Dear Melissa,
Early in 2020, I truly committed to being alone. I had recently accepted and embraced my queerness after spending the previous decade in continuous relationships. I often placed my lovers’ needs above my own, spent too much time doing rather than being, and could no longer understand how to listen to my body. Just two short months later, we entered lockdown. It was the first time in my life when I could no longer rely on the distraction of a lover. Learning how to listen to my body became a daily practice I honored with fastidious care.
In your collection Girlhood, you reveal similar truths. In the essay “Wild America,” you confide in your reader about your months of solitude in your thirties and how they brought you back to yourself, to the twelve-year-old you eating watermelon and caving to the inner wildness that you recognized within yourself but not in anyone else. We’re invited into these honest recollections of girlhood and curiosity that often come with being alone. And I, too, found myself as I read yearning to return to my twelve-year-old body—a body stinging with burns from climbing Sugar Maples and chilled from driving homemade go-karts through muddied Indiana cornfields. Few collections have allowed me, commanded me, to trace and mourn my youth as much as Girlhood:
“Sometimes I think about going back. I imagine reversing the film of my personhood, reeling the spool to find the single frame where it all changes. As though there would be one murky celluloid square in which my body was taken away from me. Not just my body, but all the pleasures that came through it. A hand reaching into the frame and snatching it all away—the sting of salt water on my skinned knees, the ache of a palm tendered by oak bark, the pelt of gravel against my calves as my bike flew downhill, the hum of my legs after running all day, my own voice ringing in that cathedral of pine trees, the perfect freedom of caring only about what my body could do and never about how it was seen” (103).
Throughout Girlhood, we are able to trace the ripple effects of the patriarchy, silence, shame, and sexual harm. We follow you in “Intrusions” as you dissect the repercussions of mainstream media using violent abuse against women as a central plot point in television shows and movies like True Detective, Mindhunter, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Body Double. These examinations with your precise lyricism are as heartbreaking as they are essential.
It was in “Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself,” though, where I recognized my need to ground myself was as strong as my need to reflect. Within the first few pages of the essay, you say, “I am not interested in defining my experiences as wounds so much as in examining their consequences” (198). I found myself excited and fearful for what came next—a sprawling examination of topics ranging from queerness to the Panopticon effect, to depersonalization and cuddle parties, to sexual assault and affirmative consent. I was reminded of my Indiana small-town sex education, when my health teacher sat on her stool at the front of our classroom and asked, “What do you want to know?” I don’t remember many questions that followed other than one, asked by a boy: “Does using two condoms really work?” None of us got the answers we needed in that classroom. But Asher Roth’s “I Love College” song was recently released, and music was our education. Needless to say, affirmative consent wasn’t a phrase I heard until my twenties.
In the same essay,“Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself,” when you share your memory of revealing your early sexual history to your partner, I found myself frozen, considering the implications of my own silence and shame: “Not speaking of a subject can turn it into a secret. Secrets, if initially a source of power to their keepers, often transmute into a source of shame over time. If you act as though a happening is unspeakable, then you begin to think of it as such” (229). These devastating commandments give space for undoing all the ways women have made themselves smaller.
With Girlhood, you’ve given readers an opportunity to join you in reflection, conversation, and change, even though we may not completely know what that looks like: “After decades of not listening, I had to invite my body to tell me. I had to invite other women to tell me. I had to recognize the recurrent experiences that I did not yet have words for.” Now, more than ever, I’m invigorated to do the repetitive daily work of listening to my body’s needs so they never again “become illegible to me” (267). Your interviews with other women about their experiences with sexual harassment and violence reminded me we are never truly alone, and I feel encouraged to listen to my body.
Thank you for writing Girlhood and for the reminder that real healing is “sometimes painful and often tedious. We must choose it over and over” (269). Thank you for validating my desire to spend time with and care for myself. Thank you for giving space to your readers to mourn our own girlhoods, our own wildness. Thank you for saying, “unknown value has no value,” and recognizing our value is a conscientious effort we must make every day (310). Thank you for these tender reminders. I will remind myself over and over and over.
Your fan,
Lauren Cross
