Emergency in the Reading Room

An audience member collapsed at a book reading at McNally Jackson* the other night.

The promoting writer was the wise, steadfast storyteller Jeanette Winterson. She was reading from her latest, a memoir revisiting issues central to the seminal semi-autobiographical Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Pandora Press, 1985) when an elderly (please insert: the most respectful euphemism for of a certain age) woman lost consciousness, falling from her chair with a thud. Seconds later a nearby listener hollered, “Call 911!”

No one taught me to be crass. I’ve come by it naturally and embraced it. I’m generally tactless but empathetic and good in a crisis. In this case, phone off, bike helmet in hand, stretching my congenitally impaired hearing trying to understand Winterson from the rail of the stairs separating the packed downstairs reading area from the horrible shop patrons and the troll steaming milk in the café, thereby obstructing the paramedic’s path to the patient, when I saw someone dialing, I fled.

If it’s possible to wish the afflicted party health while thanking her by livening, with her emergency, a rote genre of event typically formulaic enough to convince even the most idealistic attendees that creativity is dead in literature, that’s what I’d like to express.

Why go? Winterson tells great stories, she will not inure labels, she’s a writer, it’s who she is not what she does, she’s read more books than I have and she answers questions (click here to hear Winterson on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show) the way she writes book and film reviews, sincerely and expansively. Also, Winterson largely operates in a historical narrative sensitive to sex and gender. It’s a pleasure to hear someone speak intelligently and not stridently through this filter – especially with all the recent coverage of offensive election year legislation and posturing. It’s an analgesic for a tradition I defend without embracing.

Winterson’s public is like Ani Difranco’s, dressed up in their best manners queuing to hear Gloria Steinem give a talk on Betty Friedan, and her story of surviving fundamentalism, finding freedom in books and in bedding what her attracted her heart, regardless of at times severe social constraints, is important to a lot of people.

When the woman dropped out of her chair at the reading I imagined her an idealized example of “the problem that has no name.” She regretted having been conservative through Women’s Lib, married young to a kind man she didn’t respond to physically, the situation all the more loathsome for it’s outward agreeableness, she read Oranges in 85’ which set her on a path to self-acknowledgement and peace in the final third of her life, coming to close the book, to meet her literary hero, seated next to the woman she’d married two years ago in Vermont, smiling, her heart lost it’s strength.

Or, she was just a lady with fine literary taste.

Regardless of the verity of this theatrically invented life, I’m a direct beneficiary and product of big and little “f” feminism(s). Even if I typically choose not to understand the world in agreeing terms, my story can be told that way: grandmothers employed outside the home, mother steeped in second wave ideology who became a white collar rock star, a breadwinner, and raised her two children singing to jazzy tunes in the key of “I can do whatever I want.” I thank my mother, grandmothers and everyone who struggled under harsher conditions than I by proxy, in person if the chance presents itself, and continue to live as untouched by social identity politics as possible: gender-sexual, racial, ethnic, national, or any other variety.

As much as these categories do to help us define and discuss ourselves, consenting that they’re crucial to some, and that many great minds have processed through these traditions, to me, they feel like cages we build to constrain ourselves.

In the short time she held the room at MJ, Winterson said something I’ve read previously in her writing: “books are homes we enter.” It’s a relatable metaphor for anyone who’s braved the day’s banalities for the reward of a good book and a comfortable chair. Stories contain us; we live in them, learn, laugh and cry. As I child I made my home in fiction and nonfiction with little distinction. I was Thomas Jefferson and Anne Hutchinson, Harriet Tubman and W.E.B. Dubois and Ernest Hemingway and Zora Neale Hurston. None of my grade school classmates stopped me from playing Alexander the Great during recess after an ancient history lesson or fighting imagined monsters as the Red Ranger** if I was wearing a red shirt and called it first. Being sexually female, phenotypically light-skinned and ethnically Jewish on my father’s side have had very little bearing on my sense of personhood.

I’m not a pioneer in this and I’m not alone. Many Millennials I know well enough to speak for have similar stories and feel less bound by stringent identity matrices than in times past. We just, are. Economic hard times aside, is it extreme hubris or socially insensitive to posit that we feel, some of us, like we were born free?

Not everyone recognizes our disenthrallment, there’s fighting still to be done and unfortunately this freedom isn’t an infinite dimension of contemporary life (I could never have been a world class gymnast, nor could my brother, we’re too big and too slow) but I do believe sincerely that we’re living in a time when the idea of gender specific ownership of character traits, job titles, and social status has been annihilated by empirical evidence. The same goes for sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, nationality and religious background. Counter-stereotypes are historically documented and daily, perhaps hourly, reinforced. This American story of more and more of us living out the lofty language of our formative documents has been lived before, to different degrees throughout human history.

Identities are both arbitrary, though traceable, in groups and ephemeral, if relevant, in individuals. None of it holds up to any rigorous examination – rational or scientific. Work done by the likes of Spencer Wells on The Genographic Project shows that almost all of our most important identity markers, like race, are largely invisible in our genes. If I call myself a feminist, if I call myself black it’s important to look at what scale: region or time period, we’re looking at. Today, in one cosmopolitan city, fem is fem to some and not to others, brown is black or white depending on whom you ask. Neither are self-definitions constant. Through time, one person might be gay, straight, gay again, Caribbean, feminist, Christian, Muslim or Californian.

Having recently spent time reading and talking to some bright young females, I’m thinking maybe the recapitulation theory, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, disproven for embryonic development, should be re-examined in the theater of personal identity and self-realization. Perhaps I feel free because I’ve done my time. I’ve been fortunate enough to have read Simone de Beauvoir, raged with the Riot Girl movement, delivered more tirades, and occasionally punches, than I’ve cared to defending rights and safety, mine and others.

High School sophomore, fashion pundit and blogger Tavi Gevinson who, apart from reminding me that if I ever thought I was cool I was certainly delusional, in one of the first posts on her site rookiemag.com, for and by teenage girls, launched last fall, First Encounters With the Male Gaze uses the tools of gender-specific thinking to remain strong and confident in a post-puberty world. Talking to a thirteen year-old cousin over Christmas, a very impressive person by any criteria, better at math and more worldly than most of my brother’s friends ten years her senior, I learned she had a lot to say about girls being talkative, emotional, and concerned about clothing. Etching out differences between the sexes seemed to be a crucial part of her growing understanding of the world as well. Will these youngsters come to feel the strengths of these labels and registers obliterated over time as I have? It will be interesting to discover. I wish only that they feel comfortable with their understandings of themselves and help others to do the same. I bet they do.

Yes, there’s still fighting to be done. Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and genius power spouses Nicholas Kristoph and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky highlights underreported areas of superlative injustice by telling individual stories and providing actionable advice, shaking lax westerners out of our atrocity fatigue, and encouraging us to contribute however we’re able.

Hanging onto traditions not out of a protracted sense of indebtedness or because it feels comfortable, but to understand and be understood, to be watchful for regression, and change what needs changing feels right to me. I appreciate that we have the languages to inspire action in places of conflict and suffering and I respect those for whom these traditions are crucially important. It’s all just a ruddy bore sometimes. I try not to be snide. I’d sooner laugh at the peg-light displays in Forbidden Planet or the puppetry in E.T.. Visual effects techniques have evolved but those films are definitive, pillars, proof of our strengths as a species – almost as cool as The Nineteenth Amendment.

After the 911-call went out at the bookstore I went home to read Winterson instead of listening, she’s prolific, and has happily made much of her work available online. She’s a writer: literary, imaginative, technical and emotional, her actions have earned her that label. Labels based on actions feel right.

When economist Lawrence Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury and president of Harvard University notoriously commented that the underrepresentation of women in the sciences at the highest level could be explained by a “lack of aptitude.” It was a blunder, eventually resulting in a no-confidence vote in Summers, his resignation from Harvard and the formation of a task force to investigate women in science led by theoretical physicist, model-builder and cosmologist Lisa Randall, who, in a 2005 Scientific American article, published following the Summers snafu, said: "I just want to see a whole bunch more women enter the field so these issues don't have to come up anymore."

Dr. Randall is a scientist, hesitant to comment as a social analyst, and she admits in the S.A. piece that the issue is complicated, but the tacit acknowledgment and plain solution present in this statement perfectly enthuse and placate, ringing like an anthem for doing. Distinctions are distraction. Seeing someone do what he or she is meant to do, loves to do, doing it to the best of his or her abilities is good medicine, transformative, powerful – like hearing Louis Armstrong play or sing or watching Wayne Gretzky on the ice.

I felt this reading Randall’s Warped Passages and going through article after article on Winterson’s site the night of the unrealized MJ event. Addressing recent events and the breakdown she had a couple years ago in this column article Winterson writes:

My Tweetie-pie dream from when I was going bonkers… There was the yellow canary – and it was definitely me and I had a nice gilded cage – but it was on wheels with an engine – and me (the bird) was speeding about in my motorised cage thinking I was free.

As a completely unqualified outside observer, I couldn’t help thinking that Winterson’s dream and possibly her breakdown were the result of continuing to analyze the world through a specific socio-cultural (female empowerment) lens while maintaining an identity founded on the rejection of this type of codified limitation.

We all have ways of dampening the infinite within us. Our species seems to be flawed in this way. But if we keep doing and doing our best, if individuals like Kristof, WuDunn, Randall, Winterson, Gevinson and my mother and teenage cousins continue to live and work, if we remain open, apply labels to actions and not appearances, there’s reason to be hopeful. We’ll have more Armstrongs and Gretskys of all different shapes, sizes, colors and persuasions. Stories of progress and opportunity will endure through time and expand through space.

* McNally Jackson is a bookstore, café and literary curatorial space in Soho, New York.

** The Red Ranger is a heroic male teenager from The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, a television series that aired in the U.S. beginning in 1993.