Suffer Like a Girl

Jennifer Kurdyla
Aug 26, 2017 · 11 min read
The Answers by Catherine Lacey
My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent

The First Noble Truth of Buddhism proclaims that all life is suffering, or dukkah. When I first heard this, I was struck by how counterintuitive it seemed given the cliché image of the “happy Buddha,” embodying the easy contentment and authentic inner glow we are told we need to achieve to be considered successful humans. As one goes deeper into the philosophy of Buddhism, one learns ways to remove the causes of suffering from our lives — all of which are grossly external — and realize that happiness and the potential thereof lies within us, intrinsically and inalienably. At the same time, Buddhism doesn’t suggest that we can fully escape suffering simply by meditating ourselves into a state of bliss or enlightenment. Nor does science: numerous studies illustrate that the chemicals in our brains that control both pleasure and pain are deeply connected. One can’t exist without the other, like the brain freeze that inevitably follows a perfect spoonful of ice cream or the famed “runner’s high” that’s accompanied by panting, sweating, and sore-for-days muscles (if you’re lucky to only suffer that much).

Nonetheless, in our present time, perhaps more than ever, it couldn’t be clearer that suffering abounds in all shapes, sizes, colors, and environments — and seemingly without its counterpart, pleasure. From woefully horrific subway rides to international terrorism to the epics failures of civic and political institutions and everything in between, suffering seems like something no one can escape even with the deepest meditation practice. (Perhaps if we all decided to meditation together, something about that could be done.) Boiling it down further, women are bearing the brunt of this suffering in many arenas, often with a good dose of contradiction. We are still underpaid compared to men, and our biological ability to bear children hinders professional and economic growth; on the flip side, our “signature color” (pink, as deemed by toy companies back in 1957) has become a generational phenomenon that enforces solidarity, and we see how in the face of political defeat women in positions of authority are standing up for ourselves to protect reproductive and other essential rights.

A case studie for how this paradox is (perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not) disseminating culture lies in the unlikely area of contemporary literature. Take two novels, one by a man and one by a woman, one debut and one sophomore, publishing within two months of each other, with premises so wildly different that to put them in the space of the same essay requires just about a big a leap of faith as does reading them on their own. The first, Catherine Lacey’s The Answers, is about a young woman named Mary consumed by a life crisis, the solution to which involves a New Age BDSM therapy in tandem with a Brave New World-esque relationship farce. The second is Gabriel Tallent’s ostentatiously disturbing My Absolute Darling, which fuses Lolita with A Little Life and The Hunger Games in a plot whose action and emotional nexus — rage, disgust, anxiety, joy, and compassion — revolves around the sexual abuse of a young girl named Turtle by her charismatic widower father.

To read these two books, especially in the close succession I happened to, is a test of one’s emotional resilience and suspension of disbelief. Separately, their plots don’t necessarily highlight the female-suffering angle that I took away; their respective focus on intellectual identity and universal human morals take center stage in situ. However, stepping back as one does to process such an intense reading experience, I couldn’t help realize that the suffering of both books required a base-level acceptance of the fact that women were dealt a special hand at the suffering card table. Their pain was more intense, more interesting to describe, more wrenching to feel and also more believable because, in a way, a man would never put up with the conditions these women are dealt. In fact, in these books the men seem practically victimized by the natural state of suffering they endure as humans, and the greater suffering of the women around them is the only natural balm. How I and we succumbed to deeming this “entertainment,” aside from the critical accolades both received, shocks and fascinates me.

In Lacey’s fictional universe, the science behind the pain-pleasure connection is more actualized as Mary finds intense relief from her longtime physical ailments during her sessions with Ed, a practitioner of an expensive holistic treatment called PAKing (Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia). “I’d spent a year suffering undiagnosable illnesses in almost every part of me,” she says, “but after only one session with Ed . . . I could almost forget I was a body. Such a luxury it was, to not be overwhelmed by decay.” Before this time, she describes how “For a year I’d had no life, just symptoms,” ranging from pain in the head and back to rashes, lumps, insomnia, and anxiety. But PAKing isn’t a foolproof solution given its literal cost — the price a female must pay for relief from a man — and so Mary faces yet another layer of pain in the quest to relieve her initial pain.

In her anxious desperation to continue treatment, she signs up for an experiment in which she plays one of many girlfriends to a celebrity, Kurt, whose loneliness requires an entire tribe of women each devoted to different needs: Mary is the “Emotional Girlfriend,” another is the “Maternal Girlfriend,” and still another the “Anger Girlfriend” (her job is to deliberately antagonize him, for thrills). Their roles and behaviors toward each other are completely controlled by devices that track the chemical fluctuations in their bodies, a perfect irony for the simulation of the multifaceted yet unstable love one feels with a real human.

In this capacity, Mary makes very good money, and in tandem the pain-pleasure she experiences with Ed and Kurt both intensify. The result, however, isn’t greater embodiment — more pleasure from her physcial existence as a woman — but less. Lacey describes a late session between Mary and Ed as: “Each pore on her body had become a mouth and was breathing in great gasps, and this breathing covered her, and she felt it in her face, in the spaces between her fingers, the heavy skin along her thighs, papery backs of hands, soft lobes, all of it.” Besides through this passage’s vivid imagery, the erasure of her body’s distinct elements comes through here in the narrative itself. Up until this second Part, the novel was narrated in the first person, whereas she’s now been stripped of her agency as an “I.” The briefest of interludes, an untitled section before Part 3, offers an explanation for why this narrative transition needs to take place in Mary’s voice, and how. The two-page passage delves into a philosophical examination of love: “How to best love?” it asks. “How to know anything, for certain, in another’s heart? Such a serious thing we are doing, and no one really knows how to do it.” Love, essentially, is what Mary is searching for throughout the novel — love of her body by her body, love from her estranged family and mother who doesn’t remember her, love from a man, from a friend, from her pseudo-boyfriend. That Mary wakes up just after that passage in Part 3, resuming her I-voice, with the line “I woke up with nothing. A silent apartment. I had no pain, no need. Nothing to struggle against or for” is telling about the transformation she’s undergone throughout her ordeal. Through the physical work of PAKing, and through her artificially emotional romance with Kurt, Mary comes to see her body as not herself; she must first be all-body (her pores as mouths in experiences that she can barely remember, cognitively) then renounce it to achieve a tolerable state of intellectual existence from which she can ponder the nature of love. It’s what she wanted in a way, relief of the pain of being a single body, but by the end of the book still seems to be craving connection that requires a body: “I thought of all those billions of hearts beating out there, trying to find love or keep love going. All those people, getting in the way of each other — how do we even stand it? How do we make our way around? . . . Who put all this fear in us, this fear of changing when all we ever do is change? . . . Can’t we all wake up now, here, in this warm valley between cold mountains of sleep?” Does the suffering she endured, and that which she endured to relief it, compare to the relief itself? The novel doesn’t answer, but rather makes us wonder whether this woman, with this body’s acute sensitivity to feelings and reliance on men to escape them, ultimately transcends or is subsumed by her initial, near-constant, state of pain.

More viscerally potent is the pain of fourteen-year-old Turtle in My Absolute Darling, where a lush and verdant North Carolina setting seems to deliberately oppose the rather cold, sterile world of The Answers. While she spends her afternoons, motherless and friendless, exploring the woods and rivers around her, she comes home to her father, Martin, an attractive man by all objective standards but one whose inner demons come out to play more than they should. We don’t know much about his marriage with Turtle’s mother, but from the way he treats his daughter it doesn’t seem like it was a good one. For as is revealed a fashion that seems all-too-typical (and easy) to diagnose — she’s reticent at school, a loner overall, uncomfortable with her gender — Turtle endures truly horrific sexual abuse from Martin on a daily basis. Tallent describes this with unflinching detail and anatomical accuracy (what happened off-stage in Lolitia is front-and-center here).

There are almost too many scenes of torture of this innocent child to list let alone summarize, but one in particular stands out. When it happens in real-time, the scene is narrated in the third person, but the full effect isn’t quite felt until Turtle reclaims the ordeal and tells the story to her one teenage friend, and potential love interest, Jacob. She tells him in what I imagined was a blank-stared deadpan of how her father made her do endless pull-ups on a rafter while he held a newly sharpened knife directly below her crotch:

But that’s not how it is. Every pull-up is a choice, and to do them, it takes discipline and it takes courage. You think, I don’t have to do this pull-up. You want to give up. And you start thinking maybe it’s a good idea, because the pain of holding on to the rafter becomes greater than the threat of death. Because then it wouldn’t hurt anymore. Because holding steady is — is — There is this bad, really bad, sense of uncertainty, an uncertainty so painful, so asshole-clenching, that it becomes — It’s an awful thing to say, but it’s easier to let go and be split in fucking half than it is to try to hold on, suffering and not knowing what is going to happen. That’s courage.

Turtle’s sense of her own agency is shown to be terribly warped in this moment, and it’s not lost on the reader how closely tied it is to her sex. Not only is her literal genitalia on the line here — something she values because it’s all that Martin values in her — but she associates her willful preservation of that identity with “suffering and not knowing what is going to happen.” The only thing that gives her agency is inextricably tied to pain and to a lack of intellectual freedom. Instead, she’d rather sacrifice herself just to remove the pain and know that it’s all over.

Another young girl experiences Martin’s wrath in a similar way, but through a less-politicized body part. Shortly after he picks up an even younger girl, Cayenne, at a gas station parking lot, he injures her such that he deems it necessary to amputate part of her finger at home, with Turtle as his second in command. Knowing all she’s been through, yet torn at the thought of seeing another victim, she helps him hold her down and quiet the piercing shrieks of pain streaming from her undeniably female mouth. Cayenne and Turtle eventually become allies, but this additional layer of torture in the book suggests that Turtle, as a woman, cannot relieve her fellow woman from the same kind of suffering she knows as the norm. She even becomes complicit in it, since after all it could be, as Turtle knows, much worse.

What ultimately unites the girls and sets in motion the path to their freedom is a radical rethinking of how they understand their need for — indeed love for — Martin. Both start out with an insatiable desire to be loved, which he no doubt shows them albeit in his very disturbed way. Even toward the end of the novel, we see this longing prevailing in Turtle as “He strides over to her and hits her hard in the jaw and she reels back in a plume of blood and her overwhelming feeling is one of relief. . . . she turns to look at him over her shoulder . . . with love, real love, and Martin, with his fist knotted in her hair, drives her forward into the door, the grain of the wood laying weals against her cheek.” Turtle knows that this love is warped and ultimately one-sided, for in contrast to Martin there’s Jacob, and when she’s with this truly kind and gentle young man “Her moments of happiness occur right at the margin of the unbearable. She knows it will not last and she thinks, you can never forget, Turtle, what it was like, here, without him [Martin]. . . . Nothing is as difficult as a sustained and unremitting contact with your own mind.” It’s within her own (female) mind and body that this conflict of pain and pleasure, of desire and disgust, occurs, and when she realizes that the only way to release herself from the un-love she receives from men (even in the sense that her love of Jacob is full of guilt and fear of what Martin would do if he found out) is to seek love elsewhere: in herself. She must reclaim her body as her own rather than as the story that Martin has spun around it, as something worthwhile because it exists in and of itself.

Turtle’s story isn’t a completely happy ending. Although Martin is gone from her life in the end, and she’s able to move in with her compassionate teacher (who, in a distinctly female way, doesn’t intervene in Turtle’s situation until it’s almost too late), we see her in the final pages broken physically and emotionally. She is struggling to reintegrate herself into society: namely, a school dance she wants desperately to attend but is afraid will be a trigger for many reasons. These two women become allies in the war of love, tending to the wounds that it wrought upon them both and the uncertainty of what’s on the other side.

Ed in The Answers provides a helpful adage for where this mind-body, pleasure-pain divide comes from. He explains to Mary that “The root of your symptoms is deeply embedded and intertwined with your nonphyscial self, so it makes sense that Western medicine hasn’t been helpful to you.” The pain, then, comes from her higher-level, cognitive desire to understand, diagnose, treat her body. Whereas in the process of becoming fully embodied, as she does with PAKing and as Turtle does in her final wounded form, she finds release and a love that’s not conditioned on physiology. In these women’s ability to endure so much to realize this about the nature of love, pain becomes not a sign of weakness but one of endurance, triumph, and innner wisdom. They suffered like the Buddha, they fought like girls, and won.

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