'Cause she thinks SHE'S the passionate one...
I have a new story up at Tor.com today, "Ballroom Blitz." It's a retelling of the 12 Dancing Princesses fairy tale set in a punk dive on the old Lower East Side. It's a story with a lot of history behind it.
When I explained the original fairy tale to a friend's partner a few years back, he said "So what's the moral of that? Don't be a woman?" "Pretty much," I said. It's clear to me reading the story that there's another tale buried in it, about the princesses trying to save and free the young men they're dancing with, young men under some kind of curse ("You're just excited because tonight we'll be freeing our princes," says the eldest princess to the youngest), but their plans are scuttled by one of their father's spies, who then gets to marry the eldest and presumably inherit the kingdom, while their beloved princes are beheaded.
What's the moral of that? Don't be a woman.
So I wrote a different story, about the young men the princesses are saving, and what happens when, in this version, they succeed.
I wrote the first version of this story back in 2007 or 2008 while listening to a lot of Flogging Molly and feeling a deep pull of nostalgia for the adolescence I wanted and never quite got (I got something not quite as good), and I brought it to Sycamore Hill, where a number of people told me exactly what was wrong with it, and they were all right. I put it away for a year or so, and then worked on it some more, and then put it away for another year or so, and then worked on it some more, and then put it away, until August 2014, when I realized I needed something to read at KGB and I could not find the draft pages of my alleged novel that I had planned on reading. I spent a harried 24 hours going over and over this story while listening to the So So Glos, rewriting and patching and stitching until you could hardly tell that it had once had as many problems as it had, and read three-quarters of it the following evening, at which point the incomparable Ellen Datlow snatched it out of my hand and said she was taking it home with her.
I don't argue with Ellen Datlow.
This story is not like many of the other stories I've published recently. It's not political; it's not about being Jewish (although, for the record, Jake and Isabel are both Jewish--plenty of Jews on the punk scene, there's a book about it, Lenny Kaye, Bernie Rhodes, Malcolm McClaren, Nancy Spungen, Mick Jones by descent, Chris Stein (my mother dated him in high school), Lou Reed of course, Joey Ramone, Richard Hell; I met the author at one point but I no longer remember where. Isabel is, of course, named after my heroine Emma Goldman, and though it doesn't come up in the story, Jake's last name is Auslander). It's about depression, which, in the words of Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace "runs in my family--it practically gallops." It's on my mom's side and on my dad's side--my father's father had such marked episodes of depression that they knew it even back then, when mental/emotional health issues were much less well addressed.
It's certainly done a number on me. The first bout with depression that I remember came when I was 14 and my best friend was shipped off to Connecticut by her parents. It lasted only a few months. But when my parents split up when I was 16, I entered a two-year misery that I came partway out of when I was 18. It wasn't until I went to a psychiatrist when I was 25, nine months after my late best friend had died that I went on anti-depressants and found out how people without depression feel all the time. "When did this bout of depression start?" the psychiatrist asked. "Well, you know, it's hard to tell," I answered. "I mean, those feelings are always there, right? But you just push them to the back of your mind and get on with your day, and then they get worse and worse until you can't do that anymore." "When you say 'those feelings are always there,'" said the psychiatrist carefully, "what do you mean?"
Apparently, for people without dysthymia, those feelings are not always there. So I went on anti-depressants 14 years ago, and they worked within an week and I have never once looked back and no, I am never going off them, because I remember what that was like and I would literally rather lose a limb. I'm on them right now and have been on them throughout my pregnancy, and no, I'm not interested in what the NYT article you read about taking anti-depressants during pregnancy says. Fuck the NYT. My mental health and freedom from misery and desire not to die are not up for debate, and they are not negotiable. You know what would be bad for my developing baby? A mother who cries constantly, can't manage to feed herself or put on shoes, and has constant suicidal ideation. You can look it up. Maternal depression is really bad for fetuses and babies.
Which is not to say I haven't had severe bouts of depression since going on meds. I have, I've had ones that lasted for weeks and ones that lasted for years, and it usually means I need to adjust my meds--add a new one, go up on a dosage, something like that.
Anyway, the point is, this story is about depression, and self-medicating through music, which I've done a lot of, and as far as self-medicating goes, music works as well as anything and better than most. When I read "Ballroom Blitz" at KGB, my mother told me it was like a punch in the stomach, that she had to keep repeating to herself "It's OK, because she goes to a therapist and goes to Barnard and graduates magna cum laude and gets a PhD in English at Penn..." about Isabel, which struck me dumb for a moment. Because Isabel isn't me. It never occurred to me that Isabel would be me. Isabel has my depression, and Isabel has my wardrobe (everything she is described wearing is something I've had and worn at one time or another), but Isabel isn't me.
Jake is me.
It's something of a departure for me. I've never written a male protagonist before, certainly not one meant to be in any way sympathetic, and I've never identified with a male character I've written before (let's be honest, I don't write many male characters--they just don't feature as important in my stories). So I sat down and thought about what I would have been like as a young man, and what my father, who has depression extraordinarily similar to mine, was like as a young man, and so I amped up the testosterone levels and the aggression and anger and violence, but Jake, trapped in pain and misery of his own making and knowing it's all his own fault, is me. (You can tell Isabel isn't me because she's good at calculus, and my own math skills drop off after pre-calc. Jake, with no interests outside of drinking and music? That's me during adolescence.)
Originally the story had a much bleaker ending: Isabel leaves Jake after freeing him, and he spends the rest of his days for the foreseeable future sitting at the bar, waiting for her to come back. But when I did the August rewrite...I don't know, I just couldn't. Maybe because so many of my stories have ended so grimly lately; maybe because I identified with Jake and even with Isabel too much to condemn them to that. I just knew I wanted to give them as close to a happy ending as they could get.
Once the story had a happy ending, I wanted to use "We Got the Days" by the So So Glos as the epigraph, and this may be the one time I didn't do what Ellen Datlow said. "Don't bother," she said. "Music is never worth it--it's always a pain in the ass and they always ask for more money than you get for the story." But the Glos were awesome and super-enthusiastic about the idea, and their manager was super-responsive, and they made it completely possible for me to do it, so many thanks to them, too.
I really love this story. I love the pyrotechnics of some of the passages of writing. It's deeply personal. So even if it isn't like a lot of my other work, I hope you like it.
(I named it "Ballroom Blitz" after the song that always closed out the night at "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control," the punk night I used to go to when I was living in Philadelphia. I know it's not technically a punk song (though The Damned certainly covered it a fair bit), but it should be.)
When I explained the original fairy tale to a friend's partner a few years back, he said "So what's the moral of that? Don't be a woman?" "Pretty much," I said. It's clear to me reading the story that there's another tale buried in it, about the princesses trying to save and free the young men they're dancing with, young men under some kind of curse ("You're just excited because tonight we'll be freeing our princes," says the eldest princess to the youngest), but their plans are scuttled by one of their father's spies, who then gets to marry the eldest and presumably inherit the kingdom, while their beloved princes are beheaded.
What's the moral of that? Don't be a woman.
So I wrote a different story, about the young men the princesses are saving, and what happens when, in this version, they succeed.
I wrote the first version of this story back in 2007 or 2008 while listening to a lot of Flogging Molly and feeling a deep pull of nostalgia for the adolescence I wanted and never quite got (I got something not quite as good), and I brought it to Sycamore Hill, where a number of people told me exactly what was wrong with it, and they were all right. I put it away for a year or so, and then worked on it some more, and then put it away for another year or so, and then worked on it some more, and then put it away, until August 2014, when I realized I needed something to read at KGB and I could not find the draft pages of my alleged novel that I had planned on reading. I spent a harried 24 hours going over and over this story while listening to the So So Glos, rewriting and patching and stitching until you could hardly tell that it had once had as many problems as it had, and read three-quarters of it the following evening, at which point the incomparable Ellen Datlow snatched it out of my hand and said she was taking it home with her.
I don't argue with Ellen Datlow.
This story is not like many of the other stories I've published recently. It's not political; it's not about being Jewish (although, for the record, Jake and Isabel are both Jewish--plenty of Jews on the punk scene, there's a book about it, Lenny Kaye, Bernie Rhodes, Malcolm McClaren, Nancy Spungen, Mick Jones by descent, Chris Stein (my mother dated him in high school), Lou Reed of course, Joey Ramone, Richard Hell; I met the author at one point but I no longer remember where. Isabel is, of course, named after my heroine Emma Goldman, and though it doesn't come up in the story, Jake's last name is Auslander). It's about depression, which, in the words of Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace "runs in my family--it practically gallops." It's on my mom's side and on my dad's side--my father's father had such marked episodes of depression that they knew it even back then, when mental/emotional health issues were much less well addressed.
It's certainly done a number on me. The first bout with depression that I remember came when I was 14 and my best friend was shipped off to Connecticut by her parents. It lasted only a few months. But when my parents split up when I was 16, I entered a two-year misery that I came partway out of when I was 18. It wasn't until I went to a psychiatrist when I was 25, nine months after my late best friend had died that I went on anti-depressants and found out how people without depression feel all the time. "When did this bout of depression start?" the psychiatrist asked. "Well, you know, it's hard to tell," I answered. "I mean, those feelings are always there, right? But you just push them to the back of your mind and get on with your day, and then they get worse and worse until you can't do that anymore." "When you say 'those feelings are always there,'" said the psychiatrist carefully, "what do you mean?"
Apparently, for people without dysthymia, those feelings are not always there. So I went on anti-depressants 14 years ago, and they worked within an week and I have never once looked back and no, I am never going off them, because I remember what that was like and I would literally rather lose a limb. I'm on them right now and have been on them throughout my pregnancy, and no, I'm not interested in what the NYT article you read about taking anti-depressants during pregnancy says. Fuck the NYT. My mental health and freedom from misery and desire not to die are not up for debate, and they are not negotiable. You know what would be bad for my developing baby? A mother who cries constantly, can't manage to feed herself or put on shoes, and has constant suicidal ideation. You can look it up. Maternal depression is really bad for fetuses and babies.
Which is not to say I haven't had severe bouts of depression since going on meds. I have, I've had ones that lasted for weeks and ones that lasted for years, and it usually means I need to adjust my meds--add a new one, go up on a dosage, something like that.
Anyway, the point is, this story is about depression, and self-medicating through music, which I've done a lot of, and as far as self-medicating goes, music works as well as anything and better than most. When I read "Ballroom Blitz" at KGB, my mother told me it was like a punch in the stomach, that she had to keep repeating to herself "It's OK, because she goes to a therapist and goes to Barnard and graduates magna cum laude and gets a PhD in English at Penn..." about Isabel, which struck me dumb for a moment. Because Isabel isn't me. It never occurred to me that Isabel would be me. Isabel has my depression, and Isabel has my wardrobe (everything she is described wearing is something I've had and worn at one time or another), but Isabel isn't me.
Jake is me.
It's something of a departure for me. I've never written a male protagonist before, certainly not one meant to be in any way sympathetic, and I've never identified with a male character I've written before (let's be honest, I don't write many male characters--they just don't feature as important in my stories). So I sat down and thought about what I would have been like as a young man, and what my father, who has depression extraordinarily similar to mine, was like as a young man, and so I amped up the testosterone levels and the aggression and anger and violence, but Jake, trapped in pain and misery of his own making and knowing it's all his own fault, is me. (You can tell Isabel isn't me because she's good at calculus, and my own math skills drop off after pre-calc. Jake, with no interests outside of drinking and music? That's me during adolescence.)
Originally the story had a much bleaker ending: Isabel leaves Jake after freeing him, and he spends the rest of his days for the foreseeable future sitting at the bar, waiting for her to come back. But when I did the August rewrite...I don't know, I just couldn't. Maybe because so many of my stories have ended so grimly lately; maybe because I identified with Jake and even with Isabel too much to condemn them to that. I just knew I wanted to give them as close to a happy ending as they could get.
Once the story had a happy ending, I wanted to use "We Got the Days" by the So So Glos as the epigraph, and this may be the one time I didn't do what Ellen Datlow said. "Don't bother," she said. "Music is never worth it--it's always a pain in the ass and they always ask for more money than you get for the story." But the Glos were awesome and super-enthusiastic about the idea, and their manager was super-responsive, and they made it completely possible for me to do it, so many thanks to them, too.
I really love this story. I love the pyrotechnics of some of the passages of writing. It's deeply personal. So even if it isn't like a lot of my other work, I hope you like it.
(I named it "Ballroom Blitz" after the song that always closed out the night at "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control," the punk night I used to go to when I was living in Philadelphia. I know it's not technically a punk song (though The Damned certainly covered it a fair bit), but it should be.)