Stack’s first book is the extraordinary account of her time spent there, as well as in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Libya—all countries in thrall to war machines or repressive regimes. After a three-year stint as the Moscow Bureau Chief, she began a post in China this July. I reached her at her home in Beijing to talk about the book. A few hours after our Skype-enabled conversation, Every Man In This Village Is A Liar was announced as a finalist for the National Book Award.

The Rumpus: I’m curious—the book has been out now for several months—and I’m curious about the response you’ve gotten in general but in particular from your colleagues at the LA Times, and elsewhere. I was struck by how honestly and openly you described grappling with the limits of war journalism.

Megan Stack: I tried to be very honest in the book, and not just in terms of telling the truth by the letter—I tried to be intellectually honest about war reporting, and foreign reporting in general, and to a certain extent the very nature of reporting. Because I think there’s a tendency to be a little less intellectually honest in the way we portray ourselves and the work that we do. Everybody wants to look good and look like they know everything and they’re the smartest kid on the block, and I was really trying to get beyond that—the posturing that I feel like sometimes gets in the way of journalistic accounts. But I don’t think anybody would come to me and say, “You misrepresented this.” If anything, I think some people appreciated it.

Rumpus: You’re very frank about the business—or the process—of reporting, and its challenges. For instance in the Yemen chapter, you get at the pressure of situations where, like, “they sent me here, so I have to send them something back” [even if the facts on the ground are unverifiable].

Stack: It’s funny—the Yemen chapter was the one I was thinking about too. That was the chapter where I tried to say to the reader, “Look, let me level with you. Not everything that you are reading in the newspaper is necessarily completely clear.” It’s not that it’s untrue—of course these things are true; it’s true that someone said this to a reporter, and it’s not like reporters are going around misquoting people—of course they’re not. The problem is that there are so many layers of misrepresentation, there are so many layers of the difficulty of penetrating another country that’s not your country, finding someone to talk to you who isn’t just trying to use you for their purposes, who isn’t lying to you because of the agenda of the foreign government.

If you’re talking about truth, it’s not really enough to say, “This happened, according to this official.” Because that may not be true, and that’s what I was trying to elucidate with the example of that one trip where I felt so completely unable to come back with anything that was truly meaningful to the story I was trying to get, about how the so-called war on terror was being fought in Yemen and what kind of compromises were being made, what kind of deals had been struck between the U.S. government and Yemen, and just what it feels like to get swaddled in spin, and more and more desperate to come up with something. You start out with very ambitious plans for the trip and then—some of these trips disintegrate into, “Okay, what kind of feature can I get, because I’m leaving on Saturday and I have to pull something together.” That’s just part of the work, but I wanted people to have a sense of that—because it is how a lot of places that are important to the U.S. are covered.

Rumpus: I got the sense that a big part of your experience was figuring out how the job worked. You were so young when you first went to the Afghanistan, and one of the first things that happens is you report a story that Donald Rumsfeld contradicts in the press the next day.

Stack: It wasn’t just me—everybody who was working in that part of Afghanistan that day got the same story. But yeah, there was a denial of a bombing that had pretty clearly taken place. That’s something that you deal with all the time; getting people to tell the truth is in general very difficult, and in no place is it more difficult than a war zone. The nature of that experience is that people are doing things that are not noble and that they don’t want to remember themselves, let alone talk about. It’s a very sticky thing to try and sort through.

Rumpus: When did you know that you would write this book, and filter your experiences into a work of narrative non-fiction?

Stack: It’s interesting, I had experienced all of these things in the Middle East, and it was all sort of still boiling inside of me. I used to look at the pile of newspaper stories that I had written over the years, and just feel kind of sad, and like they weren’t enough. All of the people I had known, all of the human tragedies and triumphs and places and emotions that I had seen felt more or less wasted. And I was really bothered by that; I felt like if I move on with my life and don’t find a way to record these things in a way that was more artful then I had wasted my time.

I wanted to write a book, but I didn’t think that I could write a book, and I didn’t think I had a book. I didn’t have an idea of what the book would be. I was in Egypt when I was thinking this through and I remember having coffee with a friend and telling her, “I don’t have a book.” And she said, “You do, you have a book.” I said, “I don’t remember anything that’s happened the past six years, it’s just a blur of experiences and places and I could never sit down and take it all apart.”

But it’s interesting, once I got to Moscow, and out of that part of the world—Moscow was so completely different—the daily experience and the feeling of being there—from an Arab country, that it gave me the distance that I needed. I started going back and reading through all of my reporting notebooks, and re-reading my journals, which is something that I don’t usually do. I had the time and the space, for the first time, to process all of the things that had taken place, and what they meant. And that’s where the book started to come; I saw that there was a narrative, there was an overarching thread that ran through all of these disparate experiences and countries, and that in some ways it was the story of this thing called the war on terror. It’s also a very American story about going out into the world and getting lost, and to a certain extent that had happened to me:  I had had to find my footing again after ending up in war zones almost serendipitously—I don’t know if you can call it serendipity to end up in a war zone! By happenstance. And it had also happened to the country—the country had gotten into something that got so much bigger and more complicated and difficult to get out of than any of us could have imagined after September 11^th.

Rumpus: In terms of arriving at your style—which I found really distinctive—was that a parallel challenge, or something that evolved as you wrote?

Stack: I write a lot independently—this is the first thing I’ve published outside of the LA Times, ever—but I do write a lot, and read a lot. I think I had my own way that I wanted to do a book; I knew exactly how I wanted to write it. If anything I felt really free when I was writing the book; I felt like I could finally write the way I wanted to write, and I didn’t have to make it match a newspaper style. Which I like to do—I like working for a newspaper—but it was great not to have those restrictions in prose style, to be able to lose myself a little bit and have more of a free-roaming artistic experience. I really enjoyed writing the book; there were times I would spend working—in the morning in Moscow with the streets still dark, and I was just so happy writing.

Rumpus: You wrote that you “had expected everything from war, danger and blood and hurt, and the war produced all of it.” Was there anything that surprised you about the experience of war, or your own response to it?

Stack: I covered different conflicts at different stages of my late twenties and I guess early thirties; from the first time that I went to war, I think the thing that was most striking to me—and I bet that a lot of people have this experience, just on first impression—is how much ordinary life there still is in a war zone. You watch movies and read books about war and it’s very easy to get this melodramatic impression that everything’s going to be blowing up around you all the time, and it’ll be non-stop carnage. I think you expect that to some extent unconsciously without realizing that’s your expectation. Then you go to a war zone and you realize that kids still go to school, and you can go to one village and it will be this apocalyptic nightmare, and a few miles down the road you’ll maybe find something completely different. Obviously every war is different, but when I went to Afghanistan that was what surprised me the most. I had girded myself, I was ready for it to be awful and traumatic and difficult every moment of the day. Then you get there and find yourself having a wonderful day with villagers—or whatever; you have all kinds of different experiences in the context of covering the war.

As far as myself—and I wrote about this in the book—I think went from in the beginning feeling very aloof and unafraid and sort of cavalier about being there to two years later being in Lebanon and being terrified for the first time, and how awful it was to be that scared in a war zone. All of a sudden I found myself not having those reserves of fearlessness. It made it much harder to be there, unsurprisingly.

Rumpus: The chapter in which you chronicle the aftermath of the assassination of Rafik Hariri in Lebanon is amazing—one thing I kept wondering as I read it is how you got such incredible access. It almost sounds like you became a part of his funeral procession.

Stack: It’s one of the things about Lebanon that had started to change when I left Lebanon—I’m not sure if it’s still like that. I did have very good access in Lebanon, but that wasn’t specific to me, all the reporters were able to come and go. But with Hariri for example—and a lot of Lebanese leaders—you’re talking really about communal bosses, so you’re kind of talking about somebody who’s sitting at the top of a pyramid which consists of a sect. In the case of Hariri of course you’re talking about Sunni Muslims. And one of the ways that people who derive power from their people show their strength is to let you know that they would go out among the people and be with them. There was that sense of inherent protection, that you didn’t need a bodyguard and people could come up and kiss your hand and ask you for a favor. That was a real display of strength.

As a result, if you were a reporter you could kind of just walk into the house—not every day, but during the funeral definitely, because they opened the doors and let in, not everybody in Beirut, but the Beirut upper crust was definitely all there. That started to change after the war, but Lebanon in general—once you spend some time there you realize it’s kind of like a small town. It’s not like Cairo where you have huge numbers of people and a huge security apparatus, it’s much more of a small town feel.

Rumpus: I noticed in the news this morning there are reports of [Iranian President] Ahmadinejad’s visit to Lebanon, where I guess he received a distinctly warm welcome. You made some criticisms of the U.S.’s position on Hezbollah in the book, I’m curious about your thoughts on what the U.S. should be doing?

Stack: I don’t think the book is critical of how the United States deals with Hezbollah, I think the book talks about, during the war in Lebanon, the efficacy of bombing Hezbollah. I think there is a parallel to Iraq and the old school thought of counter-insurgency strategy and does it work to deal with an insurgency this way.

Mourners of Rafik al-Hariri

The book does talk about how, after the assassination of Hariri, there was this rush, in U.S. policy circles, to look at Lebanon as a country that was defined by the Hariri people, which is to say the pro-Western, either Sunni Muslim or Christian or Druze communities, and not recognize the fact that there is a huge Shi’ite population in Lebanon and in general that population is with Hezbollah. You can crunch the numbers and try to make them not say that, but it’s the truth, that’s what the situation is. So there’s the question—and this is a complicated issue that’s in the book—about the problems that were going to be caused after the assassination of Hariri by to some extent negating the existence of part of the country, and how that would destabilize Lebanon in the long run.

I think that is what you see today: You see Ahmadinejad coming and you see how excited the country is. Obviously not the entire country, I’m sure there are people in Lebanon today who are disgusted with the fact that he’s there, but you have a very, very divided country in Lebanon—it sometimes seems like a hopelessly divided country. So it becomes very dangerous and very difficult to pick one side or the other and say, “We’re going to let this side define what Lebanon is.”

Rumpus: I got the sense in the book that you were raised Catholic?

Stack: I was, I was raised Catholic and my family is very observant Catholic. They went to church every Sunday.

Rumpus: I’m wondering what your feelings are about religion…[general laughter] I guess that’s kind of an absurd question.

Stack: I don’t think I can possibly answer that question effectively or honestly in the context of this interview just because there are so many things that I can say about that.

Rumpus: Let me ask a more specific question: In your chapter on Egypt you observe that “profound” religious faith is often a product of poverty and a source of comfort for its practitioners—“to feel the fire of faith when you have nothing else to hold.” You compare it to the Christian fundamentalist movement in the United States. I’m wondering if you could talk about the notion of class—if you think it’s a determining factor in whether someone is raised in an extremist faith, rather than a moderate one, or no faith at all.

Stack: No, no, I don’t think that at all. I wrote about that in the chapter about Saudi Arabia, which is one of the most radicalized places in the Arab world, and also the richest. No, I would definitely not make that argument at all. In the chapter about the Muslim Brotherhood, it’s talking about Egypt, and a part of Egypt where people are poor and don’t have much, and what they do have is this profound religious faith that they’ve been raised with and that binds them to their ancestors and to their relatives in a very powerful way. It’s also a place where the mosque is one of the only social structures you have; it’s naturally going to have a great deal of appeal to people growing up there.

When I think of those people in that chapter in that village, I don’t think of them as necessarily radicalized people. They were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, but individually I think that’s what they were living inside of, that’s culturally what they had—I don’t think they were people who were individually looking to blow something up, or whatever. They were people who were very, very devout. In a country like Egypt, where you have so much corruption, here were people [the Muslim Brotherhood] who came to them as political leaders draped in this perception of incorruptibility—“We’re not coming from the wealthy, powerful secular leaders, we’re coming to you from religion, we’re coming from the mosque.” And the people have seen their entire lives that these are people who take care of orphans, and the elderly—it’s a very powerful PR move. It’s a large issue and I go into it more fully in the book, but I think poverty is just one part of it.

Rumpus: You have a quote from one of the Muslim Brotherhood candidates whom you shadow that I thought, although it has a specific context, really got to the heart of the matter. He said: “Globalization shouldn’t be a globalization of morals, of interfering in affairs of every stripe.” All of the issues and events you write about in the book are so complex and so layered, and yet it seems to me you either believe this or you don’t.

Stack: He was saying that to me at that moment because I was a woman who was asking him about how women would be treated in this theoretical universe where the Muslim Brotherhood came to power, and he did not like that. He was trying to tell me, in a roundabout way, “Hey, back off, you don’t live here, this isn’t your country, you can talk about women’s rights in your own country, not here.”

But the question you’re raising is the serious question of our time, and it’s something that’s not necessarily answerable with a throwaway line. I think to a certain extent, I think it matters—it matters to me. It matters, for example, what my tax dollars go toward. Do I like the idea, for example of propping up dictatorships that oppress their own people and don’t hold elections? No, I don’t like that at all. On the other hand, I live in the world, and I have spent the better part of the last decade traveling the world, and I do understand that there are strategic concerns, and those concerns are real, they’re not fake concerns.

I’m a writer, I’m a journalist, and I’m forming, as I go along, my stance on these big questions. I don’t have a hard answer. But what is very important to me is that people in the United States become more educated about the world, because those are exactly the kinds of questions we need to decide as a country. What would Americans say? What is more important to them? Is it preserving markets? Is it preserving strategic interests? We like to think of ourselves as a country of ideals, and we don’t like to think of ourselves as a country that has done things to contravene those ideals overseas, but I think that we should have a very conscious sense of the choices we’re making as a country and I don’t think we necessarily do. For me, the bigger thing is moving information and getting people educated and trying to share some of the stories so that at least they can make educated choices and informed choices.

As I said, I think the question you just asked is truly one of the driving ones in foreign affairs right now. This is a big deal. If you look at China, for example—I remember a lot of Arab governments telling me, and people in the Arab oil industry telling me that they really liked dealing with China because China paid, and China just wants to do business. “China doesn’t hassle us about human rights: They come, they make a deal, they go home. We don’t have to have the conversation about political prisoners or torture, or whatever it’s going to be with the Americans.” At the end of the day, we still have a lot of the same deals with these countries but we do go through the process of putting some pressure on them; sometimes they do some good. All these questions—how we want to guide ourselves as a country—I think is really important, and I’m not sure that that conversation is taking place in the country right now.

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There was a night last month where I couldn’t sleep. I had to be up early for another full day of screenings and filing at the Toronto International Film Festival, but my mind was cycling through a generic course of memories and misgivings. It was a restlessness fueled partly by a badly timed fistful of jujubes, partly by the rude, stamping heifer in the back quadrant of my brain who loves both simple sugars and leveling with me about what it is I think I’m doing with my life.

That morning I had caught a screening that featured an actor—Justin Long—whom I had written a couple of unkind things about two weeks earlier, when I was assigned to review his last film, Going the Distance. This new one was a historical film, and I winced at the sight of him in Confederate garb, his life ebbing on a battlefield. It was a little like glimpsing a guy you’d just dumped in traffic and hoping to God he wouldn’t look your way. I shriveled a bit, despite myself. Did he see me?

Going the Distance was not a good movie, but it pricked me in the way that separates bad movies from actively bad movies. I was irritated by the self-satisfaction with which the film presented its take on the dilemma of long-distance relationships: unconcerned with being thoughtful or even entertaining, it pushed all its chips onto the relatability of its concept. “Relatability” may not be a proper word—yet—but it is increasingly legitimate as a standard by which things—from TV to books to politicians to romantic comedies—are valued. The more main the stream, the more relatable a thing must be to get over.

Blame Oprah if you want to, but relatability has been fermenting as both a cultural phenomenon and evaluative rubric since the 1970s, when a combination of factors moved the social concept of the self to the front of the culture. The mainstreaming of therapy and therapized language, the platonic “we’re all the same” rhetoric of the civil rights and equality movements, the merging of high and low culture, and rampant individualism conspired to form a kind of cultural currency, a new dialect that had the ear of the country.

As a concept it grew valuable, and could be attached to modes of engagement–whether artistic, socio-cultural, or political–that were previously uninterested in relating to their audience in any conscious way. The memoir boom was built on this idea, as is much of chick lit, reality TV and of course the blogoscenti. With the dawn of the internet and its attendant traffic in user-generated, confessional minutiae—and I’ll comment on yours if you comment on mine—an ascendant cultural irregularity found the medium to turn its message into a malignancy. Romantic comedies often engender the worst of the phenomenon: Instead of telling a story, in the name of relatability they hit notes, make references, and present punchline-based characters in the effort to elicit one of our laziest, sub-trash responses, which in full goes something like this: I was exposed to something, and it reminded me of me.

The most dangerous thing about relatability is the way it is often presented (and accepted) as a reasonable facsimile of or substitute for truth. This, I worry, may handicap our culture so violently that recovery, if it comes at all, will be generations in the reckoning; if in the meantime we lose our appetite for the real thing we are pretty much doomed. The pursuit of truth is a basic human instinct, and guides our engagement with ourselves, with art, and with other human beings; the scourge of relatability—and its sweetheart deal with another basic instinct, adaptation—puts all three relationships at risk.

When one writes a review of a film like Going the Distance, these are not the exact thoughts one has, especially if one has to file within 18 hours of seeing it. But there is a sort of inkling that demands further attention. The above is as close to a full articulation of it as I can manage. At the time I just knew the movie was bad, and bad in a way that particularly galled me. We don’t need characters, it seemed to say, we don’t need an interesting script—we’ll just present our concept, make some glib gestures towards plot, smear some wing sauce on Barrymore’s face, and roll credits.

Although Barrymore can coast in as the assumed heroine—she has managed to merge relatability and dream girlishness into a one-woman, moveable franchise—the equally undeveloped character played by Justin Long was doubly handicapped. Long, whom I have liked since I first saw him on Ed ten years ago, sheds almost everything that is appealing about his persona in the role, and it’s a disaster. Beside Barrymore, who at last has acquired the face of a gorgeous grown woman, he seems especially wan. What I might have said in articulating that particular complaint was that he read too immature, or boyish, but I… I went another way.

There is a paragraph about Long’s character that I wrote and re-wrote. I scaled back one sentence in particular, turning a smackdown into a more general statement—an ad hominem exit clause that was supposed to help me sleep at night. This is the sentence: “How a milky, affectless mook with half-formed features and a first day of kindergarten haircut might punch several classes above his weight is a mystery, as my colleague pointed out in her review of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, we are increasingly asked to accept on screen.”

Now, I know that doesn’t look good, and I guess I’m trying to rough out here—if not justify—how pans studded with snarky jibes get written, in part because I am alternately mystified and troubled by it myself. Part of it, surely, is the fact that I don’t really imagine the person I am writing about seeking out and lingering on my words, despite the fact that I have sought out and lingered on every word and review pertaining to my work that I have been able to get my hands on.

After filing the review my editor replied immediately, singling out that line for some editorial snaps. This had the opposite of its intended effect, and sent me wobbling. I lay awake that night, not wondering so much if I had been fair but if I could have found a way to be less glancing and harsh, or alternately if I have the stomach to be as unsparing as someone who considers themselves first and foremost a critic must be. Maybe if I’d had more time; maybe if I didn’t have to watch so many of these godawful movies; maybe if I hadn’t had to look at the Mac guy’s overdeveloped bare ass not once but twice. I mean my god.

I am aware it sounds silly—agonizing over a few spilled words into the seething trough of the internet—but I have several guilt wounds when it comes to film criticism, and this instance merely refreshed one of them with a little salt.

Background hit: I came to New York to study film more to come to New York than to study film; I had already been writing for several years—fiction, humor, essays, travel narrative—before I wrote my first film review, and it all happened by a kind of accident. God knows it’s a happy accident—it has kept me afloat—but I do tend to think of it as Justin Long might think, perhaps, of his mid-career stint in the advertising world. Most of my colleagues grew up dreaming of being a film critic, and yet as lucky as I am I habitually correct friends of mine who introduce me to third parties as such, and then can’t seem to stop myself from reprimanding them in private. They are bewildered by this, and to some extent I am too. It’s certainly not that I don’t believe in criticism, and what it does; if anything my main objection to the cultural scourge of “relatability” is the deadening effect it has on our collective—and vital—critical mechanism. What I object to, on an increasingly regular basis, is what criticism does to me.

I am acutely aware that, as recovering internet mean person Emily Gould recently put it, “it often feels as though whatever writing spotlight still exists belongs to whoever can be the most abrasive or pandering.” For working critics, it can seem like the ebbing tide has lowered all boats; there’s an option available now that wasn’t there before, and no one’s going to stop you from using it—if anything it’s encouraged; in some fields it’s the competitive option, a way to attract attention and keep the vicious commentariat appeased—or sliding inexorably toward it. That’s on you, and vigilance is required if you want to maintain a sense of identity and purpose uninfected by the internet’s constitutional grammar of incivility.

During that sleepless night in Toronto last month, my worry came down to what every writer’s should: words and the way I use them. I’m not built for film festivals, for watching six films a day and cranking out responses in the grim race to be the first to ding the bell. It’s not that I don’t care (although I don’t care), it’s that that kind of scribbling, insensible mania brings to the fore all my fears about writing for a living, which is a privilege with perilous side effects. Strange but true: Being a working writer is one of the most dangerous things a writer can be.

I often think with a shudder of Renata Adler’s savage 1980 takedown of Pauline Kael in the pages of the New York Review of Books. Both women had worked as film critics—Adler for several years, Kael several decades. The gist of Adler’s attack was that no critic could work for more than a few years (more than she did, in other words) without turning what acumen they brought to the craft inside out. After that the writer’s output is indelibly marked by a grotesque aesthetic inversion, a fate that led Adler to call Kael’s previous five years of work “piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.”

Adler had especial wrath for Kael’s halogenic style, and the ecstasies of contempt she was capable of when she really hated a movie, or a performer. Her early work had “liveliness,” “energy,” and “good sense.” Her later work was “hysterical,” “shrill,” and “strident.” Kael was being irresponsible with words, and Adler took exception. “Stunned” is the word invariably used to describe Kael’s response to the piece, and much of the literary world agreed, though they would have probably added “giddy” if they were honest. It just wasn’t something you saw that often, particularly given that the crank call came from within Kael’s house at The New Yorker, where Adler had been an editor for years.

It’s fascinating to watch Adler parse her own aesthetic mortification over Kael’s miscegenetic prose, which proved an unstoppable match for her hydraulic responsiveness to movie art. In his excellent study in contrasts, Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Craig Seligman redressed each of Adler’s points of attack. He also defended Kael’s right to be what some people might call cruel: “Niceness, in criticism, is a form of bad faith,” he writes. “Nature is red in tooth and claw, and distinguishing those who can from those who can’t is the first thing a critic has to do.”

Well, I mean, now he tells me. But then I never saw my work in criticism that formally, not because I didn’t take it seriously but because I didn’t see it as a serious, career-defining focus. Kael’s own take speaks more directly to me: “I think the sense of feeling qualified to praise and complain in the same breath is part of our feeling that movies belong to us. Going to the movies was more satisfying than what schools had taught us was art. We responded totally—which often meant contemptuously, wanting more, wanting movies to be better.”

The thing is, I don’t think anybody—whether they write professionally or snark for sport; whether they agonize over their takedowns or proudly make their name on them—expects the target of their criticism to say their name on national television. Kael never said a public word about Adler’s review; Justin Long took me to task on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.

That night, last month, when I couldn’t sleep—I finally did, but only briefly, and was up an hour before I needed to be, checking my email. In my email was news of Twitter followers I had acquired overnight, so I checked them too. Here was the last thing the first one had written: “Up way too late, watching Justin Long call out Michelle Orange from Movie Line about her Going The Distance review on Jimmy Fallon.”

After a few moments staring at the screen I tapped NBC.com into a tab, finding two short clips of Long from the previous night’s show. I watched one—nothing—and then the other, and just when I was sure there had been a mistake, Long began roll calling his films, reaping applause after each one. He checks himself for pandering, and Jimmy Fallon cracks, “Wait until Michelle Orange sees this and writes about it.” A big laugh goes up, as if the joke is understood. I sat suspended for a few seconds and then closed the tab in horror, put my clothes on and ran out the door, as though my laptop had been compromised and was about to detonate. Eight hours and three films later it was easy to convince myself that what I saw was actually a fragment of the dream I thought I had foregone between 6 and 7 am.

People began writing to congratulate me, though, which was as alarming as anything else, and Movieline wrote up the incident, helpfully transcribing it in full so I wouldn’t have to watch it myself. Long details his policy about not reading reviews, then how he broke it with Going the Distance only to find one that “was so bad it set the bar […] for insults.”

When Renata Adler was forced out of the New Yorker after her unsparing 2000 memoir of her years there set a new bar for workplace recrimination, she began teaching at Boston University. Her axiom about working critics is very similar to the one I have heard many of my writers friends apply to the teaching racket: after a few years there’s simply nothing left to give, and then the students start to take, often in the form of writing mean shit about your freeloading, bird-dogging ass on RateMyProfessor.com. But we all have to make a living, don’t we, and then find a way to live with it; short stories, travel essays, and even book contracts stopped paying the bills about 20 years ago. When my writer friends call me a film critic I ask them how they would feel if I introduced them as a copy editor, or an SAT tutor, or whatever they do to make ends meet. Sometimes they get it, sometimes they look at me like I’m even crazier than they had already confirmed me to be, but God help me I just can’t relate to that characterization.

Constitutionally I resist categories of every sort—they make it easier for other people to turn away from you, to not face you in full. The bigger problem is that I am feeling weary and a little afraid, because there was no point when I actually decided that this was going to be how I spent a serious portion of my time, and while I know very well how lucky I am to be watching movies and writing for a living, I am also stubborn and procedural enough to object to the situation on those grounds alone. A tension builds up between responsibility and the fear of professional (or, horrors, creative) drift.

When it’s not making me feel like a baby that tension seems like a distinctly adult affliction, and not limited to any one ambition: How much control can we reasonably expect to exert over our lives, or the way our actions affect other lives? Can you practice criticism and still shy away from being defined by it? Ms. Sontag, take it away: Seligman said Sontag only wrote about art she intended to praise or elevate, and hated being called a critic. Kael, on the other hand, embraced the title, and  “was happy in the role of evaluator, and evaluation is how she got to insight.” At the risk of aligning myself with greatness (polite pause), I tend to alternate between the two sensibilities. Given my head and a sizable annuity, I would only turn from my own ideas when someone else’s commanded me to; that said it would be an impulse I couldn’t ignore.

Then again, the task-oriented, deeply professional part of me is fulfilled by nailing my response to a film or book to the table. In the moment I feel no compunction about anything but getting it right, which is its own satisfaction. The second part is finite and expendable, I am finding, while the first will go only when I do. Am I a critic? Certainty #1: I am a writer who needs to make a living and is allergic to half-assing, which means if I have to write about your bad movie, you better duck and cover. Certainty #2: I worry more about what I do than how I do it. I don’t know if I’m really that busted up about hurting an actor’s feelings, although, as my colleague Stephanie Zacharek pointed out when I whinged to her about the incident, it can be helpful to remember that they have them.

Before he recited from memory the very sentence that I dithered and fretted over as an example of the way he internalizes negative criticism, Justin Long set the stage: “I actually kind of appreciate this woman—Michelle Orange, wherever you are, at Movieline. I remember it. I remember the quote, and this is word for word.”

I mean, I remember it too, Justin. I do.

***

Rumpus original art by Walter Green.

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My father knew he had a jealous daughter, and I knew he was impervious: the books—and the inner life he cultivated with tremendous discipline—would always win.

Toward the end of my precocious phase—age 25 or so—I took to asking friends and family members the roughly three dozen questions that make up Proust’s famous questionnaire. Face conveniently buried in a hard-bound spiral notebook, I fired off questions I would never have had the nerve to ask without pencil and pretense in hand. With badly feigned disinterest I took down their dearest hopes and laments, their insecurities and  mottos, and somewhere in the middle of those was this: What or who is the greatest love of your life? This was the big one, the kill shot; I could never get it out without a quaver. “Erica,” said my ex-boyfriend. “Susan,” said my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend. “Jason”; “I don’t know”; “My father.” That last one was mine. And my father’s reply? “Literature,” he said simply, without even a courtesy pause.

John Orange and Hanger-On

My most enduring childhood image of my father, an English professor and the most devoted reader this side of an Yemeni madrasa, is of his body laid out in a kind of horizontal prayer position on his bed: two cushions under his neck, thin-socked, kayak-skinny feet crossed at the ankles, and a book propped open above his elbows, 60-watt halo from the bedside table gilding his silhouette. The tableau is framed from a distance because that’s how I usually observed it as a kid—from the hall and then the bedroom door, where I would stand with the patience of a ninja, bored cross-eyed and stubbornly awaiting acknowledgment.

My father was a worthy opponent. After a few minutes I would make incremental moves—slow and silent enough to avoid being ejected outright—toward the bed, where I would perch, then recline, then snoodge closer until my head was right on his shoulder. I’d press my face against his and read along, trying to catch his eyeline and get lost wherever it was he had gone. Eventually I would cede defeat but not surrender, kicking off to get a book of my own and read alongside him. I suspect that pleased him most but he was never one to gloat.

The Young Professor

My father knew he had a jealous daughter, and I knew he was impervious: the books—and the inner life he cultivated with tremendous discipline—would always win. His most cunning move was heading off a lifelong grudge match by teaching me to read when I was three years old. The thing took: a blissful show-off, I loved to recite, and especially liked writing things for my father to read—a neat trick, a backdoor I discovered early. In grade five I won a poetry contest and the prize was a bookstore gift certificate: second to a Snoopy Sno-Cone machine, it was my heart’s desire. I bought a set of children’s classics—The Secret Garden, Black Beauty, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe—and crimped the pages between my fingers with my own ankles x’d at the foot of my bed, my own bedside lamp blazing.

At the end of every school year my father worried out loud that his students, increasingly observed to be approaching higher education as a sort of resume-building formality, had just read their last book. I got the same treatment when I graduated, although I never stopped reading and soon began writing; my neat trick became a knack. I began taking my father’s constant suggestions without the spoonful of sugar, and was introduced to some of my favorite books: The Quincunx, Earthly Powers, Oryx and Crake. Occasionally he’d take mine, though as I got older I stopped sulking when he didn’t add my latest rave to his list—the realization of just how thoroughly better read, in every possible way, my father is than I may ever hope to be humbles me continuously: he’ll catch up to David Foster Wallace when I finally double back to Dostoevsky.

Re-Commencement, Spring '09

This September is the first one in my lifetime, and the first in his past forty years, when my father hasn’t begun a new school year, along with several thousand co-eds, in London, Ontario. His office was cleared out with the dorms this spring, groaning cartons of books and knick-knacks are now displaced in my childhood home’s basement, awaiting a frankly highly unlikely shelf-building initiative. During the spring’s circuit of high profile speeches meant to inspire students just starting out in the world, I thought also of those, like my father, facing a kind of re-commencement, a similar uncertainty—a return to the sock-dropping prospect of freedom, if not free-fall.

“I know that I can retire safely, without feeling lost,” my father told me several years ago, “because all my life I have practiced enjoying my own company.” Friends whose fathers have recently retired tell stories of sudden and plunging depressions, marriages capsizing, foundations imploding when the retiree’s professional persona fell away. But literature, not teaching, is the love of my father’s life, and in a way, just like the kids he shared the staged with at this year’s convocation, he has spent most of his life preparing for this moment.

In recent months his emails have been seeded with uneasy joshes about the future, the loss of a certain status, and an even more certain salary—the word “dotage” has recurred. I know, as I know myself and my own introverted ways, that the line between interiority and withdrawal requires a pitiless referee, and I worried abstractly about my father losing step with his chosen companion—preferring to reminisce about the good old novels, perhaps, or succumbing to a 70-year itch. Then a note arrived: “I have ordered Infinite Jest,” he wrote. “I’ll finally have the time to read it, anyway.” That’s my 67-year-old newly retired father, I thought; the man is unstoppable.

So while my dad will undoubtedly enjoy a suitably itinerant, active retirement, when I think of the coming years I return instead to the image of his long frame in repose, a thousand-page whopper balanced on his chest, concentration radiating from some vigorous, supernal core. I keep him there—I think I always will—because that’s where he’s most content, and where I know he’s safe.

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For the past ten years, Jeff has been taking a photo of himself every day–or having the Canadian cool kids (like Bruce La Bruce and Sloan’s Jay Ferguson) he hangs out with and the famous people he meets through his job (Michael Stipe and Dave Eggers, among many) take the photo for him. He recently had an exhibit of all 3,653 pictures at Toronto’s Contact Festival. Last night Meredith told me the requisite amazing story about Jeff (this one involving meeting his musical hero and the dubious workmanship of Prada pants), and then an equally amazing, much sadder story: last fall Jeff, who’s 36, was diagnosed with cancer.

In recent months Jeff’s daily photo has chronicled the lead-up and recovery from the radical operation he endured to remove a tumor from his sciatic nerve. He also lost the nerve itself, part of his tailbone, and the use of his left leg, below the knee. Viewed along the continuum of what is obviously an extraordinary, eccentric life, the recent photos are both devastating and a powerful inspiration. I urge you to take a look at Jeff’s life, one day at a time, and then read his ongoing diary, along with well-wishes, on his guest book (my favorite detail might be the fact that the surgeon who spent 11 hours rummaging through Jeff’s insides–and accidentally fracturing his pelvis–had Metallica blasting all the way). The rest is obvious: breathe, run, jump–say cheese–and be glad.

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More from the annals of advertising.

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When the news broke that two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, had been arrested in North Korea for illegally entering the country across the Chinese border, my thoughts went quickly to author Hyejin Kim. Ling and Lee were in Northeastern China working on a story about the North Korean women who risk their lives to escape across the border to China, where they often face lives of indentured servitude and the ever-present fear of being outed by the husbands they marry or communities they join and sent back to North Korea.

Hyejin Kim’s first novel, Jia: A Novel of North Korea, is a fictionalized account of just such a journey; it’s a story she heard many times when she was living in Northeastern China, and one of those women in particular inspired Kim, a global affairs scholar and education consultant, to write the book. In 2006 I had the pleasure of working with Hyejin on her manuscript, and was deeply impressed with both the stark lyricism of her prose and humane, urgent approach to her subject. I wanted to talk to her about the release of the book, the situation now, and the clear dangers of trying to get these stories out into the world–Ling and Lee were convicted not only of trespassing but entering the country with the intention of creating a “smear campaign over [a] human rights issue.” Hyejin lives in Singapore, and my phone plan is pretty basic, so we conducted this interview over email.

The Rumpus: We haven’t been in touch since the novel’s release, almost exactly two years ago–what was the experience of publishing the book like for you? Did anything about its reception either in the U.S., Korea, China, or elsewhere surprise you? Has it been translated?

Hyejin Kim: The book is still published only in English. There have been several expressions of interest from publishers and writers who work in other languages. However, I am still waiting for appropriate publishers — publishers who can translate it without any political intentions. I wrote this book to focus on human life in North Korea, not to give a political lesson.

I was invited to some conferences after the book came out and will be attending two writers festivals in upcoming months. The book has been reviewed in a few high-profile magazines, as well as in several online venues. I was glad to see that many readers have indeed taken the book as a human rather than political story. I was told that some schools in the U.S. are using the book in class. In addition, the book has interested a film producer and he would like to make it as a film. I am currently working with him to write a film script based on the book.

Due to the language difference, the book has remained relatively unknown in Asia. Korea is not aware of it yet. The film might be known there earlier than the book.

Rumpus: You based the novel on the life of a North Korean woman you met while you were in Northeastern China who had escaped across the North Korean/Chinese border, and you were very careful about protecting her. Did you choose fiction over non-fiction to tell her story for this reason? Are the two of you still in touch and do you feel comfortable giving us a sense of how she is now and what she thought of the book?

Kim: Ji’a could be any girl in North Korea. Her character has been mixed with several people I have met even though one woman in particular gave me the motivation to start writing about them.

At present, I am not in touch with them. If you can’t help them directly, you’d better not ask them where they are and who they are until they start speaking. Asking about their lives out of curiosity and giving them hope for something you cannot promise can put them in danger of the worst kind. That’s what I learned while I was there.

Rumpus: What is your sense about how the problem of North Korean defectors over that border is being handled? Has it worsened since the time you were there? A recent Washington Post article discussed the particular plight of North Korean women, whom the Chinese government will not recognize as refugees and the North Koreans will treat as criminals if they return. How does China defend its policy toward these escapees?

Kim: The Chinese government has amicable relations with the North Korean government. Recognizing those North Korean defectors as refugees means that they deny or disregard the North Korean authorities. Therefore, the Chinese government avoids involvement with this issue. They know of their existence. The Chinese local governments usually evade this issue and do not want to be involved. When the issue gets attentions from the public (especially from international organizations or from foreign correspondences), the central government can put pressure on the local governments. Then the local governments take some actions. Or due to diplomatic relations between China and North Korea, sometimes those inspections start. So the policies are capricious and depending on the atmosphere North Korean escapees’ lives are affected — they might be dragged back to North Korea or ignored by the public.

Rumpus: The two American reporters who were arrested in North Korea in March were attempting to cover the same story that you told in Jia. First, why has it taken so long for this situation to get the attention it deserves? Can you explain the politics of that border and what has happened there over the past few decades for those who don’t know?

Kim: In some of the places between China and North Korea, it is so easy to cross the border. If you don’t discover North Korean soldiers walking around, you cannot even guess that it could be the border. When I was in Northeast China, there were those kinds of places. You can talk with North Korean soldiers only an arm’s length away. In places where there are no guards, one must observe the utmost care not to accidentally cross. I can imagine how the tragedy happened and what I can say is that I feel sorry to hear the news and they should have been more cautious. I doubt that North Korean soldiers forcefully kidnapped them. Without knowing it those women could have crossed the border or they might have strong professional consciousness as journalists.

I was once held by Chinese police for several hours because I was taking photos of North Korean towns. As I mentioned, the politics of that border are capricious. It depends on diplomatic politics or international relations between North Korea and other countries. If the relations are not good or some issues related to North Korean escapees are in public, monitoring of that border on the North Korean side as well as the Chinese side get more strict. At other times, the policies can be rather lenient. When I was in a border town, taking photos was usually fine. But in this one cast it wasn’t. Due to the sudden order from the central government, they changed their attitudes. In the end, it was fine even though I lost all my film.

Rumpus: What was your reaction to the arrest of the journalists and now their sentencing to twelve years in the notorious North Korean labor camps? What do you think the government is trying to gain and do you have any predictions about the outcome?

Kim: I would be surprised if those journalists are consigned to North Korean labor camps, and I hope that doesn’t happen. They could think that those journalists are good hostages who can use when it is necessary to have negotiations and they can lead dialogue with the US on their own terms. I hope dialogue between the two countries, North Korea and the U.S., on this issue progresses soon.

Rumpus: In Jia you wrote vividly of the devastating famine of the mid-to-late 90s in North Korea, which lead to the starvation deaths of at least one million North Koreans. Poverty and lack of food are still critical issues in that country–could the sanctions being threatened lead to a similar situation and is that even a consideration for the dear leader?

Kim: My understanding is that the famine has enduring effects, even if the worst is over. North Koreans get food from several sources, among them their own harvest, aid from South Korea and elsewhere, as well as from Chinese traders. Certainly cutting off any of that supply would hurt many people. What the North Korean elite think of the situation is anyone’s guess.

Rumpus: President Obama and President Lee of South Korea recently committed to de-nuclearizing the Korean peninsula. Although North Korea was famously included on President Bush’s “axis of evil,” during his tenure they were virtually ignored. Are we paying the price for that now? There is a tendency here to characterize North Korea as our sort of crazy, cartoon enemies with delusions of grandeur–a country that can’t even feed and house its own population but thinks it can rule the world. Do we underestimate them at our peril and how real do you think this nuclear threat is?

Kim: As a South Korean who has family members in South Korea, of course I would like to believe that the nuclear threat is just a threat, or interpret this North Korean action as showing instability within North Korean society.

I don’t think that they hallucinate to the point they believe they can rule the world. It could be the last peevish acts against the world or tactics that they use in order to evade domestic instabilities (or some chaos in North Korean society). The attempt by North Korean Leader Kim Jong Il to name his son as his successor and the disagreement (or complaints) from other North Korean elites could be the reason why Kim Jong Il is conducting missile tests. In addition, a sudden change of attitudes with the new South Korean government and increased conflicts between the two countries could be among the factors. Diplomatic relations between North Korea and other countries seem to be a roller coaster and this ride could last longer but hopefully it will end safely.

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Recently I rewatched a great film by Lynn Shelton called My Effortless Brilliance. I enjoyed it so much the first time that I wanted to show it to all of my friends, ideally while I sat beside them, beaming. I began with one particular friend, and the screening was a success: we laughed, we cringed, we were quietly moved.

When it was over my friend turned to me and said, “That guy, the main character, you know who

My Effortless Brilliance

he reminded me of?” I did, but I didn’t. It had bothered me all the way through the first time, this free-ranging recognition, so when my friend named a mutual acquaintance it was like cannonballing into a pool of bubble wrap: ridiculous, pod-popping satisfaction. He’s someone I’ve met only once, so there are no logical grounds for how deeply I felt the justice of this comparison, which was physical, but not only; it just jived, it was yar, you knew it. It was also as if, simply by way of making the match, my friend and I had become the proprietors of a secret about this person, and a wicked one at that.

Turnabout, let’s call it; secret for secret, anyway. I seem to have one of those faces, see. Perhaps you do too, and you know what I’m talking about. The kind of face people think they know, or have seen before, or can easily conflate with those they have studied more intimately in two dimensions than we can ever hope to in three. Perhaps this isn’t uncommon at all. In fact, in thinking this over, I have imagined most of you reading these words and thinking “Yeah, I get that all the time” (I actually began a random polling which was indeed invariably met with: “Yeah, I get that all the time”) and quickly had to confront the possibility that on some level and to some degree we all somehow suspect we’ve met one another before.

So I—like you, apparently—get this a lot.  Only occasionally do people suggest that we went to camp, or I played on their volleyball team; too rarely have I come to them in a dream. Most often it turns out I am someone, or remind them of someone, they have seen on the big screen, someone whose image or affect or ineffable essence, having refracted and settled into some deep and murky but primordial quadrant of their memory, I have stirred and called to the fore. With strangers the conviction that attends the culmination of this process is particularly hard to overturn.

A few weeks ago I was on the subway when a jumpy man asked me if our train went to Queensborough Plaza. I told him that it did and we both relaxed a little in our seats; one more of life’s problems solved. Another issue quickly presented itself, however, and the nervous man leaned forward again, turning to me with the words that have come to fire a sort of ontological dread in my belly: “Where have I seen you before?”

Lest you think this gentleman had any sort of design on his seatmate, let me assure you that the ratio of women to men who hit me with this big one is almost equal, and in fact skews slightly female. “Have I seen you before?” he repeated, and I said, no, I didn’t think so. “Yeah, you’re that woman, you were in that movie.” “I’m not, I wasn’t, I promise,” I said. “Are you sure?” he pressed, looking truly perplexed. This time I couldn’t help him.

Am I sure? Too often, when I meet someone new, somewhere in the first few minutes they will get a sort of far-off, foggy look in their eyes while I’m discoursing on some godforsaken thing or other. I have learned to recognize this look not as crashing boredom (though I can spot that too, thank you) but the prelude to my least favorite how-do-you-do. It comes in several variations: Who do you look like? Do you know who you look like? Who do you remind me of? Do I know you? Where have I seen you before? The following details my attempt to get a grip on these questions and why they began to annoy, sadden, and then just thoroughly wig me out.

Let’s start with the Greeks; them or Larry King. “Perception is reality,” the latter is fond of saying, and under that rubric, might we in fact be the amalgams of different faces and performances people impulsively map onto us and might that not in fact be the best way we can hope to be known, if we are to be known at all? A brief equation inspired by Mr. King’s classical aphorism: the essential unknowability of other people times one of the best resorts we have found in the face of that predicament—the movies—equals the intense psychological and aesthetic intimacies we develop with the images and individuals we spend so much time watching more freely, closely, nakedly than we can ever watch each other. That is to say, without being watched back.

Film in particular has become so much a part of how we absorb and organize the world, in fact, that I would argue that the mapping/comparative impulse is not a matter of art imitating life or vice versa, but art mutating into life, then setting off a series of elaborate and ultimately inextricable counter-mutations. It was like a movie, a movie was like it–who can tell anymore? I wonder, if one were to empty out a brain and divvy up its critical, alpha chip signifiers–this is a woman, this is a man; this is repulsion, this is beauty; this is how a kiss goes, this is how you die; this is running for your life, this is walking down a city street all exhilarated and shit–how many of them would come straight from the movies, how many from lived experience, and how many from some unholy genome splicing of the two which becomes less an image or a visual phrase than a funny feeling in the old tummy. I imagine most of us would prefer the second pile to be the biggest but that’s just not the world/perception/reality we live in; the moving image changed so much more than the way we spend our rainy Sundays. Sometimes I worry that I’m actually most alive at the movies, and that that predicament is why we can’t help but see them everywhere we go, and in everyone we meet.

In Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind, Jack Black’s character destroys the

Be Kind Rewind

inventory of a video store, then attempts to restock it with homemade versions in which he stars. His partner, played by Mos Def, says the customers will know these films are fake, they won’t be fooled, but Black doesn’t see why: “Maybe I am in Ghostbusters,” he says. Maybe we all are, Gondry suggests; maybe the act of watching a film not only completes but activates it, triggering a sort of psycho-sentient osmosis, opening a channel that allows a part of us to join the film and a part of the film to join us. Watching Before Sunrise a decade after I first saw it I was struck by the feeling of having left a part of my 20-year-old self somewhere within it, I could almost recognize her lurking between the euro-trains, behind the cobblestone alleys, in the fresh faces of the actors themselves. Maybe I am in Before Sunrise.

When someone else does the recognizing, of course, it gets trickier, by virtue of both engaging their own multi-mapped, memory-banked viewing experiences and raising one of the most critical questions one human being can ask another: What is it you see when you look at me?

Consider the overlap between the way we normals and the actual famous people field that question, and the psychic fallout it entails.  Sasha Grey calls watching herself have sex onscreen surreal. “I don’t feel like it’s me,” she says, “It’s just a weird feeling that’s hard to describe.” In a scene early in Don’t Look Back, the young Bob Dylan laughs uneasily over a newspaper’s claim that he smokes 80 cigarettes a day. “I’m glad I’m not him,” he says.

Forty years later, in a 2004 interview, Dylan talked about the kind of interaction that keeps him from going out in public. “People will say, ‘Are you who I think you are?’” Dylan said. “And you’ll say, ‘Ahh, I don’t know.’ And they’ll say, ‘You’re, you’re him,’ and you’ll say, ‘Okay, yes?’ And then the next thing is, ‘Oh, no. Are you really him? I don’t think you’re him.’ And that can go on and on.”

Susan Strasberg used to tell a story about walking around New York with an incognito-in-plain-sight Marilyn Monroe. “Do you want to see me be her?” Monroe would say, and Strasberg describes the star turning on some imperceptible inner switch, then beginning to glow. Within moments the people who had been passing right by were stopping in their tracks, scrambling for pen and paper.

Of course creating distance between person and persona is common among people whose faces and bodies and voices become commodoties, if sometimes confusing for the public picking up the tab. And of course normals have personas too, themselves often in part constructed out of the personas they have watched and admired on screen, though we all want to be recognized, especially at parties where boys are present, as sovereign creations: Nobody wants to be unoriginal, or a type, or a screen of such accommodating blankness that pretty much anyone from Bea Arthur to a cartoon cat can be projected onto it. But also who needs their benign social interactions to segue without warning into not just an inappropriately intense eyeballing but a weirdly potent subordination of their individuality?

There was a point, two years ago, when I finally lost my patience. I was speaking with two gentlemen at a very civilized gathering in a lovely home where I knew only the hosts. One of them, a money guy, got the foggy look in his eyes: “Who do you…Who does she…Where have I…” I told him that I hated this game and it never ended well, but he wrangled three more people to surround me, bouncing ideas and shouting nominees like Scattergory clues. I followed what I’m pretty sure is the advised strategy for a bear attack: keep still, don’t make eye contact, and wait for it to be over. Unsatisfied, he actually left the room to seek out the host’s computer, so he might google and put his mind at ease. He gathered his team around the monitor in the other room, where they deliberated after he finally located the actress he had in mind. None of them noticed when I got my coat from the closet behind them and walked out the door.

This bothered me for a long time. I complained bitterly about it to my dad, who seems to have one of those faces as well. All while I was growing up, people told me whom my dad looked like, variations on the dark and handsome theme; he just looked like my dad to me. But then it happened: I was 13 or 14 and saw my first Jimmy Stewart movie, The Philadelphia Story. “Dad!” I said. “That’s you!” You’re crazy, he said. “Don’t you see it? Don’t people tell you that?” I recognize his bafflement now, though I’ll be damned if I’m wrong about Jimmy Stewart. Especially in profile. (It still happens: Last Christmas he got it from the checkout lady at the A&P. “Who do you look like?” she said. “You look like that actor…” “Abe Vigoda?” I volunteered. “No,” she frowned, hard.)

My dad told me not to take it so hard, that people sometimes fumble when they’re trying to make frivolous social contact. I can understand that—I am that—and this is not that. Writing such a scenario off as a clumsy attempt at connection is not a misplaced generosity but a misunderstanding. Generosity might grope for some understanding of the impulse we humans have, when confronted with something perfectly ordinary and frankly terrifying—a new human being—to “solve” them, contain them in some satisfying way, avoid looking further into yet another wild abyss. In other words it’s the avoidance of connection, which I believe, dear internet reader, you might be familiar with.

When it comes to strangers on trains and pleased-to-meet-you’s at parties, I have made the above, slightly strenuous philosophical peace with the Compare and Conquer. But those who know me well–friends, boyfriends, health professionals–aren’t much better, regularly telling me of faces and performances that sent up flags of familiarity for them. I’m still working on that one. I tried to list all of the names I have heard, and stopped at 16, with one woman by far the front-runner. The others, however, when considered in a gallery-like format, share almost no distinguishing characteristics, save their utter, abiding whiteness. I feel oppressed by the spectrum; it makes me feel lonely, the opposite of known.  In any case they always seem to be telling me something important, so occasionally I have watched these unlikely women, trying to see what my friends see, but it’s impossible. It’s most impossible, in fact, when I actually do see myself, briefly, in a laugh, or a look, or a pointy nose. It’s just a weird feeling that’s hard to describe.

You tell me.

Last week, while perusing the Feminist Art exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum I came across what I perceived to be a stone cut-out of a penis from the 3rd century BCE. The writing on the wall, however, described a figure of a seated woman, perhaps with a harp or cello propped between her legs. I pulled my friend over. “What do you see?” I asked. “A penis,” she said. “Exactly. A penis. Thank you.” Then we left and my friend cooed over a dog that I would bet money was bred for maximum ugliness per square inch. I couldn’t see it. Maybe if I had been raised with them, like her, I could. In the world of dog-owning, I hear, what owners hope to see most in their pets, consciously or unconsciously, is some part themselves. And in the context of a Feminist Exhibit, a five thousand year old icon of a penis becomes a squatting goddess.

The previous week I had left the supermarket feeling low after starting a fight between two stock boys: one was apparently defending the honor of the former child star his colleague had somehow seen in me as I was pricing strawberries. I became aware of the conflict when a shiny, gelled head peeked out from around the pasta display for a second look, then ducked back behind. “Naw, man, are you crazy? That’s my girl, that’s my chica!” he boomed. The other one stood his ground, hollering back. It was as though I wasn’t there at all.

Soon after the spaghetti aisle incident I saw The Girlfriend Experience, Steven Soderbergh’s new film. Film critic Glenn Kenny has a small part in the film, and while I have met Glenn several times and had a few friendly exchanges, it was not until I watched him on a giant screen, in the dark, in that uniquely uninhibited way, that I realized how profoundly he reminds me of another friend, a much closer friend. They look not a bit alike, and of course Glenn was playing a character, if one that didn’t require a makeover or a funny accent; on screen he captured not the image or personality of my friend but the feeling. I can’t tell you how satisfying that two-toned ring of alarm and recognition was, that proud little thrill of affirmation: There he is! He lives!

That night I came home to an email from a different friend who said he had just seen a film whose lead actress really reminded him of me. He wouldn’t tell me her name, though, or the nature of the role, aware of my long history of being driven bananas by such things but “also because I fear that you might be like, ‘her?! me?!?! NO WAY!’ and then get mad at me.” I didn’t press, and I didn’t get mad. I don’t think I would have even if he’d told me; for the first time it actually made me feel kind of good. She lives!

Yesterday I stepped into my local library, and the security guard began to laugh when she saw me coming—not that unusual, I admit. But she was still smiling when she waved away my dutifully opened bag. “Did you forget something?” she asked, then looked me right in the face. The security guard thought she knew me—had just seen me. I winked at her and slipped inside.

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