DE A R R E A DER , When I got married nearly ten years ago, I was genuinely surprised by the princess-ness of it all; how blatant, how embarrassingly forthright the sales pitch, when clerks at the dress store referred to it unironically as YOUR DAY, as though it was the only day that would ever belong to me, or suggested that I try on tiaras. A sales pitch—and a frame that remains impossible to step outside of. No matter who we are to each other, my husband and I are still characterized by others as inside a story that makes him the hero, and me, the grateful beauty. For the past decade, everyone in our lives—colleagues, friends, family—have, subtly but meaningfully, contextualized my decisions through his (but never his through mine). My choice of job, house, or what kind of book to write are reflected back to me through the prism of his achievements; my independence, apparently obliterated by a role that is historically subservient, reproductive, and secondbest. I’m still shocked when people openly probe my childlessness as though it is not a wound, then turn to ask him about his work. I didn’t understand that my worth would be measured so openly, or found so wanting. Yet: I’d been warned—and how. My first toy was a baby doll, followed by dollhouses, mini brooms, and plastic kitchens. All the while, streaming through the ether, on televisions and in picture books, a series of neutered corporate fairy tales taught me that a woman’s greatest goal in life is to be chosen by the most important and eligible man in the land. The world had told me explicitly that I had one purpose, but I believed that it didn’t apply. The need to see myself as exceptional has been a profound driver of my choices, one that motivated me through all of my achievements. But when it comes to the word “wife,” there are no exceptions; apparently, not even for me. Once I realized that, it was impossible not to reflect the world back to itself; to dig out my most powerful conditioning and build something with its dust.
I asked myself why I believed that I could choose which rules applied to me, and which did not; indeed, what I thought the role of a wife would get me; and what everyone, including me, stood to gain from this status quo. I began to write my own warning; my very own fairy tale, The Force of Such Beauty: the story of a woman who believes herself to be an exception to the rule. Set in Lucomo, an imagined sovereign state that is, like Monaco, Singapore or even the city of Amsterdam, an economic node that fosters the gross imbalances of global wealth, the novel holds a magic mirror to the modern-day princess story. A young woman named Caroline loses herself: Given the gift of beauty, she meets a handsome prince, moves to a castle, and wears a crown. And then she opens her eyes and discovers that castles, designed to be impenetrable, are prisons; and princesses, bound to lives that prioritize only their reproductive labor, are their most glorious prisoners. Caroline, a retired Olympic marathon runner, isn’t like my previous characters; she isn’t particularly wordy, or educated. She’s bodily, loving, and strong; she’s an egoist, a naïf; and occasionally, a villain and a fool. As an athlete, Caroline embodies a certain vision of independence, ambition and drive; as a princess, she embodies another, a falsehood that is sold to women from the day we are born. Her story is a cathartic exercise in the recklessness of trust, the hedonism of greed, and the tragic fantasy that safety can be given to us by men. She shows us what life is really like for a princess—the woman who gets to be measured against the most powerful man in her world. Stepping into her glass slippers is a reminder that inevitably, those shoes will shatter, and the shards will cut every tendon in your foot.
BAR BAR A B O U R LAN D