jokes and laughter mixed in with explorations of ideas and events, aspirations and emotions, the conversations I’d dreamed of.
A friend to talk to in person, a friend to write to every day. It was a hard time, and there is grumbling in the email to Tina, but I had reached a point where my social life was all that I could desire. Marina, who usually had a birdlike brightness of eye, a vivacity and an exceptional emotional warmth, as well as a brilliant political mind, had been subdued after her separation until that evening of the long faint herringbone clouds. Thanks to the email (Tina also liked food descriptions), I knew I’d made us a dinner of pasta, artichokes, and greens from the Civic Center Farmers’ Market, and that I had invited over my younger brother, also a close friend of hers, who joined us after he had participated in a demonstration in which 4,000 candles were lit for victims of a massacre, and that we had drunk a bottle of red wine, and under that mild influence Marina had recovered her sparkle and her verve.
The herringbone clouds letter didn’t mention that I had been joking that night, as I had for years, about writing an essay called “Men Explain Things to Me.” I’d brought it up at the dinner on my little drop-leaf oak dining table with the massive vaselike center legs, the one I’d bought from the elderly lesbian couple next door. When I did, Marina had energetically urged me to write the piece and said how much young women like her sister needed it.
Many years later, in the apartment I currently inhabit, I sat at another kitchen table, with a film actress who had come to talk with me about feminism. The next day an enormous bouquet arrived with a card quoting back what she liked best of what I had said: “It’s not you, it’s patriarchy,” which might be one of feminism’s basic messages. That is, there’s nothing wrong with you; there’s something wrong with the system that bears down on you and tells you you’re useless, incompetent, untrustworthy, worthless, wrong. Marina heard in my anecdotes the possibility of telling that to the world or to some women in it, and she thought they ought to hear it.
I was an early riser, and she was catching up on much-needed sleep, and the attic had just two large rooms. The kitchen and the daybed on which guests slept were in the west room. The east room was my bedroom and office, with a long, built-in desktop held up at its center by the old spindle-legged desk. So the morning of the 25th, rather than disturb her rest, I sat down at that desk once again and did her bidding. The essay poured out with ease or rather tumbled out seemingly of its own accord. When this happens it means that the thoughts have long been gestating and writing is only a birth of what was already taking form out of sight. So much of the work of writing happens when you are seemingly not working, made by that part of yourself you may not know and do not control, and when the work shows up like that your job is to get out of its way.
What I wrote that morning startled me, because when I had been joking the night before, I hadn’t connected men explaining things to me to what I would write that morning. The essay’s beginning is comedy: in an incident from five years earlier, a man talks over me to explain my own book to me and is briefly stunned to realize (when my companion finally succeeds in interrupting him) that I, the person he’s already dismissed and turned into an audience, am the author of that “very important book” on Muybridge on which he is holding forth.
I’ve sometimes been taken to task by people as though I equate minor indignities with major crimes, people who don’t or prefer not to understand that we talk about a lot of things on a spectrum, and we can distinguish the different points on the spectrum, but the point is that it’s one spectrum. Making black people drink out of separate drinking fountains and lynching them are different in degree and kind, but they both emerge from the same effort to enforce segregation and inequality, and almost no