by Leigh Stein
I had my laptop with me on vacation, and whenever we weren’t sightseeing I was obsessively checking updates in a secret Facebook group for women writers. The group was only a few months old, but it had grown from a few dozen members to tens of thousands of members, almost overnight. I saw women posting that they’d never had the guts to submit to their dream publications before. I saw other women cheering them on, sharing connections, and stories of sexism and racism faced in their fields. I felt like a teenager again, forming intimate alliances with women I’d never met, typing little messages of courage and hope and sympathy at all hours of the day and night.
When Brian and I got back to New York, I slept and slept and slept and when I woke up, I had an idea.
Maybe we should all get together and have a conference, I typed to the group.
After a dozen immediate “likes” on my post, I stood up from my desk. “I’ve decided to organize a conference,” I announced to Brian.
He took a deep breath. “A conference is a lot of work,” he said gently.
“I know that!” I snapped. Of course I didn’t know. I had no idea how much work it would be, no vision of the twelve-hour days ahead, but Brian’s subtle skepticism of my plan made me doubly determined to accomplish it.
Within hours I found a cochair, and we started brainstorming how we would raise all the money we needed to bring hundreds of women together in New York.
“I need to buy a domain name for us,” I said to Brian. We were calling our organization Out of the Binders, after the Mitt Romney gaffe about having binders full of women, but outofthe binders.com seemed long and unmemorable.
“Why don’t you just call it BinderCon,” he suggested.
Over the next three months, with the help of a couple dozen volunteers, my cochair and I sold tickets and awarded scholarships to BinderCon. We rented five venues over the course of two days, booked eighty speakers, and ordered hundreds of hot pink tote bags.
In October, my mom and sister came from Chicago. A couple of the women I’d met on LiveJournal ten years before flew in from California. There were more than five hundred women there—including my friend Julia.
On the first morning of the conference, standing at the podium in Cooper Union’s Great Hall, I delivered a short speech. I told the story of the ugly winter after our lease was up in Albuquerque, when I was living back at my parents’ house for the fourth time, missing Jason and hating myself for missing him, temping at the sump pump company where I was not allowed to read, and then I got Julia’s e-mail that said she might have a job for me in New York.
“It’s hard to imagine what my life would be like today,” I said, “if Julia hadn’t convinced me to send my résumé, and if I hadn’t taken the leap, as much as I was terrified to leap, terrified to even lift one toe.”
I knew so intimately what it was to be afraid. I was afraid of leaving Jason; I was afraid of staying with Jason; I was afraid of telling anyone the truth about our relationship for fear they would make the decision for me. I was afraid that I would be dependent, living with my parents forever, and I was also afraid that the job prospect was too good to be true.
But when I spoke in front of all those women, for the first time I felt that I could translate my personal experience into a story that would help someone else. “We all need Julias in our lives, friends who push us to be our most excellent selves,” I continued, “but we also have to do the hard work of pushing past our own fears and doubts.
“And so today I dare you to do the thing you don’t think you’re ready to do.”
It was the message I had once needed to hear. It just took years to find it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For believing in me and this book, I wish to thank Julia Phillips, Ellen Dworsky, Liz Hildreth, Alizah Salario, Claire Dunnington, Cathrin Wirtz, Nathan Ihara, and Jennie Baird. I am very grateful to Erin Hosier for adopting me and always responding to my e-mails within twenty-four hours, and to everyone at Plume, especially Kate Napolitano, for her wisdom and guidance, but also David Rosenthal, Joanna Kamouh, Jason Booher, and Andrea Santoro. Thank you to Matthew Daddona, Sarah Bridgins, and Rachel Bressler for their early support, and to Doree Shafrir at BuzzFeed, Kiese Laymon at Gawker, and Rebecca Soffer at Modern Loss, for publishing essays related to this book. I am grateful for the insights of my teachers Zia Jaffrey, Karen Karbo, and Beverly Lowry. Mom and Dad and Hattie, thank you for understanding why I needed to write this; I love you. Binders, I love you, too. Brian says he is waiting for the movie version to find out what happens, but I hope he flips ahead to find this page where I say thank you for being my partner and giving me a room of my own.
WORKS CONSULTED
Books
Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors (New York: Norton, 2009).
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides (New York: Picador, 1993).
Euripides, Alcestis in Euripides I, translated by Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).
Euripedes, The Medea in Euripides I, translated by Rex Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).
Angela Lambert, The Lost Life of Eva Braun (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014).
Cathy Luchetti and Carol Olwell, eds., Women of the West (New York: Norton, 2001).
Roxana Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe (Hanover and New London, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1989).
Elizabeth Winder, Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 (New York: HarperCollins, 2013).
Essays and Articles
Edwin G. Dexter, “Suicide and the Weather,” Popular Science Monthly 58 (April 1901): 604–15.
Joan Didion, “Georgia O’Keeffe,” The White Album (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990).
James C. Kaufman, “The Sylvia Plath Effect: Mental Illness in Eminent Creative Writers,” The Journal of Creative Behavior 35, no. 1 (March 2001): 37–50.
John Moore, “‘The Hieroglyphics of Love’: The Torch Singers and Interpretation,” Popular Music 8, no. 1 (January 1989): 31–58.
Eleni Petridou, Fotios C. Papadopoulos, Constantine E. Frangakis, Alkistis Shalkidou, and Dimitrios Trichopoulos, “A Role of Sunshine in the Triggering of Suicide,” Epidemiology 13, no. 1 (January 2002): 106–9.
RESOURCES
When I started writing this book, it was because I thought that what happened to me had never happened to anyone else. By the time I finished, I understood I was writing the story of so many. Intimate-partner violence is a public health concern, and according to the most recent survey published by the CDC1, more than one in three women and one in four men have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. They also found that nearly half of all women and men (48.4 percent and 48.8 percent, respectively) have experienced “psychological aggression” by an intimate partner. Young people are most at risk: first occurrences of rape, violence, and/or stalking mostly occur before age twenty-five.
If you or someone you know is experiencing intimate-partner violence, resources and support are available to help you. Here are some:
The National Domestic Violence Hotline (NDVH) operates 24/7 in more than 170 languages, with a TTY line available for the deaf. 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), 1-800-787-3224 (TTY)
Crisis Text Line (http://www.crisistextline.org/)
Shalom Bayit (http://www.shalom-bayit.org/) is based in the Bay Area and seeks to end domestic violence in Jewish homes. Call (866) SHALOM-7 for help. Love Shouldn’t Hurt (http://love-shouldnt-hurt.org/) is their youth program.
Metropolitan Family Services (https://www.metrofamily.org/) provides clinical services for survivors of partner abuse and their children, and for teens and children who have witnessed domestic violence. (Illinois)
Mujeres Latinas en Acción (http://www.mujereslatinasenaccion.org/) provides a twenty-four-ho
ur crisis hotline, counseling, and court advocates. (Illinois)
The New Mexico Coalition Against Domestic Violence (http://www.nmcadv.org/) provides a list of statewide victim-services providers.
Day One (http://www.dayoneny.org/) partners with youth to end dating abuse and domestic violence through education, support services, and legal advocacy. (New York)
The New York City Anti-Violence Project (www.avp.org) empowers lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and HIV-affected communities and allies to end all forms of violence, and supports survivors through counseling and advocacy.
Safe Horizon (http://www.safehorizon.org/) provides free telephone hotlines 24/7 for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and homeless youth and teens. There is a special hotline for hearing-impaired clients, and the website (and hotline) is also available in Spanish. (New York)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Leigh Stein is the author of the novel The Fallback Plan, which made the “highbrow brilliant” quadrant of New York’s “Approval Matrix,” as well as a collection of poetry, Dispatch from the Future, selected for Publishers Weekly’s Best Summer Books of 2012 list, in addition to the Rumpus Poetry Book Club. Her nonfiction has appeared in Allure, BuzzFeed, Gawker, The Hairpin, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Slate, The Toast, and xoJane. Formerly an editorial staff member at The New Yorker, she currently lives outside New York City and is the Executive Director of the nonprofit organization Out of the Binders, which advances the careers of women and gender-nonconforming writers through conferences called BinderCon. For her advocacy work, she has been called a “leading feminist” by The Washington Post, and honored as a “woman of influence” by New York Business Journal.
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1 Black, M. C., Basile, K. C., Breiding, M. J., Smith, S. G., Walters, M. L., Merrick, M. T., Chen, J., and Stevens, M.R. (2011). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2010 Summary Report. Atlanta, GA: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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