by Karen Karbo
It’s the longest con out there, self-improvement.
Thinking endlessly about self-improvement takes up a lot of headspace and time. Once you’ve sworn it off, you find yourself with a lot of room to think. At night, as I was drifting off to sleep, I thought of Bronnie Ware’s elders, and how they regretted not having had the courage to be who they were. I would think: I am as free as I will ever be. My daughter is grown-up, my parents are both gone, I have a (very) little money in the bank. I thought about Mary Oliver’s oft-quoted, yet still awesome, line: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
I remembered something I hadn’t thought of in decades: after my mother died, I found among her things a file labeled Dream Trip. It was stuffed with clippings of things to do in London, Vienna, Paris, and Rome. She was waiting to go. Waiting until I was launched. Waiting until money wasn’t so tight. Waiting until my father could take off three weeks instead of the two he was allotted. There was always a perfectly good reason now was not the time to go. I remembered a moment with my mother, bloated and bald from chemo. She said, “I guess I will never get to Vienna.” And then she died. She was forty-six.
The day after our daughter got married in June 2018, I decided I needed to turn the final card over and risk being who I believed myself to be: a woman who made her dream of living in France come true. We put our 102-year-old gray colonial with the straggly pink rose bushes up for sale, sold our old VW Cabrio, got rid of most of our stuff, and moved to a village named Collioure.
I am writing this to you from there.
Collioure is an ancient village on the Mediterranean, where the Pyrenees mountains meet the sea. It’s most famous for being the place where Henri Matisse discovered his bright fauve palette. Before Collioure, Matisse was a traditionalist with a dwindling career; in 1905 he discovered the light of Collioure, the red-and-blue anchovy boats, the pink glow of sky and ocean at dusk, the deep green of the ancient vineyards blanketing the hillsides.
My husband and I live in a tiny apartment with stone walls and green wooden shutters with peeling paint, over the nougat shop and across from the second-rate boulangerie. We swim in the sea every day, and like Jenny Odell and her bird-watching, I have become a sea-watcher, attuning myself to its different moods depending on whether there had been a storm or what direction the wind is coming from. Sometimes the sea is smooth green glass; other times it’s gray and disorganized. When the wind is in from Africa, everything in the village is covered in a fine ocher-colored dust. After our swim, we have a glass of local rosé at the St. Elme, our favorite seaside café.
Imperfection is an art here. Some days the boulangerie has enough croissants for its customers and sometimes it doesn’t. The shops close for lunch, until whenever it suits them to open in the afternoon. There is an army barracks where the French commandos live while in training, and the French flag is raised anywhere between 7:20 and 8:00 a.m. each day. There is no such thing as on the dot, or ice-cold beer, or people who can’t stop to have a tepid one with a friend. Every day I speak my B-minus level French, and hope that it will improve, but I’m not counting on it.
The French people I’ve met in our new home say yeah, no, not happening as if they were born to it. They say it with a smirk. Even if eventually they will say yes, and . . . they always start with no. It amuses them, I’m told, to be convinced to say yes. It allows for a conversation. As for self-improvement, they find it uninteresting. They prize originality and the willingness to see what happens next.
Notes
INTRODUCTION: HELLO YOU
Created not by bison hunters: Three-quarters of hand stencils in eight caves in France and Spain were determined to be female, according to a study conducted by archeologist Dean Snow, under the auspices of National Geographic. Virginia Hughes, “Were the First Artists Mostly Women?” National Geographic, October 9, 2013.
Then came the wealthy: Alastair Sooke, “How Ancient Egypt Shaped Our Idea of Beauty,” BBC.com, February 4, 2016.
Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen: Alison Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine (New York: Ballantine Books, 2000).
One Huffington Post piece: Ester Bloom, “How ‘Treat Yourself’ Became a Capitalist Command,” Atlantic, November 19, 2015.
There are over a thousand known varieties of bananas: “Banana Facts and Figures,” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2018, fao.org/economic/est/est-commodities/bananas/bananafacts.
CHAPTER 1: TODAY IS THE DAY
Over the past decade microbiologists: M. Valles-Colomer, G. Falony, Y. Darzi, et al., “The Neuroactive Potential of the Human Gut Microbiota in Quality of Life and Depression,” Nature Microbiology, February 2019.
unless you’ve participated in the American Gut Project: americangut.org.
The Voldemort of emotions: Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t): Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough” (New York: Avery, 2007), introduction.
Shame, as Brown defines: Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me, chapter 1.
During Brown’s investigation: Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me, chapter 3.
during the last decade: Sharon M. Fruh et al., “Obesity Stigma and Bias,” Journal for Nurse Practitioners 12, no. 7 (July–August 2016): 425–32.
A groundbreaking piece of research: Meghan L. Meyer and Matthew D. Lieberman, “Why People Are Always Thinking about Themselves: Medial Prefrontal Cortex Activity during Rest Primes Self-Referential Processing,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 30, no. 5 (May 2018): 714–21.
The growing sophistication of technology: Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna, “The Brain’s Default Network and Its Adaptive Role in Internal Mentation,” Neuroscientist 18, no. 3 (June 2012): 251–70.
CHAPTER 2: THE GREAT FEMALE SELF-IMPROVEMENT BAMBOOZLEMENT
Behold an advertisement in a 1919 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal: Sarah Everts, “How Advertisers Convinced Americans They Smelled Bad,” Smithsonian.com, August 2, 2012.
A 1923 ad campaign: Marlen Komar, “How One Everyday Beauty Product Is Responsible for the Most Outdated Marriage Cliche Ever,” Bustle.com, July 12, 2017.
In 2018 women spent: Statista Research Department, “Total Consumer Spending of Women Worldwide in 2013 and 2018,” Statista.com, August 9, 2019.
A 2015 article in Forbes: Bridget Brennan, “Top 10 Things Everyone Should Know About Women Consumers,” Forbes, January 21, 2015.
As cultural critic Ellen Willis: Ellen Willis, “Women and the Myth of Consumerism,” Ramparts, 8, no. 12 (June 1970): 13–16.
Enter the clever tactic: “History of Philip Morris,” Center for Media and Democracy, SourceWatch.org, 1987, November 24, 2015.
Philip Morris also manufactured Virginia Slims: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Women and Smoking: A Report of the Surgeon General,” MMWR 51, no. RR-12 (August 2002).
A study published in: Debra Trampe, Diederik A. Stapel, and Frans W. Siero, “The Self-Activation Effect of Advertisements: Ads Can Affect Whether and How Consumers Think About the Self,” Journal of Consumer Research 37, no. 6 (April 2011). (Note: It has since been retracted.)
She may have said: Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, reprint edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), conclusion.
As I write this: Todd Spangler, “Are Americans Addicted to Smartphones? U.S. Consumers Check Their Phones 52 Times Daily, Study Finds,” Variety, November 14, 2018.
Will Storr, writing in: Will Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2018), book zero.
They practice something Canadian writer: Kelly Diels, “Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand,” kellydiels.com.
Vox reported in 2018: Julia Belluz, “Goop Was Fined $145,000 for Its Claims about Jade Eggs for Vaginas. It’s Still Selling Them,” Vox.com, September 6, 2018.
Carina Chocano, author of: Carina Chocano, “The Coast of Utopia,” Vanity Fair, August 2019.
Look no further
than: Hayley Krischer, “The New Mom Uniform of Park Slope,” New York Times, January 16, 2019.
Pioneered by twentieth-century French philosopher: René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
CHAPTER 3: IT’S COMPLICATED: SELF-IMPROVEMENT FOR GIRLS
I could “watch my figure”: Ellen Peck, How to Get a Teen-Age Boy and What to Do with Him When You Get Him (New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1969). You really can’t make this stuff up.
In Kids These Days: Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017), chapter 3.
One of the fallouts: “Billionaire Fortunes Grew by $2.5 Billion a Day Last Year as Poorest Saw Their Wealth Fall,” Oxfam International, January 21, 2019, https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-fortunes-grew-25-billion-day-last-year-poorest-saw-their-wealth-fall.
A January 2019 article: Adam Schubak, “20 Ways to Be the Best You in 2019,” Men’s Health, January 9, 2019.
Let us never forget: Eugene Scott, “White Women Helped Elect Trump. Now He’s Losing Their Support,” Washington Post, January 22, 2018.
In 2008, candidate Mitt Romney: Morgan Little, “Mitt, Ann Romney Defend Putting Dog on Car Roof; Fallout Continues,” Los Angeles Times, April 17, 2012.
Joan C. Williams, in: Joan C. Williams, “How Women Can Escape the Likability Trap: Powerful Women Know How to Flip Feminine Stereotypes to Their Advantage,” New York Times, August 16, 2019.
Jia Tolentino, writing about: Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (New York: Random House, 2019), 78.
CHAPTER 4: YOUR BEST SELF IS LIKE AN IMAGINARY BELOVED
One contributor to Thought Catalog: Claudia St. Claire, “I Have an Imaginary Boyfriend,” Thought Catalog, January 21, 2014.
Second-wave feminism effectively: Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, Autumn 1975.
“A woman must continually”: John Berger, Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series, reprint edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 46.
Kathryn Schulz, writing in: Kathryn Schulz, “The Self in Self-Help,” New York magazine, January 4, 2013.
Those who suffer from: Katharine A. Phillips et al., “Body Dysmorphic Disorder: Some Key Issues for DSM-V,” Depression and Anxiety 27, no. 6 (June 2010): 573–91.
CHAPTER 5: A SHORT HISTORY OF SELF-IMPROVEMENT DURING THE LATE MODERN AGE
Then new machine technologies: Stephen Nicholas and Deborah Oxley, “The Living Standards of Women during the Industrial Revolution, 1795–1820,” Economic History Review 46, no. 4 (November 1993): 723–49.
At the end of the nineteenth century: Francis Parkman, “The Woman Question,” North American Review 129, no. 275 (October 1879): 303–21.
English philosopher John Locke: Helena Rodrigues, “In Defense of Women: Equality in Locke’s Political Theory” (The Midwest Political Science Association, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois, April 15, 2004).
A generation later French writer: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (New York: Penguin Classics, 2007), Book V.
Symptoms included insomnia, anxiety: Rachel P. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), chapter 1.
Psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall: G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, Vol. II (New York: D. Appleton, 1905), 588.
It is as if the Almighty: Ann Douglas Wood, “The ‘Fashionable Diseases’: Women’s Complaints and Their Treatment in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4 (Summer 1973): 29.
He believed the ovaries: Rita Arditti, “Women as Objects: Science and Sexual Politics,” Science for the People, September 1974, 8.
By 1906, 150,000 women: Ehrenreich and English, 136.
Ellen Swallow Richards, the founder: Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women, rev. ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), chapter 5.
Around the same: Susan Contratto, “Psychology Views Mothers and Mothering: 1897–1980,” Feminist Re-visions: What Has Been and Might Be (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1983).
His theory, developed: Ibid.
In 1963, she published: Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (New York: Basic Books, 2011), chapter 8.
Helen Gurley was one: Brooke Hauser, Enter Helen: The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman (New York: Harper, 2016).
She is demonstrating: Nora Ephron, “Helen Gurley Brown: ‘If You’re a Little Mouseburger, Come with Me. I Was a Mouseburger and I Can Help You.’ The Most of Nora Ephron (New York: Knopf, 2013), 86.
By 1980, half: George Guilder, “Women in the Work Force,” Atlantic, September 1986.
It was 1982, and: Jennifer Szalai, “The Complicated Origins of ‘Having It All,’” New York Times Magazine, January 2, 2015.
CHAPTER 6: WHERE THE WILD THINGS STILL ARE
Mark Manson, the King: Mark Manson, “The Staggering Bullshit of ‘The Secret,’” MarkManson.net.
These books take: Sadie Trombetta, “Women Are Angrier Than Ever, and These 3 Books Explore What That Means,” Bustle, September 27, 2018.
Which brings us to: Carl Jung, “Aion: Phenomenology of the Self,” in Joseph Campbell (ed.), The Portable Jung (New York: The Viking Press, 1971).
CHAPTER 7: TRUE YOU RISING
I read a little: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 1107.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times: Jennifer Conlin, “The $10-Billion Business of Self-Care,” Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2019.
According to Samsung: Rachel Jacoby Zoldan, “This Is the Estimated Number of Selfies You’ll Take in a Lifetime,” Teen Vogue, March 31, 2017.
Stein lived in Paris: Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, reissue edition (New York: Vintage, 1990).
CHAPTER 8: THE YEAH, NO. NOT HAPPENING CHEAT SHEET
But there were: Soraya Nadia McDonald, “Kim Novak Responds to Post-Oscars Ridicule: ‘I Was Bullied,’” Washington Post, April 18, 2014.
In 2006, Duke: Yang Yang, “On the Dynamics of, and Heterogeneity in, Subjective Well-Being Across the Life Course and Over Time in the United States,” SINET, May & August no. 94 & 95 (2008).
Jessica Valenti sums: Jessica Valenti, “She Who Dies with the Most ‘Likes’ Wins?” Nation, November 29, 2012.
In Secrets from: Traci Mann, Secrets from the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again (New York: Harper Wave, 2015), chapter 2.
From Parents magazine: Lauren Wiener, “Stressed? 28 Ways to Unwind—By Tonight!” Parents, undated.
CHAPTER 9: WHY YES, AND . . .
Stanford professor emerita: Patricia Ryan Madson, Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up (New York: Bell Tower, 2005).
Based in Oakland: Jenny Odell, “How to Do Nothing,” Medium.com, June 29, 2017.
“When I go biking, I repeat,” A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Vintage, 1991), 184.
“Money gives men power”: Noreen Malone, “Can Women Have It All? Beyoncé Says Yes,” New Republic, January 27, 2013.
The cockroach-resiliency: Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976; repr. New York: Other Press, 1999).
“I came to meetings”: Judith Taylor, “I’m a woman who imitated the swagger of an entitled white male—and it got results,” The Star, October 13, 2018.
“Nothing frustrates me so”: Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).
“Responsibility to yourself”: Adrienne Rich, “Claiming an Education,” On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (New Y
ork: W.W. Norton, 1979), 233–234.
About the Author
KAREN KARBO is the author of Trespassers Welcome Here, The Diamond Lane, and Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me; the memoir The Stuff of Life; and the Kick Ass Women series. Her short stories, essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction and a winner of the General Electric Younger Writer Award. In addition, Karbo penned three books in the Minerva Clark mystery series for children. A longtime resident of Portland, Oregon, she now lives in Collioure, France.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by Karen Karbo
Fiction
Trespassers Welcome Here
The Diamond Lane
Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me
Nonfiction
Generation Ex: Tales from the Second Wives Club
The Stuff of Life: A Daughter’s Memoir
How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great
The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman
How Georgia Became O’Keeffe: Lessons on the Art of Living
Julia Child Rules: Lessons on Savoring Life
In Praise of Difficult Women: Life Lessons from 29 Heroines Who Dared to Break the Rules
For Younger Readers
Minerva Clark Gets a Clue
Minerva Clark Goes to the Dogs
Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost
Copyright
YEAH, NO. NOT HAPPENING. Copyright © 2020 by Karen Karbo. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.