to believe in love

At one point in Sarah Schulman’s novel Girls, Visions and Everything, one character says to another,

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Every once in a while, a book comes along that breaks me into pieces and puts me together again. A book that reaches into my past, illuminates my present and stays with me into the future. I think Girls, Visions and Everything is one of those books. It seems appropriate that I was made aware of Schulman’s work through the work of Masha Tupitsyn, whose writing has also been tremendously important to me. When I read the above line, I knew that I’d read it before and was trying to remember where. Then I remembered that Tupitsyn had quoted it here, in reference to her own wonderful free book, Like Someone in Love.

I write about videogames for a living, not about love, so I don’t look to life for material in the sense that Lila, the aspiring writer protagonist of Girls, Visions and Everything might. But I do write things down when my heart is heavy (I don’t know how I would live otherwise) and I put some of that out into the world, I guess because I’ve always gotten a lot out of writing by others that came from an intensely personal place. I always think carefully about what to say and what to leave unsaid, about where the line is for me between public and private. 

Last night Masha posted an image of her book Love Dog in a Soho bookstore under a banner that read “Public/Private: Redrawing the Lines.” The lines are being redrawn now, and things that were always complicated are perhaps becoming more complicated in the era of Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook. A friend and I had this exchange the other night:

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and she’s right that technology is complicating our understanding of relationships and romance, of how to really, meaningfully connect with each other. But these things have never been simple, and though I think that Lila and I have very little in common, I can relate to her because, like me, she’s filled with all these questions about what it means to love someone, and through it all, she has an unwavering belief in love, and in the transformative power of real love, of loving and being loved. 

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(a modified “PLEASE MOVE BACK” sign I saw on a MUNI bus years ago)

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There was a trip home I took last year during which the whole universe seemed to be throbbing and I knew that I was simultaneously as close to and as far from what I’d wanted as I’d ever been, when the feeling that anything was possible and the feeling that nothing was possible collided inside me. But I knew then, in a way that I hadn’t known in a long long time (but that I still know now) that life is holy and every minute precious.

 

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It’s quite something for me to read a story about a community of young queer women, being a queer woman myself who is well into my 30s and who didn’t have the opportunities when I was younger to form connections with other queer women as a queer woman.

Thinking about the book and what it means to be queer reminded me of Masha’s great interview in Bitch, Queer is Hardly Just Who You Sleep With,” in which she says, “Women are supposed to be the ones on the balcony, not the ones down below professing their love. We don’t think the female romantic is romantic. We think she is a predator. We think she is desperate, unstable—Fatal Attraction, the cougar, the spinster, the troublemaker. But deep emotion in this age is a radical act." 

And I think that’s part of why I love Girls, Visions and Everything so much. Lila is a romantic hero who really is romantic. Her depth of feeling is not unstable or threatening or predatory; it’s bold. It’s radical.

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