#4: On the ordinary/extraordinary
High school never ends, and neither does the self-reflection.
Hi friends,
This week I’m intentionally not writing about the US presidential election, even though it’s Literally All I Can Possibly Think About. Instead: we’re gonna talk about teenage aspirations, blogs, Sally Rooney, TikTok memes, and Halloween costumes. (Why does it sound like I’m just saying word salad here? I feel like Stefon on Saturday Night Live.) Whatever, here we go:
I recently rediscovered a blog that I kept from roughly ages 16 to 18 —
In other words: the angstiest years of adolescence. The results were startling, and sweet. It’s funny: I often joke that I had better taste in creative things as a teenager than I do now — potentially because I tried harder? Back then, I attended gigs like my life depended on it. I followed runway shows and had actual aesthetic opinions about Phoebe Philo’s tenure at Céline or what would happen to McQueen under Sarah Burton. One summer I wanted to practice my French and so I systematically watched my way through Godard’s entire filmography, something I haven’t done since and frankly would never have the attention span for now. I know all these things because my long-lost blog is littered with Conor Oberst lyrics and screen-shotted stills from Une femme est une femme. (Pretentious? Me? Never.)
I think many of us who were teenage girls in the early 2010s participated in a degree of the ‘I’m not like other girls’ trap. (We didn’t see through it enough to know better, I guess, and popular feminism wasn’t where it is today. Gen Z kids seem to have gotten over this, or at least better at couching it behind more elaborate justifications.) And in school I remember often feeling that there was a frustrating binary: anybody who didn’t fit into, or want to fit into, the dominant mainstream social narrative of my suburban high school would do a conscious 180 the other way and self-describe as a weirdo. I recall resenting this dichotomy, or at least not feeling at home in it. Only in the prohibitive landscape of high school could it feel so impossible to hold complexity, to take a less harshly defined middle path. One of the cooler things about growing up is seeing what the people I grew up with are up to now, and realising that everyone is more complex than we believed each other to be, or than we had space to be.
In school I wanted to be extraordinary, but I did not want to have to do anything additional to achieve this. The latter is because I was already expending so much energy just keeping up with the juggling act of expectations (and trying desperately not to fail calculus class). And so I had this innate feeling, which I wrote about in many journal-esque blog entries, that I was destined for extraordinary circumstances. I eventually quit calculus and took up a creative writing class instead. It was there, for perhaps the first time, that I experienced the delight of accessing a wellspring of untapped potential talent. I hadn’t changed, but the circumstances had.
I felt I was meant for — not just aspiring to, but deserving of — a setting that would recognise me for all the cultural cache I constantly worked to accumulate. Specifically, what I believed I was meant for was: to live in Europe, be a writer, have a shabby-chic flat (preferably a Parisian garret in the VIème, because I was in a long-suffering Hemingway phase, but London or Edinburgh or Dublin would’ve sufficed), to have chic clothes and long legs and long hair, to attend underground raves, to meet European men, to be part of interesting creative movements. I swear I’m not editorialising here; a blog post from October 2012 outlines these goals verbatim in bullet-point form. I ticked off most of these wishes quicker than anticipated (still waiting on ‘having long legs’). But were any of these things owed to me the way that I, on some level, thought they should be? Absolutely not. I don’t blame my younger myself for having dreamed so, though.
In combing through my old blog, I found reposted screenshots and gifs from Skins, a wildly unrealistic English TV series about a crew of teenagers in Bristol. I had forgotten how popular the series was for a time. Effy Stonem, the mysterious and exceedingly cool ringleader with her biker boots and kohl eyeliner and preternatural silence, had been an icon to me. In the first episode, day one of sixth form at fictional Roundview College, Effy commands the attention of her entire school without trying, without even speaking more than a few enigmatic words. This was my teenage ego’s greatest dream: to experience the positive knockdown results of charisma, without having to do the work. To be seen as special or notable, just by being my usual self. At the core: to be recognised.
Retrospectively, I want to postulate that this expectation of being inherently deserving of such things is a situation specific to the upper-middle class. I also want to fully highlight that in many ways, whiteness is endemic to it. By this, I mean that only in a culture of white supremacism can privileged white mediocrity be venerated or elevated to success, often over the very hard work of others. This is true even in the fictional Skins universe: Effy is affluent, white, thin, and conventionally beautiful. For these reasons, it is clear both to the audience, and to her classmates, that naturally she would be the protagonist of the series and of school life.
But looking through the blog archive, I found myself steeped not only in empathy but also in something that felt like nostalgia. Not nostalgia for adolescence (LOL are you kidding me), but rather for how at that age I chased after cultural knowledge because to obtain it felt like a portal, a way to coagulate an identity I desperately craved. I was viscerally transported back to the feeling, so intense in those days, that my identity was determined largely in negative relief: I could see who I was, or at least who I wanted to be, by virtue of what was missing at present — what I desired. This is a human tendency. I would argue, though, that teenagers feel it most urgently. Personally, I’ve found as I get older — and follow the paths my teenage self laid out, or move in utterly different directions — my identity is derived much more from what I have accumulated, tangibly accomplished, than what I want. (This is its own issue.) At risk of sounding specious, I also think there’s plenty of room at this juncture for social critiques — of what our societal markers of success do to our sense of worth, and the basis on which we construct our identities.
I say all of this to preface my thoughts on an article, Normal Novels, in The Point Magazine. In it, writer Becca Rothfeld examines the phenomenon of the ‘normal’ protagonist in recent literature. She uses Sally Rooney as a case study. Rooney famously achieved literary superstardom in her mid-twenties — something which surely requires some behind-the-scenes confluence of raw talent and ambition in addition to the more obvious cocktail of zeitgeist and luck. Despite this, Rooney maintains publicly that she isn’t really anybody special, that she is a totally normal person. Of course, Rothfeld writes, this is a fallacy: ‘Genuinely normal people do not have the chance to advertise their normalcy in Vanity Fair or Oprah’s magazine. Would Rooney still be so eager to downplay her achievements if there were any risk that she would actually succeed in deflecting attention? I have to say, I hope not.’ Occasionally, a clarifying glint of ferocity surfaces in Rooney’s public image or her work. In these instances, she hits a different register, which rings true.
Rooney, for Belfast-based literary journal The Tangerine: ‘Everyone has a life. I haven’t had a particularly interesting one.’ Photo credit: Jonny L Davies/ Faber & Faber
Similarly, as Rothfeld points out, Rooney’s characters are extremely fortunate, popular, successful without having to work at it or be particularly extraordinary in their own right:
‘If you are a writer in a Rooney novel, you are sure to be discovered without going to any great lengths to promote yourself. You are sure to write beautifully without agonizing over your work (or even editing it). And if you are a woman in a Rooney novel, you will only ever become disheveled in a glamorous way. You might be too thin or too aloof, but you will never be too emotional […] Ultimately, there is no chance… that the market will fail to reward your talents and no chance at all that you are not, deep down, very special.
The fantasy Rooney fosters in her interviews no less than in her fiction is that you can be the best without being better than any of your rivals—that normalcy, elevated to a high art, amounts to a kind of distinction.’
There’s a joke on TikTok wherein people act out what they imagine they look like as the ‘main character’ of their own life: dreamily gazing out a train window or writing moodily in a coffeeshop, everyone around them secretly in love with their effortless coolness. And then, for comic effect, they proceed to demonstrate what they ‘actually’ look like, which is always less bildungsroman ingénue and more… Gollum hunched over a laptop. In Rooney’s novels, this perception disconnect happens in reverse. The intense inner turmoil of her protagonists is belied by the external validation they consistently, improbably, receive. Normal People’s Connell is tortured by insecurity about his writing talent. Yet the moment he decides to start sending out work, he racks up accolades (often against his will) and is accepted to the only MFA he applies to.
This phenomenon manifests itself politically, too. Rooney is frequently described as a socialist writer, but the characters engage only half-heartedly within this framework. Conversations With Friends’ Frances is a self-identifying Communist, but very little airtime is given to any enactment of her professed ideologies beyond dinner-party posturing. Often, in Rooney’s world of spare prose, it seems all one must do to make something true is to speak it lucidly into existence (tbh, this explains Connell and Marianne’s inability to get their relationship shit together: they just don’t know how to communicate).
Rothfeld later makes a larger point that the prevalence of this notion — the ‘normal’ character who is seen as extraordinary — goes beyond just highbrow novels. Twilight’s Bella Swan and Fifty Shades of Grey’s Anastasia Steele are both rendered intentionally ‘normal’ — but this ‘normality’ is in fact precisely what Edward Cullen and Christian Grey, respectively, find uniquely attractive about them. It occurs to me that the writers of these series, Stephenie Meyer and E.L. James, both got their start writing fanfiction. To me, this explains a lot: in fanfiction, largely written from canonically underrepresented perspectives such as the female or queer gaze, the protagonist tends to function as somewhat of a stand-in. The whole point is that you, as the reader, can insert yourself into the narrative. This means there must be a fine line: ‘your’ character therefore can’t be too fleshed out in any extraordinary way — otherwise you can’t imagine yourself in their place — but they must be perceived as extraordinary, so you can benefit by proxy.
Anyway, my interest in all of this is not borne of any dislike for Sally Rooney. (Twilight and Fifty Shades are not my jam, but far be it from me to deny someone else the pleasure). I actually love Rooney’s work. My introduction to her was last year, when I bought Normal People on a whim at the Waterstones in Heathrow Terminal 5 to kill time during a layover. I was exhausted of hearing about the insane popularity of the book, felt compelled to see what the big deal was. I suspected it wouldn’t live up to the hype. I was wrong; I tore through the novel before my plane even took off, and read it an entire second time before the plane landed. Her writing landed for me. It felt real. The astute descriptions of the social strata and privileges of Trinity echoed my own university experience in St Andrews. The misfires between Marianne and Connell, and the portrayal of the complexities of young-adulthood, were the struggles my friends and I were (are) all living through. The prose was agile. Frankly, I would kill to have written a book like Rooney’s. And that’s just the thing.
Rothfeld writes that that the phenomenon she’s talking about taps into a larger, unattainable duality that many people of this specific socioeconomic caste and generational milieu — the one that Frances and Bobbi and Connell and Marianne inhabit, as do I, and as do most of the people reading this — are impossibly striving for. As Rothfeld says:
‘Who wouldn’t like to succeed in romance without really trying? Who hasn’t sometimes wished that their normalcy were exceptional? And who among the overeducated leftist set has not dreamed of surpassing their opponents without compromising their egalitarian virtue? The commercial and critical success of Rooney’s books is no mystery, for they give the comforting impression that, whoever you are, you too could make out with a preternaturally beautiful vampire or get handcuffed to a torture machine by a magnate with washboard abs. You too could publish the story or seduce the entire school. You too are different—and that is what makes you the same!’
Like, ouch, man. Feeling dragged here. We want to have it all, whatever ‘it all’ is, without sacrificing our integrity or our cred, neither our inherited privileges. We’ve all pretended that something we tried very hard on was effortless, or that we don’t care about a material trapping about which we actually care a lot. We will all continue to do these things. We exist in this system. The ambivalence with which both Rooney herself, and her characters, embody their ideological ideals arguably reflects the messiness many of us similarly exhibit in living out our values in everyday life. And probably if I wrote a bestselling novel tomorrow, I’d be out there borrowing a page from Rooney’s self-deprecating playbook: insisting to the press that I’m actually a totally normal person, I promise I’m honestly really quite ordinary. I mean, how else are you meant to seem impressive?
Years after abandoning my teenage blog, I dressed as Effy Stonem for a Halloween party in undergrad. It was last-minute and I had ransacked my wardrobe for an easy costume. By this point Skins was long since passé, but what it lacked in cultural relevancy it made up for in having ensconced itself in the popular canon; I knew that Effy would be a clearly identifiable and somewhat nostalgic entity in a room full of British twenty-somethings. I wore an oversized t-shirt dress, ripped fishnets, biker boots, piles of chain necklaces, and a metric ton of eyeliner.
Everyone got the reference, except for a lone perplexed American guy who asked me why I was wearing my regular clothes to a Halloween party. Initially I was annoyed. Nobody wants their Halloween costume to be a flop. But a small, buried part of me was pleased the costume went unrecognised, if only just to one random stranger in a Buzz Lightyear costume. It meant I was mysterious. And somehow, still, that felt like the whole point.
Some good stuff:
Kevin Parker of Tame Impala breaking down his favourite drum sounds - enjoy.
This poem, ‘Earl’ by Louis Jenkins, which literally tore my heart out.
I know the rest of the world has been over the whole Cats thing for like a year but I for one laughed out loud at this:
On that note, wrapping up. If you’re in America and you STILL haven’t voted yet, go fucking do it already. As always, thank you for reading and please share this newsletter with anyone who might enjoy it. See you next time,
Maddy