Secret Stories
So, my friend E, who only ever refers to people by their initials and strange nicknames, says this in a recent blog post:
Every writer has a secret story, SC says in the developers’ session, a story they’ll often tell you when they’re drunk or know you very well. It’s the story they really want to tell, the story they’re working towards.
It got me thinking: What’s my secret story?
photo by Duquesa Mercedes
And I think I know what the secret story is. Or what I want it to be. I think the secret story is why I keep going back to these old books by old boys, books about growing up and battling with the world, coming to grips with reality, etc. There are quite a few of these spiritual/intellectual coming of age novels all about how a boy becomes a man, but there are so few about the transition a young woman experiences. Why is that?
Is it because so many people just summarize our transition as getting your period and a bra? Well, I have my own theories about that, and I just deleted two long-winded paragraphs about it because I’m going to save those thoughts for another time. But the secret story I want to write is the story of a new generation of women — women who are becoming themselves in a way that women before were never (or rarely) encouraged to do.
In the opening pages of Demian, Herman Hesse writes:
Each man’s life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that — one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best he can.
The story I want to write is one in which that journey is as much for women as it is for men.
Tags: Demian | feminism | literature
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4 Responses to “Secret Stories”.
While I don’t have any brilliant insights into your questions, I am very very very interested to read your interpretations on the theme. I agree that there are too few (good) coming-of-age stories for women and I would love to see the turning of the genre coming from you.
I totally agree. I was raised with respect for, but little attention paid to, my gender, so I tend to read coming-of-age stories just as that, and identify with as many male characters as female ones.
When I started wearing a bra, my mom showed me how and that was it. When I got my period, I didn’t say a thing. I hated shaving my legs. But getting a car, moving out (and back in and out and back in and out again), having my heart broken, being lost in more ways than one … those things marked my growth.
But I really would like to see a coming-of-age story that commemorates becoming a woman. Not the clichés so much, but yeah. Those stories are too often missing.
I certainly have secret stories and I do actually write them down ocassionally. The trick of course is working up the nerve to actually share them with someone.
I was actually just as intrigued, if not more, by the secret story part. I blog and write so much, I don’t really feel like I have many secret stories — even if it’s not something I have covered, It’s something I might talk about. But I have one. Not really exciting exactly, or that unusual, but secret. From absolutely everyone on this planet, close to me or not (because sometimes it’s actually easier to share with those with whom we’re only passingly close). I wonder how many people are walking around with stories like that.
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