I land on my knees, crestfallen on the linoleum floor of our kitchen in Beverly Hills. I have sprinted home from school because I have received news. Devastating news. Devastating news that somehow, I was rejected from Brown. Even though I did everything right. Even though I am perfect.
I cry so much I give myself a headache.
I cry so much both of my parents come home early from work.
I cry so much I rip my vintage Polyester paisley dress. I really like this dress. It makes me feel like an air hostess in the 1960s.
But none of that matters now.
Instead, I go to Wellesley.
Wellesley is far away from my friends and summer camp crushes, and it’s literally snowing. I try to get into the Broadway musical Spring Awakening just to have a little break. Junior year, I escape to Oxford. Senior year, I am floating. Just a few short months, and then I can go back to my real life.
I enlist in a film class called Domesticity and its Discontents. Our professor is, to my utter surprise and delight, chic and familiar and, dare I say, even a little bohemian. She reminds me of my parents’ friends. She tells long stories about her time at Barnard waiting in line for coffee at dawn behind construction workers at Choc Full o’Nuts. She gives us blonde Oreos and talks of the erotic. She complains about the father of her children, who leaves her a Christmas tree every year even though they’re broken up.
I am drawn to my classmate, Sonia, who wears navy suits and asks interesting questions about Deleuze. Who talks of naked parties and a Wellesley I have never known. It is here, milling around the art department, I hear a rumor that Margaret, our professor, is lover to the avant-garde new-wave filmmaker Chantal Akerman.
Chantal’s films are sleepy.
They meander and follow girls around bedrooms and kitchens, waiting. Idle. Often melancholy.
Girls who are hungry and cold.
Girls who unravel into eating bags of sugar.
Girls who lust after their friends and contemporaries.
What can you expect from a land called Brussels, anyway?
Margaret and Chantal stay together for seventeen years.
Then, at the age of 65, Chantal takes her own life.
I write to Margaret every so often and tell her I am thinking of her. I ask if she’d ever like to write about Chantal, if it would be cathartic. Maybe, I suggest, with Sonia as well, as she has become a film scholar in her own right. Yet, everyone kind of loses touch over the years. Then, over the summer of 2023, 36 hours after my dad dies, Margaret replies.
“I confess I was a little stunned about the prospect of writing / speaking about Chantal and all I learned from her. Her death was, to stay the least, traumatic. There is a Chantal Akerman foundation in Brussels (run by Chantal's sister) that is trying to assemble documentation about her. They've contacted me and asked me to fill in the ‘gaps’ in her biography in the years 1998-2015. I confess, I've just frozen and haven't been able even to answer them. Maybe talking with you two might help me unlock a bit. One thought is that it might be fun to look at her films together and just talk with you about what she told me about them. I'm not sure I could (yet) write anything to you about her.”
Sonia and I drive to Cape Cod from New York. We look out at the marshland where we were once before (at the end of her class together in 2010). Little crabs in the sea frolic, doing their thing. Margaret has a dog named Willow who is friendly and unpretentious. We make linguini with clams and settle. Small oil lamps burn atop the dining room table, and flutes play on the ratio. “I wanted it to be like a shoebox,” Margaret gestures, “but glass on three sides.” It feels like we are in a greenhouse, in the forest. Like a dream.
My eyes wander to Margaret’s hundreds of books.
It’s funny, the weekend I graduated from Wellesley, I thought I’d never want to see another book again. Then, walking along the pier of the Cape, I stumbled upon a charming used bookstore. Of course, I wandered in and bought one book by Susan Sontag and another on contemporary dance. My rebellion against intellectualism lasted less than 24 hours. How embarrassing.
Margaret’s impressive book case is light wood of her own design. That kind of 80s minimalist aesthetic that makes you feel like you’re on forever-vacation. Like the Vancouver airport.
When you’re a kid, you think your life will be made up of wide circles but they become smaller and more defined, marked with Sharpie until you eventually find yourself at the center of everything. I am still a child wide-eyed in a bookstore, except I know everyone and everything is free.
I spot lots of Alice Munro and The Barthes Reader and spellbinding titles like God & Nature as well as The Invisible World. I slice my hand in and select one called The Witch as Muse. Like a tarot card, it picks me.
When I hold it in my hand, I see one page Margaret has earmarked by a yellow post-it. It points to one specific passage in the book, which she has also marked in pencil with small, grey stars.
“In essence, melancholy was a form of femininity that threatened dissolution (chaos) and against which masculinity—in the form of individuals, institutions, or the polity—continually defined and defined itself.”
So, sadness as chaos.
So, sadness as rebellion.
So, sadness as a golden key to a new kind of place.
So, sadness as liberation.
So, sadness as transcendence.
Yes.
Yes.
I remember girls I loved in elementary school. Girls I loved at Oxford.
I let my heart break.
I let tears flow, like sugar.
Please, take your wars and gold coins when you go.
Darling, I
will keep the sea.
Call me crazy.
Last week, I began to publish my book here, the story of my childhood & coming-of-age. Since, because of some meetings in New York, I have decided to wait & publish the old-fashioned way (on paper). So, From Your Lips to God’s Ears will be essays & poems that may appear random but still, in the end, make up a world. Thank you for coming along with me on this voyage, regardless of anything. I love you very much. P.S. You can read Margaret’s great new book on Hieronymous Bosch here (Yale Press). x
lovely and more lovely