I Get Sad on My Birthday
Twenty-eight
The Sunday Letter #14
Tomorrow’s my birthday. I’ll be 28, which doesn’t quite make sense. As a teenager I recall thinking that 27 was a proper “adult age.” COVID started when I was 24 and I blinked and I was 27, imbued with the sense that I was supposed to feel older. But I have always felt impossibly young amongst older friends, impossibly old amongst younger ones (which I wrote about last week as well). I often hear from friends that their first impression of me was of someone who “had her shit together,” maybe because I moved away from home and into an apartment with a boyfriend earlier than most. Maybe it was because I’d mastered the art of projecting self-confidence with a self-esteem built on the opinions of others. But the truth is I’ve never felt at ease with the age that I am—does anyone?
As a child I resisted the norms of what the adults around me believed I was “supposed” to do as a teenager, like go bra-shopping, pluck my eyebrows, or dress more girly. Adults would discuss my growing body and associated insecurities within earshot, so I gave in and shaved my arms and wore a dress to my eighth grade graduation. A compulsive people pleaser, I was never grounded because I never misbehaved.
By high school, I realized I liked literature and philosophy and spending lunchtime alone in the art room. I was constantly fatigued and spent my free time asleep. I developed lockjaw from stress and got good grades despite never doing any homework. I was solitary, despite having a group of longtime friends. I was carving out my interests while being both intrigued and repulsed by the expectations others had for me, like a trained zoo animal that knows if it does the dance it’ll get the reward. I graduated ten years ago and if I try to account for the time between now and then, it doesn’t feel as though I’m tracing the same life. In ten years I might feel the same way. Maybe 38-year old me won’t recognize the woman who wrote these words at 28, but maybe she’ll feel the same compassion I feel towards all my younger selves, who were doing the best with what they had at the time.
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Last year on my birthday, I was still emerging from the pain of a friendship ending, and in an attempt to reclaim myself I hosted a small dinner party with close friends. Last night, I hosted another dinner party, and despite the stress of planning followed by the worry that no one would show up, I realized it might be a tradition I want to continue forever. Having friends gather, meet, and laugh together over pizza, wine, and cake, while my dog sniffed their feet, was a perfect start to 28.
My mother was gracious enough to let me host the party in her home, and as I was setting up the plates she remarked on the number of people that were joining. I thought about the deliberate effort it takes to keep and maintain friendships, how I’ve struggled with it in the past, either from trying too hard, too fast, maybe not enough. How I’m able to invest in friendships now because I don’t yet have kids or responsibilities beyond work. Her advice: maintain those friendships, cultivate those interests, have something beyond your relationship to which you can turn in the hard, lonely moments.
At my party last year, my dear friend C snuck outside with me while my friends laughed around the table. We sat together on my deck and I admired, for the umpteenth time, her beauty and grace. I’ve always been attracted to friendships with older women (my psychologist noticed this about me early on). I’m fascinated by the way they move through the world and honoured they might see something in me worth loving. She mentioned that she hoped babies might be in her future. She cleaned the kitchen for me when I left to rejoin my friends, the care she showed everyone already so easy, warm, and maternal.
A few months ago I went to visit her newborn baby twins for the first time. They have sweet adorable cheeks and French names. We reminisced about my birthday the year before and I mentioned that I’d taken film photos of her, marvelling at how one minute we hadn’t known of the twins’ existence and the next, here they were. She laughed and told me that she was probably already pregnant that night and hadn’t realized. And now here were these two angels, perfect fingers curling around my own.
My wish for the future is that my friends join me every June for pizza and wine, and I hope that their babies join too, and provide the extra giggles alongside the oldies in the soundtracks for the night. One day those babies will be 28 and dancing to Florence + the Machine in their backyards too, with moms and aunties and friends looking on and feeling so impossibly young.
Leaving you with my favourite song from last night’s playlist…
This week’s recommendations
Like the rest of the world, I’m mourning the end of Succession and wondering what I’ll even do on Sunday nights anymore. Did you know that Roman’s boyish shirt was purchased from Walmart for $7? Or that Brian Cox felt rejected due to a certain major plot point in the final season? I love a show that keeps us intrigued for weeks, maybe even months or years afterwards. But the one point I could never quite suspend my disbelief on…
I finally started The Other Two, however, and I’m really enjoying its Broad City vibe. Plus, Molly Shannon! Enough said.
I wanted to see You Hurt My Feelings with friends today, but the wine I drank last night said: lol no. Hopefully I will catch it soon though! Julia Louis Dreyfus playing a writer in an A24 movie is basically a premise stolen directly from my dream journal.
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In Esquire, “Is My Writing a Hobby Or a Career?”:
If writing was happening in what some might call margins of my life, did that inherently make it a hobby—or was it actually what knit my life together?
Caroline Calloway, scammer extraordinaire, is back, baby, this time with a Vanity Fair profile by bonafide Joan Didion/Eve Babitz connoisseur Lili Anolik:
The term I’m groping for is con artist, emphasis on the artist because she’s authentically that too. In fact, it could be argued that she isn’t a writer but a performance artist’s take on a writer.
A great review from
on Emma Cline’s novel The Guest (a book I found to be propulsively well-written but ultimately unsatisfying):If every narrative choice an author makes is to avoid looking directly at the giant, all-consuming part of the character’s life, you might start asking yourself if the author is just afraid to go there.
From 2019, Rachel Cusk on Celia Paul, asking, “Can a Woman Who Is an Artist Ever Just Be an Artist?”:
Can a woman artist — however virtuosic and talented, however disciplined — ever attain a fundamental freedom from the fact of her own womanhood? Must the politics of femininity invariably be accounted for, whether by determinedly ignoring them or by deliberately confronting them?
I adored Lives of Girls and Women, Alice Munro’s 1971 novel-in-stories, which perfectly captured the life of a young woman in small-town Canada as she grows into a writer. There is a scene in which the narrator, Del, has sex for the first time above her mother’s flower garden. She bleeds, and the next day she returns to look at the blood, asking her mother to join her and witness it, though her mother is uninterested, not understanding the gravity of the moment. A gorgeous scene that will stick with me for a longtime.
This Week in Annie Ernaux News…
Oh to have been a fly on the wall at Charleston Festival, where Annie Ernaux sat down with Sally Rooney to discuss Ernaux’s iconic career and how the Nobel Prize, which “fell into my life like a bomb,” disrupted her writing life in a heartbreaking way: since winning the prize she “cannot write, and the act of the writing was always my future.”
Later, on writing gender and class into her work, Ernaux noted: “What motivates me to write is to describe the things that have been left unsaid.” And on her famous quote about writing to avenge her people, Ernaux said: “I’m really talking about avenging my class and my gender by revealing past injustices… I’m not doing that to pass judgement, I’m doing it as a form of reparation. I think writing can be an act of reparation.”
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A perfect birthday anthem for the girls: “I get sad on my birthday.” Truer words, etc.
Reading: “I’m nearly done with Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust which has taken me most of May and now the start of June to digest. It’s about 600 pages of dense, flowery prose and detailed incursions into the late Victorian social scene, but every now and again it hits you right in the guts. Good stuff.”
Watching: “I finished Succession last Sunday and have been crying about it ever since. No room for anything else in my TV/movie-heart right now.”
Listening: “Francesca by Hozier, The Streets by Double Vision, and Andante Espressivo - String Orchestra - Number One Boy from the Succession S4 Soundtrack (Nicholas Britell is a genius). Not to mention Florence and the Machine’s oeuvre (which I am never not listening to).”
Life, etc: “Vibing my wire-frame glasses again. Blouses and velvet scarfs and blue jeans. Vanilla candles. Soup and chocolate chip cookies. Going to bed early. Crisp blue skies.”
P.S. You can find Shaye on Instagram and here: