Nonetheless, she does not ask to be loved; like Jane Eyre she demands it, and she doesn’t question her due as a person stumbling through a bewildering world. Her tear-filled imperative—love me—is fraught with the barbs of growing pains, but it is assertive. It is, moreover, analogous to what she asks of herself.
For the first time Ramona looked into her very own mirror in her very own room. She saw a stranger, a girl with red eyes and a puffy, tearstained face, who did not look at all the way Ramona pictured herself. Ramona thought of herself as the kind of girl everyone should like, but this girl…
Ramona scowled, and the girl scowled back. Ramona managed a small smile. So did the girl. Ramona felt better. She wanted the girl in the mirror to like her.23
This moment of self-recognition follows on the heels of a furious outburst at school, where Ramona, upon realizing the horrid Susan has copied her artwork, destroys it and her own as well. Ramona’s young sense of self turns on the conviction that she is inimitable: consequently, Susan’s offense—the illegitimate invocation of sameness—stirs in Ramona an aversion so extreme as to be indecipherable, especially to adults like Mrs. Griggs. But Ramona does not always attempt to explain, to usher along those who cannot easily empathize with her decisions. After all, for the duration of Ramona the Brave, she is only six years old, and she assumes, in confident hastiness, that even if she is misunderstood, she need not account for herself.
Because exuberant little girls are so often compelled to demystify their emotions and the behaviors motivated by them, Ramona’s tendency to act and then delay the debriefing satisfies our ache of recognition. Yet, as Ramona peers at her reflection, damp and flush, it’s clear that she is rarely served well by this approach. Too Much little girls like Ramona, the fortunate ones, anyway, learn a flinty lesson—that their self-preservation demands near-saintly patience with a world disinclined to accommodate them. Cleary’s heroine must learn how to negotiate with the Griggses of the world, who would prefer it if she returned to her seat, folded her hands, and emulated the youthful femininity of her sister, Beezus, and even the dreaded Susan. Ramona’s first duty is to the little girl in the mirror, and Cleary suggests that she will, as she grows older, devise ways to live in the brash, loud way she relishes—in the way that feels truest—without always being so handily diminished. But she will struggle in this endeavor. There is never a guarantee that Ramona the Brave—the Ramona who demands every day to exist according to her own metrics, whose dedication to self-honesty will not permit her to behave as anything other than her instinctual self—will ever be regarded as anything but a pest.
To this day, a little girl’s too muchness is not a right, but a privileged exception typically reserved for white, able-bodied heroines. Ramona Quimby remains an exemplar of young, girlish empowerment not only because of Cleary’s literary perceptiveness, but also because the ranks of Too Much girls have hardly thickened, even if the atmosphere has softened. We no longer languish beneath the oppressive virtue of a thousand Simple Susans, thank goodness. We’ve slogged to the lip of Wonderland’s inhospitable terrain, in which Lewis Carroll’s Alice—adventuresome, inquisitive, but ultimately marked by authorial neuroses—ambles through a punishing world devised to clip at her fluctuating body. Nor do our heroines suffer like young Jane Eyre when they screw their courage to the sticking place and speak truth to power. From her first years at Hogwarts, J. K. Rowling’s famous heroine, Hermione Granger—intellectually nimble, earnest without apology, and rarely intimidated—demands attention from even her most bullying professors. She raises her hand in class whenever she knows the answer (she always knows the answer), and the series’ titular hero, Harry Potter, would be royally fucked a dozen times over without Hermione’s steady guidance, which, of course, Harry and Ron bemoan as bossiness.
Charlotte Brontë’s heroines, sometimes churlish, but stridently devoted to a trusted few, are granted—perhaps unexpectedly—an emotional afterlife in Katniss Everdeen of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy. An arrow-slinging misanthrope, she, like Jane Eyre and Hermione, would sooner sacrifice herself than submit those she loves to suffering. After all, Katniss loves so few people. She is flinty and withholding, Lucy Snowe—the tricksy, taciturn heroine of Brontë’s Villette—as a dystopian action hero, and Collins doesn’t shield her young readers from the scorch of trauma that sears brain and body like a torch blazing in her abdomen. Of the contemporary young heroines we know best, Katniss supplies evidence that little girls in pain can still be warriors—that, indeed, they may be the ones to save us.
These are formidable characters, but they nonetheless comprise paltry offerings. Disney, the same animation behemoth that offered us Cinderella, Snow White, and even Alice in Wonderland, together with Pixar, brought us the aforementioned Merida, who, unlike her fellow champion Mulan, doesn’t pursue conventionally masculine pursuits as an extreme means to an end. On the contrary, she heaves against the strictures imposed upon a Scottish princess and prefers wild adventures with her bow and arrow—the weapon of choice, it seems, for the atypical female character who is still intended to attract readers and audiences with her grace and beauty. Merida’s too muchness is signified in the film by her ebullient and meandering red curls, but even Anne Shirley would have resigned herself to life as a redhead if she had such a wealth of sinuous locks. By far, Moana is the studio’s greatest achievement, and the most trenchant marker of its evolution, with a courageous, keen, and splendidly silly titular character who flourishes throughout her coming-of-age hero’s journey. In fact, before Moana embarks on her sea voyage, she is trained carefully by her parents to inherit rule of the Polynesian island without the explicit support of a companion. There is no dispute over Moana’s gender presentation: the film’s central interpersonal conflict resides in her desire for a more expansive life than the one she’s offered: she is yet another precocious, bighearted girl who wants too much and cannot resist the tidal pull of exploration.
And as for characters like Arya Stark, from George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, or Eleven from Netflix’s Stranger Things, they are little girls who are not precisely written for children—of course, neither was Jane Eyre. Maisie Williams’s interpretation of Arya, angry but maniacally focused, is revelatory, but HBO’s adaptation of Martin’s novel would be difficult to digest for young girls (it would have been—and still is—for me, anyway). But these characters have been brought into the fold; they are there, waiting, when today’s little girls search beyond Hermione and Ramona and Moana. They await together with Jane, plain-faced and stouthearted, seething in the gnarled face of injustice. And when they encounter Eleven, whose bounteous power surges from her wellspring of emotion—in marked contrast with Alice, who suffers in a deluge born from her tear ducts—perhaps they will not say, as we did, “Thank goodness.” As Wonderland recedes into the distance—its punishing and confounding landscape melting at the horizon—the view brightens, and what we are owed becomes ever clearer. Perhaps instead they will nod and remark, “Of course.”
Chapter Three
Nerve
My mother might have told you that my too muchness blossomed inside her womb, within the thump-thump-thump of my fledgling heart. While she was in labor with me, toiling to bring me into the world, I was preoccupied with staying out of it, thank you very much. In fact, my determination was such that the doctor resorted to using forceps, at last dragging me into the hospital room’s antiseptic cool and away from the safe, wet warmth of maternity. I would never be as close to Mom again; thankfully, my instinct to withdraw from waking life dissipated with exposure.
So it came to pass: I was, after much protest, born.
I like this story because it so precisely adheres to the cliché of the difficult and neurotic child whose disposition manifests from the absolute start—when she revolts against vacating the cozy womb: the one who knows in some ineffable, visceral way that nothing could possibly improve by exiting a temperature-controlled chamber in which all of her b
asic needs were met, and where she was bathed in an embrace, utterly surrounded by the body that loved her best.
But I also consider it a fitting metaphor for what has long felt to me like a physiological incompatibility with the world. Maybe I sensed it: my tiny limbs buzzing with alarm, head crackling in confusion. From the very start, I was a problem, an agitated little body requiring extraction by hardware. This world wouldn’t know what to do with me, nor I with it. Regardless, this whole enterprise of being born was sure to be a catastrophe.
And at first, it was. I screamed and wailed relentlessly, as if tormented by some obscure demon, distraught by the mere fact of being in the world. According to my parents, they finally resorted to a practice of driving me throughout the night, meandering in a weary circuit through the streets of Durham, North Carolina, silence and motion the only things that could subdue me. If either Mom or Dad uttered so much as a word, I began to cry again.
By adolescence, I had acclimated somewhat to my existence, but in the meantime had accumulated a bundle of neuroses and obsessive-compulsive habits. Mom often likened me to Anne Shirley of the Edwardian series Anne of Green Gables—a compliment, mostly, because she wanted to encourage the pleasure I took in writing and in fanciful games. I suppose the comparison was apt enough, if Anne also balked at the thought of leaving her room without ensuring, five separate times, that her Walkman remained precisely where she had deposited it. There was, everywhere, so much possibility for error—accident—disaster! It was imperative that I attend to the minutest details of the everyday, lest my wobbly, fear-filled life collapse. I checked the inside of my locker multiple times to ensure my books were there—and then passed the night fretting that, somehow, they weren’t. If a teacher awarded our class the coveted gift of “no homework,” I would confirm the news with them multiple times before departing the classroom. (Anne would have done this, I bet.) I harbored an obsession for patterns of all sorts. It was not just desirable, but cosmically imperative, that my report card never bear the shame of a scarlet “B” (I was forced to become more lax in high school, when my brain explained, with weeping exhaustion, that it could accommodate neither calculus nor chemistry). I still cried habitually, but, at the very least, I had some idea why.
This much seems like honest inheritance. Everyone in my immediate family is stridently Type-A, and we all nurture our respective eccentricities like rose gardens. My mother, a kindred spirit in galactic feeling and perfectionism, was convinced that our bannister was crooked by three sixteenths of an inch. When, years ago, she fretted that new wallpaper had been applied unevenly to the dining room walls, she stationed herself across from the offending portion and stared it down like a tiger, chasing truth with her canny eyes (merely taking measurements was insufficient; she required optical verification too). Her sensitivity, like mine, was steep: she was the sort of person who felt the world in her bones, whose empathy at times seemed unsafe—though, as I am learning, that’s the point of empathy in the first place. She cried during maudlin commercials, throughout Bambi, and when, in the 1985 film series, Matthew Cuthbert dies in Anne’s arms, out in the fields of Green Gables. She wept bitterly for the baby bird she discovered in our backyard, pecked brutally to death by a blue jay, and for Ginger in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), which we both read and then watched—habitually—when the 1994 film adaptation was released on VHS. When, in 1994, newspapers broke the story of Susan Smith drowning her two young sons, she was inconsolable for days. If my younger sisters or I angered her—and we were quite adept at this—Mom’s volcanic yelling gave way to thick, red-faced sobs.
I was rarely privy to Mom’s marital frustrations—to my knowledge they were infrequent—but I knew that her approach to solving them involved a degree of self-policing. Our household was calibrated according to our father’s preferences for engagement. If we were upset over some domestic or interpersonal matter, it only made matters worse to approach him in tears. Recognizing Dad’s disinclination to meet with unbridled distress, Mom—who absorbed her daughters’ schoolday strifes and waded into the quagmires of homeownership—trained herself to wait until her upset dissipated and, instead, approached him in the calm aftermath. She admonished me to follow suit, and we both did our best. If I misbehaved and was punished, I learned not to attempt an emotional plea in the moment. Instead, I took to leaving letters on Dad’s pillow when I wanted to apologize for some trespass—and to negotiate my punishment—but was too intimidated to ask him directly. Dad always mitigated my sentence. He helmed a conventionally patriarchal household, but was kind-hearted in the face of my pleas for reduced sentences (“no television for a week” became “no television until the weekend”). As for Mom, I couldn’t imagine anyone meeting her tenderness with flinty chill, least of all the person who was so in love with her. When she spoke, he listened with careful appreciation. They were, I believe, as happy as two people could be.
My father never asked us to comport ourselves with his own characteristic placidity, nor did he explicitly demand stoicism; we only saw how highly he revered it and adjusted our behavior accordingly. This protocol was largely the result of unspoken deduction. It most often fell to me—or so I thought—to wrangle my too muchness before approaching Dad, whether I was in shambles over my algebra homework or because he had denied my request to see a PG-13-rated film. Had Mom not imparted it to me, I still would have divined this familial covenant. After all, she was my template. In all the years she lived, I observed her careful self-monitoring: withdrawing to an unoccupied room to sob through some affliction, shushing an impassioned conversation into the ether as soon as the door to Dad’s parking spot in the garage grumbled its ascent.
Our too muchness, as I understood it, was an obstruction to familial harmony, rather than a disposition entitled to empathy, and it was our responsibility to tame the beasts that made us wild. As a family, we were imbued by the larger cultural organizing principle that instructs men to both model and reward shows of emotional reserve and admonishes against too muchness. Throughout her life, Mom must have been taught this—that her lavishness of feeling was shameful, and that she ought to be grateful when it was tolerated. I bore witness as she crammed herself into more seemly boxes, and tried to emulate her efforts. I ached for the both of us.
Eventually, I arrived at a striking realization: for someone like my mother, the world brimmed with emotional hazards. Years later, when I read George Eliot’s Middlemarch, I wondered to what extent she had been afforded the sort of emotional protection presumed fundamental to a happy life:
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.1
She died before I thought to ask: Did the world seem to roar inside you, Mom? I’m merely left with my own experience of empathy, which I smugly consider one of my better qualities until I remember her compassion: it flowed from a wellspring deeper and more bountiful than my own. She was happy, often cheery, but the world’s sorrows and joys and fears filtered through her like rainwater frizzled with electricity. Somehow, she maintained her balance with a heart that—whether she willed it to or not—always extended and exerted itself, accommodating a new woe that was relevant to her precisely because she was aware of it. Thus, it mattered.
When it came to her three daughters, the boundaries between our sorrows and hers were unsurprisingly labile. “I can’t help it,” she once sobbed, devastated upon hearing the news that Sarah, my youngest sister, had been dumped by her jerk boyfriend. Sarah sat at the kitchen table, soused in her own misery, and Mom embraced her, resting her cheek upon my sister’s bowed head. “My heart is tied to yours.”
Yet her empathy, so often a gateway to rage, could unnerve, even embarrass me. Years before this, when I was in eighth grade, I had become unwittingly embroiled in a debacle regarding student censorsh
ip, and Mom was livid on my behalf, champing at the bit to charge into battle with the academic authorities. I attended an elite private school in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where the liberal arts education was extraordinary and the student body was, to a significant degree, comprised of wealthy, coddled bullies who harbored little interest in me unless I was the convenient butt of a joke.
This dynamic shifted briefly when, for a school assignment in which we were instructed to compose satires, I took as my focus our own social ecosystem, which was as sordid as junior high relations come. I delighted in the project and wrote without considering the potential consequences: these essays were intended to be read not only by our teachers but our classmates. Then, during a draft workshop, one of the more popular girls, Carrie, was assigned my essay to review. I watched her as she read, the corners of her mouth turning gently downward. She said very little when she handed back my draft, but I observed, anxiously, that she seemed upset, or at the very least preoccupied.
Of course you know what follows. Before the next period, Carrie had apprised her friends of my transgression, and they were duly affronted. Within the next few days, their well-monied parents had called the school to complain, and our milquetoast headmaster was prepared to demand that I rewrite the essay. My parents found the controversy to be preposterous and, what’s more, unfair. Dad penned a strongly worded letter to the school with the dictionary’s definition of “satire” typed in full at the top of the page. I would not, he declared, rewrite an assignment that I had completed exactly as instructed. Mom raged and readied herself for confrontation with school administrators, teachers, basically anyone who might suggest that my rather benign thoughts on the school’s social web were based in malice.
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