Included in the American writer Ann Rower’s newly expanded edition of If You’re a Girl (Semiotext(e), 2024) she writes about Taylor Swift’s 2020 song “The Lakes.” A mid-tempo ballad commended for its lyrical introspection, the record’s somber mood is embellished by the record’s sleeve cover—a black and white photo of a dark-haired woman walking down a path into a foggy distance. “Take me to the lakes where all the poets go to die,” Swift sings, as if foreshadowing her fixation on troubadours in her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department.
“Suddenly I find myself plunged into some new kind of deep almost bottomless grief,” writes Rower in response to listening to Swift’s song. But there’s an infatuation at play too: At 86, Ann Rower self-proclaims that she is the “world’s oldest ‘Swiftie” (a term she learns from her physical therapist). The bottomless grief that she refers to is a result of a life stricken with a proximity to mental illness, the pains of womanhood, and the unfortunate fates of some of those closest to her. Despite the allure of melancholic pop and the raw emotions that lie within its pages, there is much joy to be found in If You’re A Girl, the result of a well-lived and well-written long life.
Ann Rower was 53 when she made her literary debut with this collection of personal essays and stories. Initially published by Semiotext(e) in 1991 as the first entry of their Native Agents series that platformed women in an overly male literary landscape, If You’re a Girl captured the spit and vinegar of mid-late twentieth-century female bohemia. For Chris Kraus, her editor and champion, Rower was more than just a great writer, she was also a “powerful influence.” Rower truly rubbed shoulders with some of the greats throughout her time, not to mention going to music and theater camp with Francis ‘Francie’ Ford Coppola in her earlier life. Her relationships with creative heroes and heroines gave her excellent material for her inaugural iteration of If You’re A Girl. Her energy from the 90s comes through her myriad recollections of a fast-paced life in New York City, at times even crediting the city for her friends’ various mental breaks, “He said it was from being in New York, the excitement I guess, you know like on that program about herpes and how it said sometimes a very good fuck will bring on an attack,” she doesn’t run from it though, she immerses herself and writes from it like a true artist.
It would be easy to shelve Rower’s work under “autofiction.” Certainly, the pieces collected in this expanded edition of If You’re a Girl fall into the literary canon of confessional female memoir writing: stories about lovers, about friends (some famous), about New York, are all present. She even puts forward the idea for a ‘transfiction’ in her 1990 essay of the same name, in which a spiritual creative force higher than ourselves uses our bodies as a vessel to write through us. “I think you always fall in love with the voices you’re transcribing,” Rower writes, and I can certainly see where she’s coming from. Yet, so too could one call Rower an engrossing chronicler. As Sheila Heti notes in her introduction, Rower was so alive for the many great American moments she passed through (“like a Forrest Gump or a Zelig”). It’s one delight to read the confessions of an octogenarian Swiftie, it’s another to enjoy Rower’s memories of Timothy Leary (as his babysitter and later as a participant in his LSD experiments) and her friendship with Cookie Mueller, “it was really my honor to know her all those wonderful and, in the end, terrible, disease-filled years.” Though she is not one to be swayed by someone’s fame or to rose-tint her glasses, she is as honest about Timothy Leary as she is about her personal trainer— “Leary struck me as an asshole, such a jerk,”—and much more scathing towards the former.
Rower’s close relationship to Kraus are highlighted by the book’s inclusion of their editorial notes that give readers a peek into a process seldom seen or acknowledged. “I love editing,” Rower writes, “because editing is a kind of writing.” She lets us sit in with her and Kraus as they affirm the text, using parentheses at times to break the fourth wall, “(Oops, I did it again!)” and bringing us behind the scenes, so to speak, on the writer-editor dialog: “I was going to end the foreword, the stories of the stories, with that…” There are even times when she addresses Kraus directly: “Oh, Chris, I am so looking forward to our new adventure.”
The unexpected pleasure of this rapport—intimate engaging, and spanning decades—is what singles out this relaunch from the standard reissue. Not only is this a cause celebre of the book’s return, but also of Rower’s, who stopped writing for decades after the death of her partner, Heather Lewis. Their fractured relationship seems to color all of Rower’s stories in one way or another. In response to Lewis’s suicide, Rower removes the kidgloves when discussing abuse, alcoholism, mental illness, and breakdowns, all of which were still taboo when If You’re a Girl first appeared. Her language indicates a familiarity and understanding of these conditions, referring to Lewis as “slipping away,” something that she recognized in reason but emotionally despised: “I became furious at her for ruining my life and sank into a deep clinical depression which transformed me into a zombie.”
After If You’re a Girl was first published, Rower went on to write two novels: Armed Response (1995) and Lee & Elaine (2002) (of which extracts appear in this collection) before capping the pen altogether. By returning to this collection, and adding to it stories from her life in New York as an older woman, a project of healing emerges. But what can also be appreciated from this collection spanning nearly forty years is Rower’s ability to remain alive through it all. A youthful outlook and humor is visible throughout all of her work, and she can be playfully scathing toward some of her subjects, mainly men, “a six-foot-two slender imp of a therapist,” and she can be completely shameless about her decades-long crushes, particularly Eileen Myles, “who was Irish and lesbian and one of my favorite writers, and, I thought, very sexy.”
Her candidness empowers her writing, with some of her best passages coming from gleefully unusual sources: like the story of Rower’s elderly aunt being given a bikini wax by a young male carer, whereby he finds himself “eye to eye with an old gal’s vagina which opened up as he pulled the wax strips back, like the surface of a distant planet in some galaxy on the nightly news and he was no astronaut.” But this isn’t just a trait that has emerged in old age, these kinds of visceral descriptions are featured in her 1991 texts too, especially when writing about the erotic.
It’s curious then that Rower occasionally feels self-conscious about her subjects: “to legitimate my obsession,” she writes, “I say I’m writing a story about it.” She admits that her tangential rambling is kind of embarrassing at times, and discloses, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’ve completely lost my filter. If I ever had one.” Whether her humor, increasingly obscene in her later period, has been a way to deal with a history of personal hardship, she leaves the reader laughing along with her.
A spiritual lightheartedness has been her tether. Learning later in life about yoga and her energetic centers—her “chakra, tantra, mantra, sound, breath, rhythm, karma sutra”—the cheeky way in which she processes grief begins to make sense. It’s relatable and humane. Beneath the raconteur is a writer telling you the story of her hopes for survival and the love she discovered toward herself as she achieved it.
