A Silent Smiling Woman
Britney posted (and then deleted?) something apologizing for hurting anyone with the things she said in her book. It was also a post to say she loves Justin Timberlake’s song. I kept thinking about the part in her book where she’s taken pills to initiate an abortion, and has to go through it at home to avoid any media finding out, and is writhing around on the floor in pain while JT plays her songs on his acoustic guitar. He didn’t want the baby. She kind of did. She endured the pain; he played his songs.
It was a brave thing to confess. That she’d had sex with him, that she liked having sex. That she got pregnant. That they decided to terminate the pregnancy. That Britney Jean Spears had an abortion at the urging, and with the blessing, of her boy-band boy god. But who was on the floor?
Sometimes the truth feels good to confess, and then it curdles. People ask you about that truth and by the very act of asking, it makes you feel like you have to have answers. The world keeps moving on and on and on; nothing stops and nothing changed. People said things on podcasts that felt righteous, but words are just air and soon there was another podcast, and it was hosted by Amanda Bynes. Amanda Bynes! If she’s no longer on the floor, why am I still on this floor? You start to wonder if it was wrong to say what you said. It feels better to decide that what you said was wrong, because that’s a way out. Maybe Britney can be in the next Trolls movie; why can’t she be in the next Trolls movie?
In another (deleted?) post, Britney confessed that she made out with Ben Affleck, but that somewhere along the way, she’d forgotten all about it. That’s life when you’re Britney. A celebrity is just a man, and men are just boys. Britney knows boys. She used to play them in basketball and kiss them in trucks. Boys fanned out like sticks of Juicy Fruit. Even the pilot of her plane, he’s a boy. She takes his glasses and tries them on. She’s almost blind in her left eye but glasses? So dorky! The pilot looks like he’s waiting her out, the way you would after someone starts disrobing at the DMV. In another post, and another, and another, Britney pushes her breasts in and up, see what they can do? She pulls her tiny shorts lower, then lower. You used to love looking at her body. Let her show you that you still do.
I’m slowly coming out of an intense period of self-absorption. My book came out November 7, and I’ve been worried and obsessed and manic over how it’s doing. Is it doing well enough? What if I were prettier, less jowly? Am I supposed to be more successful at this point? Am I not living up to my potential, and is it because I haven’t done enough squats, don’t care about skin care, am a decade behind on Real Housewives, left Twitter a year ago, am a dowdy mom, am not talented enough, am missing something? What am I missing? How can I find it? Do I love myself enough, or too much? Am I delusional? Do people pity me? Should I be doing more? Shouldn’t I have more money? Why am I so broke? Why is my house always a mess? Why am I such a failure?
In between all of that, there have been great reviews and lovely buzz and truly amazing reader responses, and I am so proud. But I’m ready to stop obsessing. I wish there were some great oracle or literary judge or document I could procure that declared this book Good Enough, It’s Okay to Feel Good, but there isn’t. I’ve been listening to Carly Simon’s Coming Around Again a lot, because it seems to capture the life of a woman who is a wife and mother and, I’m guessing, an artist, and she is mid-crisis, struggling among the bald facts of daily life. She literally talks about fixing the toaster in the song. What other songs do that? Again and again, she sings,
I know nothing stays the same
But if you're willing to play the game
It's coming around again
and it reminds me that writers, the ones who are willing to play the game—stay in the work, remember what it is about the work that is meaningful, remember who they are—they get to go around again at some point down the road. I’m happy to be reminding myself that I’m willing, and that there is beauty and meaning in the kind of weariness that comes after having to confront oneself. It’s coming around again.
What else? I talked to John Cotter about his memoir, Losing Music, which is about losing his hearing and is so full of grace and rage and beauty that it took my breath away.
I’ve been playing this game since the start of the year where I find connections between the book I’ve just read to the book I’m reading now, and having just read the excellent Dear Fang, with Love, I’m delighted to find quite a few connections to the book I’m reading now, Katya Apekina’s Mother Doll. (A character named Vera, generational trauma related to the Jewish experience.) I am able to find connections in every single book and it’s really making me think we live in a simulation. I meant to document all the connections but that would take away from my Britney Instagram time.
I took a screenwriting class with Lauren Veloski via Write or Die Magazine, and it was incredible. And now I’m writing a limited series, y’all! Lauren is teaching another screenwriting workshop called Your Teenage Self Was a F**king Star, and I mean, that sounds very fun.
The most dangerous animal in the world is a silent smiling woman.
-Anonymous, via Britney Spears’s Instagram