More Than Angry The Year in the United States

Millions of women, trans people, men, and youth poured into the streets to protest Donald Trump's inauguration in January 2017. Estimates place participation in the Women's March at five million worldwide, including the largest single day protest in Washington, DC, with a crowd of over 470,000 (Waddell). In a social media follow-up in October 2017 to the Women's March, millions broke the silence about sexual abuse by sharing the hashtag #MeToo. Many participants describe rage as the connective tissue joining global street protest to social media activism. In both, lifetimes of grief and trauma were given public and angry voice. It is no surprise, of course, that women are angry. What is surprising is that so many publishers believed readers would be hungry for books, by and for women with complex lives and emotions, about what Audre Lorde called the "uses of anger." While the act of sharing #MeToo entailed writing, reading those words persuaded millions to join a community of survivors that was emerging from the shadows.¹ Part "imagined community," part "intimate public," those who showed up for and shared autobiographical accounts of sexual violence represented a market for life stories by women.² In addition to the narratives that emerged online, a wave of first-person books by feminist writers dominated bestseller lists, commanded high profile reviews, and generated speaking engagements pitched at politically liberal and progressive book-buying women. From Brittney Cooper's Eloquent Rage (2018) to Rebecca Traister's Good and Mad (2018), Soraya Chemaly's Rage Becomes Her (2018), and Lindy West's The Witches are Coming (2019), booksellers promoted and readers embraced the theme of women's anger. Cooper, Traister, Chemaly, and West are established scholars or writers of social commentary, and while their books are not memoirs per se, they all leverage a feminist fusion of the personal, political, and critical. They expose the failure of respectability politics to achieve anti-racist ends (Cooper), delineate the long history of women's protest and silencing (Traister), and argue for the need for an intersectional analysis of race, gender, class, sexuality, and injustice.

Testifying to the reading public's interest in complex accounts of women's lives, new autobiographical essay collections on anger have emerged alongside single-authored books. Lilly Dancyger's edited collection, Burn it Down: Women Writing about Anger (2019), for example, joined Shelly Oria's Indelible in the Hippocampus (2019), whose title cites Christine Blasey Ford comment on the searing quality of traumatic memory during her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers. When Sen. Patrick Leahy asked Blasey Ford what memories stood out from the assault, her answer drew on her research into trauma, brain science, and memory: "Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two [boys], and their having fun at my expense."

When we talk about the centrality of anger in women's life writing, it is crucial to distinguish it from the self-righteous displays of white male entitlement that characterize Trump supporters. The neo-nazis who marched in Charlotte were angry. The white male mass killer who gunned down nine African American congregants during Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina was angry. As was the gunman who killed seventeen at Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida. To claim anger as a power for women in a time so disastrously shaped by toxic masculine rage and violence requires a feminist reframing along the line carefully laid out by Audre Lorde. In her 1981 essay "The Uses of Anger," she writes: "Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change" (282). Lorde puts anger in historical and political context. She distinguishes the anger of racists from her angry response to racism. Anger, for Lorde, is multiform, instrumental, and anything but simple. Life writing enables us to see that women's anger comes from lifelong experiences of violence, shaming, and injustice. As Lorde explained, women are more than angry. Fury combines with embitterment, grief, terror, humor, joy, desire, and resilience to build out the affective landscape. Life writers give anger a history and a place, incorporating it into complex storylines about loss and the afterlife of suffering. Although women are exposed to cultural practices of judgment that cast them as tainted witnesses and unsympathetic victims, life writing enables them to tell stories that include generational trauma, as well as legacies of resilience and renewal.³ Memoirs by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Jia Tolentino, Nicole Chung, T. Kira Madden, and Tara Westover, for example, use life narrative to open perspectives on racist policing and chronic poverty (Khan-Cullors), the similarity between evangelical spiritual experience and drug use (Tolentino), and transracial adoption (Chung), and in so doing, delineate in precise and previously unrecorded ways what it feels like to find a way through gendered violence (Madden; Westover).

Carmen Maria Machado's In The Dream House, the follow-up to her powerful 2017 short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, is the story of an abusive relationship. Both Machado and her abusive lover are writers. Machado is a student in the Iowa Writers Workshop; her partner is in an MFA program in a different city, where she rents "the dream house," a name that captures the high hopes and nightmarish reality of their domesticity. The memoir is experimental, nervy, full of sex, and then violence. The gothic is never far away. Machado builds on its baseline requirement of "woman plus habitation" to expose the queasiness of what goes on behind close doors as the excitement of a new lesbian relationship disintegrates—bafflingly, horribly—into intimate partner violence and gaslighting, and the lover becomes a stranger. The sense of Machado losing and finding her bearings is reflected in chapter titles that offer a series of allegories for the dream house. These include chapters entitled "Dream House as Noir," "Dream House as Lesbian Cult Classic," "Dream House as World Building," and "Dream House as Epiphany," the full text of which reads: "Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal" (112).

The story of queer domestic abuse, Machado points out, has been infrequently told, a deficit she intends to correct with this memoir. As Machado describes it, changes in her lover were difficult to reconcile with her previous behavior as a caring partner. Little by little, however, intimacy became laced with threat, exploding into violence. Machado struggles to name what is happening. To do so, she connects the concealment of queer desire to the mystification of queer intimate partner violence. Both are shrouded in silence and shame. Myths that domestic abuse is what men do to women, and that lesbian relationships are utopian in this regard, make it more difficult to identify and end abuse. Machado laments the absence of an archive about queer domestic violence, and through her memoir seeks to bring visibility by telling her story. In one abusive episode, the silencing is explicit, as is Machado's defiance of it: "'You're not allowed to write about this,' she says. 'Don't you ever write about this. Do you fucking understand me?'" (44).

In the midst of chapters about terrifying abuse, Machado pauses her narration of the relationship and turns to the problem of naming. In a patient contextualization of how silence allows abuse to flourish, Machado gets Biblical, likening herself to a new Adam charged with naming intimate partner violence, and then she gets critical, turning to history, law, sociology, and gender studies to build a counter-discourse because "our culture does not have an investment in helping queer folks understand what their experiences mean" (139).

Like Machado, Sarah M. Broom focuses on a literal house, that emblem of domesticity, as a way to explore how women's anger arises in the context of relationships. In her National Book Award-winning debut memoir The Yellow House, Broom offers a generational memoir focused on the house her mother, Ivory Mae, purchased in the up-and-coming neighborhood of New Orleans East in 1961. There Ivory Mae and her second husband lived with their twelve children. From the potent centering device of the matrilineal home, Broom evokes a century of her family's relationship to New Orleans and each other.

As Broom describes her mother's life, Ivory Mae has reasons to be angry. Along with the sorrow of widowhood and her high school's refusal to allow her to resume her studies after the birth of her first child, the legality of racism in the Jim Crow South exposes the family to poverty and violence. Life is both precious and cheap for people of color in New Orleans. Children get hurt in too many ways, and there is never enough money or support. Anger seeps through this powerful account of chronic, structural, and lethal racism. In the aftermath of Katrina and the destruction of the Yellow House, Broom concludes: "The story of our house was the only thing left" (372). The memoir stands where nothing else remains.

Houses are architectural objects sometimes associated with women because they host domestic life. Houses, as Machado and Broom show, are also metaphors for belonging in public life. A man's home is his castle, but a woman makes a house a home, as the sayings go. Virginia Woolf, in an early Gothic metaphor of twinning self-preservation with suicide, advised women to kill the angel in the Victorian house. For Woolf, the domestically ministering angel is a repressive feminine ideal draining the woman writer of creative power. But for the Broom family, the house is more complicated. It signifies Ivory Mae's achievement, her legacy, and the betrayal of it.

Stephanie Land addresses this terrain by connecting her own exposure to homelessness and her effort to support herself and her daughter by cleaning other people's houses in Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and A Mother's Will to Survive. Maid follows Land's popular 2015 essay in Vox and recounts how an unexpected pregnancy causes Land to lose her tenuous foothold on an economically stable life, and in so doing, exposes how precarious many women's lives are all the time. Land notes that white privilege and educational attainment equip her to navigate a public assistance bureaucracy that is, nonetheless, obstructive and inadequate. Like Machado's memoir, it contributes to a missing archive of knowledge. Land uses life narrative to cast a steady gaze—empathetic, self-aware, feminist—on the invisibility of white working poor mothers and the stigma they face as they struggle to secure a stable life for their children. Land is unable to raise her child in conditions of stability and predictability. She is made to feel that she is at fault for this—despite her overwork—and for the failure of men in her life to be responsible, and even more basically, not abusive. Because poor mothers are shamed. They are shamed for having children they cannot support in a culture that does not provide them with the means to access stable childcare, housing, or employment. The unique vulnerability of women—as mothers, workers, and members of families and communities mired in patriarchy—is front and center in this memoir. Everyday male violence forces economically dependent women into all-too-familiar compromises.

Until she published her new memoir, Know My Name, Chanel Miller's public identity was "Emily Doe," the unnamed woman Brock Turner raped and whose harrowing victim impact statement was published by Buzzfeed. Chanel Miller was anonymized as Emily Doe, but the rape shield laws that kept her name out of the media did not protect her privacy. Instead, she became a blank screen onto which the court, the media, and strangers could project their biases about rape culture.

Miller's memoir is organized in three parts: the assault, the trial, and the aftermath that follows Brock Turner's conviction on three counts of felony sexual assault. To recap, Turner was charged with raping an unconscious woman (Miller) in 2015—behind a dumpster—outside a Stanford fraternity house. Miller recounts waking up in the hospital with no memory of the attack. She learns about the extent of her violation during the exam as she and two nurses remove pine needles from her hair, her skin, and her genitals. She does not learn the details of the assault from the police or D.A. Instead, she reads about it online. Miller suffered anxiety and depression as her life was derailed, first by the assault, and subsequently by the trial. In the second part of the memoir, Miller explains how a rape trial is conducted. Victims are routinely smeared while the accused is transformed into a golden boy who, unfortunately, drank too much. His future, above all else, is to be given the highest consideration, while her past will be combed for evidence that she brought this on herself. Readers will learn that most rapists are not charged, despite the evidence, and that a fraction of those who are charged are convicted. They will see how an unambiguously culpable Turner, who was interrupted during the assault by two Swedish grad students who chased him and held him until police arrived, was able to rewrite the narrative as one of consent, albeit drunken, because he raped Miller while she was unconscious.

Judge Aaron Persky opined from the bench about the pain Turner would suffer during incarceration. Although the maximum sentence was fourteen years, Persky sentenced Turner to six months. He served three. The third section of the book traces Miller's healing and renewal in the wake of the verdict. As her life moves on, a public outpouring of anger over the light sentence takes aim at Persky. Led by Stanford Law Professor Michelle Dauber, who is also a friend of the Miller family, a campaign to recall Persky succeeds as Persky's pattern of giving similarly light sentences to men convicted of sexual assault, especially of unconscious victims, also exposes problems in California rape law. A successful conviction, recall campaign, and a change in the law do not a happy ending make, but they are positive signs of the power of women's anger.

The good news is that readers are gravitating toward a wide range of female "I"s and their complicated lives as recorded in life writing. If readers can let women be angry, and even embrace anger as an affect we have barely fathomed the complexities of, then what new affinities can life writing foster? If we do not have to approve of, relate to, or sympathize with women in order to engage with them, if we do not have to shush or shame them, but can instead witness the messiness that patriarchy imposes, then we might be able to access the perennial promise of autobiography: as one person tells her story, she reveals what made her.