How a Woman Remembers

I’m not good at remembering.

It’s a strange thing to admit, because B is in constant wonder at the things I can remember, at the startling amount of detail. I have an almost photographic memory — if I do remember something, I remember what I was wearing, what you were wearing, what direction I was facing, where my hands were, how the sun was falling, what the inside of my mouth tasted like.

I’m not talking about that kind of memory. I’m talking about the narrative kind. The kind that tells a life, step by step. First this happened, and then that.

I think this  is a big part of the reason I was drawn toward poetry. Poetry is more to do with that first kind of memory — the exact feeling of something, that one moment. You don’t have to tell the reader the timeline. Or rather, poetry’s timelines operate more like my internal ones do — in flashes of moments.

Another way to say it is that I’m good at forgetting. They say that a memory is formed when you replay it again and again in your mind. I don’t like to look backwards, and when I do, I feel like reality becomes less real. I get sucked all the way under the surface of the thing, and coming back out makes me wonder if I’m dreaming.

I came across this weird thing this week that is such old news by now. I live in Korea, so sometimes I don’t hear about things. I mostly consider that to be a good thing. Where to begin? This young woman who called herself Marie Calloway wrote stories about sex and took photos of herself in various states of undress, etc., and posted them to her Tumblr and Thought Catalog. Big news, right? She got in touch with Tao Lin, who is such a tired cliche of a little man that I don’t even have the energy to get into it, and started spamming him with her work, which he rejected until she sent a story about a somewhat ‘big deal’ New York writer (and one of a school that Lin seems to oppose, because thinking and caring is bad, or whatever) cheating on his girlfriend with her. Then, this woman was suddenly brilliant and Lin wanted to publish her. Which I’m sure was because he suddenly thought she was brilliant and not at all because he was aware the traffic the unleashed scandal would send to his site.

And so he published it. By that, I mean he posted it on his website.

And there was all kinds of fallout and lots of people clicking on lots of links.

That’s not what I care about. What I care about was the explanation (ie, defense) Lin came up with for why he thought this story was worthwhile. And it’s so funny, because it’s Lin — a man — deciding it, but he said her work was a new form that exemplified feminine subjectivity.

Because that’s what women’s writing was really lacking before, when they weren’t talking about being nervous and insecure about having sex with an older man. Emily Dickinson, Joan Didion, Eileen Myles… I could go on and on and on. But those weren’t enough of what Lin wanted to consider feminine subjectivity to count, according to Lin, who is definitely the person who should be in charge of determining these things, according to Lin.

I don’t remember what the specific thing I did was that made B say it, one bright late morning standing at the Bupyeong-bound bus station, facing east, me wearing a loose, long-sleeved charcoal-colored dress belted at the waist, him standing to my right, me facing the street, him facing me. My hair was up, and it was late enough in our early relationship that I thought it wasn’t early in the relationship anymore. I don’t remember where we were going. But he said something I did was “like a man.” And I told him that anything I did was like a woman, because I was a woman and I was doing it.

The woman who called herself Marie has disappeared now, all chewed up and spat out by the literary movement run by men who occasionally allow women who act and write like they think women should act and write into the clubhouse, as long as they abide by clubhouse rules. By the end, it seemed Marie was fully aware of what had transpired, and I have to give her version of feminine subjectivity credit for that. I figured that out not by reading the hundreds of articles and opinions that left a trail all over the internet in the aftermath of the publication, but by reading interviews with Marie — her own words.

If you want to know more about feminine subjectivity, read female writers. Read a lot of them. Because the very definition of subjectivity is that it is subjective, and there are as many versions of feminine subjectivity as there are females. There are as many versions of feminine subjectivity as there are masculine, in fact. And thank god for that.