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Watching Normal People by Katy Whitehead
They started watching Normal People, like everybody else, during the first lockdown. They’d been married three years at this point. She’d read two of Rooney’s novels, and both of her published stories (as well as much of the criticism) so she knew it wasn’t going to be socialist in any major way––knew, too, that everyone was tired of Rooney’s women, with their self-loathing, masochistic (anti-feminist?) tendencies. But her real problem with the young Irish bestseller was the extent to which, despite her proclaimed Marxist politics, Rooney’s writing remained deeply uncynical about love.
Perhaps, there was a touch of envy in K’s assessment. At university, she’d read Laura Kipnis’ Against Love, after a particularly heart-wrenching breakup; she’d written a whole essay, in fact, looping in Freud and Marcuse, to argue that modern romantic love was just a manifestation of capitalism (it was something about consumerism, obviously, but also about how “true-love” transferred the work ethic to the bedroom; something too, if she recalls, about perpetuating a sense of scarcity, and Protestantism, and rationing harmless immateriality, an idea inspired by Terry Eagleton’s writing on the rise of literature; also something, she thinks, about perfume). The high mark she’d received had taken the sting out of the breakup––there was a thrill in transmuting her embodied and largely trivial-seeming pain into intellectual pleasure.
Off the back of this, K’s lecturer had encouraged her to apply for the MA at Cambridge; she could develop the piece into her application submission. Only, not long after that, she reconciled with the ex-boyfriend and, restored to his warm arms and weed-drenched Saturdays watching The American Apprentice in bed, could no longer understand Marcuse’s notion of “profitable conformity” or what it had to do with a “true-love myth.” She failed to expand the essay with sufficient passion and rigor and when that boyfriend dumped her, again, some months later, she took it as a double blow: the loss of both love, and of intellectualism’s promised protections. She came to acquaint the softening of her heart with a sort of intellectual softness, and henceforth never fully trusted romantic attachments, nor her capacity for critical thinking.
Her decision to marry seemed somehow both naive and cynical.
So how had this happened? This marriage, with Matt? Six years on, there had been a house party, then a dinner, but really it was the holiday in Greece, a romantic island for rock climbers where the sunsets, mojitos, and cheese-on-fire, as well as the heightened stakes of being held, via rope, off a cliff face, by a man you’ve barely met, came together in an irrepressible sense of destiny that defied all critical theory.
Now, eight more years on, aged 34, married, and with a toddler, but without much of a career, or the time required to develop one, she found herself vacillating between two contradictory positions: that love is a pro-capitalist, pro-patriarchy myth that doesn’t serve a young woman’s interests; that love is everything, all you need, life’s one purpose. So naturally she’d enjoyed the passages in Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, that lightly satirized this way of thinking, like the one where Frances (the narrator) and Bobbi (her best friend and one-time girlfriend) debate the politics of love over instant message:
Bobbi: if you look at love as something other than an interpersonal phenomenonBobbi: and try to understand it as a social value system
Bobbi: it’s both antithetical to capitalism, in that it challenges the axiom of selfishness
Bobbi: which dictates the whole logic of inequality
Bobbi: and yet also it’s subservient and facilitatory
Bobbi: i.e. mothers selflessly raising children without any profit motive
Bobbi: which seems to contradict the demands of the market at one level
Bobbi: and yet actually just functions to provide workers for free
me: yes
me: capitalism harnesses “love” for profit
me: love is the discursive practice and unpaid labour is the effect
me: but I mean, I get that, I’m anti love as such
Bobbi: that’s vapid frances
Bobbi: you have to do more than say you’re anti things.
She’ll admit it, it annoyed her—that Rooney had managed to turn these contradictions into literary gold dust, while she found herself here: married but confused, concerned about her hypocrisy, raising her child without undue regard for the profit motive and yet not feeling blessed with any of the selfless axiom-challenging—stuck. K’s “anti-love” position had seen her rejected by ex-boyfriends as cold and unnatural; her “anti-capitalist” stance had found her out of a job; her decision to marry, largely for the purpose of creating a solid family base, seemed somehow both naive and cynical, in the harsh light of parenthood; Rooney’s ability to mine these sorts of contradictions, clever and playful, precise and heartfelt, had got her a two-book deal in a seven-party auction.
It was April 2020. Since the pandemic shuttered their nursery in late March, K and her husband, Matt, had developed a routine that involved her working between six and 10 A.M. and then again after four. This was by far the most childcare he had provided since their son’s birth, over two years ago, but somehow even this niggled: how long it had taken him to offer some relief; how scarce the time still felt, given she had two years to catch up.
Their son, Leo, had only recently begun napping reliably, in the early afternoon. On weekdays, she used this time productively. But after lunch on Saturdays and Sundays, they would take turns to walk the pram once around the park, and when his thin purple eyelids flickered shut, somewhere between the sycamore blossom and the lime trees, they’d park the pram in the hallway, close the door on their son’s sweaty-headed snoring, and hit play on the remote for their wall-mounted smart TV.
Whoever said “there is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall” (it was Cyril Connolly) presumably had somewhere better to place their baby whilst he napped.
The TV show was the third outing of Normal People’s protagonists. As well as this BBC/Hulu version, and the novel, there was a story in the White Review, “At the Clinic,” that introduced the two main characters.
Normal People, the book and show, follows Marianne, wealthy but unpopular, and Connell, the popular and quiet son of her family’s cleaner, who begin a love affair in high school. Marianne’s family are cold, so she is too; there is the sense Connell is embarrassed by her––he encourages her to keep their relationship secret. When they find themselves at the same university, the balance has shifted, with Marianne thriving and Connell, subject to more financial and different social pressures, isolated. Connell’s passion for Marianne is deeply-felt but confusing to him. Both are very smart, book smart, politics smart; less smart, perhaps, about the workings of the heart.
Matt had never read the book and had no preconceived notions about the show. K had seen the promo material before the show itself; the soft-focus vision of the two leads, in matching school uniform, or nuzzling in long grasses, conjured for her such a strong sense of nostalgia. Yet it was one that couldn’t altogether be trusted: Since she’d gone to an all-girls school, where no boys shared the uniform, this didn’t relate to her own youth, but rather a shared imaginary past where one could expect to love innocently and be loved innocently in return (and where your capacity for love, perhaps, renders you beautiful). In other words, the show promised everything she hated––and loved––about “true-love.”
Because these were their only windows of off-duty time––and because the enforced lockdown stymied all other forms of entertainment, or indeed, social engagement––the culture they consumed in these charmed hours took on a significance, and a dreamlike hue. It would follow them through the days and into the nights, and over the weeks. It would lodge itself in their subconscious.
The thing that surprised her, in the early episodes, was how hard her husband fell for it. Matt seemed to see a lot of himself in Connell: the inarticulateness of the smart boy; his vulnerability to group social pressure.
They’d been having precisely the amount of fun you might expect for a couple three years into marriage, with a two-year-old son, in a pandemic.
Partly what had caused their rift—besides her husband’s enviable freedom to work outside the house—was her sense that he was a cold person, that he didn’t feel anything deeply. While Connell worries he is “emotionally empty,” her husband often claimed, half-ironically, not to have a subconscious.
Privately, she thought he was also rather like Marianne, with her problems giving and receiving love. Perhaps Matt’s coldness had roots in his family history. In his older brother role, he’d been forced to adopt a certain early self-sufficiency; his mother had gone back to work when he was small. His parents had separated when he was in his teens. He’d gotten used to fending for himself, emotionally, and fending for himself had been encouraged.
She also found herself relating in certain ways to Marianne. K had attended her all-girls private school, part-funded by a scholarship, so knew the double-edged sword of intellect, the way it lifts you up, but also marks you out, especially as a woman, and the way being marked out can come to define you.
If one has been defined at a young age, as K, and Marianne, and presumably debate champion and multi-bestseller Rooney have, by their intellect, that must also inflect your approach to romantic life. You might enjoy the release of supplication. You might find refuge in the “subservient and facilitatory” as a form of rebellion, or of masochism. You might thrill to the sense of your rational mind being overthrown by embodied passions. Or you might feel wary and mistrustful of affection, both others’ and your own, and attempt to puncture it with defensive behaviors, barbed comments and intellectual provocations. (No doubt she had some issues with her parents, too!)
Episode Six: a party, of sorts. Marianne leans back in a chair, a challenging glare in her eye. Connell hovers at the fringes, awkward. He’s outside the social sphere, this is not his world. They are sleeping together, have been since high school, the power shifts between them like a see-saw. Or a set of scales. For there is some balance here: In a patriarchal world, he holds the power of being the man; in a capitalist world, she of being wealthy.
Back when K and Matt first got together, she thinks, things had also felt more balanced. But now he earns so much and she earns nothing. She wonders how many other relationships over-topple this way, when children are born.
Marianne was hurt by Connell, back in high school; she doesn’t want to let herself be hurt again. At the party, she quilts protections out of her critical distance, hides behind her feminism. He seems to have real feelings for her now, compared to the sketch in the White Review story—the focus seems less on his being “emotionally empty,” more on the fact that he worries about this—and he knows he can’t claim her or anything (it’s a sort of classic set up, he doesn’t think he deserves her but also doesn’t want the inconvenience of having to make himself worthy of her . . . ).
He’d been preparing to leave Dublin for the summer, accepting that might mean they’d break up, but he’s lost his job, can’t afford to stay, too proud initially to ask her for financial help. (Rooney is great on this, the way economic necessity embeds bad patterns of relating.)
But Connell is considering it––he cares for her, she likes him—when Marianne says, “Men seem more interested in limiting women’s freedoms than exploring their own.” Does he receive it, as she perhaps intended, in good spirits, a gloss of cynicism? Does he hear it as a test? It’s the turning point, the point where he must ask her if he can stay with her, or walk away, wounding them both (the wounding has been foreshadowed by broken glass in the sink). Connell doesn’t speak up, and in the living room, one evening, baby fast asleep upstairs, K found herself gritting her teeth, “Why doesn’t he just communicate?”
Matt seemed to see a lot of himself in Connell: the inarticulateness of the smart boy; his vulnerability to group social pressure.
“Because she said that thing about limiting freedoms,” her husband replied.
She asked the question rhetorically.
The critic Jessa Crispin considered the party interchange bad dialogue. Specifically: “The TV show analyzes itself for you with these offhand comments by the characters, so you don’t have to do any of the hard work of thinking, and they don’t have to do any of the hard work of delving into the complexity of contemporary heterosexuality.”
But Crispin understates the way this mode of relating is key to the main characters’ dynamic, and the unfolding narrative.
Marianne doesn’t think her words will affect Connell. Yet in one reading, they change everything. It is her words that mean that Connell doesn’t show vulnerability, doesn’t ask for help; that they break up, rather than stay together.
This interaction might be a key part of the writer and directors’ “delving into the complexity of contemporary heterosexuality”: the way we hide behind our politics; the way recourse to this sort of glib political aside can be a sign of emotional damage, or repression, in a world that values stoicism and independence over intimacy and communication.
And when, watching this episode, K realized that her husband’s inarticulateness might be in part a reaction to the things she says; that his inarticulateness was not his fault alone; that two people, in a couple, are symbiotic, she felt the possibility of repair to some small wound in their relationship.
As soon as the moment of salve suggested itself, she was keen to puncture it. “Let’s not be like James Corden and say Normal People changed our life.”
He shot her a look: Hurt? Annoyed? “Let’s not bring James Corden into it.”
Between episode Eight and Nine.
They went to the forest. They parked on the golf course side, the rickety pot-holed road near the old-people’s home, not by the tree on the hill now purple with blossom. They breathed in the green. Ate sandwiches out of Tupperware, high on a hill, bagels, with limp Edam, turned stodgy in the humidity of the box.
She can’t recall what game they played that day, perhaps they were hunting for bears as their son ran stumble-trip over the tree-roots. Perhaps they were spotting squirrels or wading through mud enticed by small animal biscuits half-dipped in chocolate. She had the feeling not of being happy exactly but of making a truce, in the war that raged inside her all the time, contentment versus dissatisfaction in the name of self-betterment.
She watched her husband chase after their boy, tickling him until chuckles fell like blossoms from his mouth, and thought: What was the problem?
Her husband, she thought, was insufficiently feminist. That was the problem. He believed (or so she believed) that the things she found difficult were things she had chosen (the drudge of childcare, maybe, or the struggle of freelancing). He didn’t seem to understand how her efforts were affected by systems. He was supposed to be a socialist, despite his job in corporate banking. Yet he seemed to believe, within the home unit, that adults should take care of themselves.
On return to the car, he unhooked their son from his carrier—asleep—and tried to place him—still asleep—in the car seat. He felt a stab in his abs, which didn’t go away even after he stood up. Briefly his pained expression invited her to imagine what it was like to be him: He presumed the problem was muscular. And felt a lot of things all mixed together. A kind of hermit anger looking for a home in blame. A feeling of losing control, things spinning just beyond his grasp. Annoyance at having had to twist to put the toddler in the car, that parenthood is not ergonomic. He felt stress at how he was going to cope, already exhausted from the month since nursery shut. Also, he had a professional exam coming up. That was one of the places he got self-esteem from: taking tests, receiving high marks. Transmitting his intellectual skills into external awards. Being good at something, objectively good. The exam represented a necessary tension relief.
At home, baby transferred successfully to pram without waking, Matt lay on the floor, on his back, frozen peas on his stomach, holding his eyes as his face changed color; he held his eyes as though he could squeeze the tears back in, as Connell talked to his therapist.
Before the baby, K had only seen him cry like this once. When his younger cousin died suddenly of Deep Vein Thrombosis and she found Matt in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, trying, and failing, to comprehend the incalculable shock of the loss.
On the TV, Connell’s friend had just committed suicide, and Connell was talking to a therapist about feeling isolated and unliked. It wasn’t clear whether it was Connell’s predicament or his own pain that caused her husband to cry, but perhaps the physical pain was giving him a context to cry; the physical pain allowed him to relate to Connell more freely than he might otherwise have done.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“It’s just a very good portrayal of men’s mental health,” he replied, sobbing.
When the episode finished, he retreated to their bedroom, vomited, then called NHS 111. At that point in the pandemic, they were avoiding unnecessary interactions, but he believed in his pain the way she never had hers, so he took a cloth mask stitched by his mother and tapped his phone to summon an Uber.
At the hospital, a doctor did checks, gave him painkillers, and diagnosed a suspected gallstone.
At home K moved around her baby, cooked some convenient dinner, tried not to panic.
While Matt was at the hospital, she put Leo to bed for the first time in months. Co-sleeping had been their solution to the long stretches of broken nights, but their son had become “too attached to the breast,” so they’d separated him into his own room a couple of months earlier, and Matt had taken on night duties, first settling him in the evening, then shushing him back to sleep when he woke.
And that night, even though she resorted to giving him a feed, when she watched his eyelids flutter after the third recitation of The Snail and the Whale, she felt proud. She was asleep when Matt, numbed by drugs, got home, and the next day he got up and returned to the hospital for a scan.
In her husband’s absence, she took Leo to the empty park where the benches were all taped off.
A discarded mask flapped around her feet.
She washed her hands after taking the kitchen rubbish out. She hadn’t realized till then that the easiest way to get rid of the guilt about resentment she imagined her husband felt for always having to do the bins was by taking them out herself.
Later, she washed her hands again after taking out the bin from the bathroom. Her hands were sore from so much washing, like the paper cut feeling of postnatal mental illness.
Wash your hands all the time, the midwife at the prenatal classes, had said. Before you eat, after you eat, before nappy changes, after nappy changes, before breast feeding, after breast feeding, to which the doctor in the hospital, observing her stitches, had added, before and after you use the loo. Within weeks she no longer recognized her skin, wizened like a crone’s. She resisted hand cream, for fear it would somehow get inside the baby.
She placed a new bag in the bin. The bags were from Simple Human, a name that evokes the affirmative joy of something functioning as expected. The ergonomics that parenthood lacked. They always arrived as if by magic, delivered by fairies. Or elves. In fact, her husband had them on some sort of “subscribe and save,” like the nappies.
In his absence, she found herself feeling grateful for how much Matt did around the house. She had always resisted housework, a protest against the domesticity she saw as threatening the last reserves of creative energy, or a tribute to people like Virginia Woolf or Jean Rhys or Doris Lessing, whose Golden Notebook makes an appearance in Normal People’s early scenes; what she didn’t realize was how much she also resisted gratitude.
And perhaps this resistance had prevented her from correctly quantifying the value of the tasks performed by her husband—how taking care of the house was one of the ways Matt showed his love.
But there’s something disgusting about gratitude, about earnestness; there is something soft about it, like a stale biscuit—something dangerous too—a slippery slope. Day one, you feel grateful. By day five, you might have submitted totally to the other person and—then? What’s left?
She wanted to watch the finale, so hoped Matt would get home in time for Leo’s nap.
But shortly before midday she received a text, “Just spoke to the doctor. Probably appendicitis but need to see another doctor and probably get another scan. Also saw some legions on my left fema bone so will need to see a specialist about those too, which sounds scary. Tumour or cancer or infection maybe?”
She had to read the message a couple of times, thrown by his misuse of the word “legion” which conjured hordes in armor; thrown also by the intrusion of the real into their constructed life. The real was less the possibility of cancer than his admission of finding something scary. That was new. And destabilizing. The last time that had happened they’d been in the labor ward, worrying she was going to die, or possibly the next morning when she handed him the baby and he handed him straight back again, fearful that his shaking hands would drop him.
Rooney writes about this of course, the way that pain crises can crystallize the things that really matter, can slough off some of the resentments and grudges that calcify on a relationship.
There’s something disgusting about gratitude, about earnestness; there is something soft about it, like a stale biscuit.
In “At the Clinic,” Marianne’s physical (unchosen) pain softens something inside Connell, allowing him to better consider the pain he believes she has chosen:
Connell . . . lacks focus and thinks recurrently about Marianne’s pain. Marianne involves herself in things that are bad for her. That’s an opinion Connell feels really guilty about.
At the same time, Marianne’s pain—or the numbing medication—allows her to temporarily shrug off her characteristic coldness, as though coldness were also a sort of pain.
In Conversations with Friends, Frances conceals her physical pain, caused by endometriosis, from her lover Nick, as well as the true extent of her romantic feelings, until a gynecological emergency breaks through.
In the first two thirds of the book, whenever Frances feels physical pain she tries to distract herself from it; the same is often true for her emotional experiences.
She distracts herself with physical sensations, whether “breeze [which] felt new,” food which “tasted impossibly good, as did soft drinks,” or even incidents of mild self-harm: When her lover’s friends joke about “some women [liking] married men,” she steps “on [her] foot so hard the pain [shoots] up [her] leg.” She also takes comfort from intellectual achievement: “Whenever I got a ‘brilliant’ I took a photograph of it on my phone.” These strategies work for Frances, up to a point.
Through juxtaposition, the reader intuits the way her coldness and detachment are related to the techniques she used to distance herself from her (alcoholic) father’s moods: “I learnt not to provoke him. I was cold as a fish.” This line is followed, after a section break, with the decision to visit him and “I could feel a headache developing, like it was coming down from the sky directly into my brain.” Love, in its complexity, and its absence, causes physical pain, but interestingly, intellectual pursuits which she calls “morally neutral at best” also produce a “fine, shrill headache.” In this way the work of feeling, and of thinking, in Rooney’s work are joined in their capacity to bring about physical discomfort.
There is also an economic component to this. Frances lives in a flat owned by her father’s brother. The reader is invited to consider how this continued financial enmeshment might prolong her reliance on the emotional strategies she developed in her adolescence.
In both “At the Clinic” (a title that invites associations with more private settings than the dentist’s, and more sex-inflected conditions than an infected tooth) and Conversations with Friends, the pain crisis functions as a way of mediating between subjectivities that might otherwise be too submerged, and separate. Physical pain becomes a way of contextualizing, externalizing and measuring emotional discomfort.
It is ultimately her endometritis that forces Frances to be vulnerable with Nick. When he learns of her condition, he comes over. She notes that he looks at her differently now: “in a way that was not at all vulgar, the kind of look you can give someone’s body when you’ve seen it many times and it has a particular relationship to you.” Letting her former girlfriend Bobbi care for her alters their relationship too: “The time she ran me that bath had changed something, had placed Bobbi in a new relation to me even as we both remained ourselves.”
Perhaps it takes a pain crisis to remake habits formed in youth, patterns of self-reliance, self-control and detachment designed to protect oneself but that no longer function.
Matt would need to stay in hospital, until his appendix could be removed. Keyhole surgery was banned due to Covid, so he’d be having the general anesthetic.
For now, he was in the green zone, non-Covid.
“The food guys are all air hostesses,” he texted, “They’re bringing some good energy.”
K imagined the BA stewardesses, delivering walnut slices and fantasy templates.
She sent him photos of their living room, kitchen and dining room which she had cleaned extensively.
That evening he was moved to the red zone (Covid and non-Covid). “The guy in the bed next to mine refuses to wear a mask . . . keeps coughing.”
Covid ward. She’d heard stories. The perfectly healthy-30-year-old who gets the coronavirus, and against all odds, dies; who goes into hospital for a routine operation but because of the viral load comes out sicker. And what about the tumor? That was bad luck, alright. Or was it more than that, some sort of perverse, ironic punishment, for her coldness, her dramatics?
Perhaps she cherished even this little mental drama because it re-centralized her in the action: her husband, the one in the hospital during the pandemic; her husband with the maybe cancer.
She bit the flesh around her fingernails, willed their baby son asleep, and sat beside his cot bed in the dark, thinking how ironic that just as Normal People showed her what kind of person her husband was, enabling them to love each other better, he gets sick, then cancer, then Covid . . .
One time, she’d had a terrible pain in her abdomen. It hurt so much she couldn’t walk, couldn’t sleep. It throbbed. She wanted to go to the hospital, but Matt had asked her how the pain had ranked on the pain scale and she’d said nine, and he’d given her this little look, like it was an exaggeration. Told her to keep drinking water. Later when it turned out that she’d been retaining urine, probably the side effects from coming off long-term migraine medication, and she needed tests to assess the kidney damage, he was apologetic, but blamed it on a mathematical confusion, between logarithmic and exponential scales, also a miscommunication about whether it was “the worst pain ever felt” or the “worst pain she could imagine.” Perhaps that was the problem, her imagination was so much bigger than his.
One time––they’d been going out for six months––they took part in a Zombie Chase adventure on the Isle of Dogs. They were put on a team with three strangers, a middle-aged couple and their teenage daughter, and she had felt responsible to this ersatz family, the daughter especially––it reminded her of the ramshackle family groups you find in real horror movies––and unwilling to leave them behind. Games ensued: groaning victims in dimly-lit shipping containers, dropped Tic Tacs representing medicine, “mental patients” locked in cages, hordes of racing “zombies.” She had watched enough horror movies to know that strategy and teamwork were valued ahead of self-preservation; that’s why there’s always a final girl, because she has a balanced portfolio of skills, not just brute strength and self-interest, but care and cunning too. But Matt was less of a movie fan; he ran and ran, and as the zombies picked off the rest of their team, she felt herself getting madder and madder; when the zombie “bit” her and she got marked up with the UV pen, she felt annoyed too that the game hadn’t found a way to put an ironic twist on it. That unlike the movies, the game rewarded what society often seemed to reward: each man for himself.
Of their team, only Matt survived.
Following the appendix surgery, Matt spent the night in hospital. He’d forgotten to take anything, a Kindle, a charger, headphones. Luckily, some nurse took pity on him; he managed to charge his phone.
The next morning, she began another day of “nursery at home,” following the instructions sent by email from his preschool.
In the park, K and Leo fought about a straw for his juice.
He screamed and sobbed and she found herself exhausted.
“I was trying to help you,” she heard herself desperately explain.
“Oh,” said her two-year-old, “I did not know that was what you were trying to do.”
Where did it come from, this perfect emotional literacy? More crucially, where did it go?
Matt got home late and limped around the house, skin pale, speech slurred from the last drops in his blood of anesthetic.
She asked about the sexy flight attendants.
“No,” he replied, laughing. “They were all guys!”
He described how in the green zone, when a medic entered and saw Matt in his mask, they pulled theirs up, sheepishly, like kids caught with their hands in the sweet jar. In the red zone it was a different story: The surgeon was armored in full-bodied PPE, like he was off to Mars.
Together they watched the finale.
Marianne pushes Connell to accept an MFA in New York, forcing a breakup.
“She’s punishing him for applying to the MFA without telling her,” said K.
“That’s the sort of thing you’d do,” said Matt.
He was disappointed, he said, the couple hadn’t made it work.
They both were.
She accompanied Matt to the bathroom where he peed, still woozy from drugs. She sat on the edge of the tub and thought about what to say.
The surgery had been a success, from a medical standpoint. Although he’d have to go back for scans every few months, the doctors weren’t overly worried about the tumor. His initial Covid tests were negative and even though it was possible he’d caught it, they weren’t in a high-risk group.
Pain crises didn’t seem to work for them the way they did for Rooney’s characters. They were rarely so healing, so generative.
She felt herself a little fizzy. Sad. Desperate.
Pain crises didn’t seem to work for them the way they did for Rooney’s characters. They were rarely so healing, so generative.
There was the urinary retention, but there were also a myriad other times in which she had felt pain that had been downrated. Perhaps the thing that had looked most like a pain crisis in their recent life was childbirth—that acute, life-altering agony—but one whose potential to bring change was perhaps nullified by its status as meaningful, productive work. Labor. A pain she had chosen.
And the various pains that followed it—the suspected De Quervain’s tenosynovitis, the agony at the base of her spine when breastfeeding, the feeling that her brain was shattering under the strain of accommodating everyone’s needs and opinions—they were of the chronic sort that easily fall within the tide of acceptable discomforts under capitalism.
They hadn’t achieved Rooney-levels of crisis-inspired empathy. She could see his old self-protective walls coming up.
He told her the surgery had revealed the appendicitis hadn’t been very advanced. “The nurse said I had a stronger reaction to the initial incident than most.”
“Do you think you have a low pain threshold?”
“I don’t know if that term has much meaning really.” His voice wavered. “It’s all about nerve endings, where you feel the pain.”
She thought of masculinity like a giant suspension bridge, the way it quivers actually being in the design, the way it burns off nervous energy and releases tension, not a sign of real vulnerability, but of strength.
“I read an article recently that said redheads are more susceptible to pain than other people,” she said.
Matt finished peeing and staggered towards the basin.
“I’m blonde,” he said.
Rooney portrays characters who believe in “small jobs, like raising children.” In Conversations with Friends, Bobbi suggests “spontaneous consent” as an answer to the disempowerment encoded in conventional monogamy, but: how to square this with simply being “humans, struggling to create happy children and families?”
In fiction, pain crises can be the catalyst to new ways of relating, but K and Matt weren’t fictional people. They were just normal people, muddling through.
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