Mom, Am I Still Young?

Impossibility of youth

out of office.

The Sunday Letter #13

I’m writing this from a balcony in Banff, overlooking the mountains. We’re here for a wedding, happening in a few hours, between two university pals that are adorably well-suited to each other. When we arrived on Friday evening, we caught up with them in the Lodge’s hot tub and reminisced about our own wedding that they attended a few years ago. “How was that four years ago?” we wondered. We are all so impossibly young.

I heard myself giving them advice about some innocuous thing, and a middle-aged couple grinned at us from across the hot tub. “Do you want our opinion, as old people?” they laughed, before giving genuinely sweet advice. I felt self-conscious suddenly, wondering if my advice had sounded like that of a child playing at adulthood. But the couple was pleased to share advice, to proudly mention their ten-year old daughter.

“Are you getting married?” they asked my friends. When they replied yes, the woman lit up. “You’ll love it! We got married here. Forever ago…” The couple smiled sweetly at each other. After our conversation dissolved and we’d turned away from each other, the woman swam to sit on her husband’s lap, turning away from us and towards the starry sky. I imagined they were whispering to each other memories from their wedding all those years ago. Perhaps chatting idly about their daughter. Perhaps laughing at how impossibly young we all were.

This week’s recommendations

Greta Gerwig’s mind! Something I appreciate about her films is that they’re blisteringly intelligent but simultaneously never cruel; she is somehow optimistic in her portrayal of humanity without being naive. So when I say that Barbie looks like a bubblegum-flavoured Truman Show I mean it in the best way. Loved this tidbit in Margot Robbie’s Vogue profile (which includes delicious details about the film set, including the fact that there was weekly film screenings for the cast and crew, known on set as “movie church”):

“Barbie was invented first,” Gerwig points out. “Ken was invented after Barbie, to burnish Barbie’s position in our eyes and in the world. That kind of creation myth is the opposite of the creation myth in Genesis.”

And later in the profile, she espouses more philosophy:

When Gerwig took a tour of Mattel, she learned that the vast majority of dolls in its Barbie line are named Barbie. “Now all of the dolls are Barbie. All of them are Barbie, and Barbie is everyone. Philosophically, I was like, Well, now that’s interesting.” The more she thought about it, the more the multiplicity of Barbies suggested “an expansive idea of self that we could all learn from.”

And finally, some thoughts on how Gerwig came to the story of Barbie. I love that coming of age is such a sticking point as a theme for Gerwig, something she’ll always be digging at:

I do glean a few details about the rest of Barbie. The arc is partially inspired by something Gerwig read when she was a kid, in the 1994 bestseller Reviving Ophelia. “My mom would check out books from the library about parenting, and then I would read them,” Gerwig says. The book describes an abrupt change that happens in American girls when they hit adolescence and begin to bend to external expectations. “They’re funny and brash and confident, and then they just—stop,” Gerwig says. This memory bubbled up early in the writing and Gerwig found it “jarring,” the realization that this is where the story had to go: “How is this journey the same thing that a teenage girl feels? All of a sudden, she thinks, Oh, I’m not good enough.”

Oh, I’m not ready for Succession to end tonight! Here’s James Cromwell (Uncle Ewan), dissecting the eulogy performance he was terrified to give: “When art is disconnected from the human spirit, the work is a lie.”

The Woman, The Myth, The Legend…Jane Fonda goes off on Hollywood and how “It took me until I was 70 to become a person”:

Fonda explained why she eventually cut off her hair. “Nobody has ever asked me that. I always had all of this blonde hair, especially when I was with Vadim,” she said. “It made me feel safe and feminine. When I was starting to become political, I decided I needed to get rid of it all. I went to Vadim’s barber for men, and he cut it all off. I felt so liberated.”

Rachel Aviv on The Lovely Bones author Alice Sebold and the man who was wrongfully convicted of sexually-assaulting her, their fraught relationship, the ripple-effect of harm, and a struggle to reconnect to a language that feels lost.

In The Atlantic, “The First Social-Media Babies Are Growing Up—And They’re Horrified.”

Casey Plett on revisiting her early work and accepting her younger self:

When I first re-read this old book of mine last summer, juvenility was not the feeling that approached me. Instead, I felt a deep, deep love and sense of marvel for the unhappy girl who wrote this book 10 years ago. I wouldn’t write a book like that again, but it’s not because I’m embarrassed by that past girl’s writing, or “cringing” at it, to borrow Moore’s term. It’s because I couldn’t write what 25-year-old-me wrote even if I wanted to: That girl was dancing to an inner music I don’t hear anymore.

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As I was writing this issue, this song came up on shuffle and promptly disoriented me. “Mom, am I still young? Can I dream for a few months more?” My birthday is next week, and even though I’m approaching the end of my twenties, I feel entirely stuck between feeling impossibly young and confusedly old. But alas, today is also my mom’s birthday! Happy birthday mom—you’re my favourite one.