Double Bind
Page 1
For Jacquelyn and Sylvie, my mother and daughter.
CONTENTS
ROBIN ROMM • Introduction
PAM HOUSTON • Ebenezer Laughs Back: Confessions of a Workaholic
THERESA REBECK • What Came Next
AYANA MATHIS • On Impractical Urges
CAMAS DAVIS • Girl with Knife
ROBIN ROMM • Reply All
MARCIA CHATELAIN • Nature and Nurture
ERIKA L. SÁNCHEZ • Crying in the Bathroom
YAEL CHATAV SCHONBRUN • Both
ELIZABETH COREY • No Happy Harmony
ALLISON BARRETT CARTER • Leaning In, Leaning Out
ROXANE GAY • The Price of Black Ambition
CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS • Escape Velocity
BLAIR BRAVERMAN • Single Lead
LAN SAMANTHA CHANG • The Chang Girls
EVANY THOMAS • Goal Your Own Way
NADIA P. MANZOOR • Astronauts
ELISA ALBERT • The Snarling Girl: Notes on Ambition
JULIE HOLLAND • Ambitchin’
FRANCINE PROSE • Original Sin
MOLLY RINGWALD • Know Your Place
JOAN LEEGANT • Ambition: The Cliffie Notes
CRISTINA HENRÍQUEZ • Doubly Denied
HAWA ALLAN • Becoming Meta
SARAH RUHL • Letters to My Mother and Daughters on Ambition
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DOUBLE BIND
How one’s life might turn out, even after heroic effort, is anyone’s guess. It’s like this: a door opens, perhaps just a fraction of an inch. There’s no telling if the door will open at all, or for whom, but if it does, you push push push until it is wide enough for you to squeeze through.
—AYANA MATHIS
My heart says, get up, get back in the game, this isn’t just about you.
—THERESA REBECK
I was overcome with weariness, and I thought: Fuck it, I give up. But of course that’s not true either. Nope! Not at all. Onward.
—ELISA ALBERT
Introduction
ROBIN ROMM
When I first asked successful women to write about ambition, I received enthusiastic responses. Yes! Great topic, very rich, very current—so much to say. But invariably, a few days later, I’d receive a clarifying follow-up email: “I just want you to know that I’m not sure I’m ambitious. Lucky, yes. Hardworking, yes. Disciplined, very. But I’m not sure about ambitious.”
This happened not once, but numerous times. Most of these women—best-selling writers, tenured professors, doctors, lawyers, scientists—were working at the top of their professions. They lectured at universities, raised children, wrote books, and navigated mercurial careers with fearlessness and grace. Were they really going to argue that their accomplishments had nothing to do with ambition?
This discomfort with the term ambition and all it suggested made me even more eager to commission essays. My own experiences with ambition were fraught. I’ve always been goal-oriented, motivated by the desire for mastery and achievement. (I define ambition, per Anna Fels, as the desire to do good work in the world and have that work recognized by people who understand it.) But by the time I got to college and became increasingly self-aware, this quality felt more complicated than it had felt as a girl, not only something to be proud of but also something to cloak. In my twenties, I inherited what so many young women inherit, the pervasive sense that striving and achieving had to be approached delicately or you risked the negative judgment of others. The ideal was achievement with an air of self-sacrifice or gentleness. As I moved on, into the world, I continued to feel a tug between two desires: to be the best student/investigator/writer/editor/professor that I could possibly be and the desire to be seen the way I saw myself, as motivated and curious, not “aggressive” or “strident.”
I didn’t always recognize this for what it was—the perpetual double bind of the gender, success paired eternally with scrutiny and retreat. Until I began to edit and compile this book, I only suspected how this conflict pervaded the lives of other women, how thoroughly the desire to succeed in their work complicated their careers, family planning, childrearing, art-making, friendships, and families. As I got deeper into the project, I not only found my tribe of conflict-ridden, energetic, interesting, thinking women, but I also realized that this central topic had never been addressed with the nuance and detail I craved.
For the past couple of years, every time this book has come up at a dinner, at a party, at an artist’s colony, on the airplane, it has inspired passionate dialogue. Isn’t ambition about ego? Can doing good or living a good life be an ambition or is ambition solely about career? Are you fetishizing career with a book on ambition? It’s a problem that women go to part time when they have kids; it leaves men in all the management roles and so the work culture never changes. It’s a problem to leave your kids with sitters—sets off a spiritual crisis. I gave up on ambition, I don’t see myself as ambitious, I have always been ambitious, my husband thinks I am ambitious but . . . I want my daughters to be ambitious but I also want them to be selfless . . . My mother never got to do the things she wanted and so I feel called to do them. I am wildly ambitious and only recently realized people find that ugly. Is being wildly ambitious seen as ugly? I don’t like the idea of selfishness, so I don’t like the word “ambition.” I prefer the word “passionate.” I prefer the word “fortunate.” I prefer the word “engaged.” More and more people joined the conversation, argued or swapped tales from the trenches. I marveled at just how deep this issue cut and through how many layers.
I’m a writer and a reader, a believer that stories do what no statistic or graph can: humanize dilemmas that often feel intellectual or abstract. A slew of groundbreaking business and sociology books have recently tackled the subject of women and striving, but I wanted the nitty-gritty details, the actual ways striving affected individual lives. Women said they breastfed while being CEOs but how? Women switched careers midlife or defied their families’ expectations, but what did that look like? Why is the word so difficult to embrace? Who else out there felt conflicted when they sought success, when they achieved success?
These stories were hard to write. Ambition, for many of my contributors, felt connected to deeply private impulses and actions that made them too vulnerable, that exposed things that felt less pretty or tidy than the façade they wanted to project—or felt they needed to project to stay in their roles. Frequently, I received essays on loss or faith or childhood or forgiveness, but not on ambition. Back to the drawing board.
But this challenge and the triumph of the resulting essays are what make the book so strong. There’s no recipe here for how to get a raise, or wardrobe tips for looking like the corporate warrior. The contributors, through bravery and discipline and many, many drafts, have created a striking book about struggle and failure and achievement and identity and everything in between. It’s a validation that women’s ambition is tricky to navigate but entirely worthwhile, and that no young woman should feel, as I did, confused and silenced by all that is unspoken about it.
Of course, the deeper I got into the compilation process, the more I wanted to include. Every essay inspired me to think of another topic, equally crucial. We had one on balancing motherhood and career, but did we have one on giving up a career for motherhood? We had one on writing, but what about engineering? Everyone I spoke to had a wish list: What about a woman in the clergy? What about an essay by a woman who failed? What about an Etsy entrepreneur? What about a woman in banking? I spent months trying to find women who could write with nuance and precision about every single facet until I realized there are infinite facets. That’s what makes this topic truly compelling. I couldn’t possibly represent t
hem all.
So this book isn’t every story—it’s a way to ignite conversation, to inspire women of all ages and walks of life to consider the role of ambition in their lives, to embrace it with more confidence, to define it and own it and understand why it feels uncomfortable. I hope this book will help them live at the far reaches of their abilities and talents.
It’s an entry point. The rest is up to you.
Ebenezer Laughs Back: Confessions of a Workaholic
PAM HOUSTON
My beautiful mother ran away from Spiceland, Indiana, at the end of the eighth grade. Her Aunt Ermie, who had raised her to that point, had bet my mother fifty dollars that she could not get straight Cs on her final report card. But she did get straight Cs, took the cash, and got on a bus bound for Broadway. Once in New York City, she got plucked off the streets by two young actors—who, thirty years later, became my Uncle Tommy and my Uncle Don. For the next several decades, she danced and sang and told jokes and did handsprings and cartwheels across stages in countless theaters, nightclubs, and cabarets in New York and elsewhere. During World War II, she went overseas with Bob Hope’s USO touring show. After that she became Frank Sinatra’s opening act in Vegas, and after that, she returned to New York and acted in supporting roles both on and off Broadway with some of the best of that time—Jackie Gleason, Walter Pidgeon, Nancy Walker. She never made it big, but she always had work and she was proud of that. And though she never said it to me precisely this way, I believe she loved her life in those years with a ferocity approximating the love I have for my own life as a writer and traveler and teacher of writing.
Then, somewhere in the neighborhood of forty-two (she always lied about her age and my father lied in her obituary, so now we will never know for sure) for reasons that are utterly inexplicable to me, she married my father and got pregnant. In that order—I have checked the dates a hundred times. He came backstage one night, so the story goes, after her performance at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania, with a dozen roses and an invitation for the pretty actress to take a spin in his cream-colored Buick convertible. She got so drunk on their first date she threw up all over his milky leather seats, and he said, “You better get your act together because we are going to get married.”
Six weeks later they wed, and so began the miserable, conventional, ambitionless rest of her life.
From a very early age, I wanted to grow up to be someone who wrote, traveled, and lived, as much as possible, surrounded by animals. Even before I had ever been there, I had a strong desire to live in the American West. The first time I stood in front of a classroom, I found out I loved to teach. All of those things together formed what we might call my ambition.
Now I am fifty-two. I have written six books and countless stories and articles. I teach creative writing in graduate programs at two universities, and in several other venues around the country and the globe. I have been to seventy countries and counting (Cuba will make seventy-one later this year), and I live on a ranch at nine thousand feet in Colorado with two dogs, two horses, five sheep, two miniature donkeys, and a formerly feral cat.
We can conclude, therefore, that I am ambitious, perhaps even wildly so. If I were a man, someone might call me a lucky bastard. I’m not sure what the female equivalent of a lucky bastard is, but I do know luck has been on my side often enough in my life that some people call me blessed. Other people call me an asshole. But I don’t think I actually am an asshole. Perhaps assholery is like ambition or luck or even color blindness, where, the more you have of it, the less likely you are to recognize it in yourself.
I will say straight out that I gravitate toward people, especially women, who are ambitious. I was going to say that I don’t have much respect for people without ambition, but then I thought of a monk I met who was living in a cave in the mountains of Bhutan, for whom I have a world of respect. But now we are swimming in the deep water of abstraction because surely the monk has ambition, even if his primary ambition is to be ambitionless.
And like all abstractions, the word ambition is built to cover some pretty wide territory, from insidious social climbing to nose-to-the-grindstone dedication to flights of artistic, or even capitalistic, vision. The harder I think about ambition as a thing, isolate from other things, the more it collapses in on itself. In fact I don’t even know whether to write that I have ambition to, or that I have ambition for. In the first version, ambition is like a drive, and in the second it is more like a jones.
I used to believe I could do without sleep. I more than believed it; I actually put my theory into practice. For roughly twenty years, between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, I didn’t go to bed at all two nights a week on average, and the other nights I felt pretty good as long as I closed my eyes for three or four hours. I used to count the hour I spent showering, dressing, and drinking coffee toward my sleep total because they all seemed like relaxing activities. Needless to say, I got a tremendous amount of work done. I never had to turn down any professional opportunities, because if things got tight I would just stay up for a night or two or five and get everything done by the deadline.
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” I used to say, appalling my friends and loved ones. I thought, because I wasn’t partying in the wee hours of the night, only writing essays and grading papers, staying up all night probably wasn’t that bad for me. I still don’t know if it was bad for me, though recent science suggests it was.
By the time I turned forty-five, I had to admit I felt better if I got at least five hours’ sleep a night, but I could still get enough work done to maintain my seven or eight various paid occupations that add up, I always figure, to something like three full-time jobs. Now, at fifty-two, I need six hours a night and do better when I have seven. When this first started to happen, I thought it meant I was dying of some dreaded disease, until somebody pointed out that I was simply becoming a normal person. But I have not learned to say no with a normal person’s frequency.
“I gave up everything I loved for you,” my mother would say to me almost daily, to get me to clean my room or part my hair on the side or wear my retainer. And I would want only to find a way to give it all back, to restore her satisfying working life before being saddled with the burden of me.
“But why did you do that?” I wish I had had the wherewithal to ask her.
Alcohol addiction notwithstanding, my mother had the strongest will of anyone I have ever known. She barely ate and she never perspired and she did not grow body hair. I am fairly certain if her biological clock had ticked one time she could have willed it silent with her mind or smashed it with her fist.
My father was charming, but she had had forty-two years, plus or minus, to learn to see through his kind of charm. Had thirty years in the ups and downs of show business simply worn her out? Did she marry my father because she saw a future rushing toward her where the fact of her age would make it harder and harder to land roles? Or did some Indianan idea of conventionality sneak up out of the cornfield and grab her from behind?
If it did, it lied to her about how it would feel once she got there. Her mother had died in childbirth with her, so it stands to reason that my birth would have killed her at least a little. She lived on until my thirtieth birthday, an honorable life that included fundraisers for the United Way, work with the developmentally disabled, devotion to the altar guild, good friends, and lots of tennis. But it seemed to be only a half-life, a shadow of the thirty years that had preceded it, and when a combination of vodka and Vioxx took her out at seventy (give or take), I was, alongside my sadness, glad she didn’t have to witness herself losing any more than she already had.
It is still nearly impossible for me to turn down a job. For a long time, I thought this was because my father was a child of the Depression and was so afraid of being poor that he often couldn’t keep himself from putting his finger down on the disconnect button of a total stranger’s long-distance phone call; his favorite piece of life advice was �
��one day you will realize you spend your whole life lying in the gutter with someone else’s foot on your neck.” And it’s true; I accept nearly every job, large or small, that comes my way—partly out of fear that each one might be the last offer. But I have been at this life for decades now and the work opportunities have never abated. Furthermore, virtually every professional prospect still sounds interesting, and/or rewarding, and/or fun.
I write literary fiction and nonfiction, and I teach others to do the same. That means I am in a subset of a subset of a subset of anything that matters on any large world scale. I am not curing cancer or even making shows for network television, and perhaps as a result, I have come to understand that ambition’s real payoff is less about being loved for the work you do and more about getting to do the work you love.
While I was growing up, I assumed everyone had ambition in equal amounts. But then I got older and met people that didn’t have as much, or really, any. That was shocking to me, as ambition never felt like anything I cultivated, but something I came with, prepackaged. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be lazy, or metaphysically exhausted or disinterested or aloof—I simply don’t have those speeds—but I do know how I am is not all good news. I do know enough to ask where ambition ends and workaholism begins.
There are so many ways to divide the world, but sometimes I think the demographic with which I have the least in common is women who don’t work, with women who had ambition, for instance, to marry well instead. I know we are supposed to pretend those women don’t exist anymore, but they do. I know some. For instance, I have a friend, let’s call her Q, who used to like to work in an artistic field—and she was good at it—but then her ambition became to snag a rich guy, and it turned out she was good at that too. At her wedding, she announced, without irony, “I have arrived.” I found the moment chilling and was not surprised to see that, before too long, Q lost nearly all of her interest in making art.