21/365: In praise of teenage girls

When do we go electric?

Last week, I had to write a personal statement for a residency. I hate writing them. Mostly, I have no idea what ties my practice together, especially now it’s becoming a body of work, and a chaotic body at that.

I didn’t want to put a teenage girl in my next novel. I’ve done that twice already, why would I do it again. Instead, it centres around a dead woman. A dead woman I couldn’t get right. A dead woman I couldn’t hear. A dead woman everyone else talked over and sure there’s a dead woman in my first book and there’s a dead woman in my second book so why I was bothered by the problem of writing a teenager for the third time, I’m not sure.

Probably because the most obvious things hide in plain sight until we’re ready to see them.

I didn’t let myself go for a walk. I didn’t let myself clean. I didn’t let myself convince myself that these other things are still writing. There comes a point when they just aren’t. Not everything is writing. Somethings are just procrastination.

I shut myself in a cafe where they know me embarrassingly well, possibly I should learn to make my own coffee but half the pleasure of coffee is that someone else makes it for you. I sit there with my second cup and my heart racing just a little faster than it should. The cursor blinks, the first line of the manuscript glares back at me the armature will not bend.

There it is. Right there. The armature will not bend. It’s the framework that’s wrong. There’s something missing. It is inflexible, not malleable enough to beat into any kind of shape. I have to go back to it. A child in a pram, I am petulant at this, I would like to throw my rattle, have someone else pick it up. I would like to keep writing forward, gathering word count and the smug sense of completion that comes with it but there’s no sense in this, not when all that will emerge is a draft suitable only for the backspace.

I leave three hours later, knowing what it is I have to do.

My dead woman needs to be a teenager. I write dead women and teenage girls. Sometimes they’re dead too. Now I need to write a dead woman who was once a teenager, and make her so very achingly vividly alive so we miss her all the more. This part is fun.

David Lynch was alive when I realised this and now he’s not. His dying seems still incomprehensible. I’m not sure someone like him can die. I’m not sure he has died, perhaps he’s rendered death impossible, or perhaps he exists to prove the certainty of immortality. He said that every artist must remain two ages, I can’t remember which he said he was, but I am 3 and 16 and possibly not an artist. Three was my favourite age and I will happily throw rocks at anyone who says it’s too young an age to remember. It wasn’t. I remember it with a clarity and sense of acute joy that makes me think how lucky I was to be the three year old I was. Of course, some of those memories are filtered through photos and stories and my mother liked to tell a lot of stories about me being three, especially the one about my jumping from her arms onto the back of a donkey and being incandescent that I wasn’t allowed to ride it away on an adventure. I’m still angry about that. What fun me and the donkey might have had, would have had. It does not matter that my uncle’s donkey bit me and I’ve always been wary of donkeys since, that donkey was meant for me. I do not hold grudges for long. I learnt this summer that memory acquisition is linked to our ability to articulate memories, and I wonder if perhaps since I learnt to read when I was three, that this facilitated the early memories. There isn’t a way of knowing, but I’m still three and love life best when it’s as bright as it was then.

And I am still 16.

When you’re sixteen and starve yourself, people like to call you a silly teenager. It’s an easy slur term. Silly teenage girl. Easy demographic to target. It’s not like we know anything about the world at that age. Is it?

I write about teenage girls because to dismiss teenage girls as silly, is to misread not just teenage girls, but the women they become. I like to write the complexity of their inner and outer worlds, how intelligent they are, how knowing they are, to explore where naivety and exploitation intersect. A lot of Ava Anna Ada revolves around this.

I lived on my wits when I was a teenager. Maybe I didn’t understand then but my starvation was an intuitive understanding that something wasn’t right. My best friend as a teenager is still one of my best friends because in her I met an ally. We shared something, a kinship, but more than that, an understanding of where we needed to be in the world, and the distance between that and our rural private school that had us hidden way in a turreted world at the end of a long drive. Surrounded by forest we were almost Sleeping Beauty like in our isolation, all these girls, some function in someone else’s dream (and you bet that’s in the manuscript, it’s too good not to be). The tension created by the distance between our reality and our desires, something we felt and expressed in our behaviour, our bodies, the culture we gravitated towards, and one all the girls felt in their own way. Eating disorders were rampant, bullying was so normal teachers didn’t think to do anything about it, half the male teachers were trying to sleep with the girls, the other half the boys. It was a strange murky world, one I didn’t mean to go back to but I can’t stop thinking about how vital the intelligence teenage girls possess is. We know how to survive and we know we have to do it ourselves then. Somewhere along the line we lose it.

In screenwriting, the midpoint is the point at which the hero stops reacting to their journey to become proactive. Teenage girls might not understand it, but there’s a window where they are proactive, and then somehow something blurs it, capitalism led desire and economics blurring our actual wants and needs. Submission to the dominant ideal is a survival instinct of its own. It’s easy to forget the importance of being proactive, it’s easy to forget how much agency we have.

A teenage girl wouldn’t. Accusing grown women of behaving like teenage girls is a way to insult both groups of women, reducing each by neglecting to see the intelligence inherent in teenage girls. It’s a cheap insult but also really a compliment.

My best female friendships are the ones where we tap into that part of ourselves, where we have the honesty to discuss the deepest parts of our life, around dinner tables, fires, in each other’s beds late at night watching crap TV but talking, really talking, over those six pound dive bar double gins. Two women in the cafe this morning were talking about their kids’ school and being governors and their husband’s promotions and the flowers they needed to collect and when they started on their lumber support research I really couldn’t anymore. What a trick to miss, to have a coffee alone and still be talking about people who weren’t there, still talking about their own servitude. There’s a fine line between expectation and complicity and at some point, proactive agency comes into play.

I knew how to stay alive as a teenage girl, even if it looked like dying. After, I learnt to distrust my instincts. But over and over, those instincts have kept me alive, taking me away from situations that only ever were going to damage me. It’s not a bad thing to be 16 still, she keeps me proactive, while the 3 year old keeps me alive in a different way.

I realise that I write dead women for the change from reactive to proactive, a return of sorts to the teenage knowing. When someone is dead, it’s easier to find the three acts of their lives, the point at which they begin to become who they are meant to be - addressing forces of antagonism head on, which is not to say it happens midway through a life. That would be too neat and also just trite. I watched A Complete Unknown on Friday while thinking all these things - it’s perhaps the point at which a character embraces the fact that to be who they need to be, for them, it’s realising they will have to go electric, no matter the opposition.

And for me, I’ll be content if I can always remember to be as elementally close to myself and what I need as I was when I was 16. Proactive over reactive. Always writing teaches you things about living.