And beginning the feminist conversation with myself
This is an opinion piece written by an individual member and was not voted on by membership. Opinion pieces from members do not reflect the opinions of other members and are not chapter approved statements.
2/10. Would not recommend. This book plays up some of the worst stereotypes and effects of white American culture, and it does so through horrific themes. Suicide and incest are pervasively spoonfed to you throughout the novel in ways that make me sick. Hate that. Hated the book.
Unfortunately, Irving’s emotional jiu-jitsu and exploration of dark and morbid topics is supposedly part of the fun. He’s been praised for his matter-of-fact presentations of heavy themes. Failure to find stability in a family, the loss of loved ones to a plane crash, and suicide are all explored to magnify the absurdity of loss’s effects on us. There is a tremendous depth to his works at times. This is, in theory, the work of someone who truly understands the human condition.
But come on. He doesn’t need to romanticize everything morbid. I don’t know what incest looks like with two consenting adults (as is so tastefully portrayed in the novel), but it doesn’t look like that. I mean, I would know. I haven’t spent the last year grappling with the internalized misogyny my family instilled in itself to keep victims quiet just to think the book was accurate. Irving barely explores the difficulty of finding, documenting, and addressing households affected by incestual abuse—no matter how often that abuse happens. Sure, I wasn’t directly impacted, but I had my close encounters. I knew enough to know how it worked. If nothing happened, it wasn’t going to be talked about. An odd interaction with an uncle; a strange drawing with familiar faces- that’s nothing. And if something did happen? If an abuser was amongst the family again? If you told someone what was happening? Don’t worry. It’s taken care of. Don’t. Talk. About. It.
It won’t be reported.
And if it is, what happens in the courtroom stays in the courtroom. There will be no family dinner-table discussion.
Look, all I’m saying is if John Irving is gonna discuss the perverted nature of our society, he should do it right. I’m aware most of his writings begin about a decade or two before the Epstein class really started to dig into our cultural framework, but I just think that’s no excuse. For me, once what was going on really started to click, I began to ask questions. Like a half-decent writer, I tried to make sense of what was happening. I tried to understand it so that I could talk about it correctly. Obviously, that’s been difficult and so far unsuccessful. I still feel the effects of asking those questions in myself, in the ways I shut down. There’s no correct way to talk about it when there’s no one willing to talk.
So I guess I’m just upset that I don’t think Irving accounted for that in this novel—in any of his novels. I mean, he has like 20 of them and the majority portray incest, so I think this might just be his thing and not something he’s “unafraid to talk about”. And he still hasn’t taken the time to get it right. He talks about it the way most people misinterpret Lolita. As if it’s almost a beautiful thing in his misunderstood eyes. But whatever. He’s gonna get the praise he’s gonna get.
It feels like Irving has this self-righteous air around the subject, like he understands it differently and can therefore talk about it differently. And it’s frustrating because, well, I can’t talk about it at all. I don’t mean within my family. I mean because I can’t. I can’t get myself to talk about it. I can’t talk about it because my family’s conditioning to keep us quiet worked. Every conversation about gender-based violence; every conversation about defining feminism; every conversation where I feel like it could come up, I avoid. And if I don’t avoid it, I walk away shaking. Having been through what I’ve been through, within and without my family, it’s almost easier to be victimized and to dissociate than to go through the process of analyzing what happened. I was trained to be more afraid of how I’ll be perceived if I talk about it than of actually being abused.
But
I can’t keep watching my mom turn into a scared little girl whenever her brother’s name is mentioned. I can’t avoid my cousin anymore because I don’t know how to ask if he meant to send me what he did. I can’t keep watching my aunt relive finding those notebooks at 15 and reading her own name in them. I can’t keep asking myself if the decades-long family friends know how their daughter was talked about; that when I hit puberty, my body was compared to hers; that her sister was written about in those notebooks too. I can’t hear more stories from other women in my family about the patriarchs within it. And now that it’s “over,” I can’t watch while the older generations fight to keep these things undiscovered, as if there was never a judge or jury involved—to pretend they haven’t paid extra for people to have personal security during their prison sentence. I can’t learn about them lying to protect the abusers. I can’t do this anymore. So, so much has been buried under the rug that any discussion was suffocated before those most hurt could get peace.
So I’ll learn to speak up. At home, and out in the world.
I haven’t been much of a feminist yet; I’m just now truly addressing my internalized misogyny. In recent years I’ve become much more aware of what it means to me to be a woman: This comes at the same time that I’ve begun to face the world as a mother. This new understanding of the world has been difficult to accept, and something I spent the last year trying to avoid in the chapter.
No matter how much I didn’t feel ready, being asked repeatedly to figure out childcare, and to attend male-dominated events to make other non-cis men comfortable, and experiencing unintentional-yet-outright sexism eventually led me to “accept my fate.” I let the project I was slowly, privately, and personally working through become a bandaid for others’ bruised egos, all while knowing I wasn’t there yet. I didn’t know what lines were where, or how they were being crossed. I didn’t say anything. As I helped push part of this conversation within SLDSA, I found that I’m still unwilling to actually talk about it. I’m unable to vocalize my thoughts without feeling deeply uncomfortable; presenting the Centering Children Resolution—itself born from my first time really confronting what feminism means to me—is the most emotional and distressing experience I’ve had during my time in the chapter.
That distress was needed. I’ve spent years terrified of how every word I said and wrote would sound. Addressing these things within the chapter carried the same emotional weight that I would be buried under addressing them at home. After passing the resolution, the discomfort grew, and I couldn’t sit in silence anymore. Now was the time to address those ghosts which lingered in the hallways of my childhood home. I’m beginning to open the conversation at home, and I’m finally ready to talk out loud. To identify myself as another angry feminist, and actually sit and think through what that means to me: politically, spiritually, personally. Beginning with a book first recommended to me by a family member at 14, I’m on my way to developing a clear feminist framework to bring forward to the world.
In the meantime, I hope Irving comes to actually understand how this plays out in a home; what it means to be a child raised in a family with strange rumors. The Hotel New Hampshire does not capture it right, and what a shame that is. He really could’ve given life to an often hidden conversation. What a waste. The rest of the novel is fine though, if you were wondering.
