Dear Melissa Faliveno,
Throughout my 6th-grade year, a basketball player, freakishly tall for his age, teased me in our shared social studies class to no end. An anxious, reactive preteen, I snapped back, cheeks red and fists balled. Each time I brought up my frustrations, I was met with a “He likes you” or, my least favorite, “That’s just how boys are.”
I feel seen in a scene where Sam recounts being taunted by the schoolboys on the bus. You write, “‘It’s ’cause they like you,’ he’d say with a wink” (81).
As you and I both know, teasing and taunting don’t end in middle school. We’re told we must believe that this is the way men love. I refuse to fall for this. While I am glad that I have experienced a kind love in my past, one that didn’t involve insults under the name of a crush, I refuse to fall for this sort of verbiage in the future.
On Sam’s alcoholism, you write the following:
Growing up in a family of drunks, you learn a few things. First, everyone has the ability to let you down, and probably will. You can’t count on anyone but yourself. Second, you are bad. You were born bad, or turned bad, and either way you caused everything bad. Everything bad is your fault (68).
It has been quite some time since I have read a novel involving alcoholism without a male protagonist. I wonder if the guilt Sam faces is not only due to her experiences with drinking, but of being non-male and an alcoholic.
Is there a way in which this distinctly non-male-ness places more blame on Sam and her mother’s restraint than if they were men? Is there a way we can push past or push through disease and disorder to better take care of ourselves?
Can we be more than what is expected of us?
“‘In any case,’ Lou-Ann said as the waitress shuffled away, ‘I think there’s a lot of stories like that. About a woman who’s more than she seems’” (237), you write.
I want to be a woman who is much more than she seems. If my body were to contort and transform the way Sam’s does throughout the novel, I would like that fish — because, let’s face it, I’d be a slimy water-dwelling creature with the absurd number of hours I spend searching for the nearest body of water to swim in — to grow sharp anglerfish teeth to feed and protect itself. I hope I’d be one of the big ones — the basketball-sized freaks, rather than the golf ball-sized gals; I hope, like Sam, to resist the chains of one’s genetically predisposed diseases and disorders.
I am grateful to have read the reinvention of the Gothic that is Hemlock — to read Sam’s humanity and animality on full display, and to question my own. I look forward to its official release early next year.
Very sincerely,
Carlin Steere
