Half vs. Whole

My husband didn't like a standup special and it hurt my feelings.

Do you find culture by imbibing from the fonts of the liberal elite? (It took me so long to write that sentence.) Did you learn about your new favorite standup comedian from a New York Times Magazine profile? Did you first hear your favorite band on an NPR Tiny Desk Concert? If so, I judge you! I judge you as I judge myself. For you are as Basic a Bitch as I. And folks? I’M BASIC. If I’ve ever shared an opinion with you, it’s because I just heard someone else say it on the Slate Culture Gabfest. All to say, I should have known about the work of Jacqueline Novak long before I did, given that I have been a professional comedy writer for the last fifteen years. However, because of how little distance I cover during my infrequent cultural walkabouts, I only know who she is because my usual effete sources are buzzing about her new Netflix standup special, Get On Your Knees. Okay, I’m late to the party. BUT I’M HUNGRY TO LEARN! So the other day, as I suffered through a workout on the Concept2 RowErg I’d dragged into my living room, I decided to watch the dang thing, hoping it would distract me from own physical misery.

I loved it, but even more than loving it, I related to it. The references to Modernist poetry and self-help, the relentless need to acknowledge her own ridiculousness before anyone else could, the very written-ness of it all. I recognized myself. It sent me spiraling, wondering, if I hadn’t devoted the last fifteen years to writing stuff I thought other people would like, if instead I had had the courage to cultivate the seedlings of my own authentic voice, could I have created something this special? The arrogance! The very HUBRIS! But there I was, getting so worked up as I worked out that I began to hyperventilate, and that hasn’t happened since I tried to watch I Am Sam on the treadmill. Afterward, I was obsessed. I read her New Yorker profile. I listened to her WTF appearance, all while my youngest child screamed, “Mommy! Mommy!” and I ignored him, because my hands were already full with another child: MY INNER ONE.

After washing my hands of my real children by putting them to bed, I begged my husband to rewatch the special with me, which he really didn’t want to do because he was pretty sure he’d hate it. I should have seen where this was heading, and a part of me did, but I told that part of me to SHUT UP because I needed him to bear witness. I needed him to recognize me in this piece of art, thereby giving me permission to see myself in it, thereby allowing me to fantasize about a sliding doors reality full of my own liberal elite buzz and accolades that maybe possibly was still within reach if I could just figure out what to do differently. Anyway, we watched it, and after a half hour, he asked if we could please turn it off because he didn’t like it. That hurt my feelings.

The central question of the movie You Hurt My Feelings — with which this substack feels great kinship for obvious reasons — is about whether you can dislike the creative works of a person while still loving that person. I often take that question one step more personally, in that I not only need people I love to love the things I make, I need them to love the things I love that someone else made. It’s a constant source of tension between my husband and me, because he only likes depressing stories about sad people who just keep getting sadder and sadder and sadder. Yet I graciously Stockholm Syndrome myself into believing I enjoy the books, movies, and music he holds dear, so why can’t he extend the same fucking courtesy?! Often I find myself angry when he dislikes something that I don’t even like, only because it resembles something I could have liked. Don’t get me started on the fight we had after watching Lady Bird, a movie about which I recall nothing except that the girl jumped out of a moving car on the highway and came off without a scratch, which seems….. UNLIKELY. And I’ll spare you the umbrage I took when he said Oppenheimer was objectively a better movie than Barbie, even though I myself wasn’t crazy about Barbie, and have deep philosophical issues with this capitalist trend of products-as-movies. (Just because you wink at the thing doesn’t mean you’re not still doing the thing!) Why do I have this need to protect Greta Gerwig from my husband’s scorn, I ask myself? The bitch just made a billion dollar blockbuster, SHE’S FINE! (…I heard someone say on the Slate Culture Gabfest.)

Part of it is that it’s just so damn hard to make things. It seems cruel to dismiss something someone has put so much of themselves into, which again, already covered in You Hurt My Feelings. But while you haven’t figuratively put yourself into the things you love, you (I) see yourself (myself) in them, and having someone reject them feels similarly personal. To me. Apparently not to everyone. How free those brave souls must feel, out there just casually liking and disliking whatever they want without waiting to hear the rest of the group weigh in, unmoved by popular opinion, unwilling to ask themselves the question, “Is it me? Am I the fool?” Because why should they? Don’t we all know by now that no one’s taste can be wrong? It can only be different?

The day after I’d raged at my husband for not liking Jacqueline Novak, I returned to the conversation with calm and melancholy. I think I have no taste, I told him. I think I like everything. That’s not true, he told me. And I guess it’s not because I could never really get into Breaking Bad. I don’t think it’s going out too far on a limb to say that people create things because they want to be seen. If you are talented and fortunate enough to create something original, you might even be seen long after you’re dead. I think we also consume creative works to be seen, maybe if even just by ourselves. CS Lewis said “We read to know that we are not alone.” I forced my husband to watch a standup special because I wanted him to see me in Jacqueline Novak, but how absurd to be drawn to something because of its freshness, only to challenge that freshness by comparing it to myself. The same way so many of us feel protective of the quality of the things we like, while also wanting to be completely unique in liking it. Can you believe I’m still thinking about this shit? I GOT KIDS TO RAISE! And yet I feel like I’m thirteen again, insisting that I alone am the teenager who likes Tori Amos and Conan O’Brien because I’m the only one in my class with their pictures in my locker, only discover years later that there was one of me in every class in every seventh grade in America. And upon discovering it, simultaneously feeling both comforted and foolish for my misguided sense of smug alienation.

My dad says the hardest thing about marriage is the constant battle of wanting to be together and also wanting to be separate, of wanting to be half of something while also wanting to be whole. I think the hardest part of marriage is having a partner who’s such a GD snob. And yet, don’t I want him to have discerning taste, so that I can celebrate myself for being (hopefully) among his favorite things? I think wanting to be half and whole goes far beyond marriage. I am constantly looking at the world, searching for my reflection, sure that somehow if I keep creating things I can prove I am the one and only me.