All The Lives We’ll (Always) Want: Female Adolescence Unwoven [Book Review]
I first found Alana Massey’s writing on this very website when I internet-stumbled out of a Twitter hole and upon her essay “Against Chill.” It’s one of those essays where you start whispering “yes” and “say that!” louder and louder into the glow of your screen until you’re basically shouting by the end. Massey’s voice has that rare ability to be both arresting, and inviting. She’s also wry, and very clever. When I finished that essay, I felt the mixture of pride, appreciation, and envy one feels for a beautiful stranger. Here was a book deal waiting to happen, I was certain of it. Two years later, I had All the Lives I Want in my hands.
Massey’s debut essay collection explores the culture-at-large, the male gaze, and the complicated dynamics of growing up as a girl, all through the lens of her celebrity obsessions. The book reflects often on what it means to be seen versus what it is to be known. This feels pitch-perfect, as the subject material itself acknowledges a shared knowledge of the private history of other people that will leave many readers saying, “Thank God, I thought I imagined all of that.”
There are millennials and then there are the the sort of ret-conned millennials, people (myself included) lumped into the “m-word” demographic only because they fit the generational distinction. The world that babies of the late 80s were born into was a completely different one than the ones that arrived even five years later, so the millennial description fits us only loosely, as if we were contextualizing a hazy dream about the future when it hadn’t yet arrived. We were the set-up crew.
There’s an argument to be made that this restless technological adolescence was also the AGE OF TABLOID, a time when celebrities became more visible than ever but were still unable to curate and corral how they would like to be seen. It was a time when gossip fodder was gleaned from crude Perez Hilton (look him up kids, he’s the father [or… would you guys say daddy? I don’t get it] of your memes), and also a time when some truly insane shit went down.
It was a world I felt like I witnessed by myself. This would not be unusual or even surprising because I happen to have custody over an extremely vivid, nearly encyclopedic memory for details large and small. But all of what I remembered — things like the trials and triumphs of Fiona Apple, the shoplifting humiliation of Winona Ryder, the formative Kirsten Dunst canon — happened before the time when every cultural moment of significance lived on the internet. And most of the people on the internet were too young to have seen it, or too old to care.
That wouldn’t matter if those people and those events didn’t feel so visceral, so personal, so owned by me and so informative to how I tried to understand the world. But without a witness to the zeitgeist of my girlhood, sometimes it felt like I made it all up. I’m a woman and so I know by now that that if there’s nobody to verify my story, chances are that it’s all in my head.
That’s why it is extremely gratifying for an American woman (me) of a certain age (mine) to read All the Lives I Want. Not only did somebody else watch The Virgin Suicides, in its entirety (who was that film’s target audience?), that same person was also maddened by the lack of charisma exhibited by Bill Murray in Lost in Translation and ALSO intrigued by the algorithm that is Sylvia Plath’s eternal place in the shrines of teen girls on Tumblr. All are rich artifacts that engulf, amuse and mystify as they also serve to shed light on greater cultural phenomenon that continue to unfold.
These essays are the first deep-dive I’ve seen into what these particular slivers of nostalgia say about what it means to live right now, and as a woman, too. Massey embraces the clear-eyed, lyrical gaze of a woman that values the girl she was, one that sees the sparkle of growing up a girl as encapsulating a perfect human experience. All the Live I Want is heroic in its charms, but also in its honesty. If women glimpse a particular rending of the stars, a particular closeness to their grief, a particular weight of sadness over what is broken, it’s only because we are kept so close to the ground, because we are so entwined with the things that want to kill us.
But what the essays in All the Lives I Want proclaim so well is that to refuse to feel, to reject the feminine imagination as a form of weakness, would be to give in to a deception. We must not yield. “We are more than the echo chambers for imaginaries of womanhood,” Massey asserts, and though this simple assertion shouldn’t be groundbreaking — it is.
Massey argues that there are angels among us (Lana Del Rey and Fiona Apple), and transcendent, amorphous witches too (like Courtney Love), but she spares harsh judgement on most of her subjects. The only demons in Massey’s writing are the men that seek to possess and dispossess us, not caring if we wither once we’re empty of them. “I wondered what it felt like to possess such emotional capital and not use it,” Massey writes of one, and we get the feeling that she could only use such an insult on someone who had both truly earned it and wouldn’t feel the sting the way they should. By imagining herself into various iterations, by indulging in whims and guilt and daydreams, Massey has fashioned an armor of formidable strength. It is empathy, powerful and bold. Hers probably has glitter on it.
The most wonderful moments in this essay collection come in the form of confessions that give way to warm self-forgiveness. The celebrity culture is a vehicle to view society as something large and terrifying, but also to view ourselves from above as mere humans battling the tide. All the Lives I Want is really about coveting a single, specific life, one that bravely lays claim to the legitimacy of emotions and carries them forward and through, without an apology and without letting go.
