This is one of those times when everything seems to converge, when upheaval – war, pandemic, environmental collapse, scorching political unrest, racism, wrenching economic and social disparity – shines its searchlight not only on our world but on our lives. In crisis we either shut down — metaphorically pull the covers over our head — or go on high alert. We turn off the television and stop reading our newsfeeds and instead binge on the Gilmore Girls or on one British police procedural series after another or we scrutinize not just global events but our immediate environs and our daily interactions, taking a hard look. For some of us, perhaps in self-defense, this chaos brings an intensity to our focus on the everyday. And what could be more quotidian for a female than the subject of menstruation?

My granddaughter has just been “visited,” as they used to say well before my time, by her first period. An event marking personal change and disorientation in a world that is changing at a disorienting rate. My lens abruptly shifted from examining the overwhelming chaos around us to the more familiar chaos I imagine my granddaughter navigating through.

I mentioned to a well read and much-movied friend teetering on the brink of eighty that I was thinking about writing about menarche, expecting his patrician nose to crinkle and his forehead crease in the way I’ve observed when I have brought up topics he found distasteful. But instead, he encouraged me, saying he had never seen a treatment of the subject in novels or in film except in the horror movie Carrie, based on the eponymous Stephen King novel.

Now there’s a depiction of a girl in the throes of hormonal eruption/disruption that could arrest anyone’s development.

The title character is very much a late bloomer, retarded in her social and physical development, a senior in high school when she begins menstruation. Menarche comes upon her – overtakes her – while she’s at school. She is showering in the locker room when she discovers she is bleeding and panics, believing that she (rather than her childhood) is dying. Her classmates turn on her, reveling in her ignorance and fear, and bomb her cowering, naked body with a barrage of tampons and sanitary pads while shouting, “Plug it up! Plug it up! Plug it up!”

When that Brian de Palma movie came out in the 1970s, I was taken to see it by friends. I had no idea what to expect.  Sitting through that film led to a resolution that was easy for me to keep: never to read a book by Stephen King or see another de Palma movie. No fan of the horror genre, I also felt that this was a work of stark misogyny. I was repulsed not just by the “mean girls” trope, but by the girls in the film being depicted as sadists on a par with the forces of the SS. The climax of the movie shows two of these vile teenagers giggling as they jerry-rig a bucket of pigs’ blood so it will cascade onto the unsuspecting, white-gowned Carrie while she is on stage being crowned queen of the prom. (At least that’s the way I remember it these decades later. I’m not willing to put myself through a second viewing.) Seriously? As if the audience had not already grasped that puberty was the ruination of Carrie, unleashing forces in her (telekinesis, the ability to control objects with psychic power rather than by physical means) that will end in mass destruction. But a bucket of pigs’ blood? Did we – as well as Carrie – have to be hit over the head with the metaphor?

When I was ten years old, I went into our household’s guest bathroom, which was also the bathroom closest to the bedroom I shared with my aunt and the chamber the family called the “powder room” in those euphemistic times. On my way I observed my mother and her friend at the kitchen table talking and drinking coffee. When I emerged from the bathroom, trembling, I announced, “Mom, I’m hemorrhaging.” (I was a word person even at the age of ten.) I felt no embarrassment, only a sense of medical urgency. I was relieved the other woman was there as my mother didn’t drive and someone had to quickly transport me to the hospital. My words were greeted not by the concern and bustle I expected but by silence. Then my mother calmly told me to go back into the bathroom and clean myself and she would meet me in my bedroom. I was bewildered, but I obeyed. When I again came out, the friend was gone and my mother was sitting on my bed, something she never did in my shared bedroom. Next to her on the bed were laid out an enormous white cotton pad, some kind of strap, and a package insert on the proper way to wear a sanitary napkin. She told me that what I was experiencing was normal, that it would happen regularly, that it was something that happened to all girls. And then something preposterous about eggs, but I knew girls weren’t chickens. This was impossible to believe. There was no corroboration. At age ten, it hadn’t yet happened to anyone else I knew. But even at that age I was savvy enough to realize that normal was over, that this was something else.

And that was pretty much all my mother told me.

Life was so unfair. I had four brothers. I had no sister. Because I was a girl, I had to share a bedroom with someone forty years older. And now this. Regular bleeding from somewhere in one’s toilet parts that none of my brothers would ever have to experience.

And of course, I didn’t know the half of it.

In fairness, I must say that many of my contemporaries were not treated to a much better version of The Talk. And in my mother’s case, my early menarche – not to mention my startling announcement in the presence of a third party – must’ve been fairly discombobulating to a person who placed such a high value on discretion.

My mother was not one to indulge in conversation about either one’s physical or emotional interior. Her sense of propriety prevailed. One kept things to oneself. One didn’t recount one’s dreams (she was always turning down my offers to share mine). My mother didn’t engage in gossip and she didn’t mind silence. Restraint was a virtue that perhaps exceeded faith, hope, and charity.

Justified or not, I got my revenge over and over again.

As a teenager, I routinely punished my mother for her reserve. On the occasions when I was afflicted by my period and a young gentleman caller showed up at our door, I would find a way to work my current state into conversation. Going out for an afternoon at a Lake Michigan beach I’d inform the boy who’d come to collect me, “I’ve got my period, so I won’t be going in the water today.” I would delight in the ashen look on both my date’s and my mother’s faces. I talked about cramps (mine were bad and lent themselves to vivid description) and the heaviness of my flow. I could even introduce the topic in the absence of my period by reflecting on how in the days immediately preceding onset I would transmogrify into a clutz, dropping things, bumping into furniture. I’m sorry now for torturing my mother, but of course, it wouldn’t have been torture if we were able to comfortably discuss such things. If The Facts of Life were treated like facts of life.

I did a better job when my own daughters went through menarche, but I don’t know how much better. My older daughter used to stick her fingers in her ears and make lalalala sounds to drown out disgusting talk about the changes she could expect. Her sister was young enough to be intrigued rather than grossed out by the words her sibling was trying to keep from penetrating into her consciousness, so she probably assimilated what she needed to know well before she needed to know it.

While many parents today work purposefully to acknowledge and incorporate puberty into a holistic view of family life, menarche and the onset of bodily changes and the uninvited hormonal tides that accompany the menstrual cycle are still delicate, difficult subjects.

We think we have whisked away the cobweb of taboos, but even the ancient prohibitions remain with us. In Nepal, there is still the custom of chhaupadi where women take up residence in menstrual huts during their periods. The Quran forbids sexual intercourse during menstruation. Jewish law’s term for a menstruating woman, niddah, signifies one who is unclean. Traditional Hinduism teaches that menstruating women are impure and polluted. An international organization, Flo, that offers education and outreach to women, including supplying feminine hygiene products to women who don’t have the cultural or economic resources necessary to manage their periods, reports that many girls in rural India, Africa, and Indonesia drop out of school once they experience menarche. But this is not a third-world problem. Period shaming is still prevalent around the globe.

So I was delighted to learn that there is a new film — the anti-Carrie film?— just released by Disney — Disney!— that tackles the subject of female puberty. With Pixar animation! How cool is that?

I learned of Red Panda by way of hearing about an influential film critic who — if he did not exactly trash the movie — dismissed it. He couldn’t relate! Picture alternating emojis here: a laughing-with-tears face and an exploding head.

The summer I was eleven my father delivered me to the house of a classmate on his way to work and gave me my bus fare and a little extra for the trip home, so on my return, I stopped at the small grocery store wedged in near the bus stop to buy a pack of Black Jack licorice chewing gum. Inside, I crossed paths with two boys from the class above mine. I was able to summon the courage to greet them as I was dressed in one of my favorite outfits: slim white capris pants below a boxy, beribboned crop top that stopped at my waist. The boys snickered in reply. The only other shopper was staring at me. I looked down and saw what they saw: the patch of red blooming against the white. I dropped the gum and ran out of the store. I still had to wait there, exposed on the street corner. I still had to board the bus, ride the bus, and walk the unbearably long mile home from the bus stop. I was dying. Not from hemorrhage, from shame.

My daughter tells me that I will be relieved to learn there is now Period Underwear that protects the wearer – everyone’s granddaughter — from such ignominy and she is right—I am very happy to hear it.

And I am looking forward to seeing Red Panda with my granddaughter.

“The Unknown Woman of the Seine” is one of those images, one of those phrases, one of those characters you can go most of your life never encountering – or never noticing, at least – until you do, and once you do, you start seeing her everywhere.

Hers is the tale – or two tales really – the first about the young woman whose body washed up on the banks of the Seine some time in the late 1880s, was taken to the city morgue, publicly displayed, never claimed, but whose face bore such a lovely and beatific expression that a caste was made – and this becomes the second tale: of the plaster mask that went from being an artist’s study tool to a poet’s muse, to the subject of short stories, novels, movies, and photographic essays, before eventually winding up as the template for the first CPR dummy, Resusci Anne, thus rounding these two narratives into a singular, circular whole – of the drowning victim whose surviving image served to teach us all how to save each other from, among other things, drowning.

For me, the discovery of this diptych – of woman and mask – took place about a decade ago, maybe a year or so before I started writing the book, which I did for the same reason I write any book: because my mind keeps returning to it, and to the questions it poses. In this case (and assuming any part of the origin story is true), what life could account for the expression we encounter on that mask? Maybe more to the point, what death?

Without entering too much into process, research followed. And surmise. Certain resemblances asserted themselves, and by their lead, the beginnings of an answer started to take shape around other secondary questions having to do with the acute effects of longstanding physical and psychological trauma, the Sino-French War, the recurrence of certain specific bodhisattvas, the annals of 19th century French (and Swiss) crime, the fin-de-siecle anti-absinthe movement, and the World’s Fair of 1889, of course, whose final three days serve as the story’s squarest frame.

Inevitably, as I grew more familiar with the history, the place, and the various available characters, the book began to take on the romantic, ornate, gas-lit atmosphere of its setting. At the same time, however, and just as inevitably, I became aware that my actual storyline – that is, the investigation into the life and death of the Unknown Woman — was leading me down some very dark alleys, and that lurking in the shadows of this world were more sinister elements, specific exhibits of racism and acts of violence that were as grotesque and disturbing as anything the human imagination could conjure. Only they were true, indelibly etched into the record of the period.

I cannot say that this dissuaded me. For a writer, the knowledge that your present course is liable, at certain turns, to shock the conscience of an empathetic reader isn’t necessarily bad news. It means you may be on to something, in fact, and especially these days, when the ways we talk about our deepest communal faults and fault-lines have begun to feel so pitched and so prescribed, there’s value, I believe, to opening the mind’s eye and seeing these demons in action. And in effect. That’s what novels do.

So I proceeded, aware however that certain crucial questions were out in the open now, and would hover for the remainder of my effort – questions not just about how I should address the more upsetting features of this landscape, but about whether I should. And why.

Now in addition to being a writer, I am also a teacher, which means that I currently find myself in a moment of upheaval, wrought by the confluence of a technological revolution and a socio-political reckoning that calls upon us – happily and necessarily – to revisit the most basic questions about what we think we’re doing, which in my case means teaching literature. In the brave new world of boundless bandwidth and vanishing attention spans, what does it even mean to be a reader, or ‘culturally literate’? Is this an idea we want to preserve? Is reading novels, say, a behavior we want to continue encouraging? And if the answer is yes, then on what basis do I choose to model that behavior on this book here as opposed to that one there?

I’d like to think that all English teachers are wrestling with such questions, and I expect that our answers will vary, depending upon the paths that led us to the classroom, and the paths that led our students there as well. Obviously. But for me, and for now, my own answer to that last question in particular – what makes me most excited to share a text with my students, and to read it with them – is this, and if this sheds light on my creative m.o. or why I feel not just emboldened but obliged to take the hazardous trail when it presents itself…fine.

First, I should admit that I’ve never considered it to be the purpose of a novel – or a song, a painting, or any work of art for that matter – to offer remedies, solutions, or instructions. I’m aware of the counterarguments, but it’s my experience that ideology flattens art, and I’m not interested in agendas. I can get those easily enough online. When I smell one in something someone has created, my tendency is to think it kinda stinks.

What doesn’t stink – what stays fresh, that is, and what I, therefore, trust in most — is the Particular. The Singular. The One-and-Only-ness of whatever the writer has set their sights on. And that quality can apply to any aspect of the work – to the situation, a feeling, or to a character, of course – that’s always the best. The effect is the same no matter where you find it, though, and harkens to the old idea that the more precise the detail – or focus of our attention — the more universal the resonance will be. So it doesn’t matter that I’m reading about a Chinese farmer in a rice field 2500 years ago. If the language captures that moment, the moment will capture me, and in so doing, expose all those boundaries that supposedly divide that farmer and me for what they are: the real fiction.

But I’ll go a step further and admit that my favorite of these moments, the ones that really make me sit up in my chair, or maybe even put the book down and take a quick walk of gratitude – are those in which an author manages not only to distill the essence of the thing, but the antidote as well.

What do I mean?

I mean that passage where, even as the protagonist appears to be having their grand epiphany – is actually pronouncing the truth inside their head (and an admirable truth at that!) – the author manages to tilt it just a fraction, just enough to let us see that this too is vanity, of course, it is (e.g., Tolstoy, Woolf). Equally, as stirring is the lunatic’s street corner rant, which for all its frustrating loops and arbitrary digressions still glimmers with moments of divine light. This makes me very happy (e.g., Nizami, Nijinsky, Morrison, Kanye). That glance in the mirror reveals the villainy of the hero or the heroism of the villain. Anything, really, that challenges or confounds the reader’s reflex to make an easy sense of what just happened or to relax into obvious assumption about who’s reliable and who isn’t, or what the moral of this story surely must be (e.g., Shakespeare). I like a good kōan. I like the parable that makes no sense (e.g., Buddha, Jesus). I like the composer who, having written the most beautiful melody he can think of, can’t resist smearing it just a little with his thumb (e.g., Prokofiev, Waits). Or that author who for some reason saves her clearest, tenderest prose for the most gruesome image in the book (e.g., Allende).

These are my heroes, my mentors and masters, who teach me not to be so quick, or ever to think I know. All meaning is a double-edged sword. Ego cloaks itself in noble deeds every day. The lotus grows from garbage heaps. And literature is never more vital – or more consoling, it seems to me – than when it reminds us of this, the gorgeous moral ambiguity of human being.

Do I say all this to suggest that The Unknown Woman of the Seine actually achieves such an effect? Or to justify the paths I finally chose in trying to solve the mystery of that young woman’s face? Hardly. Not my place. Not my interest really. But I will happily admit that this is why I read; this is why I teach; and that by implication, sure, this is why I write.

 

Crying in the Park, Climbing in the Window: Two images helped me imagine the story of a woman scientist

 

When I was a young woman trying to figure out how to be a mother and a writer, I read an interview with cosmologist Vera Rubin. In 1951, after completing a master’s degree in astronomy, Rubin moved to a new city because of her husband’s job, giving up her studies to care for her newborn son. It was a hard time. She loved her baby, but she was lonely. She missed science.

Rubin’s lifeline was the Astrophysical Journal. When it came in the mail, she would take it to the park, pushing her son in his baby carriage, then sit on a bench and read it, weeping.

Eventually, Rubin figured out how to get herself into a PhD program. Twenty years after that, she discovered that the universe largely consists of dark matter, an insight that transformed our understanding of the cosmos. Ultimately, Rubin had a successful and celebrated career. But the image of the young mother with the baby carriage reading an astrophysics journal through her tears remains burned into my mind.

*          *          *

When I was a kid, I wasn’t interested in science. My father, a molecular biologist, would sometimes take me to his lab on Saturdays. Mostly I played with the paper clips in his desk. Other times he would take me into our Maryland woods and show me butterflies, wildflowers, and the dam a pair of beavers built across our stream one year. I would lag behind, impatient to be back inside: to trade the palpable world for the imaginary ones inside books.

Nonetheless, scientists interested me. Or maybe it was the idea of scientists: how they burrowed underneath the skin of the world to find out how it worked. Their seriousness of purpose stirred me. I read the books my father had read as a boy that had helped inspire his interest in science—Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith and Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters—and came away with a romantic notion of a Life Dedicated to Truth. But in high school science classes, as in the woods, my mind often drifted.

In college, I met a boy who loved stars. We got married when he was in astronomy graduate school, and suddenly there I was, surrounded by scientists again! I had never wondered why so few of my father’s colleagues were women, but now I was struck by the fact that my husband’s classmates and professors were almost all men. What was up with that?

Of course, women have long faced obstacles in many professions, but there is something particularly galling about antagonism to women in a calling that’s supposed to be about objectivity and the pursuit of truth.

It’s also interesting. It occurred to me that the travails of a woman scientist might be good fodder for a novel. I started reading, trying to see what I could learn.

There are lots of compelling (infuriating!) stories about women scientists who struggled because of men. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s discovery of what stars are made of was initially disbelieved, and the man who discouraged her from publishing her result was later widely credited for the breakthrough. Rosalind Franklin’s x-ray photograph of DNA was used without her knowledge by the men who later won the Nobel Prize for solving the molecule’s structure. These women, and others like them, overcame many obstacles to bring us truth from the far reaches of the galaxy and from inside our infinitesimal cells. How did they do it? What sustained them?

One morning, reading the New York Times, I encountered the obituary of a geneticist I had never heard of, Barbara McClintock (1902-1992). One paragraph in particular caught my attention:

Modern genetics has known no figure quite like Dr. McClintock, who worked alone and chose not to publish some of her revolutionary observations for years, explaining later that she thought no one would accept the findings. She never gave lectures, as most scientists do to build their careers. Instead, until her last days, she worked in her laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor twelve hours a day, six days a week. Until 1986, she did not have a telephone, requesting that anyone who wanted to talk to her write a letter instead.

I clipped the obit and put it in a file. I didn’t think I knew enough yet to write that story—not enough about novels or science or life. That would take a couple of decades.

*          *          *

In 2014, I finally felt ready. To prepare to write the novel, I did a lot of research about McClintock. I read biographies, had conversations with scientists (including my dad), and visited archives. One moment from her life particularly stood out to me: as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, McClintock once climbed into her office through the window because she’d forgotten her key. Somebody saw her do it, and she got in trouble, apparently because it was considered unladylike.

I could see the scene so vividly: a slight, strong woman clambering up a stone wall on (perhaps) an early Sunday morning. Tackling the problem at hand in an effective, unconventional way! That scene was one of the first I wrote. During revision, though, I realized I had to cut the whole Missouri section. That was okay (you always have to cut), but I hated losing that scene.

A few drafts later, I decided to begin the book with the main character wandering the streets of Ithaca, New York, late at night after an ill-conceived and alcohol-fueled kiss with her housemate, another girl. Where would she go at such an hour? I followed her across campus as she tried various locked doors, lugging her heavy suitcase and her shame.

When she got to the biology building, its door was locked too. She looked up to the classroom where her bio lab met, and I thought: What if the window were slightly open? What if she decided to climb up? Transformed, the anecdote from Missouri became just the tool I needed. (The metaphoric overtones—that a woman may need to find an unconventional way into a male-dominated field—did not occur to me until later.)

In the course of writing a novel, it’s often some indelible picture stuck in your head that gets you going, or that helps you through a dark wood when you’re stuck. The woman climbing in through the window helped me solve a problem and gave me an opening chapter. But it was the image of the young mother reading the physics journal and weeping that started me on the journey. I could not have written In the Field without both of them.