by Alice Bolin
It is obvious to me now that I should have read Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors in the thick of my hypochondria, which lasted for about four years. Sontag wrote them to “alleviate unnecessary suffering” when people thought about illness, “to calm the imagination, not to incite it.” It was in fact my noisy imagination that kept me from reading them. I shuddered at the cover of AIDS and Its Metaphors, an abstracted photo of cells under a microscope, a cursed image if I had ever seen one. I was the kind of hypochondriac who avoided the doctor, terrified of the certainty of diagnosis. I wallowed in my fear, prolonging agony that could have been ended by a series of tests.
Sontag writes about the connection between the modern conception of illness and the origins of individualism, with romanticized diseases like TB becoming “an interior décor of the body.” This is the lineage of our aestheticizing of mental illness, which is often portrayed as a tragic eccentricity or a surplus of insight: think The Bell Jar, Girl: Interrupted, A Beautiful Mind, and our suicided geniuses from Vincent van Gogh to Kurt Cobain. Throughout my childhood and adolescence I was tortured by insomnia and compulsive thinking, but I was satisfied that my misery made me, at the very least, special, and it was possible that it made me brilliant. In reality, the amorphous symptoms that constitute mental illness make it maybe the most common chronic ailment. Sontag’s thesis is that our societal metaphors are often sicker than our sicknesses. Her demystification of illness was at odds with my conception of myself, in that it might have led me to get the help I needed.
I hesitate when I associate my hypochondria with narcissism. I don’t think an anxiety disorder is a moral defect. But in my hypochondria I was consumed with observing myself—taking my temperature, pressing my lymph nodes, and staring at my teeth in the mirror, like the first Narcissus at the pond. I was confused above all about where my self was and what constituted it, convinced my body concealed both poisonous defects and unseeable beauty. I was young and always randomly heartbroken, and my fears of STDs and cancer were transparently metaphorical: I was afraid of a change to my body that would usurp my identity and render me unlovable, or that a diagnosis would confirm that I was already unlovable.
Part of the problem is that mental illnesses are not primarily bad feelings, but the thought patterns and compulsions the sufferer develops to deal with them. These are difficult to let go of because, in a limited way, they work. Systems of magical thinking do provide reassurance, even if it takes torturous negotiations with one’s own brain to get there. I sort of agree with Freud that our mental dysfunctions are related to childhood shame, but rather than repressing shameful parts of ourselves, these dysfunctions help us protect them. As a kid I longed to have glasses, braces, a wheelchair, or a chronic disease, seeing them, heartlessly, as sources of importance and attention. As an adult, my hypochondria both allowed me to indulge that gruesome part of myself and to hate myself for it. I’m afraid of poetic justice finding that morbid child, of the fate of someone who likes pain, but hates punishment.
Sontag’s essays are masterpieces of compassion. When she probes our “punitive or sentimental fantasies” about sickness, she reveals how cruel they are to the sick. Of course, when confronted directly about my fear, I would have denied that a sick person is unlovable, or less himself or herself, or less human. But even then I knew the stigmas my fears played on were cruel. I could analyze my dark thoughts, but I wouldn’t let go of them. Eula Biss writes in On Immunity, a kind of successor to Sontag’s essays, that “as with other strongly held beliefs, our fears are dear to us.” And our fantasies of ourselves are dear to us, and they can make us monstrous.
In the years since my hypochondriac era, I have found that narcissism is anathema to real self-love, which requires forfeiting romantic and morbid notions of identity. I have had to acknowledge that my inner self shares in specialness, rather than possessing its own, and to my surprise, this has expanded my idea of who I am and what I am capable of. “We must have patience with everyone, but especially with ourselves,” St. Francis de Sales said, and my practice of self-love is much more a refusal to be cruel to myself than it is any pride or confidence: a reprieve rather than a reward.
The viewer of Cléo from 5 to 7 is meant to uncomfortably identify with Cléo; she is a sympathetic figure, but not an attractive one. Signs of violence and devastation surround her, but her terror manifests itself as self-absorption. Only when Cléo can truly accept the scale of horror and destruction in the world is she able to free herself from some anxiety. Antoine, the soldier she meets late in the film, is on leave from Algeria, a visitor from the heart of danger. He breaks Cléo’s isolation and movingly helps her on her journey to find peace in the universe’s indifference. “I’m afraid of everything,” Cléo tells him. “Birds, storms, elevators, needles, and now this great fear of death.” “In Algeria, you’d be afraid all the time,” Antoine says.
In the long, difficult recovery period after my mom’s heart surgery, my brothers and I rushed to my parents’ side, spending over a month making messes in their house and providing minimal practical help. One Sunday morning, a few weeks after I came back, I woke to what sounded like an explosion. Outside, we found that a woman had crashed her car into the side of the house, her front bumper landing perilously close to where my mom sat in bed, watching The Sopranos. The woman came out of her car lucid, saying she didn’t remember the crash and she didn’t know what had happened, having blacked out while driving to the church a block away. She came into our house to call her husband, but inside she started seizing, rigid and unresponsive in a chair in our living room.
I called the police, panicked. I didn’t know how to tell if she was breathing, didn’t know CPR. My nineteen-year-old brother sobbed after the ambulance arrived, asking if she was going to die. As the EMTs worked on her, I went to the church to find her husband. I asked a middle-school-aged usher where he was, then burst in on a meeting of church elders in a conference room. He looked stricken the moment I said her name. He came with me and knelt down and prayed in our driveway. The EMTs administered CPR for a terrifyingly long time, and as they were rushing her to the hospital, we heard someone say that she had responded. When my dad came home from grocery shopping, they had already left. He had missed the whole thing, and he was so innocent of the experience that we were mad at him. The woman didn’t die in our house, and she didn’t die in the hospital. My mom has seen her since. She lived down the street.
This was another thing I had never thought to be afraid of, and isn’t that the way it goes? Disaster finds us, crashes into the side of the house if it has to. As I pondered the freaky randomness of the universe, from which tragedy grows—why our house, of all houses?—I discovered that grace grows there, too, and only there. My family agreed we were thankful that she had run into our house because we had been there and were able to help her. As I threw my winter coat over my pajama pants and sprinted up the street to the church, for once I trusted my body to be enough, to know what to do.
Just Us Girls
John Fawcett’s 2000 werewolf film Ginger Snaps centers on two spooky teenage sisters, Brigitte and Ginger Fitzgerald, one of whom is bitten by a mysterious fanged beast. It is in the film’s first act, after Ginger begins to exhibit strange symptoms—hair growing from the wounds where the creature scratched her, the world’s heaviest period, and a newfound interest in boys and marijuana—that it happens: the moment.
The girls’ conventional mother, bedecked in a holiday sweat shirt with two bizarre pin curls framing her face, finds Ginger’s bloodstained underwear in the dirty laundry. (We have already heard that neither Ginger nor Brigitte has begun menstruating.) Pamela looks at the underwear for a moment, frowns, pauses, and then sprays it vigorously with bleach. Cut to Ginger, Brigitte, and their father sitting at the dinner table. Pamela enters, singsonging “Ginger’s very favorite,” holding an angel food Bundt cake topped with strawberries. She places the cake in front of Ginger and says, “Congratulations, sweetie,�
�� as strawberry sauce oozes luridly down the cake’s sides.
This. This. The period cake. The vivid evocation of menstrual blood at a suburban dinner table is so audacious and subversive and gross that you begin to suspect you are not watching just any low-budget Canadian teen gore-fest. You might be sharing in the glory of the greatest werewolf and menstruation-themed feminist horror movie of all time.
I first watched Ginger Snaps in the fall after I graduated from college, at the giant old house the manager at the ice cream store where I worked shared with a half-dozen other people. My best friend, B, and I crowded together on their collapsing brown couch and shared one Miller Lite between us. In the following weeks, as fall drew ever wetter and darker, we rented it at a little video store off the highway and watched it again. B had been talked into living in a one-bedroom apartment with a strange girl we knew from college, who at the age of twenty-two did not have a checking account and kept “everything precious to her” in a giant travel trunk that she treated like a pet. I never learned what was in it, but we enjoyed placing our coffee mugs and feet on it when she wasn’t around. I saw B’s apartment and her roommate as a burden primarily for me, even though the window in B’s tiny bedroom was broken and she nearly froze that Nebraska winter.
I would go to B’s apartment at ten at night, battle-worn after shifts at the ice cream store, with my bruised forearms crusted with chocolate and my sweat smelling like waffle cone mix. She would microwave me a bowl of canned ravioli she bought especially for me, and we would watch movies in the footprint of her roommate’s Murphy bed. After the encore showing of Ginger Snaps, we rented Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed and Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning. (The latter is a prequel that follows the sisters’ ancestors on the Canadian frontier.) That winter we decorated my apartment with a giant Ginger Snaps poster and a Ginger Snaps light switch plate that I bought online.
Part of Ginger Snaps’s brilliance is that all it aspires to be is a cheesy horror film. Fawcett set out to make a B movie, rejecting CGI and other big-budget effects, so that the actor playing Ginger had to spend hours being outfitted with fangs, cosmetic contact lenses, and even a full facial prosthetic that, according to Wikipedia, “gave her a permanently runny nose that she had to stop up with Q-tips.” Ginger Snaps creates meaning in the same way as its B-movie fellows, through the strict use of metaphor. In Ginger Snaps, we see all that is terrifying about puberty made gruesomely manifest. In puberty, a teenager’s body grows and changes in ways that can be painful and grotesque. At the same time, hormones hijack the teenager’s emotions, making her behavior more passionate and impulsive. With these fluctuations and transfigurations, the person in the mirror can appear as something terribly other: a hairy monster. And the cycle of menstruation aligns felicitously with the werewolf myth, as both involve, at least in our imaginations, a monthly change into something different, unpredictable, even frightful.
Ginger’s transformation begins slowly at first. She has a nightmarish first period and dogs won’t stop barking at her. But then her body changes in more alarming ways. A claw protrudes from her ankle and she grows a long, muscular tail. She develops fangs, and her face and torso become gradually more canine until, at the end, she has no human qualities. She is nothing but a giant, snarling, teenage werewolf. Along the way, she becomes more aggressive, sexually and otherwise. “I get this ache,” she says after she loses her virginity. “I thought it was for sex, but it’s to tear everything to fucking pieces.”
It turns out the emotions and circumstances of puberty elide with those of metamorphosing into a werewolf with remarkable consistency. Ginger’s budding sex life threatens the close relationship she and Brigitte have always had. “You’re doing drugs with guys,” Brigitte says. “Something’s definitely wrong with you.” For Brigitte, this evidence, more than Ginger’s fangs or her tail or her bloodlust, proves that something alien is taking over her sister. “Something’s wrong with you,” Brigitte insists again. “And more than you being just . . . female.”
But beyond this outsize metaphor, the more subtle dynamics of jealousy and dependence propel the film’s plot. The first time we encounter Brigitte and Ginger, they are staging their own deaths with zeal and creativity, exploring a variety of possible scenarios: Ginger eviscerated by a lawn mower, Brigitte with a pitchfork through her neck, both sisters sipping poison at a tea party, Ginger skewered on a white picket fence. They have made a pact, sealed with blood, to commit suicide before they turn sixteen. “Out by sixteen or dead in the scene, but together forever,” they repeat, “united against life as we know it.” But Brigitte betrays some hesitation even in these opening scenes. “Don’t you think our deaths should be a little more than cheap entertainment?” she asks, worried even then that they might not be rebelling, but rather surrendering to a mainstream culture that adores Dead Girls, the more gruesome, the better. Ginger rejects any worries that dying in this way might be too sensational or dramatic. “Suicide’s like the ultimate ‘fuck you,’” she says. “It’s so us.” Ginger is the older sister, and she often defines them as a single individual, taking the liberty to decide what they are.
In the end, Ginger’s change reveals how monstrous the girls’ relationship is. When her transformation is nearly complete, after she’s murdered and infected and terrorized the citizens of their little Canadian town, she pressures Brigitte to become a werewolf also. “It’s so us,” Ginger tells her. “I’d rather be dead than be what you are,” Brigitte says. But Ginger’s grotesqueness isn’t enough to break what binds them. Eventually Brigitte slits her and Ginger’s palms and infects herself. Brigitte believes she has found a cure for lycanthropy, but it also seems that abandoning Ginger is more than she can bear, because she has no identity without her. As she becomes a werewolf herself, Brigitte tells Ginger, “You wreck anything that isn’t about you. Now I am you.” Their claustrophobic, incestuous bond is a reminder that relationships can be too close, that destruction can yoke two people as well as love can.
I had never enjoyed a horror film before I saw Ginger Snaps. It was unclear to me then why I was so immediately obsessed with it, but it makes more sense to me now. I went to college when I was sixteen and graduated when I was nineteen, the entire time feeling like I was in purgatory: from my perspective no one around me was doing much to make the most of their college years either. This was part of a fundamental misunderstanding that sprung from my limited social circle. I insisted that the age difference with my classmates was not the source of my misery, because in my classes I felt no different than anyone else. But the only people who would hang around with me outside of class were do-gooder virgins who would rather make asinine mischief like going to Kmart and buying a bunch of bouncy balls than get wasted. I was often disgusted with them, because who likes a club that will have you as a member?
When I met B in my junior year, it was like the universe had mercy on me. We had a friendship that was, in some ways, like looking in a mirror: I know it sounds on the nose, but we have the same birthday. B is two years older, slightly stunted by controlling, fundamentalist parents who took her on conservative Christian pilgrimages to Focus on the Family headquarters in Colorado Springs. We had so much of the same longing: for lives and friends who were cooler, for a freedom we couldn’t have because we couldn’t picture it. She was silent in all group situations and could make anything that I requested, including drawings, costumes, headdresses, needlepoint, and duct tape purses of any design. She spoke French and played the piano. She was like all seven muses for me, hanging out up on Mount Olympus, quietly and happily creating.
B and I had schemes large and small. We had a plan to become normal after B’s twenty-second birthday by learning to drink alcohol. She would cluelessly buy bottles of Popov and cases of Busch Light for parties we had at my apartment, and this scheme worked in a limited way. For one of the parties, we attempted to re-create the period cake from Ginger Snaps using a cake mold shaped like a castle. Many of our schemes were centered on how
exactly we would get our first boyfriends, considering that the men we knew were awful and they didn’t like us anyway. When B finally did start dating a guy she had liked for years, I was completely perplexed. “I always think, I wish I could find a guy like Alice,” she told me once, and it had seemed safely improbable that she would. I was still waiting for a guy like her. Our attachment was not sexual, but when I say I loved B, I mean it. And I think love can last forever, but not that kind, not that way.
From this distance, I can’t ignore the ways I controlled and manipulated B. We were not only kindred spirits: I was drawn to her because she was someone quiet and passive for me to boss around. Often I felt like I was helping her, giving her opportunities. To get her to stay in Lincoln after college, I had my mom help get her a job. But I would also fly off the handle at our slightest disagreement, any indication we were not the mirror images we liked to believe. All the places she chose to live were immense trials for me. I saw it as her being manipulated by other people we knew, talked into moving into the apartment with the Murphy bed by friends who knew her roommate, and later persuaded by her mom to move to a suburban apartment complex with her high school friend far away from my apartment. I gave her the silent treatment for days when she moved away from downtown, even though her apartment was only a fifteen-minute drive and had a pool and windows that shut all the way. This should indicate the amount of daily attention I required from her.
In our senior year of college we went to New York on spring break, and I planned our trip down to the minute without any input from B. I created the geekiest and most eccentric itinerary imaginable, not including any partying whatsoever. I took us to see the Chieftains at Carnegie Hall on St. Patrick’s Day, a matinee in the very short run of the Broadway musical based on John Waters’s film Cry-Baby, and a Flight of the Conchords walking tour of Lower Manhattan based on my own research. I remember a particularly long and hangry journey deep into Brooklyn to get an inexpensive breakfast I had read about on the Internet, the insane amount we spent on subway fare neutralizing any savings from the cheap diner. It was exhausting to run the show, and I’m sure it was exhausting following along. The next year I went to New York again by myself to visit my aunt and uncle, and I spent most of the time in their apartment watching the first season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. By then the handwriting was on the wall: as often as I nursed feelings of betrayal and abandonment toward B, of course I was the one who left her.