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sara freeman///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Last winter, a Thursday, I attended a literary party in Manhattan. This party – in a large loft-like place – was filled with very young and preternaturally attractive women, some minor actors that my friend pointed out to me, and a small number of barely distinguishable old white men.

I remember that I wore a dress that night and that my tights were too small, so that from time to time I would have to pull them back up to stop them sagging beneath the hem of my skirt. It was an embarrassing situation and it made me sweaty and tight in my clothes, tight in my own skin. The space was already very hot from all of the bodies hovering together – desiring and barely tolerating one another all at once – and I considered, more than once, going to the bathroom to remove my tights. Just in time, I remembered that I had not shaved my legs in many months (it was winter). Although I didn’t know much about this new country that I was visiting, I knew that the unshaved legs of a dark-haired, light-skinned woman, would certainly be an impediment to my success in it.

At certain points during the evening, my friend, who knew the editor of the venerable magazine, would pinch my arm and say, “Look! Over there,” as if we had just witnessed the flight of some rare bird. The editor, I learned, was fond of young women and this explained the impressive ratios. By the end of the evening, I had had many drinks and very few conversations and I found myself face-to-face with the man himself – peacock, sparrow, bird-of-prey.

I knew from all of my past experiences, that as soon as I began speaking, this man – with his reputed knowledge of women and literature – would sniff me out: feminist, foreigner, or whatever other word, unspoken, his, would hover between us. I stayed silent. My friend functioned as my interpreter in the editor’s strange land. This worked well, because at one point, the editor gestured towards me and asked: “does she write?” as if to write was an incurable disease. My friend, answering with her characteristic generosity said: “yes, she’s quite good,” and I watched as the editor, not looking at me at all, declared, “she should send me something then,” and then flew off just as quickly as he had landed by our side.

That night, back at home, I removed my tights, and rolled them up into a ball, pressing them down into the wastebasket in my bathroom amidst pieces of torn and scribbled-on paper, tissue, and dental floss. It always feels strange to me to throw tights out; they resemble skin, and hold the imprint of the body and for these reasons seem to deserve a more dignified end. The next morning, I sent the editor a story. In the body of the email, I made witty remarks in a language not my own.

For as long as I can remember, I have been aware of and repelled by the language of masculinity, its declarations, its inherent evaluations of my most private experience. So when I received the editor’s harsh, patronizing, and undeniably gendered reading of my work, I wasn’t surprised. I was only angry with myself for forgetting what I had always known: the editor and I spoke different languages. Why had I forgotten?

But over the next weeks, the editor’s categorical statements about my work took over my language, my brain, my body, my work.  Was my work boring?  Was I boring? Did the work lack urgency? Did I lack urgency? Was the character chatty? Was I chatty? Was the character stuck in her own head? Was I stuck in my own head? His language usurped my language. His thoughts became mine. Or maybe his words and their definitions, connotations, had always been there, trying to take over my person, my thoughts and feelings with their imperiousness.

I did not write. How could I, when my language had been so easy to dismiss? I plotted wordlessly. Images rose up instead. I would return to the loft and kick him in the head. No. I would finally visit Newfoundland, and there in a modernist hut overlooking the Atlantic, I would cure my prose of its erectile dysfunction. Then the editor, hearing of my literary feats, would fly over, caw out to me, but I, of course, would refuse to feed him my newly muscular text.

When my words returned, I spent a lot of time in front of the computer, talking to myself. I rehearsed the lines that might make the editor see the effect that his words, embedded with their judgments and hierarchies, had had on me, the same effect that words like his have on women everywhere: in book reviews, in workshops, in bedrooms and offices. I flexed my biceps, I cried.

In the spring, I put away my short stories, and began to write a novel, or it began to write me. Every few paragraphs, I would wonder: Is this boring? Am I boring? Will anybody want to read this? Will he want to read this? But at the same time, the story, its characters and questions, began to feel very urgent to me. The first character I wrote, Leah, is 17 in late 1970s Montreal. She is Anglophone and cripplingly aware of her own physicality; even when she is alone, she cannot move without seeing everything that she does replicated, transfigured, distorted. In others, she finds only the confirmation of her own meaninglessness.

The question of boredom kept creeping up on me, even though the writing of this novel did not bore me. It contained more life than I had ever known in my living. Leah became Lea. In an act of shame, rather than defiance, she lops off her ‘h,’ silent proof of her uselessness, her Englishness. She loses her mother and enters McGill University to learn the language of Social Work, but instead is compelled by French, a language, which she, like so many Anglophones in Montreal, has heard all her life, but has never really known. In a French Literature course, she makes friends with Adèle, guérillère, séparatiste, who speaks and reads the language of theory and loves only women.

Adèle appeared to me and she needed her own language, a language I didn’t possess as intuitively as Lea’s. I had read feminist theory and been moved by it, but I had often felt shut out by its network of allusions. I had thought: theory connects those who know its language and alienates those who do not. But Adèle was not me; she needed to speak this language, even if I barely understood it.

I found Adèle a home in Écriture au Féminin, a movement, a commitment, a way of writing into, about, but also around and away from feminism. To my delight, this place actually existed, not in my mind, but in the real world, in the history of my city. But if Adèle lives in this place, then Lea is only a visitor, she hovers around it, dips her toes in it, not ever fully able to inhabit its ‘we’.

Theory, A Sunday was immediately familiar and also foreign to me. I found in this book sentences that felt as though they had been plucked from my own mouth; I was intimidated and shut out by others. In Louky Bersianik’s “Aristotle’s Lantern,” I uncovered the beginning of an answer to my questions about boredom and the male critic. “If the critic believes he is dealing with a simplistic text because it does not match his own worldview, his will be a superficial and simplistic reading, and his critique will resemble his reading: superficial and simplistic,” she asserts. But the assertions and statements in Theory, A Sunday, are never just that. They are qualified, questioned, and aware of their own limitations, the possibility of their own unraveling. They do not bind or oppress. This truly is “a territory in motion: open, polymorphous. A Movement.”¹

But if ideas are in motion in Theory, place is not. As a writer of fiction, I love the idea of this place, fixed, in a sense, where each Sunday, somewhere in Montreal, women and their individual bodies agreed, at least for a few hours, on a ‘we.’ A ‘we’ not in perpetual agreement, but a porous, fluid ‘we,’ a ‘we’ big enough to accept, I think, a few new characters.

And so I picture Lea, on a Sunday, walking into this room, full of women and their theories, poems, and stories. The room is warm, I am certain of that. It is alive with all of these bodies, the great urgency of their speech. Lea is nervous, and so she does not speak, but Adèle, by her side, is unfazed and voices her opinions easily. At one point, after many hours, when the conversation feels beyond Lea’s reach, she grows very hot, escapes to the bathroom.

She sits on the toilet and reflects on what she has heard. There is a woman out there, France Théoret, who spoke passionately about ‘a writing without apologies.’ What does it means to live unapologetically, Lea wonders, thinking of the body she carries tirelessly around. She gets up and runs the tap, splashes cold water on her face. No water could ever be cool enough. She is still so hot. She bends down, removes her shoes, then her tights. She feels lighter now. She is ready to return to the warm room.

For a moment she stands in the doorway, taking in the scene. She is certain that she has never seen this many women in such a small space, laughing, drinking, having conversations. She looks around, catches Adèle’s watchful eye. A question is posed to the group. A shared silence. And then she senses the answer, as if it has always been there – in her belly, her chest, her throat – a new language, welling up from within.

^{1. Louise Dupré, “Four Sketches for a Morphology” in Theory, A Sunday (New York: Belladonna Press, 2013), 101.↩}