Women on the Brink
Attempts and ambiguities
The Sunday Letter #10
For a few weeks now, I’ve been thinking about how to categorize this newsletter. It wasn’t until I started a book club last week (more on that at the bottom of this issue) that I described Solitary Daughter as a literary newsletter from a woman on the brink.
My favourite aspect of women’s literature is the internal conflict of it all. In fact, my favourite writers are the ones who are the most adept at conveying a woman stuck in her own mind. That sense of a woman, tormented, standing on the precipice of life, teetering in the face of great change. I’ve since realized it’s what draws me to any kind of story, especially the kinds that I share here. This newsletter is written from the brink; while it doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, it sure enjoys the view.
There are now over 200 of you here as regular subscribers, and that is incredibly exciting and terrifying all at once. But I’m thrilled that you’re here, and I can’t wait to keep growing and adding new elements along the way (daydreaming about eventually adding an advice column, guest writers, and more)… This process of gathering stories every week, distilling and curating them into a thoughtful issue every Sunday, has offered a great reprise from hectic daily life, and become a favourite new practice. So thanks for being here with me, on the brink. Let’s never leave.
This week’s recommendations
I rewatched Before Sunrise, a perfect summer romance film. Young Ethan Hawke! Julie Delpy! Lingering glances and meaningful meandering, that act of trying to prolong your time with someone special, in which all your conversations feel earth-shattering but would be ridiculous to outside observers (“The answer must be in the attempt”). Thank you to my pal Nikaela for pointing out that this scene featured authentic reactions from the actors, who hadn’t yet heard the song out loud. A perfect execution of show don’t tell: I blush every time.
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Horrifying news out of Texas: post-Roe, doctors fearing legal repercussions are letting pregnant patients get sicker in order to comply with new abortion restrictions.
In Dazed, “How the horror genre subverts toxic ideas around women and food,” which links to a riveting Electric Lit article, “There’s Nothing Scarier Than a Hungry Woman”:
But maybe what I was feeling was not so much the desire to eat steak, but the desire to be allowed to desire. The desire being met, being recognized, something clearly being given in to. An appetite satiated, without complication.
Jenna Wortham for The New York Times, on Christina Sharpe, “The Woman Shaping a Generation of Black Thought”: “Attentiveness and imagination are powerful restorative agents capable of reconstituting what has been broken down and targeted for obliteration.”
For The Strategist, Sophie Kemp on how being rejected by lesbians led to her discovery of the perfect white t-shirt: “One of the most embarrassing things about me is that I am a bisexual.”
This Week in Annie Ernaux News…
Rachel Cusk (!!!) on how “Annie Ernaux Has Broken Every Taboo of What Women Are Allowed to Write”:
Ernaux’s honesty had the effect of illuminating a profound and unsuspected lack of freedom in her reader. How, through the simple story of her origins, had she laid her hand so surely on the human tragedy of our ability to make ourselves unfree? The answer perhaps lay in her faith in writing as a sacred and transcendent activity. She believed in writing as some people believe in religion, as a sphere where the self, the soul, is entitled to find refuge.
On her own feelings of inadequacy in the face of writing about her life as a woman, Cusk writes,
How was I to approach as a subject something whose power of nullification was so great that it menaced the very act of representation? To write about motherhood for instance — to bring objective scrutiny and distance to the biological invasion of the self — seemed to be not only a practical but also an intellectual impossibility. In order to succeed as an artist — it seemed — both the inconvenience and thus the reality of femininity had to be scrupulously concealed.
Katy Hessel’s podcast, The Great Women Artists, featured the brilliant Siri Hustvedt this week, for a wide-ranging conversation on the omission of women from the history of the modern art movement: “Omission is when a culture has become sated with the expected that no one sees it…I had to get older to say, ‘Where are the women?’” The political studies student in me was also titillated by a mention of Plato’s Symposium, in which Plato suggests that a male philosopher’s ability to give birth to a new idea was greater than the human ability to give birth to new life.
Hustvedt goes on to discuss her favourite artists, such as Louise Bourgeois, who makes her feel like she hasn’t quite mastered art (“What attracts me is precisely what I don’t understand. I’m drawn to ambiguity”). She also encourages us to “embrace the feeling of revulsion,” and to look again, to return to that which originally repulsed us, to look with someone else’s eyes and maybe find something new. On perspective, she notes: “When we look at art, we already have this thought that it holds the traces of another human consciousness and unconsciousness, so there’s something more alive in that work…I think there’s an embodied presence in many works of art that we do feel.” On the temporal, ephemeral nature of art: while books are sequential, a painting exists only in time, so we feel it when movement is portrayed in art. “They give you everything all at once, and you cannot discover that all at once.” It’s only in the observer that a work of art becomes animated: “It’s dead without an observer, just the way a book is dead without a reader.” But if you don’t feel a work of art, you won’t remember it: “Emotion is what consolidates memory.”
You can read more about Katy Hessel’s new book, The Story of Art Without Men, in this Hyperallergic review.
Reading: “I’m currently diving into books on opposite ends of the spectrum: Elif Bautman’s The Idiot and Sarah J. Maas’ A Court Of Thorns and Roses. One is satisfying my occasional nihilistic moods, while the other is healing my inner child—I think you can guess which is which!”
Watching: “For movies, I recently watched Suzume in theaters, which is a beautiful anime about the idea of home, grief, nostalgia and the magic of community. And then I’m continuing to hang out with the Roy siblings via the last season of Succession. I’m also late to the party with Barry starting—a show that makes me feel charmed, yet anxious all at the same time.”
Listening: “I’m currently loving anything instrumental and soothing, and the artist yes/and scratches that itch perfectly with their mix of jazz, hip-hop and cinematic soundscapes. Maple Glider’s album To Enjoy Is The Only Thing is an album I’ve been returning to when I need to feel refreshed and hypnotized. And finally, I’ve been listening to everything Rachel Omandi is saying about the fashion industry on her podcast, The Cutting Room Floor.”
Life, etc: “Especially with the oncoming warm season, I’ve been on the search for more decadent options for fancy, feel-good mocktails to stock my home bar with. I’m currently loving Kin Euphorics “Spritz”, Ghia soda, and of course, Cipriani’s non-alcoholic peach bellini. And of course, pouring them in a vintage glass is a MUST!”
P.S. You can find Arbela on Instagram here! She also runs The Changing Room, which you can find on Instagram here, and on Substack here!