woman?

When a woman puts on make-up, she is not going to look younger; she is creating her version of glamour and while one can argue that this proves she is kowtowing to some kind of masochistic ideal, it is surely far more offensive to assume that women can’t tell the difference on their own between being enslaved by western beauty ideals and enjoying themselves.

Seeing as the answer to all the above in regard to make-up and non-surgical beauty treatments is no, they’ve got a free feminist pass. So if eye shadow and body scrubs are what float your boat, float away.

Burchill’s characteristically measured response disputes that – ‘“I’m doing it for me, not for men” – oh, give it a rest, you lying cow!’** – but, as she herself says, ‘Straight men couldn’t care less [about women’s beauty regimes] – they generally just want women to have a wash, bring beer, show up and strip off.’*** Whether this equally reductive gender stereotype

* ‘Spare me from the Whining Women who are Giving Feminism a Bad Name’, Julie Burchill, Observer, 29 January 2012. * Further examples of misogynistic talk being used under the pretence of making a feminist argument against the beauty industry include ‘women [who have beauty treatments] are, perhaps, unloved. But rather than admit that they may be unloved because they are unlovable – dull, clingy, humourless – they presume one more treatment will put it right ... Sexstarved saddo[s] who feel a bit hollow and have to pay to be touched’ (‘A Suitable Case for Treatment’, Guardian, 23 February

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2008); ‘So who sets these ever-climbing standards of poreless, hairless, paranoid hygiene? It’s women rather than men; women who have very little successful sex, perhaps, and seek to be touched with tenderness to the tragic extent they are prepared to pay for it’ (‘Why I Loathe the Creepy Cult of Pampering’, Daily Mail, 9 February 2012); ‘The spa culture is the foremost marketplace where the twin maladies of modern women – narcissism and self-loathing – meet up and conspire to rob them of their hard-earned cash, all the time pumping out the mantra that every woman is, or can be, beautiful ... A plain woman is still plain after a week at Champney’s. Let’s face it, we are not Italy or Sweden; “beautiful” is not the default setting for the British female (or male). And no amount of time and money is going to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, no matter how many seaweed wraps the poor fool shells out for’ (‘Face it, Ladies, Most of Us Will NEVER Be Pretty!’, Daily Mail, 11 August 2011). As you have perhaps guessed from the repetition in arguments and homogeneity of tone, all the above examples were penned by one Julie Burchill. ** ‘Spare me from the Whining Women who are Giving Feminism a Bad Name’, op. cit. *** Ibid. **** Burchill seems to find this a terrible thing, asking, ‘When did women whose looks are not their living start conducting themselves like simpering inmates of an Ottoman empire seraglio?’ (ibid.) It’s an odd argument, suggesting that women of normal looks don’t deserve to treat themselves and feel good about themselves. Clearly a bizarre point of view so let’s not waste any more of this footnote upon it.

Have a very stern word with anyone who judges women more harshly than they judge men, even – especially! – if they don’t realise they’re doing it.

Now, you could, I suppose, claim this is actually a feminist tendency: by judging other women more harshly than you judge men you are proving that you expect more of them, whereas men are just foolish little numbskulls, so gullible and easily pleased.

But in order to maintain this argument you have to be of a similar mindset to the one that is able to claim that stripping is actually an empowering feminist activity without giving yourself an aneurysm. Women who can hear what they’re saying as they speak are, in my experience, rarely able to do this. And also, taking a view of the genders that appears to be based on the laziest, most cliché-ridden of TV sitcoms – he’s a hapless schlub! She’s his smart but beleaguered wife! – is unlikely to provide much in the way of instructional value.

It would be very easy to point to multiple examples of women being crueller to one another than they are to men simply by flicking through any British newspaper in which, all too often on certain right-

wing papers, the high-profile female columnists are used as Trojan horses in which to smuggle in the worst examples of misogyny. I could, for example, talk about the female columnist who wailed about the damage inflicted on her corneas by the photos of an unacceptably curvaceous eighteen-year-old Princess Beatrice in a bikini. Or the writer who sneered, with classic social snobbery, at Pippa Middleton’s ‘characteristic fake tan’, her ‘passably attractive looks’ and her attendance at a ‘second-tier university’ while tutting at her for ‘loving the limelight’* (apparently the writer was unaware that she was, in fact, writing an article that provides this aforementioned and very NQOCD ‘limelight’). Similarly, I could point out that it was only female journalists who chastised French politician Rachida Dati for returning to work four days after giving birth, as though it was the business of these selfappointed protectors of proper maternal conduct to comment on how another woman runs her own life.

But to be honest, using the behaviour of the British media as an illustration of gender relations is like pointing to Fred West as proof that the familial unit is breaking down. So instead, let’s keep this simple, straight and realistic and list what women should not do to other women.

Don’t, when reading a story about a marital breakdown, instantly blame the mistress while letting the husband off scot-free (a good exercise to help you accustom yourself to this seemingly novel idea is to repeat the following and apparently little known mantra in front of a mirror every morning: ‘It was Brad who made and broke the commitment to Jen, not Angelina. It was Brad who made and broke the commitment to Jen, not Angelina’).

Do not stay silent if anyone ever suggests – obliquely or otherwise – that the looks or behaviour of the victim of

sexual harassment or assault are in any way to blame for the trauma inflicted, or that the victim’s reaction proves that she is weak and she really just needs to man up, so to speak. Remind this person that rape is not an expression of unleashed male desire. It is an extreme expression of sadism, bullying and/or mental illness and can happen to anyone, even – contrary to what Hollywood seems to believe – people who are not young, female and blonde, because rape is not a compliment, doled out only to the beautiful or alluring. To suggest anything otherwise is not only a disgusting slur on the victim but pretty insulting to men in general as it suggests that they are all barely contained gormless rapists.

Never cast judgement on another woman’s weight, parenting skills, marriage or general lifestyle, unless you do it to men too. But really, don’t do it to either gender. It’s just ugly.

Don’t assume that a woman who writes an emotional memoir is a self-indulgent narcissist, whereas a man who does the same is brave and something described as ‘searing’.

Should you overhear anyone doing any of the above, it is your feminist responsibility to give them a very cross wag of your finger. * ‘Cat Who Got the Cream!’, Catherine Ostler, Daily Mail, 28 April 2011.

Do not get distracted by phoney women vs women fights Whether it really is the world’s most cherished wish that all women would spend every hour of every day mud wrestling one another is something I do not know for certain. What I do know is that the media rub their sweaty thighs at the prospect of reducing something – anything – down to a possibly non-existent fight between at least two women or, as it is commonly

but offensively called, ‘a catfight’, a term that shall ne’er be uttered by me again.

The classic example from the celebrity world was Jennifer Aniston vs Angelina Jolie, with veritable landfills of celebrity magazines and tabloid journalism detailing the terrible ‘rivalry’ between Jolie and Aniston, as though they were two scrapping toddlers and Brad Pitt was the grinning, hapless teddy bear who would helplessly go home with whomever picked him up. Rare, however, was the acknowledgement that Aniston’s beef might have been more with Pitt, the husband who let her down, than the woman with whom he was now living. But then, you can’t blame Brad, right? He’s just a man, a giant, silly, brainless loin, helpless to his desires, whereas Jolie, as a woman, should have known better than to tempt him with her black magic ways.

Such nonsense is not restricted to the celebrity arena by any means. An article recently appeared in the US magazine the Atlantic, in which Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former Director of Policy for the US State Department, argued, in a thoughtful and measured piece, that women can’t have it all – not now, anyway. Now, this question is, in itself, very interesting, pointing to, as it does, a lack of true gender equality in many relationships, the changes motherhood imposes on many women’s mental and emotional priorities, the shocking lack of assistance from many employers when it comes to accommodating female employees’ childrelated responsibilities, the nightmarish difficulties of childcare arrangements and the sense of futility many women feel when faced with these cold realities. It also acts as a reminder that even those barriers are gifted to the fortunate few as lower income women don’t even get the privilege of asking themselves the question if they can have it all because, when it comes to childcare and work, their choices are even more limited.

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Sadly, such discussions were not the general response to this piece. Rather, it was spun as an argument between Slaughter and Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, who Slaughter referenced in her piece as being another woman who has talked about how women can ‘have it all’. The obvious answer to this popular question now seemed, ‘Well, probably not, but who can tell when the media are more interested in cooking up phoney lady fights than actually covering the issue?’

As most women know, different lives work for different women, and every woman’s circumstance is different. The world is very imperfect and there is no single solution for women today, just as one woman’s situation probably does not reflect that of women in general and so disagreements between women about how they live their lives do not signify some great inter-gender conflict. Women, contrary to the media’s apparent belief, are not one homogenous whole (this is something politicians all too often forget when they use the term ‘policies for women’ to mean ‘policies for parenthood’: not only are not all women parents but not all parents are women). These phoney women versus women fights are mere mosquitoes, buzzing about and distracting people who should know better from far more important issues – indeed, the issues that the women were actually talking about before the media pushed them into the wrestling ring and begged them to fight. Let others be dazzled by such nonsense. As a feminist, you know better.

Understand what feminism actually is, and how it involves Glamorgan.

Feminism is about enabling women to live the kind of lives that they want to live, whether that is living on their own on the top of Mount Rushmore in a crevice on Abraham Lincoln’s head; in a small house in the suburbs of Glamorgan with five kids and a husband called Kevin; or

wearing a burlap skirt or a couture gown

by Chanel; as made up as Marilyn Manson or as barefaced as the day you were born.

It’s about freedom, individuality and being allowed to enjoy yourself and not shaping yourself to a pre-existing stereotype or allowing your glorious personality and your fabulous opinions to be overshadowed by clichés or insecurities but rather to live as the individual you are. It is about being kind and supportive of other women, not just because they are women but because you are a kind and supportive person and you know that helping other people – male or female – is much more conducive to a better life for yourself and better world in general than sniping and backbiting.

It is allowing you to live, to quote – bringing us back to where we started – the lovely if, admittedly, not obviously feminist film, The Princess Bride, as you wish.

Extract from BE AWESOME: MODERN LIFE FOR MODERN LADIES by Hadley Freeman, published in paperback by 4th Estate, price £8.99

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THE END IS THE BEGINNING IN THE END

By Sasha Sagan

What’s Different About Being Married?

Sometimes my husband and I like to imagine we’re time travellers. Or maybe culture travellers. We did it over the course of our wedding festivities. On the night of our rehearsal dinner, I tried to imagine what it would be like if it were my last night in my family home. What if I was getting ready to leave for the very first time? On our wedding night, we tried to imagine what it would be like if this was our first time alone together? What if our honeymoon was our first trip? What if, upon arriving home, it was time to unpack and start our lives together?

For the vast majority of human history, in most corners of the earth, marriage changed everything. Especially for the bride. Imagine if your wedding night marked not only your first sexual experience, but your moving day, your first time away from mom and pop. Lucky us, we get to try everything out these days before we commit. Not to mention how much easier it must be to enjoy your own wedding when it’s not the end of life as you know it. Virtually nothing tangible is different after the wedding nowadays.

I didn’t even change my name when I got married this past September. My husband and I had already lived together for six years, we’ve made a home together, we’ve planned our lives together, even called ourselves a little family for ages (I did make him carry me over the threshold, though we’ve lived in our Manhattan apartment for four years). In a measurable way, the only things that are different are the most magical little metal love circles we now wear— rings, we’ll call them. And the way we file our taxes. Yet, something qualitative is different.

When I was a fiancée, back before I was a wife, I asked women who lived with their spouses before they were married what was different. Everyone agreed there was

something, but there was a strange inability to put one’s finger on it. Now that I’ve crossed over, I feel the same wordlessness. This is what I know: I compulsively work the phrase ‘my husband’ into conversation. ‘You have a blue sweater? My husband has a blue sweater!’ I feel a strangely erotic closeness with Jon, my husband. A deeper, almost biological connection to him, but also more attraction to him than ever. I see new flaws in him, but I like them. I feel unity with his flaws.

But I am just one woman, and I’ve only been married six months. So I thought I better ask some other ladies I know: • My mother, Ann Druyan, whose marriage to my late father was the happiest I have ever witnessed or heard of. She taught me to love love, for which I am eternally in her debt.

• Clinnette Minnis and the 16-year engagement that teaches there’s no hurry.

• Cathy Trentalancia, whose story of falling in love with her husband of 27 years is worthy of a major motion picture.

• Becca Wolff married her girlfriend of several years.

• Emma Schiro, a newlywed, after 39 years of dating.

• Sian Davin, married after a lifetime of swearing up and down that she would never wed.

Sasha Sagan is filmmaker, writer and newlywed who lives in New York City

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Ann&Carl

Name: Ann Druyan.

Age: 64.

Occupation: Writer/producer.

Where do you live? Ithaca, NY. How long were you married? Fifteen and a half years.

How long did you live together before you got married? Four years.

What changed within the relationship when you got married?

The constant deepening with every passing moment of our love for each other maintained an astonishing

exponential increase that for me has never diminished. It had begun on June 1, 1977, when we first expressed our feelings in a long distance phone call. And from that moment to this, even all these years after his death, I have never stopped trying to find ways to say, ‘I love you’ to Carl.

Virtually every day of our married lives together, one of us would propose to the other. We never get over the amazement we felt at having the good fortune to have found each other and to be married. Yes, there were the inevitable irritations. I’m not pretending that there were not moments when one of us was in a bad mood. But the norm was ecstatic. We always said that if the institution of

marriage did not exist, we would have invented it together.

How do you think your relationship changed in the eyes of society when you got married? Before we fell in love (or were consciously aware of it), Carl and I were already collaborating on the Voyager Interstellar Message Project. Since Carl was married and I was involved with another man, to the extent that people took me seriously at all, the question of whether I had the job because of Carl’s affection was not an issue. Once we were living together, I had a tougher time. This was a much more brazenly sexist period than the present. During my duties as co-writer of the original

Cosmos series and thereafter I felt frequently dissed and underestimated by people who assumed that I was just there because Carl loved me. I felt that I had to work harder than most to demonstrate my contribution.

What felt different about being a wife? What does the word mean to you? I can still hear in my heart the sound of Carl repeating the words, ‘my wife’ over and over again just for the sheer joy of what it meant to him. I was/am like every happy bride, finding the words ‘wife’ and ‘husband’ to have a psychotropic power over me. I will never lose my amazement at having the honour of being his wife.

As society lets go of the taboos against premarital sex, cohabitation and children out of wedlock, why get married? Why not just keep living together? For us personally, it was that we wanted to take our connectedness with each other as far as life would allow. But I make no proscriptions for others. I think the fact that people are not compelled to marry for any other reason than their own volition and that we are now allowed to marry whomever we love are all great developments that give me hope for the future. Taboos against premarital sex flew in the face of millions of years of evolution.

Rootless in nature, they were bound to collapse. For all those who were made to hate themselves for being human, for all the beautiful children of the unwed in the past, I feel the utmost sorrow. Marriage must come from the heart to endure and be real.

What was the most traditional thing about your marriage? And the least traditional? We worked together, day and night, so perhaps that wasn’t classically traditional. We brought our families together. Carl’s parents lived with us for the last year of his father’s life and my parents moved into the house across the road for the last five years of Carl’s life. We loved that. I remember with happiness

those dinners at home with Carl’s children and ours and parents. It felt so natural and right.

Why did you keep your name?

When I was still a child, I read Great Expectations and came away from it with the piercing question of whether or not I would be the hero of my own life. From that moment on, I knew I would never take another’s name. I was committed to doing everything I could to make my own name mean something. Marriage to Carl brought another dimension to the equation.

He was already world famous for all the brilliant hard work that he had done. I didn’t want to exploit that by becoming an instant Sagan. Besides, I adore my father and wanted to make something of the name we share.

Whose idea was it to tie the knot?

What was the proposal like? My heart still pounds every time I remember it.

We had known each other as friends and then co-workers for three years.

We were alone together countless times during that period, but because we were each committed to other people, whom we both loved, we never hinted at our mutual attraction or even allowed ourselves to contemplate it. This all changed in an instant during a long distance phone call regarding the piece of Chinese music I’d found for the Voyager record. In a 60 second phone call, it came pouring out and before we hung up, we’d agreed to marry.

That was before we’d ever kissed. But we knew we had discovered a great, undeniable truth.

What did you worry about leading up to your wedding? I can’t remember.

Probably hoping that a particular relative wouldn’t insult anyone. I just remember being what my girlfriend Lynda called ‘Miss Bliss’.

A wedding is complicated, expensive and arouses all kinds family dramas.

Why do it? We need rites of passage. I wish we had more of them, new ones, that reflect the real way we live now

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to commemorate together the most important experiences of life.

What was the most traditional thing about your wedding? And the least traditional? Ours was a traditional Jewish wedding in all respects except any mention of god. As we walked back down the aisle of a garden, we both wept like babies for joy.

How did being married differ from what your idea of marriage was as a child? My parents loved each other and were married for sixty-six years but they argued constantly. The same was true of my maternal grandparents. My paternal grandparents were in love—so I did have an idea that such a thing as a happy marriage was possible. But my marriage to Carl was one that flourished on every conceivable level.

I had never known anything like that was possible until I experienced it.

What was the best thing about being married? Being with Carl and our family. Having and raising our children. Living a love of everdeepening intensity and conviction.

Knowing we loved with everything we had.

Cathy&Salva

Name: Cathy Trentalancia.

ring finger!

Age: None of your business!

As society lets go of the taboos against premarital sex, cohabitation and children out of wedlock, why get married? Why not just keep living together? Great question! Maybe we should all just live in communes as a tribe. I honestly think that’s how it was meant to be and I’m still not convinced that it’s necessary to be married, but due to the fact that we live in a society that condones the act, it certainly makes life easier legally, especially if you have a family. I guess you could say that the necessity of marriage is geographically sensitive and in America, marriage is the easier path.

What is the most traditional thing about your marriage? And the least traditional? Hmmm… I guess the least traditional is how we met and reconnected and the fact that we have different religions, different countries of origin, and different languages. The most traditional is that we share the same values and priorities for our marriage and our family and respect each other’s opinion. (Is that traditional?!)

Occupation: development.

Media—research

and

How long have you been married? 27 years.

How long did you live together before you got married? One year in Milan, where my husband is from.

What changed when you got married?

What feels different about being a wife? The sensation of ‘long term’ was evident after marriage. My focus was set on a point that was much further out on the time scale and my decisions were mindful of another person.

How do you think your relationship changed in the eyes of society when you got married? Interestingly, in Italy, where we were married, the change (and quite honestly, the only reason to get married) is when you have a child—married or not.

When you say you’re getting married, people look at your stomach—not at your

Tell us the untraditional story of how you met and reconnected.

Salva and I met in the post office of Mykonos, Greece. He was travelling from Milan and it was my last stop after a summer of travelling through Europe alone. Ten days of incredible fun without much understanding of what the other was saying (no English for him... Less Italian per me!). I returned to NYC. He sent flowers; I thanked him but said it was better if we didn’t stay in touch because I didn’t see how a relationship could work. We didn’t see or speak to each other for 3 years, until my brother visited Milan on his honeymoon and looked him up. I had told him about Salva: ‘If I ever get married, I met the guy I’d marry in Mykonos.’ (I learned later he said the same to his family!) I didn’t even have his phone number but my brother found it thanks to the fact that it’s a unique surname and the only one in the phonebook! Long story short, my brother said, ‘This guy is in love with you, he hasn’t stopped thinking about you. You have to come see him.’ So I went to Italy to visit friends on the way to India to work on a project and, no surprise, never made it to India.

What do the titles ‘husband’ and/or ‘wife’ mean to you? I have never loved those two words! I find them so cut and dry. In Italy, we’re ‘sposo’ and ‘sposa’— there’s a touch of poetry that works for me and makes the concept less serious.

Did you keep your name? Why or why not? Kept my name but use my married name more.

Whose idea was it to tie the knot?

What was the proposal like? We were travelling in Bali and ‘married’ each other with wooden beads on the beach. We thought we should legalize it and share the moment with our friends and family, and were married by the mayor of Assisi, Italy, a year later.

What did you worry about leading up to your wedding? Chernobyl and the Libyan missile hitting Lampedusa were our two biggest worries for our guests!

Our wedding was smaller than planned because of frightened travellers!

A wedding is complicated, expensive, and arouses all kinds family dramas.

Why do it? Our wedding was quite small and simple and was a wonderful occasion to have our families and dear friends spend time together in a magical location.

What was the most traditional thing about your wedding? And the least traditional? I’m not sure there was anything traditional about our wedding!

My ‘friend of honour’ was removed at the last minute during the ceremony because he didn’t speak Italian and I had to ask another friend to take his place while the music was playing! It was a great Italian comedy from beginning to end.

“Pullquote Natin conem volorro con eatem eris quae vene rerum et omnienis perio. Itatem quo to bla di ipsunt idelecero eaquis nonsed ut parum est.”

How does being married differ from what your idea of marriage was as a child? I’m not sure I can compare those two situations. I don’t remember what my idea of marriage was as a child!

What’s the best thing about being married? I get to be with my best friend 24/7, ‘‘til death do us part.’

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Sian&Deji

Name: Sian.

Age: 33.

Occupation: Human rights lawyer.

How long have you been married?

It is nearly a year since we married at a legal ceremony, which only our family attended (on 30 March 2013); however, we took our rings off after the ceremony and did not start to refer to each other as husband and wife until after the second marriage humanist ceremony, which our friends and young family members attended on 14 September 2013. This was the more personal ceremony.

So either almost a year or almost six months, depending on when you start counting from!

How long did you live together

before you got married? A year and a half/ two years (depending on when you start counting from—see above).

What changed when you got married? What feels different about being a wife? Very little, on a practical level. But deep inside, I do feel more secure, a sense of being at home with one another, knowing we want the same thing, knowing when we argue that we will both be as motivated as one another to search for a way out of that argument.

How do you think your relationship changed in the eyes of society when you got married? Before we got married, my employers would not let me take the morning off work as unpaid annual leave when Deji’s father died but markedly said that, had we been husband and wife, then

‘of course they would’. I think people view you as more committed to one another and on a path to starting a baby. Instead of dropping hints and asking probing questions about when you are going to get married, people start asking when you are going to start making babies!

As society lets go of the taboos against premarital sex, cohabitation and children out of wedlock, why get married? Why not just keep living together? I never thought I would get married before I met Deji. I was not against it as an institution and was not against any of my friends marrying, but I had no desire to get married myself. I understood the tax benefits and the financial security arguments but it (still) angers and frustrates me from a political perspective that they exist and that non-married couples,

who have cohabited together in a relationship akin to marriage for years but who have chosen not to marry, do not benefit from the same legal rights or tax benefits. I did not want to succumb to marriage for reasons I disagree with the existence of, and I guess somewhat unusually, I never held romantic notions of marriage or my wedding day. Perhaps I was skeptical because I am the daughter of parents who are each on their third marriage, but I do not remember dreaming of my wedding day, even as a small child before their divorce when I was 12 years old.

I always saw myself as becoming a mother one day, but never dreamed about becoming a wife. Once I did form a view on it, my view was that it is the relationship that makes one relationship work and not another, not marriage, and there was simply no romantic pull for me. And I assumed the same was the case for most men of my generation (which shows how little I knew my own male friends, as most of us got married in the same summer). To me, having children with someone was—and probably still is—the biggest commitment you can ever make. However, I did always say that if I fell in love with someone who wanted to get married and I was ready to commit to having children with them, then I would get married for that person as I did not have a huge issue with it, I simply lacked the desire that I am told is in the make-up of my DNA as a woman. I spent my dowry—the money my mother and stepfather allocated for each of my siblings and me for a wedding—on my law conversion course, arguing to my romantically-minded, disappointed mother that the career it would give me would be just as long-lasting as a marriage. Then I met Deji and debated—hypothetically, of course— the concept of marriage with him.

On the first morning after meeting Deji, we were at breakfast with a group of friends and the subject of marriage came up. I remember saying, as I often said, that I never

wanted to get married, and his eyes lit up with surprise, before he said that he did. Once we were in an established relationship together, from a relatively early stage, he used to declare confidently and with a wickedly winning smile that, despite my views on the matter, ‘Sian, I am going to make you my wife one day you know! You had better get ready!’

I loved his self-assurance on the subject—every time he said this, it would make me laugh. Slowly, and despite myself, I began to want him to make me his wife! I began to think how fun it would be to get married and to celebrate our relationship with our friends and family one day. So many of our respective friends had become mutual friends and I began to realise how symbolic a celebration of our relationship a wedding would be. I realised that the idea of making that commitment to one another had become romantic for me and the idea of having a husband something that I wanted, if it was him. I did not know why; it was not that I wanted to change our relationship into something else and thought that marriage would be the means. It was that I wanted to celebrate how happy we were together and that I already felt committed for life, so why not say so and make him the happiest man by becoming his wife?

What is the most traditional thing about your marriage? And the least traditional? I still see it as primarily Deji’s role to take the bins and the recycling out. Our relationship is still very much the same; that we are even married is still the most traditional thing about it to me! That I kept my name is probably the least traditional thing about it.

What do the titles ‘husband’ and/or ‘wife’ mean to you? To us, they are almost like terms of endearment that have gained personal significance.

When we are alone and call each other ‘my husband’ and ‘my wife’, we often both smile a knowing smile because the terms have become for

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us reminders of the commitment me made and symbolic of several very romantic days, starting with the day we got engaged, and then our two equally wonderful special wedding days that enveloped last summer.

‘Husband’ and ‘wife’ are now laden with those wonderful memories for me.

On darker days, when we are in the middle of an argument, they are a reminder of the commitment me we made to always be willing to keep communicating and working on our relationship and ourselves, to become better people together and to be a natural team. To have children and to bring them up together, to teach them all that we know.

Did you keep your name? Why or why not? Yes, I most definitely did. That was never in question though. Deji did try hard to convince me that taking on his surname would be a step up in the world and definitely a privilege I should consider! He is very traditional and it was initially important to him for me to change his name, but fortunately for me, he learnt that it was more important to me not to. As an ardent feminist, I have had always found it bizarre, even as a child, that women are expected to change their name, that such an unequal tradition should still have so much sway, and not just with men but also many women. My name is so much part of my identity that I felt that any man that would want me to change my name would almost be rejecting me. How could it be a condition of our marriage that I must change my identity? How can marriage be an equal relationship if it requires me to subsume my identity into his? I think this question was all the more important to me because I’ve already changed my name once.

When I was a child, my elder sister changed her surname from her father’s (my mother’s first husband), to my mother’s. After my parents’ separation, I began to want to do the same. I thought, how close I am to my mother’s family and their oral history,

the family trees I had poured over with my grandmother that go back generations; how it is that I knew the stories of my great grandmother’s childhood and her mother’s voyage across the world from Ireland to New Zealand to marry a man she had not seen for seven years, that I knew these stories better than any fairy tale and yet knew so little about my father’s family or history. It is because my mother’s family line is a line of storytellers and because she and I have such a close bond. By contrast, I knew nothing about my father’s family, the family name I carried.

So I made the huge decision at 12 to change my name to my mother’s maiden name. For me it was a natural switch to the name, which I already felt was a reflection of my identity; it was the name that my mother had kept during their marriage and that my sister had already traded in her father’s name for. For the first time when my teacher’s called out my name in class, I felt like they were calling to me. But it was still a huge decision because it inevitably involved hurting my father. I still remember the day I had to tell him that I had reached this decision, as we walked to the bank together on the one day a week that we spent together. He said very little but I could see I had caused him so much pain, that he felt it as a rejection. Having embraced my mother’s maiden name as a child at the cost of causing my father so much pain, I cannot imagine now giving it up for a name that does not carry my family history or sense of identity, and I certainly had no intention of doing so at the expense of my feminist principles—to enter a marriage that should be equal, not about me subsuming my sense of self into a sense of him. I remember my step-sister, who is a teacher, saying how strange it was to be called by her married name by the children after she got married, as though she was looking round for the woman that they were addressing before realising it was her. I vowed to myself that if I ever did get married for the love

of a man that wanted to marry, he would take me by my name or not all because I would never go back to a life where I did not feel that the name I am addressed by is me.

Deji was not initially concerned by my position, convinced he could change my mind; then he was disappointed but persisted, in trying to convince me, at intervals. However, one day, when my brother’s fiancée was scolding me for my reticence and telling me, much to my alcoholinfused indignation, that if I loved him, I had to change my name, Deji stepped in to defuse the situation and told her that it was okay, that while he appreciated her defense of him, it was not necessary because, although he had initially battled with it, he had come to understand why I did not want to change my name, why it was so important to me and that there was no reason for me to do so and really no reason for him to want me to do so, except in order to comply with an archaic patriarchal tradition, which tells us that if the woman loves the man, she will change her name. He explained he had come to understand it would not be fair to expect me to do so because he would never want to change his name, so why should I want to change mine and why, if we are in an equal relationship, should I be the one that has to in order for us to have the same name. He said he had realised that the woman he wants to marry is a woman who would never change her name and that, despite having initially wanted me to take his name, he loved me because of the reasons I refuse to do so. This meant the world to me; I knew that he loves me for who I am.

Whose idea was it to tie the knot?

What was the proposal like? It was Deji’s idea, most definitely! It was a Wednesday evening, a gloriously sunny evening and in Clissold Park, where we had first started to fall in love, and Deji had a ‘Plan’. It wasn’t a surprise to me that Deji proposed, as we had talked about marriage

for some time and I knew he had always wanted to get married, but I had expected he would probably propose in some sort of lavish way on an indulgent luxury weekend away, when I would know from the scenario that it was coming. I could not have wished for a more romantic, personal and meaningful proposal than the one he concocted. In the early days of our courting, while we were still denying to the world that we were a couple, we had a picnic with friends in Clissold Park and towards the end of the day, while Deji and I were playing football, I fell into a deep hole hidden in long grass and sprained my ankle. Deji remembers being very impressed because I did not cry but just bemoaned the impact (that we would not be able to play football anymore that day) and that I made him give me a piggyback to the local shop so we could buy more wine to continue drinking in the sun. I then insisted on still going out to the party that we had been invited to that evening and later responded to his efforts to remove me from the dance floor to a sofa of rest by hopping away from him on one leg and kicking him with the swollen ankle. The next day, I had a huge, very swollen ankle.

Suddenly incapacitated, on crutches and unable to ride my bike—my means of independence—I was forced to rely on Deji and, for the first time up until that point, to allow him to take care of me. He lent me crutches and took me food shopping in his car and helped me cook and get things done in my shared house. I was used to being very independent and doing everything and going everywhere on my bike, but in becoming vulnerable and allowing him to look after me, I opened up much more and we spent more time together and our respect for one another and love of being in one another’s company suddenly accelerated. Thus, we both fondly refer to that day as ‘ankle spraining day’ and to the hole, which marked a turning in our relationship as ‘ankle spraining hole’, because for both of us, my falling in the hole was the start

of us falling in love.

It was this same hole that was to play a major part in ‘The Plan’. I had been on a ‘Pirates and Parrots’ themed treasure hunt hen do (bachelorette party) the saturday before, and Deji had taken the opportunity to go back to Clissold Park to find the hole that I had fallen into, in preparation, and then on the first sunny hot evening in August, 2012, he carefully hid the diamond, concealed in a velvet pouch, down the hole, ready for me to find. I, of course, wanted to sit and relax in the sun and it took a glass of wine, a game of football and quite a lot of manoeuvring for him to get me into the right area. The only trick that aroused my suspicion was that Deji kept kicking the ball really far and wide—and badly—as he manoeuvred me closer towards the hole.

When Deji reminded me that this was ‘the very same hole’ and suggested I feel its dimensions to avoid falling down it again, I just thought he was teasing me to be patronising, but felt the hole anyway. However, I mistook the velvet pouch hidden inside for a dead animal and instantly dropped it, screamed, and refused to touch it again, so it fell to Deji to rescue the pouch, remove and present me with the box inside, in time honoured manner, on bended knee. Still, I mistook the situation. The sight of the square pattenered box and the deep crush of the regal blue velvet made me think of hidden treasure and with my piratess treasure-hunting hat still on from the hen do from the saturday before, I became instantly convinced that we had found hidden treasure and got down on my knees with Deji to investigate further, excitedly exclaiming, ‘Treasure!’ He was laughing and telling me that I wasn’t meant to be on my knees for this and that I should get up, when I realised that he was proposing and began laughing too as he opened the box and presented me with a beautiful diamond stone inside. He was telling me it was ‘Two years, three months,

and X number of days ago that you fell into this hole and sprained your ankle and it was that day that I started to fall in love with you…’ And then I cannot remember what he said because I was laughing and crying and back down on my knees with him saying, ‘Yes’.

What did you worry about leading up to your wedding? Probably how low cut the sinking plunge line of my dress was.

A wedding is complicated, expensive and arouses all kinds family dramas.

Why do it? A wedding is certainly a challenge! There were many days when I bemoaned with my girlfriends, who were also getting married the same summer, over what we came to refer to as ‘wedmin’! I was blessed to have one of them living on my street and we used to meet up on an almost weekly basis for snatched secret moments in the tiny park between our flats to exchange the horrors of wedmin persecution. We were both lucky enough to be marrying men who had been dreaming of their wedding day for many years and were taking control of 70% of the wedding planning (‘wedmin’). But even so, there were moments when 30% felt too much and we had to off-load on one another. But even those moments were what made it magical, the lead up, the drama, the excitement and anticipation. We love to plan and to host parties and this was the biggest one we had ever planned in our lives. It was hard work and in our case, doubly so because we had two wedding days to plan, but there was so much in the planning that brought Deji and I together, my family and Deji, and my family and me together, and my girlfriends and me together. If you can accept that everything won’t go to plan, let go and let that go if you can, embrace every moment, then it is like walking on air, to be surrounded by all your closest, your nearest and your dearest in a celebration of your love for the person you are committing to as your partner in life; it can easily

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be the best day in your life. In that case, that meant struggling through a hangover after dancing till 4am the night before, ignoring my nerves as I learnt the speech cards in my lap for the speech I was sure I would not have the courage to make just in case I might find it [the courage], smiling when my friend’s baby, the cutest baby in the world, was sick in my hair just before lunch. I managed to see the funny side in all of it because I was bursting with excitement and joy. Looking back, we both agree our wedding days were the best two days in our lives—so far—and it was all worth it.

What was the most traditional thing about your wedding? And the least traditional? The second wedding was that I wore white. The first wedding was that I wore red.

How does being married differ from what your idea of marriage was as a child? Perhaps, the only thing I can think of is that, I still don’t feel ‘grown up’? I don’t remember thinking about what it would be like to be married when I was a child, marriage was for grown-ups and I could not imagine being grown up. Now I am married and I still cannot imagine feeling grown-up.

What’s the best thing about being married?

1. No more wedmin to do!

2. A sense of being at home.

3. The feeling I am in a life-long partnership; knowing I am still the same person, he is still the same person and nothing has really changed except that we have chosen to commit, to strive to be and to help each other to be better people together, and knowing this, knowing that it can only get better.

4. Being bound by the most wonderful memory of the most wonderful day (in our case, 2 days) together.

Clinette&Nick

Name: Clinnette Minnis.

Age: 43.

Occupation: Writer.

How long have you been married? 12 years this August.

How long did you live together before you got married? Eight years.

What changed within the relationship when you got married?

Nothing really changed except the feeling that it was official. A sense of pride that our love was able to unite two very different families.

How do you think your relationship changed in the eyes of society when you got married? You’d have to ask society. My parents taught me, ‘It’s none of my business what you think

about me. What only matters is how I feel about myself.’ And to that extent, society’s view of my relationship just isn’t as important to me as the love I have for my husband.

As society lets go of the taboos against premarital sex, cohabitation and children out of wedlock, why get married? Why not just keep living together? That was Nick’s argument. He strongly feels it’s an outdated Viking capture ceremony, and who needs the state to validate anyone’s love? But he saw how much a wedding meant to me. My father used to say, ‘Don’t take any wooden nickels’ and pepper his conversations with statistics about young AfricanAmerican women pregnant and on welfare because of a man’s empty promises. On my wedding day, I proudly showed Dad my wooden

ring and said, ‘Dad, I turned my wooden nickel into a wedding band.

What was the most traditional thing about your marriage? And the least traditional? A marriage is two people who love each other, so I don’t think there’s anything untraditional about it.

Did you keep your name? Why or why not? Hell yeah, I kept it. My name is equally good, it’s who I am, why change it?

Whose idea was it to tie the knot?

What was the proposal like? It was his. I get giddy retelling this story. We fell madly in love when we were 16.

On a trip to Hawaii, six months into our relationship, at a majestic bluff, overlooking manta rays on a clear, moonlit, star-filled night, he took

“Pullquote Natin conem volorro con eatem eris quae vene rerum et omnienis perio. Itatem quo to bla di ipsunt idelecero eaquis nonsed ut parum est.” my hands and offered an abalone shell to represent the past, a kiss to represent the present, and a ring to represent the future. He said, ‘Will you marry me?’ I said, yes. He warned me it might be a long engagement. It certainly was. We took it slow. And 15 years later, we tied the knot.

What did you worry about leading up to your wedding? When we took the plunge, we moved quickly, so there was some worry about whether we could get everyone together on short notice, and whether the families themselves would get along. My family is African-American, Southern and Christian, while Nick’s family is culturally Jewish, New Yorker, and more science-influenced. Add to that, both sides have had divorces and remarriages, so it seemed like quite a mix. To my joy, it all worked out.

Everyone got along and was thrilled to support us on our special day.

A wedding is complicated, expensive and arouses all kinds family dramas.

Why do it? It doesn’t have to be those things. Our ceremony was very small, very private: Nick, me, preacher, photographer, two witnesses, in front of a glorious waterfall by Nick’s childhood home. (And then we did it up with two receptions.)

What was the most traditional thing about your wedding? And the least traditional?

Stomping on the glass was the most traditional. The most untraditional (besides it only being six people) might have been our wedding vows, which consisted of three words each.

They weren’t, ‘I love you,’ and no, I won’t tell you what they were.

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How did being married differ from what your idea of marriage was as a child?

Coming from an unhappily divorced family, I knew it could only get better.

What is the best thing about being married?

Waking up knowing there’s another person you can trust and who believes in you while you believe in them— it’s life affirming. Add to that, our 16-month-old daughter, who has the best of both of us— she’s the living embodiment of our union and will carry our love into the future.

Emma&????

Name: Emma Schiro Occupation: Retired professor.

Age: 81.

How long have you been married?

A year. It will be a year next month.

How long were you together before you were married?

37-and-a-half years.

How much of that time did you live together?

20-and-a-half, I guess. Is that right?!

Yes, 20-and-a-half.

So, after all that time, why did you decide to get married?

Well, there are advantages to being married because of the ways laws are written. And I think that was really the determining factor. Neither of us is young, I have immediate family, he has very few, and the ones he has, he’s not close to at all. Sandy has had a couple of very serious health problems including bladder cancer, which was surgically treated and so far with great success.

That’s good.

Fortunately, the hospital we dealt

with and the doctors we dealt with paid no attention to ‘are you related?’

They simply assumed the interested party has a reason to be. One time, I went to visit him in the hospital and I didn’t know he’d been moved from one room to another, so I said to the charge nurse on the floor, ‘I’m here to see Sandy Powers,’ and she said, ‘Are you a family member?’ And I said, ‘Well, if we were married, I’d be his wife.’ [Laughs] She said, ‘Oh I’m one of those!’ And I thought, that’s very nice in New York. That does not fly in many places. I never want to be in the situation where I have to explain myself and I think I would not want him to be in that either. So there was that. All our European friends simply assumed that we were married.

Down the road, we don’t really know what the changes will be but, as of right now, not so much—but who knows? Then of course, I think my older son has always thought that we should marry. My younger son once said, ‘Why don’t you get married?’

That was many, many years ago.

And I said, ‘Well why? Does it seem necessary?’, which is a nice way of saying, ‘Not your business!’ And of course, originally, I did not want to marry. Very originally, I didn’t want to marry. I had a very, very, very difficult

divorce and a not very happy several years, and he was quite young and not seeing that it would be advantageous for him to make plans involving his own future. Although he did on some level. So we didn’t really talk about it very much and then I began to think about it maybe right around the time he got sick. I kept thinking, well, ‘Why aren’t we?’

How long ago was that, when he got sick?

In 2009.

And had there been any discussion of getting married in between the time when you first got serious and then?

No. And so what feels different now?

Just the label, really.

Right. So you say just the label is different now. But what was the label before?

‘Friend’. I called him friend. When I was there, he called me friend. When I wasn’t there, he might have referred to me as his girlfriend, I have no idea. I never liked that terminology of ‘boyfriend’ when you get over a certain age. I think it’s ridiculous.

Partner or anything?

Oh, once when I was doing some financial business with a complete stranger over the phone and they said, ‘Well who is this person?’ And I said, ‘My partner.’ ‘Oh well in that case…’

community as a whole. I know enough anthropology and I also believe that, so once the community is involved, you do what the community [does to] identify with demands because you want their acknowledgement, their recognition.

What made you decide to have a proper wedding?

Because we’re Jews!

So true. So it wasn’t like there was a proposal. You decided together—or was there a proposal?

Well I transmitted the concerns of René [the attorney—‘consigliera’]. We were in Europe having breakfast one day and he said, ‘Well yeah, I’ll think it over.’ I think he was not entirely taken aback but maybe a little bit.

And I think his major concern was, ‘Are things somehow going to be different?’ I said, no; ‘There may be some tax differences on a short term basis, not in the long term.’ I think he didn’t think about it a lot and then a couple of months later I said, have you been thinking about it, and he said, well, I’ll tell you. And I said, but you must tell me sometime and not never… He has a tendency to procrastinate! So about two weeks later I said, ‘Did you think about this some more?’ And he said, ‘Yes, okay.’

So it wasn’t exactly a proposal. But in my point of view the proposal was made many years ago.

There was no discussion of going in the courthouse or anything like that?

Well you have to go down there and get a license.

Right. So when you decided to get married…

We had to find a rabbi. Now, instrumental in all of this is a woman who I’ve known for a long time, who has been the attorney for my family for already three generations.

Wow. And we refer to her as the ‘consigliera’ [Laughs]. She had been urging me to think about the legal implications of being versus not being [married] and, when we decided, she—through our revised wills and various other agreements—I mean, we had legal agreements up the wazoo but they’re not binding in ways that people expect them to be. They’re only binding within the willingness of the people that you’re dealing with on the spot. It’s a very awkward situation.

And I think that gay couples have a much more serious problem with this.

So she said, well I’ll find you a rabbi.

And her friend is a rabbi and said, ‘Oh yeah, I think this sounds like an interesting situation’, so I went down and talked to her and when I came back, I heard that she was amenable to it—after all, we’re not believers, we’re not observant, And she met with both of us and she asked the same question: ‘Well, why do you want to have a Jewish wedding?’ And the answer is: Because getting married is not a personal, is not an event between two people, but part of the

What was the wedding day like?

How did you feel?

Freezing cold. It was incredibly cold.

We were just so happy that almost everybody we invited was able to come.

Were you nervous?

No, as long as the guests show up and the caterer shows up! A friend of ours gave us a gift of wonderful flowers.

How did you meet?

Aaah! Well, in the late sixties, I was the advisor to students, ostensibly the administrator for a very large programme grant supported for inservice teachers, and at that time, Sandy was staying out of the army like a great many people of his age.

And he came to the programme and

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he was one of my advisees, ostensibly one of my students. His performance was erratic to say the least. He had a very bad habit developed over many years of not attending very regularly, forgoing classes and whatnot. When he was in class, he was very brighteyed and very, very smart with a habit of asking questions, which weren’t exactly orthogonal to the topic but didn’t necessarily hit it right on the nose, so you had to keep saying, ‘What you’re really asking about is…’, and ‘The answer to it is…”. Then he, because of poor attendance, dropped from the programme and I thought, ‘Well what a pity’, but he was just an endearing student. But there were many. Many, many endearing students. Then he went to another place and took a couple of courses and applied for readmission and the registrar said, ‘No, he cannot be readmitted’ because the rules of the registrar’s office at that time meant that if you had received even an administrative failure, it would be averaged in, and I said, ‘You know, what you’re saying is that there is no way on earth that a person can reclaim his reputation.’ And he thought it over and said, ‘I agree, we will readmit him as a test case.’ Sandy had no idea of this.

Did you already like him at this point?

Um, not really, not particularly. So I told him, ‘You’re readmitted but keep your nose clean.’ And ‘Everybody’s watching you because you’re the test for the change in policy.’ Anyway, so he had formed a habit of calling me up to discuss the world, and we had several conversations on the phone in my office and I thought nothing much of it. And then I think he had one course to finish, to his annoyance, and one day he pulled up—every time he would drive me home from Washington Heights because he went somewhere or other and I would do anything for a car ride instead of having to schlep to the subway station at night! It was an evening programme and that station at 181st

Street is so awful. Anyway, so I would hang around all waiting for rides and he would occasionally drive me someplace. So one day, he pulled up and said, ‘Would you consider going to the movies with me?’ And I said, ‘Depends on the movie.’ So at first, he had a movie that didn’t appeal, and then he had another one and we went to the movies and I thought, ‘Wow, what a charmer!’ So that was already six years into our acquaintance.

That’s amazing.

He told me at that point he was 30 years old and he wanted to do something that would be really different and represented change in his life, and apparently he consulted several other fellow students who said, ‘Ask her out, you’ve nothing to lose!’

That is wonderful, that’s so lovely and romantic.

When he entered, I was still married, and during the time he was my student, he said, ‘I noticed that you’ve stopped wearing your engagement ring.’

Wow. He is very observant.

So now everything is the same except for legal things and you wear a ring. Nothing is different, nothing feels different?

I don’t know, when I was married—the first time I was married—I was very young. There is just no comparison of being a single, very young woman and being a married, very young woman, and I had living parents and I had in-laws and I had a lot of friends who were getting married and friends who were not getting married. And also, the role of being a woman was very different at that time. It was 1952. I had just graduated from college. My husband and I were both graduate students and it really had a different feel to be married.

The idea that you would just live with somebody for an extended period was not at all acceptable, in no

way normative, except in the most extreme Bohemian circles. My father said to me at the time, ‘Why don’t you just live together?’ But my parents were particular about things, many things.

So it would’ve been okay with them that you wanted to get married?

They were very cool about my seeing somebody. When I met Sandy and after a while I introduced him to my mother and I told her, ‘He is much, much younger,’ and she told me the following story: My mother was two years older than my father and they met through my mother’s brother who was my father’s close friend.

And she said, ‘When I was first seeing him, my friends made fun of me and said, “You’re cradle robbing”’, and she took a breath and she said, ‘And now they’re all widows!’ My mother could be spiteful for 50 years.

So being a wife is not different. Did being a bride feel different?

There are funny stories, like going to Saks and making an appointment to come in to, what I subsequently discovered, the most expensive floor in the place.

To the bridal boutique or to just formal wear?

It wasn’t even formal wear; it was just dressy dresses and of course it was around the beginning of December when everything was all holiday stuff, and that year, everything was either red or black and neither of which seemed to be suitable for the occasion, although I think I probably could’ve worn black. So this guy came mincing out and I said, ‘I need something to wear to a wedding’ and after two sentences it emerged it was my wedding and two more sentences emerged that it would be a Jewish wedding. All of a sudden, he became very, very hamish [cosy, homey in Yiddish]! It was so funny. I said, ‘Let’s not argue about money’ to Sandy; ‘You are planning on a dinner the night before for out of town guests.

You know we want it, it will cost

whatever it costs… your problem.’

Now the wedding itself came in more expensive than I thought it would but it was definitely manageable and I said, ‘I’m not going to argue about any detail concerning the catering, I’m not asking you about the dinner,’ and of course there were no mothers… …to get involved.

And my daughter-in-law kept her mouth firmly shut, which was very good! All my descendants had honours, you might say. I felt just like me. I worried whether the dress would be appropriate or not then I decided what hell. I really did look for a new dress and everything seemed to be $1300 and I thought no, I don’t need anything like this. Years ago, I went to many students’ weddings and went to other weddings, but I hardly go to weddings anymore because I don’t have very young students now, and once in a while, I go to somebody’s kid’s wedding.

So once you did it and it was all done, did you feel like, ‘Why didn’t we do this years ago?’

No. So for people that, say, have lived together a long time—let’s say there’s not a legal element—that are thinking about staying on the road that they’re are on, living together or getting married; what advice would you suggest and what would you say to them?

If you think it’s a natural thing to do and it’ll make you more comfortable and happy together and as individuals, then go ahead and do it.

If it doesn’t matter, then don’t. It is a very serious contractual step and it’s also a serious communal assertion.

Was anything surprising—like peoples’ reactions? Sandy’s reaction? Did anything surprise you?

Well, two things surprised me: during the ceremony, Sandy kept crying.

My husband did too—it’s amazing.

What made him cry specifically, do

“Pullquote Natin conem volorro con eatem eris quae vene rerum et omnienis perio. Itatem quo to bla di ipsunt idelecero eaquis nonsed ut parum est.” you know?

During the Kiddushin [the first stage of the two-stage process of Jewish marriage], you know, there’s a little assertion by the husband to take care of you. During that, the old girlfriend handed him a handkerchief!

[Laughs] I said, ‘Polly was ready with a handkerchief,’ and he said, ‘Yes, she knew me well.’ So that was a little bit surprising, and the other thing that was surprising was how incredibly happy all of our friends were.

That’s so beautiful.

One of my very old friends lives in St. Louis, and when I called her, I said, ‘Oh, brace yourself, Sandy and I are getting married.’ She said, ‘I’m coming.’ Didn’t ask when or where!

‘I’m coming!’

Anything else you would add about the experience, about what it means?

About what it’s like to be a wife?

Well, I don’t have a whole lot to compare it with. Many of my friends have been married for 50 or 60 years and of course I have friends who have had very long marriages and are widowed. I think when you have a long marriage, which has children at the beginning of it, the relationship’s stressed in a different way. For me, the big shift was between not living together and living together. I had always hoped that we would live

together, and at some point, Sandy was looking around for a place to buy and I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, if he buys an apartment separately, then this will never happen.’ Ironically, the place that he was most interested in was in Battery Park City and he would’ve been bombed out of it, so to speak. Then one day he said, ‘Why don’t you enquire about the price of your apartment?’ And I said, ‘Does that mean that you’d be interested in buying it with me?’ ‘Well yes, of course, what do you think? Well of course yes!’ But being apart was very painful at the end of every weekend or whatever. He would leave on the subway, and we did travel together and that was nice, but it’s different.

So that’s the big shift.

So it sounds like the wedding was pretty traditional in a lot of ways.

Was there anything that you didn’t do, that you chose to avoid in the tradition?

Well I’ve been to a lot of very, very orthodox weddings and the increase in the number of decimal places has been startling. Well we didn’t have hoson’s tisch [traditional Jewish table set for the groom] and we didn’t have a hora [traditional dance] either.

I didn’t need the veil. It wouldn’t have been appropriate in any event because that’s for the first wedding for the bride. I don’t know, we had

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non-Jewish chuppah holders. BFD! Emma!!

Oh I have a very dirty mind!

So you came in together?

Well I can hardly walk without somebody! Well, usually, you’re separated before the ceremony—well there was no point to that. He went out in the morning to get a coffee! So we stood around having champagne with the guests until the signing and the rabbi said, okay, and I had a friend of mine, a former student, now friend—I’ve been blessed with my students—did all the greeting at the door, directing traffic, which was extremely nice. So my kids got a chance to mingle around, otherwise I would’ve had to ask one of them, which I didn’t want to do either. I wanted my little grandson to carry the ring and he didn’t want to do that. I said to him, ‘Would you like to hold the ring?’ And he said, no.

What are the differences between living together and being married?

My younger son said, ‘Being married is just like living together, but with better glassware!’

Becca&Lisa

Name: Becca Wolff Age: 35.

Occupation: Educator.

Theatre

Director/

Lives: San Francisco.

So how long have you been married?

Since October [2013]… six months.

What feels different, internally within the relationship?

It’s really interesting because when I first started thinking about getting married, I sort of thought part of the cool thing about being gay is that you didn’t have to think about this.

Lisa, my wife, was really interested in getting married and she would bring

it up and basically we’d have these, what I kept making into intellectual conversations about this question, well, what would be different, what does it mean to get married? And she kept going, ‘Well it means you’re married!’, which I held fast I think to my belief and understanding about it. I mean, my parents have a great marriage and I don’t have any negative feelings; I just think it was that I felt like this is not my world.

And then at some point, Lisa came around and she was like, you know what, I totally respect that and its fine with me and I was so impressed, I was like, wow, that’s so cool, I should marry her.

That is fantastic. I’m a big believer in reverse psychology.

It may work. I may be the poster child.

I guess at that point, I kind of came around to the idea that it’s not the political stand that I’m not interested in making; at that point, I felt like being not married is no longer that interesting to me because, on the flipside of ‘What does it mean to be married’ is like, ‘What does it mean to not be married?’ And I didn’t feel like there was a deep meaning about that anymore to me and I didn’t feel like I was making a stand against ‘The Man’ or anything, I just felt like Lisa and I were completely committed to each other. It’s like so many of the things that marriage is, we were already kind of doing it and the difference was that I was starting to see this as a relationship that I could see going on forever, so at some point, I was going

to get her jewellery for her birthday and I was looking at rings and the guy at the counter said, ‘So when are you going to propose?’, and I was like, that’s a great idea! I was up in San Francisco and it’s when we were living down here and I was directing a show up there and she was coming up for the weekends and I was like, I’m just going to ask her. I didn’t feel nervous about it at all because I had this, ‘Yeah, this is the right thing!’ But then the moment came and the ring was out of reach and I didn’t expect that but had this super-awkward moment where I like, what if she says no?

I totally feel like the party who has to do the proposal; (traditionally) men just do not get enough credit for how nerve-wracking that is.

Anyway, so that’s amazing. What was the proposal like?

We met up in the East Bay where I was staying and we drove up to San Francisco and Lisa had been travelling all day and I had been working all day and so we took a nap before going out for dinner, and so I put the ring on the bedside table and then woke her up and was like, I have something to ask you. And then I was like, where’s the ring? I can’t reach that end of the bed anymore. And she was looking at me because now I had nothing more to say as that was the moment I was supposed to be like, ‘Here!’ and I was like, errrr… And so there was this very awkward moment and then finally I said, you know, ‘Will you marry me?’ and there was this hang time and I really didn’t feel nervous and it really was that moment where I was like, oh my god, this is the meaning of all this, that you give somebody the choice.

Suddenly you’re sitting and this is your chance to say, I do not want to make that contract and that is something that we necessarily take very seriously because contracts, maybe it sounds cold or cynical to talk about it as a contract, it gives someone the chance to say, no. And the chance to say, yes. And I think you stop doing that in a relationship. Like, at the very beginning it’s like, are we going

to be exclusive? Are we going to sleep together? Are we going to move in?

And there are all these questions and eventually it’s like, well then what?

When do you give someone a chance to say ‘Fish or cut bait,’ and so to me, that was really the most clarifying moment of learning what it was and then the fact that that contract is celebrated.

So what’s different in the eyes of society? What’s the difference between you saying, ‘Yes, I’m just waiting for my girlfriend,’ and saying, ‘I’m waiting for my wife’?

For me, it does make me feel a little more grown-up and I think that makes me think very differently about my decisions because, all of a sudden, I feel like I made this particular commitment to this particular person. I have to consider my decisions differently and also think more about the future. Lisa’s a very future-orientated person and I’m not.

I think you just have to necessarily think differently about your partner’s lifestyle, needs, whatever, so I’d say that’s different. It’d be interesting to ask Lisa though, because I call Lisa my wife but I don’t feel like a ‘wife’, it’s like, I cringe if someone says it.

It’s not an identity I ever wanted for myself, it isn’t an identity I considered sexy for myself, so we talk all the time about that and I’m like, well what do I say? Lisa calls me her partner or her spouse and sometimes she says wife, as sometimes it’s easier if people don’t know, but I do think that all of those things are up for questioning.

Everything is up for questioning. I do think, for me, [calling Lisa my wife] I guess I like it, that’s a big decision I made successfully, and that’s a great feeling and she’s such an outstanding person that I am so proud that that’s the person I am referring to, and then I do think it’s similarly on the flipside… I think that there’s this trope of people complaining about their spouses to their friends and I do think it’s different to say, ‘Oh, my wife did this thing,’ because there’s a comfort in that because, of course, no one’s

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perfect and of course, we all spend our time trying to figure out our lives and I think to say, ‘Me and my wife… whatever,’ even if we took a trip or were trying to figure out what car to buy, I feel like there’s something about it that says to the world, whatever happens, this is the situation, we are together, and whatever struggles we have, it’s towards staying together rather than towards being happier alone. I feel like it is something to say there is something greater than my desire for whatever I see for myself down the road, that together we’ve made a commitment to something greater and the rules are not ours to set, like we’ve said, whatever goes on, it’s going to go on to make this better and this is the person that I am going to put first and I guess I think it’s like, I don’t know, it’s funny that I went from, ‘I don’t know what marriage means,’ to being and also, no divorce!

So once we’ve come to this agreement that getting married is a good idea, then there’s this next part of it, which is a wedding. It’s expensive, it’s stressful, it brings up all of these like, long-buried family anxieties and issues and expectations about religious things or expectations about cultural things… Why have a wedding?

For all those reasons. I mean, what could be better? For me that thing of being in front of your family and making this commitment and again, giving people the chance to express themselves in whatever way they do, that, whether it’s through saying something or dancing or getting too fucking wasted or whatever, people do at weddings. I think we have so few opportunities in our lives to really be together as a family—especially mixed family, two families. So it’s so seldom that in the normal scheme of things—unless you are a very religious person or someone that belongs to some kind of group that has regular meetings over really abstract principles. We got married in Albany— that’s where Lisa’s from—and I didn’t have any interest in wedding

planning, which is a great thing because whatever Lisa would say I’d be like, that is great, except we can’t just have vegetables and fish. And so I weighed in on getting some steak.

When we got engaged, Lisa called her parents and her mom was like, ‘Put Becca on the phone!’ and then was like, ‘I am just so happy to have you in the family, thank you, this is so great, we just can’t wait for this,’ and her response was so positively emotional and sweet and so welcoming and warm, it just felt like, wow, I really do immediately feel a part of this family and that’s something that I didn’t know I would feel because her family are so different from mine. Then when we did the wedding planning, we decided to get married in Albany.

I think partly it was natural because this idea that like, Lisa’s the bride…

I mean, I never wanted to be the bride, that just was never something that crossed my mind. I love Albany, I’ve had only the best time there, it’s just the most Hamish [cozy, homey in Yiddish] and totally open-minded place. I mean, it’s a gay wedding and people don’t even bat an eye because it’s been legal in New York for a long time, people really don’t give a shit, they’re much more truly open-minded than a lot of Californians are.

I was going to ask you, it sounds like you had a lot of very traditional elements?

Very traditional.

What were the traditions that you threw out? Like, did you stay in separate places the night before?

Yeah, we did.

You guys are so old-fashioned!

I know. We are, it’s true. You’ve got to keep the traditions rolling.

So at some point, you decided to get married, and then between then and actually being married, is there anything that was different, or was the decision a turning point?

Honestly, and Lisa may kill me for saying this, but I really feel like she relaxed and I may have too. There were these weird things and I’d just be like, what is the problem right now? Because I’m extremely moody, just generally moody, but Lisa’s not I don’t think. But there would be these things where she would get super-

intense about stuff; I’d be like, what is happening? And that kind of got to be less and less so since we’ve been married. And we’ve talked about it and I guess my analysis of it is that you can trust each other more maybe, so there are things that are insecurities, they just don’t have the same weight now. Do you feel that way?

Yes, that’s so true. We always talk about how we feel like you are officially on the same team. You know that the objective is to make the relationship better, there’s not a point where you’re worried you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater, you know?

It’s true, because I guess in our human being’s worst moments, now there’s something to keep you from making a stupid decision, there’s a waiting room, you can’t just be like, we’re done, because there are now consequences. And at our worst moments, maybe that is the thing that we need, is to either know that there is that waiting period or be forced to face the fact that there is.

Neither of you changed your names, did you?

No. We talked about this; I really wanted Lisa to change her name but she’s been married before and she changed her name [then] and so we talked a lot about it. I mean, there is the professional stuff and all that, but in another way, it’s just an emotional thing, it’s like, why do people change their names? I do think it’s just a feeling.

Is there anything else you want to say about being married, getting married, about what it is all for?

His institution? I think it’s important to acknowledge that this argument of gay marriage versus straight marriage, that I do think that to me, the passion with which people both oppose and fight for gay marriage, I have to respect those that oppose me.

I feel like, if you fight with that kind of passion about something, I want to know why. I mean, these kinds of questions you’re asking, those are the kind of questions that I don’t actually think get asked.

But don’t you think that if it’s just saying, ‘I am going to be with you ‘til the end’— if that is how we’re

defining it, then it’s unstoppable?

Yes, I mean, I do think that it’s a mechanism of the state, it’s a religious institution and that people have profoundly different ideas about what the state is and profoundly different ideas about what religion is, and I think we have such an unproductive conversation [in the United States] about what those differences are. I have to negotiate my way based on some sort of combination of thinking and feeling, and I think, to do that thinking, beyond the feeling, you do have to say, you have to put into words somehow, if you’re like, ‘the State to me is about making sure that we have more babies in the future’, then we can have a conversation, because there are lots of couples who can’t conceive. Are you going to say that senior citizens can’t get married? And I think everyone should consider these kinds of questions you’re asking. And its important to think about them without feeling existentially challenged because I think that’s the thing, because they see someone else’s view of the state or other people’s religion as really dangerous to their own, and I think that that is the bad road.

Oh one more thing: How long did you live together before you got married?

We moved in together when we came to L.A. and that was 2009, so about three-and-a-half years, plus we lived across the street from each other for about a year. That’s the best. That’s a tradition that I’d like, suggest: before you live together you should live across the street from each other first. You have access, but you can go back to your own place. It’s like going back to the villages.

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A Violet Eulogy: Věra Chytilová

2 February 1929—12 March 2014

‘Can’t you smell it?

What?

How volatile life is.’

This snippet of dialogue, flashing up at the bottom of the screen in thick-lettered English subtitles, typifies the surreal wonderland of colour and chaos that makes up Vera Chytilová’s film, Daisies—Sedmikrásky in the original.

This 1966 Czech New Wave (Ceska Nová Vlna) classic charts the mischievous and downright nonsensical actions of two teenage girls.It received the Grand Prix of the Belgium Critics Association when it came out,but was banned for a year in Czechoslovakia for ‘depicting the wanton.’ This ‘wantonness’ is mainly found in the repeated and emphatic dwelling on food—cakes stuffed in mouths, hard-boiled eggs snipped up with scissors, apples scattered across a bed, wine glasses drained, watermelon slices carved up, a bath of milk luxuriated in, a final scene of gorging and guzzling as the two seventeen-year-olds discover a gargantuan banquet. Feasting soon turns into food fighting, an exhilarating climax to their general destruction and daring mayhem.

In refusing to follow society’s consumer-based conventions and gender expectations, these two young women disrupt the system. They just so happen to do it with gloriously colourful aplomb: Twirling in matching polka dot outfits; juxtaposed as one leans in a green dress against a blue door, the other her inversion in blue against green; creating a raucous fashion show atop a table, aided by a net curtain and some underwear, their pointed black shoes scuffing and squelching through the remains of that opulent feast.

Perhaps Daisies—the writer and director’s best-known—solidified Chytilová’s growing reputation. Born in Ostrava in 1929, her initial decision to study philosophy and architecture was discarded to earn a living first as a fashion model, and later a clapper girl at the Barrandov Film Studios. Despite initial setbacks, she studied film production at FAMU—the Academy for Performing Arts in Prague at age 28. After graduation, she released a number of radical, artistically innovative works; her graduation film, The Ceiling (Strop, 1962), and the subsequent Bag of Fleas (Pytel blech, 1962) and Something Different (O necem jinem, 1963), include themes such as fashion, gender, the female body, domesticity and the hollowness of materialism.

She was the only prominent woman in the Nová Vlna movement, which combined highly surreal visual aesthetics (including collages, abrupt cuts, and the use of non-actors rather than professionals), with social commentary on living in a communist state. It was the state that proved most problematic for Chytilová; the 1968 Prague Spring led to tightened censorship, but, unlike many of her male colleagues, she did not flee the country. Consequently, her next film, Fruit of Paradise (Ovoce stromu rajských jíme, 1970; a re-telling of the story of Adam and Eve), was deemed so unacceptable by the authorities that she was banned from producing any more work for eight years. Much of her later output following the hiatus was more realist in style, yet garnered similar responses from the government. She carried on making films after the regime fell, with her last work released in 2006.

Humour, curiosity, directness, courage, contrariness, creativity, tenacity, inventiveness, desire to communicate— just a few of the many attributes that could be ascribed to Chytilová. Return to that quote again: ‘Can you smell it?... How volatile life is?’ In viewing her playful, anarchic, subversive, often confusing films, we may not be able to smell the volatility—but we can certainly see it.

Words by Rosalind Jana

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