Unbearable Lightness by Portia de Rossi

Unbearable Lightness by Portia de Rossi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I finished this book a week ago. I finished it in two days.
I haven't connected with a book this emotionally since Going Bovine by Libba Bray.
This was different of course, being non-fiction. A book about Portia de Rossi's struggle with Anorexia Nervosa and coming out.
I'm not anorexic, nor am I gay. But the way de Rossi wrote about her compulsivity with food and the fear of losing control which then leads to a loss of control in a hellish loop, touched on some deep issues for me.
I couldn't break away from the beautiful, honest prose. I cried when my Mum and sister came over and I had to stop reading. Not because I had to stop reading. Because I was dealing with my own anxiety issues through de Rossi's journey.
The whole last chapter I cried for her and myself.
Then the epilogue. It brought hope, and I felt relief. If she can come back from that obsession, I can certainly deal with my own problems. There is brightness in the future.

Now, one thing I asked myself before reading was: Can this celebrity write? Was there a ghostwriter?
Yes and no, respectively. There were passages where de Rossi's love of words was clear: in high school, she loved reading out Shakespeare and Poetry and giving emotion to the words.
And no one else was mentioned in the fine print. De Rossi is amazing and I hope she writes more.

Lastly, I loved the sense of Australianness I felt throughout the book. De Rossi hasn't lost her roots.


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The Feminist Inside Me

That's not meant to sound dirty, I swear.

This is an issue I've been meaning to blog about for a while but haven't. I was re-watching a few episodes of Mad Men and it started me thinking about it all over again. Let's see if I can do this coherently.

I have always loved reading. And I've known I wanted to be a writer since I was ten years old and my teacher read my poems and stories out to the class.
But until I read Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck in year Eleven, no single author had me captured by their language the way Steinbeck did. There are many reasons why I loved the book, but they will do better in another post.
I love Steinbeck, and he became my favourite author from then on. Since then, I've read East of Eden, The Pearl, The Red Pony and Cannery Row.

Now, onto feminism. I feel like even if I hadn't known what feminism was, I would have developed something of this sensibility anyway. My parents split up when I was ten (coincidence?) and from then, it was three women in my house. Three strong women.
Sometime after, Dad introduced my sister and I to our future step-mother. Another strong woman. A woman who helped me realise my dreams weren't so silly after all. She was teacher of screenwriting at a Sydney tertiary institution.
Aside from that, the strongest personalities in my life were women. My grandmothers, and step-grandmothers (lots of divorce in my family, something for yet another post), are very strong women. At the age of fifteen, my paternal grandfather passed away. It sucked. But it meant that I got to watch my grandmother survive beyond that and become an even stronger woman in my eyes.

At some point during my teens, I realised that all the stories I was writing revolved around women, with very few male central characters. And, as many of my readers will know, so many of the classics and books in school, and many books in general, had male central characters. And I felt like I was doing something wrong, and tried to develop male central characters to write. I even had a male central character for the play I wrote as a final project in Drama. A project that many people praised, yet I scrapped it two weeks before it was due, in favour of a play that centred around a female main character because I felt like I connected with her better.

Fast forward to midway through uni. I realised something after reading East of Eden, which was driven home after reading Cannery Row. Steinbeck's women were more absent from his classic texts, than men were from my own writing. All women were either mothers, whores, or two dimensional girlfriends who were only referred to.
So became a flaw apparent in my idol's writing. As happens to a lot of people after high school, I had become a little more self aware. Studying my passion and becoming aware of the different types of Feminism helped too.
I came to the conclusion: so what? So what if I write about mostly women? Don't we need more texts like that? Non-chicklit* texts like that?

So, I decided that John Steinbeck was allowed to be my idol in style. I still try to keep my prose as spare as possible while still giving across the message**.

I still think that as a writer, it is a valuable tool to write from the point of view of the opposite sex, yet I don't put pressure on myself to create male central characters. There are enough.


* I have since realised that from a feminist viewpoint, that chicklit is often derided because it is just that: books for women, by women. Although a lot of it is in itself pretty sexist.

** You wouldn't think so from my blog posts. Trust me, my prose is edited a lot more :D

Inspired

Just doing one of my rounds of blog-reading*. And I came across this post by Karen Healey. She says so many things on her blog that I agree with (actually, I agree with all of it). The post addresses sex and teens in YA fiction. One element that stood out to me in particular was addressed by this comment in the comments section:

I read a post lately on a blog that claimed to be Feminist in which it was stated that it's okay to call a girl a slut so long as you apply the same standard to men. I nearly swallowed my tongue.*** 


And with this too, I agree. The tongue swallowing, that is.


I am a Feminist. And one thing that gets me with the media and the pressure that is put on women to look a certain way is response to feminists when they call it out. Rather than lessening the pressure, more pressure is put on men**. So of course, we are all equal now! The women AND the men have to conform to what it 'normal'.  


It would be nice if we could all relax and be who we are, and let others be who they are, instead of who we and they 'should' be. Whether that be in body type or sexuality or self expression.




*Unfortunately growing less and less frequent.


**Funny thing, when you look at the moisturisers and 'men's products' that are appearing, the ingredients are all the same as the 'women's'. And most of the ingredients are not all that good for the body or environment. 


***Commenter was Redzolah.