56. I Who Have Lived Among Men
On being watched in public
My dear friends, we are one month, one week and one day away from the release of my second book, Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age. Have you pre-ordered a copy?
I’ve been patiently waiting like a good little writer for this book to be published, and I’m very proud of it. I was delighted to see that Publishers Weekly gave it a coveted starred review. Look! It even got a little box around it in the print edition of the magazine. Here’s a photo:
I’ll be doing a few book “tour” dates around the Northwest, and I’ll be sure to update with any new dates in future newsletters. For now, here’s what I have planned:
Portland: Thursday, March 27 - Book Release at Powell’s City of Books, In Conversation with B. Toastie Oaster, 7 pm. Info here.
Spokane: Wednesday, April 2 - Northwest Passages Event at Steam Plant Roof Top, In Conversation with Emma Epperly, 7 pm. Tickets here.
Eugene: Sunday, April 13 - Gratitude Brewing, In Conversation with Brendan O’Meara, 1 pm. Info here.
Crested Butte, Colorado: Saturday, May 24 - Mountain Words Festival, In Conversation with Laura Krantz, 10 am. Tickets here.
Why is your city not on this list? Great question. If you want me to come speak at your local bookstore, or if you want to organize an event, please reach out in the comments or by sending me an email. Events take money and time, and I have a deficit of both of those things.
While we’re on the topic of books, this weekend I had the privilege of being invited to a Portland-area book club meeting to discuss my first book, When the Moon Turns to Blood.
I’m not sure if there is anything more heart-warming than having a group of fellow book nerds ask insightful questions about a project that I poured so much of my heart, soul and short time on this planet into.
It was a rainy Portland morning, and we gathered in a grocery store coffee shop at a long wooden table: a group of femmes ranging from high school to retirement. After reading headlines all morning about our broken country and irreparable societal divisions, I took one look at this group with their books and cookies and their muffins, and I felt a little better about the world beyond my newsfeed. We still have community.
Of course, this changed almost immediately. Within five minutes of my sitting down, a graying man with slicked back hair leaned into the ear of one of the book club members and asked if we were communists. She said, no, this was a book club. He did not respond — only taking a seat at the next table, facing this group of women, listening to every word I said, and every question they asked. We were being watched.
Perhaps this is to be expected: hold a meeting in a public place, expect public input. But the longer I spoke, feeling the eyes of this glowering chaperone on us, I thought about how what we were doing — discussing ideas and books — did not merit surveillance. And yet this man was sending us the opposite message. Here were 15 women with brains and ideas. Here also was a man who self-deputized himself as our supervisor.
The book club persisted, nonetheless. One attendee asked a question I get a lot: do I feel unsafe doing the work that I do? This is the most common question I am asked at public events and, even so, I never know how to answer it. It doesn’t seem like a great idea to air my fears in public. So I try to answer it vaguely.
On this day, it took all my willpower to stop myself from addressing this man in my answer. To tell the group: this man sitting right here is the sort of person I fear most. Of course I said something diplomatic: I take a lot of precautions to assess risk.
By then I was gaming out all possible scenarios. This man was holding his phone: I thought, okay, I should prepare for a recording or a video to appear online. He was typing a lot on that phone: okay, now I should expect he might be telling other people to join him in patrolling communists eating flax carrot muffins at the grocery store coffee shop.
Was I putting these women in danger by speaking to them in public? It is no exaggeration to say that reading right now is a radical act1, and that the people in charge of this country do not want you to think for yourself.
Is it okay to talk about ideas out loud? I can tell you this was a disturbing thought for me to have. I have never truly considered being quiet.
When we were all finished, we began putting on our coats and packing up our things, and so then our male supervisor stood up to go, too. He handed someone in the group a list, jotted down on the back of a small envelope in weirdly beautiful handwriting.
This was not a list of constitutionalist books, not a study guide of Christian nationalist teachings. This man simply told us we might like Ann Applebaum, the journalist, and Timothy Snyder, whose work I have referenced in this newsletter before. For good measure, he also suggested an acclaimed film about government surveillance of civilians.
I admit my surprise. For an hour, we had silently girded ourselves to be mansplained, lectured, told what books we should and shouldn’t be reading. It seemed this man simply wanted a community to talk about books with. At the very, very least I would offer him this advice: your approach could have been better.
For the rest of the day, I rolled this situation around in my head trying to figure out why it irked me so much. And I found myself thinking about the spellbinding novel I read last summer by Jacqueline Harpman, called I Who Have Never Known Men. Here’s the book jacket summary:
Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.
As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl — the fortieth prisoner — sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.
If you are me, you might read that book as an extended metaphor for how women and marginalized people feel in society.
There are many lines from the book that stuck with me, but one in particular applied to the situation with the book club. It comes at a point in the story when the women teach the young girl how things work there in the cage. They instructed:
"If you do something that is forbidden, it is the action that is the target. If you do something that isn't forbidden, and they intervene, then it's not the activity that's attracting the attention, it is you yourself.”
Essentially, in a cage built by men, you will be targeted for two reasons: acting in a way that falls outside their rules, or by simply existing. Which means you will never quite understand the reasons for your punishment, you only know that you will be punished. Not if, but when.
I’m not suggesting that having your public conversation listened to by an uninvited man is punishment. But when 15 women share a feeling that some consequence is coming for them because they simply had the nerve to gather, speak or think? That is a cage of its own kind.
So how might this have gone differently? That man could have asked to sit down with our group, instead of lording over us. Or he might have recognized his role in society, and seen that his presence was inserting himself into a group he had not been invited into and he could have chosen to have his coffee in a different corner of the very large coffee shop. Or he might have asked for our suggestions on a book he should read.
Even better, he might have laid $50 on the table and walked away. The book equivalent of buying a round of drinks. Enough money to let us buy a few copies of any book we need right now to feel safe, to feel ready, to learn, to choose at a time when everything else feels very much out of our control.
One last note: you might have missed this story I reported last month for Oregon Public Broadcasting. It’s about a small newspaper run by a far-right figure in a semi-urban county in Oregon, and how as the local news landscape has collapsed, a propaganda outlet posturing as news has filled the gap. It goes without saying at this point: please support your local news outlet, or your local independent journalist.
Almost two years ago, I wrote this piece about Brave New World and 1984 and book bans, and things certainly have not improved since then!
Please don't be quiet! Although we so very much want you, and us, to be safe. What harrowing times we are in.
What a good post. Thank you, Leah.