The Prime of Miss Kate Myall

I noticed my thighs for the first time in the downstairs bathroom. I was at the age when I’d just begun checking my underwear for signs of my first period. My best friend Rachel had gotten hers in April and I’d begun checking my undies every time I peed. As I looked down I noticed my thighs spreading horizontally along the toilet seat. 

 Later that day in school, I scooted my chair back from my desk and realized in horror that my thighs were doing the same thing, though largely obscured by the desk’s writing surface. I observed with relief that sitting cross-legged in gym was still fine, but when the President’s physical fitness challenge required me to put my legs out straight against a box and bend forward as far as I could, I saw them again, spreading horizontally, wider than the box against which the President was judging my flexibility. 

Something about that horizontal spread, a soft, wide maternal lap well before my child-bearing years, disgusted me. 

//

I grew up loving so much about my appearance. I remember telling an adult once how much I liked the shape of my eyebrows, and I would happily pause at any mirror I passed to smile at myself. As a child of the 90s–the decade of Julia Robert’s cultural supremacy–I took pride in my wide toothy brace-free smile, and honestly, I thought mine was even a little better than hers. 

I credit my parents for my self-love. I felt so loved by my parents and saw their constant delight in me. I remember my mother dressing me in a brass-buttoned navy cape and shiny red leather shoes and taking my picture. I recall my dad calling his boss into his office to watch me sing Belle’s opening song from Beauty and the Beast. Every night they would read to me, and I remember after the light went out my father would kiss me and say, “Your Poppa loves you. Call me if you need me.” 

Really childhood doesn’t get any better than that.

But of course, just like all Pixar movies, that opening sequence can’t last forever. Riley leaves Minnesota. Carl loses Ellie. Andy gets a Buzz Lightyear. Marlin loses Nemo, and Joe Gardner falls into a pothole and lands in the Great Beyond. 

For me, the pothole was getting my period a few weeks after my 11th birthday. Just like Riley’s parents when they arrived in San Fransisco, my parents did nothing wrong. I remember them walking me around Binnie Park to help with my cramps and to normalize being out and about with a pad on. They called our cool neighbor Jennifer to tell her I’d gotten my period and she brought me chocolates and welcomed me to the woman club. It was all pretty affirming. I figured if Jennifer could endure a period and still be as cool as she was, which she definitely was, I’d be fine.

But I didn’t just get my period. I began to get wild cravings for sugar and salt. My face became overrun with relentless acne. And I got greasy hair–oh man did my hair get greasy. I had this uneasy feeling when I read Harry Potter later on that year–Harry and I were the same age and so the book came out just when he and I had both hit 11–that the character I resembled most was Snape. 

A few weeks after my first period, my family moved to a new town. I left my best friend, Rachel Brown, Binnie Park, the easy 45-minute train journey into Manhattan, and a 15-minute bike ride to the beach, for a new town, Simsbury, 90 miles away. 90 miles–too far to travel as an 11-year-old to visit your old friends, and not far enough to be a new girl with any cred. Inside Out was released when I was 29, but watching it the 11-year-old still in me rolled my eyes at how good Riley had it relatively speaking; I’d have taken San Francisco over Simsbury any time. 

My first impression of the other girls in Simsbury was of the near-universal attainment of thick, high ponytails. Now that I’ve passed puberty and the grease has subsided, I’ve learned that my fine, curly hair naturally lends itself to a Regency or Edwardian updo and that no amount of thickening shampoo and volumizing mousse will coerce my hair into a thick, high pony. But at 11 I fought desperately to smooth out all the bumps and then tease up the tail. The result was disastrous, and eventually, I adopted a bob haircut that I held onto for almost a decade.

Meanwhile, my parents divorced. My grades slipped down, my weight went up.  I stayed with my dad because I couldn’t face moving to a new town again with my mother. Plus my dad kept the pantry stocked with 12 packs of Dr. Pepper and there was a TV in the basement with premium cable. My blood sugar levels became pre-diabetic and no matter how many Herbal Essences hair products I bought my hair remained hopeless.

It’s totally expected that my peers with their thick, high ponytails would avoid me. No one wants to be ugly by association, and I didn’t blame them. Middle schoolers have unwittingly but unwaveringly carried on the perception of kalos kagathos, the ancient Greek aristocratic concept that to be beautiful is to be noble, virtuous, good-looking, and so anointed by the gods. The bod gods of old clearly idealized equine noses and small penises, but for the queen bees of Connecticut clear skin, slim hips low rise jeans, and thick, high pony were the ultimate prizes. 

I didn’t expect, however, that my father would likewise start to avoid me. I remember on the same shopping trip that he would buy 12 packs of Dr. Pepper for me, and he began buying protein bars, cottage cheese, and pineapple for himself. He started taking long intense bicycle rides and dropped some weight. I could tell he thought he looked good. I could tell he thought I made him look bad. I don’t recall him telling me to lose weight or to figure out my hair or my acne. He didn’t need to. He just pulled away from me, leaving me at home in the basement watching Disney Channel original movies and drinking Dr. Pepper. His delight shifted distinctly away from me.

In hindsight, with a pre-pubescent child of my own, I have some measure of sympathy for him now. Adolescents can be bewilderingly gawky and insecure, but also domineering and self-sure. For someone who cared for appearances, and he did, I didn’t look good and I didn’t make him look good. 

//

I have since figured out how to do my hair and make-up and eat better. 

It was actually my father’s girlfriend who brought me to the makeup counter for the first time, a day or two before my brother’s wedding, and introduced me to salicylic acid and concealer. To this day I am grateful to her for teaching me how to treat my pimples and put on a face of makeup, and for giving me a chance to rebuild my confidence in my later teen years. To this day I’m kind of pissed that no one else before her had clued me into the affordable and accessible miracles that are salicylic acid and concealer. I have vowed to pro-actively make acne-fighting facial products available to my children. 

In those years of teenage unbeauty, I got the message, not just from my dad and the ancient Greeks, but from the whole world, that an unbeautiful me was unwelcome. Come back when you know how to smooth your hair and pluck your eyebrows and wear pearlescent blue eyeshadow and look good in spaghetti straps and $60 khakis from the Gap. 

I eventually moved out of my dad’s house. My grades improved and I developed a small circle of friends. Gilmore Girls had just come on TV, and loved watching with my single mother this fast-talking, clear-skinned, thick-haired, slim-waisted version of us.

I finally hit my stride at about 20, that’s 2006 if you’re trying to keep track. By then makeup wasn’t just for concealing acne, and I no longer had to dread drying my hair after showering. In my junior year of college, I moved to the UK. I lost a fair bit of weight, probably from having to shop and cook for myself for the first time on the low income of a student and walking everywhere. What’s more, in the constant mist of the UK my skin began to radiate with dewy perfection. Unlike my British peers who were fake baking and bronzing the bejesus out of their skin, I embraced my porcelain, Kiera Knightly-like skin and knowing that straightening my hair would just lead to limp locks I put it in updos and let the cool humidity of the country curl my tendrils into the Edwardian ideal my hair always naturally was wont to do. 

I found myself with no shortage of friends and suitors. I was complimented on my style, and even emulated. My grades had never been higher, and my confidence was back to my pre-pubescent smiling at myself in every mirror.

At 18, a couple of semesters shy of my big renaissance, my dad sent a letter to me, my siblings, and my godmothers. He was putting it on record that he didn’t want me in his life. I was too like my mother–too selfish, not loving enough, too demanding. I was just using him to pay for college. But no more. 

I received that letter on November 11th. I was taking a train to London to see a family friend, and when I met up with him at Fortnum and Mason’s he told me he’d met the Queen earlier in the day at a Remembrance Day ceremony. My father’s letter was in the pocket of my white trench coat, and as I took another train onwards from London to Scotland I reread it a few times. 

I didn’t recognize myself in the words he immortalized for all the family to see in that letter. Actually, I didn’t recognize him in that letter.

I remember as a little girl my dad told me to part my hair on the left–all the best strong women part their hair on the left: strong, smart, beautiful women like Katharine Hepburn and Hilary Rodham Clinton. My dad would paint my fingernails and agonize teaching himself to french braid my hair. He always read an extra chapter when he knew the thing I was waiting for in the story was about to happen, and even woke me up when he saw I’d missed the thing so that I could go back to sleep knowing that Mima and Joel had finally kissed around page 400 of Ben Ames Williams’ Come Spring. 

But I was an English major. I knew by then that narrators can be unreliable, and what is written is not always true, or at least not true for everyone. So after rereading that letter over and over that weekend in Edinburgh, in cafes and pubs and parks and churches, I realized at last that I didn’t agree with the conclusion my dad had come to about me. Instead, a different view of myself began resolving within my heart and mind.

I was a strong, smart, beautiful woman like Katharine Hepburn or Hilary Rodham Clinton, and not just because I parted my hair on the left, or because of my grades or my skin, but because my dad had shown me for so many days and told me so many nights: “Your Poppa loves you.” 

What’s more, the gift my dad had given me, along with my mother, was true love for myself. And that hard-fought-for self-love, compromised internally and externally through my difficult teen years, was too great of a gift to discard just as I was stepping out into the world. I believed him when he told me I was his greatest joy, and I believed him when he said that more than I believed anything he wrote in that letter. 

And the last thing I decided, over that solo weekend trip to Scotland in November of 2004, was that I didn’t need to spend my life pegging my happiness and self-worth to what my father thought of me. I had seen others in my family bask in the warmth from my father’s approval and then shiver when it was withdrawn. And I didn’t want to bask and shiver, and bask and shiver. 

So I accepted his decision not to be part of his life. And I’m so proud of myself for it.

//

I’m a re-watcher. Mostly comedies for comfort: Arrested Development, 30 Rock, The Office, The Good Place, Brooklyn 99, Parks & Recreation. That’s many hundreds of hours of laughs, and I’ve watched them over and over again for well north of 10,000 hours, I’m certain. I don’t even really watch any of them anymore, it’s more of a companionable soundtrack of familiar characters and inconsequential plots. Total comfort viewing.

But I’ve got another frequent rewatch, one that doesn’t match the light-hearted, friend-centric Schurian comedies on the list, and that is Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 special Nanette. 

Far from endless hours of sprawling jokes, Nanette is a tight 70 minutes with a premise that resists summary. However, a summary I shall attempt. 

Hannah starts by telling some jokes. There are lots of jokes about being gay. Like how the rainbow pride flag is awfully bright for a quiet lesbian such as herself. And about how she’s been criticized by leading lesbians for not being lesbian enough. And how when she came out to her mum her mother said something to the effect of: why did you have to tell me that? It would be like me telling you I’m a murderer. Trust me, when Hannah delivers all this it’s very funny.

Why am I suddenly telling you about Hannah Gadsby? Stick with me.

Because not long into the show, she pulls out of joke telling. She needs to stop telling jokes, she says. And that’s because of the tension, she says. Hannah explains: the premise of comedy is tension and release. And of course, it’s so enjoyable for the audience to be guided through endless, artificial respiration of tension and joke, tension and joke. 

But when the comedian translates their real life, their experiences, their identities, and –especially for queer folx such as Gadsby–their bodies to the stage for the gratification of the audience, well the comedic narrative can take precedence, can co-opt, the realities endured by the person whose experiences and body hold pain, trauma, and otherization. 

I tell you, this is comfort rewatching at its finest. 

No? Yeah of course not. 

But in that deconstruction of the norms of comedy–as well as a detour by way of her art history degree through the narratives of Vincent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso….just trust me it works, it really works–Hannah reconstructs her own narrative. In the reconstruction of her own narrative, Gadsby brings something that standard comedy often doesn’t: she brings trauma, she brings tragedy, and she brings resolution. 

She tells and then re-tells the story of her coming out to her mom. The first time the story ends with a laugh at her mom’s woefully inadequate initial response comparing homosexuality to homicide. The second time the story ends with something that I didn’t know that I needed in a comedy special, namely a not laugh. 

Let me read to you from the transcript of Nanette what Hannah’s mom says to her about a year after she came out. Her mum says to her, she says:

“The thing I regret is that I raised you as if you were straight. I didn’t know any different. I am so sorry. I’m so sorry. I knew… well before you did… that your life was going to be so hard. I knew that, and I wanted it more than anything in the world not to be the case. And I know I made it worse, because I wanted you to change because I knew the world wouldn’t.” 

And I looked at my mum in that moment and thought, “How did that happen? How did my mum get to be the hero of my story?” 

Hannah continues:

She evolved. I didn’t. 

See… I think part of my problem is comedy has suspended me in a perpetual state of adolescence. The way I’ve been telling that story is through jokes. And stories… unlike jokes, need three parts. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Jokes… only need two parts. A beginning and a middle. And what I had done, with that comedy show about coming out, was I froze an incredibly formative experience at its trauma point and I sealed it off into jokes. And that story became a routine, and through repetition, that joke version fused with my actual memory of what happened. But unfortunately that joke version was not nearly sophisticated enough to help me undo the damage done to me in reality. Punch lines need trauma because punch lines… need tension, and tension feeds trauma.

Why am I sharing this with you? I hardly think I should be passing off so much of someone else’s insight in my own work. But here’s the thing: I needed to hear this. I still need to hear it. I need to hear it so much sometimes I need to say it out loud in an attempt to allow it to continue resonating in my soul. 

Because here’s the thing. I got great at telling that story, about my dad distancing himself from me, then disowning me, following my choice to love myself. It’s not a story of trauma, like Hannah’s, which goes on to detail the violence that came for her in response to her otherness. Mine sounds like a story of resilience. And it is. 

But Hannah made me realize that maybe I had suspended myself in a perpetual state through my storytelling choices. It’s not a perfect metaphor, me choosing to recount the victory of choosing to love myself isn’t actually a punch line. But I think the way I’ve been telling it is just the beginning and middle.

Not that my middle didn’t have some resolution, it did. I really did write back to my dad and tell him I accepted his decision, but that I didn’t accept his narrative about who I am. And I really did hold myself in high regard for that. 

It’s satisfying to tell that story. It builds tension, and it provides release. 

There’s also a third part. I’m not sure if it’s an end so much as a long shadow of nuance, that I omit in the telling. And by omitting from the telling I omit some of the feelings. 

But I was and am deeply saddened to have lost the dad I loved so so much, who taught me how to love myself and others. Who inspired me to aspire higher in my ability to impact the world for good. Who remains a beloved, essential memory of my childhood, but who removed himself forever more from my present or future tenses. Who couldn’t extend patience, perspective, and grace in times of adolescent tension and awkwardness. Who couldn’t stick it out, confident that I was worth sticking by and guiding properly into my adulthood, but instead jettisoning me as a lost cause. 

Towards the end of Nanette, Hannah talks about the patriarchy’s obsession with female youth, or as she terms it “the mental illness of misogyny.” Roman Polansky, Woody Allen, Harvey Weinstein, Picasso–she name-checks them all as narrative builders, as the caretakers of beauty, art, culture, and acceptability. But the flaw of course is that when the narrative builder builds and sustains all the narratives to justify their predations, it only perpetuates their power and pleasure, or as Hannah puts it in a repudiation of Picasso: “You just put a kaleidoscope filter on your cock. You’re still painting flesh vases for your dick flowers.”

OK this is the last part of Nanette I’m going to crib for you today. Because in telling that story of my dad I’ve learned from Hannah not just to add the third part which is hurt, but also a fourth part, which is indigence.

She says:

…ironically, I believe Picasso was right. I believe we could paint a better world if we learned how to see it from all perspectives, as many perspectives as we possibly could. Because diversity is strength. Difference is a teacher. Fear difference, you learn nothing. Picasso’s mistake was his arrogance. He assumed he could represent all of the perspectives. And our mistake was to invalidate the perspective of a 17-year-old girl, because we believed her potential… was never going to equal his. Hindsight is a gift. Can you stop wasting my time? A 17-year-old girl is just never, ever, ever in her prime! Ever! I am in my prime! Would you test your strength out on me? 

 There is no way anyone would dare… test their strength out on me, because you all know… there is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.

My dad shouldn’t have tried to break me as he did. And I think that’s what he was trying to do in his letter. Was to break me so that I’d return to him to be fixed in the image he wanted me to be. More compliant, grateful, submissive. Maybe he’d finally manage to unlock the secret to the thick high pony and slim hips, and I’d be everything he and I wanted me to be in middle school.

So he sent me that letter, and he sent copies to four others in the family representing his perspective, refudiating my potential.

I wasn’t 17, I was 18. He was 58. 

But at 18, I had to rebuild myself. And I did. And I’m stronger. 

//

I’m a few weeks away from the anniversary of receiving that letter. This year I’m twice as old as I was when I received it. And in the last 18 years, I’ve gotten stronger, less awkward, more confident….and also indignant. Thanks to Hannah Gadsby. And Mindy Kaling too–her voice for Riley’s emotion Disgust in Inside Out is the voice in my head when I ask you: Why did he have to waste my time?

I had other things to do at 18 than rebuild myself. I had class, and friends, and self-discovery, and sex, and travel. What would that solo weekend have been like in November 2004 if I hadn’t needed to reread the most painful letter I’ll ever receive over and over and over again and needed to spend that time deciding whether or not to bend or rebuild.

Think all that we women could do if we weren’t wasting our time rebuilding all the goddamn time. 

For that matter, what could we do if we weren’t constantly worried about diet and exercise? 

And you know what, I’m pissed that I still have conflicting emotions about my weight.  As a mother, I’ve been pleased with my relative confidence in speaking to my children about complex topics like climate change, systemic racism, imperialism, and COVID. Most topics I feel firmly enough situated in to guide them through. It’s one of the great joys, in fact, for me as a mother to help onboard my kids into the great issues of our time.

But I hesitate speaking with my kids about weight and appearance. So far their bodies are lean and strong, and food choices are balanced enough, so it’s not come up for them. But a year into the pandemic I was at my highest-ever weight. My BMI classified me as obese, and didn’t know how to speak to them about my desire to lose weight because I don’t want them valuing people based on their weight, while also acknowledging to them that I valued myself lower when my weight was higher. 

I’m so mad I can’t seem to shake that inherited, misogynistic equation of self-worth and outer appearance. 

Sometimes the tension isn’t released in the middle, or the end. As much as the American in me wants to strive ever forward towards a happy ending, I think when it comes to weight and appearance and patriarchy the happy ending just isn’t there. 

That’s what those other TV shows are for; is a conflict that arises and is resolved in 22 minutes. 

So I can’t watch Nanette quite as often as I watch those other shows. But I keep coming back to it, to sit with the tension. 

In the meantime, I’ve given up interest in a high pony and slim hips. I’ve got a booty that goes for days and I just discovered that I look amazing as a blonde. My eyebrows are better than ever and my smile is friggin radiant. 

I see my eldest kid entering adolescence. She’s got a ton of head grease and some plucky little pit hairs. Last year we moved from New England to Mexico and she’s doing amazing, all things considered. She reads novels thicker than her thighs and climbs trees taller than our house. Sometimes she asks me if I have a dad, and I say yes I had an amazing dad.

For now, she just gets that part of the story. I don’t need her worrying yet about a world that may still tell her that her prime is coming in the next 7 years, or that will ask of her to bend or rebuild herself.

 But when the time is right we’ll watch Nanette together. 

Til then we’ll stick with Inside Out. 

I wish I had a better ending. To release the tension.