Books |
Use Me
Elissa Schappell
By
Published: Sep 22, 2011
Category:
Fiction
Elissa Schappell is co-founder of the literary magazine Tin House and longtime author of Vanity Fair’s monthly “Hot Type” column on books. She has a new novel, Blueprints for Building Better Girls, which is getting lots of attention (like at Elle). But jumping on the bandwagon of the new and highly praised — you don’t need Head Butler for that.
So when Anna March wanted to write about Schappell’s last book, “Use Me," I jumped. A great idea, I thought; it’s better to connect the dots than be a dot. Then there is the pleasure of giving a day over to a writer whose work has appeared in Salon, Pank, Connotation Press and other publications, and whose novel, "The Diary of Suzanne Frank," is forthcoming. You can find more about Anna on Facebook.
Anna March, Guest Butler — it’s all yours.
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The things we do to girls.
Boys too, but in the case of “Use Me,” a novel-in-stories by Elissa Schappell, it’s about the things we do to girls. Not the horrible front page sort of things, but the mundane, insidious things we do to our children. Like ignore them, compete with them, and act angrily toward them for doing nothing more than being teenagers. Send them completely contradictory messages. Cringe from their transitions and leave them hurtling toward adulthood without a desperately needed parental net.
I know all about Schappel’s second story collection, the wryly titled “Blueprints for Building Better Girls,” but “Use Me” is what made me fall in love with her writing and eagerly wait ten years for “Blueprints.” (To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle download, click here.)
We first meet Evie Wakefield, the central character in “Use Me,” as a teen on vacation with her parents in France. We follow her into adulthood, observing her marriage to the winsome but oh-so-irresponsible Billy, her mothering the clinging and clung-to Charlie and her grief over the loss of her less-than-perfect yet idealized father.
By the end of the first story, “Eau-De-Vie”, you find yourself needing to find out what becomes of Evie as she moves through the world. She is that kind of character. In the second story, “Novice Bitch” we meet Mary Beth, who will become Evie’s best friend. Mary Beth’s having her third abortion while still in Catholic high school and has just a wee little crush on the abortion doctor.
Meanwhile, Mary Beth’s mother is too busy with show dogs to even notice that Mary Beth has been spending her time having sex while being tied-up (still in her uniform, white cotton panties at her ankles). Mary Beth is still bleeding from an afternoon abortion when her mother forces her into a cramped bathroom stall to help extract some chewed up cloth from a dog’s rectum.
These are not stories for the faint of heart – but neither is life for the faint of heart.
Over the next eight stories, fathers, lovers and husbands propel the action, but they’re merely the hangers-on for these women. The real action is in the way Evie and Mary Beth — especially Evie — come into being: wounded, wanting, flawed, yearning.
Along the way “Use Me” mediates on this powerful notion: how deeply alone we are as we endure adolescence. We don’t tell anyone what’s really going on because our parents can’t take it and our friends are competing and judgmental. It’s scary and it’s lonely and we all do dumb things and then all of the sudden there we are, adults in the world, expected to know how to navigate things like intimacy, sexuality, our own families, parenting.
Schappell is brilliant at drawing a beam on hypocrisies: stop expecting to sit on daddy’s lap now that you are growing breasts, but don’t wear that strapless dress yet, especially if you are going to fill it out better than mom. Be a grownup and don’t need too much attention from mom; she’s got show dogs to attend to, after all! Be an incredible lover but remember that good girls aren’t sluts. Amidst the illuminated hypocrisies, Schappell lays oh-so-many truths bare.
None of those truths is more central than this: We lose our parents to both the realities of the way they fail us as well as their actual deaths, and sometimes we get on by recasting them as bigger, better, more than they ever were. As Evie notes in the story, "In Heaven, Dead Fathers Never Stop Dancing:"
On the first anniversary of my father’s death, we were supposed to move on. I was moving on. I didn’t want to. It was as though I was a refugee being chased from my true home, prodded into the future with the stick of forgetfulness. Turning my head, trying to catch a glimpse of something I could never see again, the lights of a place I’d never wanted to leave, a place I’d never return to, a place that in memory would become more beautiful, more irreplaceable the longer it was out of my sight.
When we are forced to cast that illusion aside — forced by a revelation too glaring to ignore — we cling. Cling to our fabricated illusions and to our own children, to the things that comfort us until we are forced to relinquish those crutches and face, if not the whole truth, a much harsher iteration of reality than the one that has warmed us for so long. That is, if we are lucky.
Schappell shows us that by letting go we are rendered whole. When we release the lock we have on our security blankets, we can step into the world.
(I can relate to Schappell’s characters trying at once to cling to the Daddies they hardly knew and at the same time trying to shrug him off. It took me a long time to come to terms with the painful ghost of my own father and to stop trying to get a long drink of good love without a sidecar of painful destruction, which is what he offered. But that’s another story altogether….)
“Use Me” will make you blink, hard, from its steady approach to pain, to sex, to life as we know it. At times it may hold a mirror up to your own life and make you want to look away. Don’t do it. Let the bright lights shine.
