European writers, French schools, and the Manosphere
Plus brief mentions of cancer treatment, Mother's Day, and Adolescence
I’m writing this on the train, which I boarded in Montpellier just after this week’s Avastin treatment at the hospital. I’m on my way to Paris, for a conference of the European Association of Creative Writing Programmes which—as you know if you’ve been paying attention—is one of my favorite organizations of writers in the world.
I’m missing the first day of the conference because of the Avastin this morning, which of course was not optional. Especially since no one has yet come up with a new treatment for me. I hope I haven’t missed that critical bonding window at the start of a conference! Although I already know many of the writers who will be attending, friends who live in Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, Belgium, Finland, Sweden, and other countries. Every minute spent with this group inspires me; they’re worth the trip even if I only have two days with them.
This is the first time I’ve traveled anywhere on my injured and still healing foot, and I’m a bit nervous about managing the weight of all my things (though I packed minimalistically) while watching my step. I meant to post this last night, as I usually do, but I was a ball of stress as I attempted to complete a dozen different tasks at once, so I hope you will forgive the slight tardiness. It amused me that when I took my blood pressure at my most stressed-out moment (because I have to take it every day while on Avastin), it was the lowest it has been all week.
My hospital appointment went smoothly, despite Dr. F. becoming predictably annoyed and dismissive when I mentioned to her that I had started a bunch of new supplements and would like to try some experimental off-label drugs. “I have nothing to do with this,” she said, pushing my lists back at me. “It is not science.” That’s fine, I said calmly. But it’s not like anything else has been offered to me. What do I have to lose? She accepted that. My nurse, as is usually the case, was kind and interested in me, mistaking my accent for German and expressing delight to discover I am a writer. She immediately took one of my identifying stickers so she could look me up online.
Now that I am finally rocketing towards Paris on a high-speed train, I am excited. It is a brief reprieve from rural life, but a reprieve all the same. And I am so looking forward to the company of one of my communities!
Apparently it was Mother’s Day in the US on Sunday. Britain, France, and the US all have different dates for Mother’s Day, meaning we never know which one to celebrate and often end up not marking the day at all. It was easier to keep track when T was in primary school in Bolivia and London and her teachers would assign her to make me something, a card, a paper tulip. But then I wouldn’t remember the American Mother’s Day and my own mother. These days my mother doesn’t know who I am or the date, so it doesn’t feel meaningful to ring her. I wish I could ring who she used to be. Her dementia is too far advanced for her to hold a conversation. Nor is there anything I could send her that might matter to her.
I confess I am a Mother’s Day agnostic. It’s nice to celebrate and be celebrated, we all love each other, but a day is so laughably inadequate. Like International Women’s Day. We get one day? For half the human race?
Even without realizing it was Mother’s Day in another country, T and I took a mother-daughter walk in the rain yesterday. I am walking, but only on flat surfaces. While it doesn’t hurt to walk, I still can’t point my foot without pain. Or bend it to the side. “Be careful!” Tim says every time I head out on a walk. “I injured myself in the house,” I remind him. “You should be saying ‘Be careful!’ the second I walk back in the door, not when I leave.”
So many of our mother-daughter walks have been in the pouring rain, which neither of us minds. I remember once in Uzbekistan we scampered laughing across Tashkent in such a downpour that we had to take our dripping clothes off in the front hall and walk naked upstairs for dry clothing. We didn’t get quite as wet yesterday, but we did still have to change our clothes.
Our conversation turned, as it often does, to the ills of the French educational system. None of her teachers seem to enjoy teaching, she said. None of them is interested in cultivating a love of learning in the kids. They just talk at the students without any concern for making learning enjoyable and rewarding. It creates students who think of school as something to endure, not something that is an end in itself, an exciting time of discovery. Her teachers are pressuring the kids to pick specializations they are already good at (rather than things that interest them) so that they can test well and eventually get a job in that field. The focus is already on securing a lifetime job in a practical field, not on learning for learning’s sake. It fills us with sadness for the kids here. Theo’s peers are already focused on practical future careers and not on discovering new and interesting things.
T also reports that most of her classmates are depressed, anxious, and generally miserable. This is what they talk about, what they write about. The drama of their despair. I know that this is common for teenagers—I too wrote disturbing stories about suicide in high school. But Theo says it feels relentless, like these kids can’t think about anything but their own unhappiness.
Theo is both inside and outside of this system. She has experienced enough different schools to know that learning can be thrilling, a joy. She is unhappy in a system that doesn’t care about inspiring kids or making learning interesting and pleasurable.
Not that her experiences in other schools have been without their own downsides. At her school in Tashkent, a cluster of her 12-year-old male classmates became obsessed with violent misogynist Andrew Tate (who has been arrested for rape and sex trafficking and whose vitriol has attracted an online following of nearly 10 million boys. Oh, and need I add he is also racist and homophobic?). This boy’s continual misogynistic and violent rants upset T and her peers, but seemed to elude the teachers. Theo once caught these boys watching porn in the classroom. The most relentless of these boys targeted Theo in particular, abusing her verbally in class and making constant comments about her on social media. Our breaking point came when he posted about her with an icon of a gun pointed at her name. We talked with the school, who talked with his parents, who sent him away to a boarding school in India. Which I am not convinced is going to save him.
So when the three of us watched Adolescence together, it struck a chord. Frankly, compared to the kid in Theo’s class, the boy in the film was a sweetheart (although the boy in T’s class thankfully has not – to my knowledge – stabbed anyone). We admired the claustrophobia created by the long shots, were terrified by the kids at the school (that’s what it’s like, Theo said, though maybe not quite as bad), and felt a deep sense of hopelessness. Theo and Tim wept over the final image of the film.
Things are so much worse for kids now than they were for me growing up. I knew horrid boys, but there was no internet where they could band together in their worship of Andrew Tate and to have their hatred of girls validated. No one would even know who Andrew Tate was. I won’t wish the internet away, because that’s impossible and foolish, but I am so glad that I grew up without it. I am so glad I had the chance to travel the world without a mobile phone or the internet. When I went away, I was truly away. My parents discouraged me from calling home except in an emergency because of the expense. I was truly on my own, relying only on my own resources. I couldn’t text anyone for advice or directions. I had to use paper maps. I got lost a lot. And I loved it. I made so many unexpected discoveries and friends. I am sorry that no one can do this anymore, unless they head somewhere truly remote, like the Bolivian jungle or Karakalpakstan. During our journeys to those places, it was an enormous relief, a joy, to be unconnected. To not be able to check email.
Like everyone else, I use the internet constantly. Not least to research (now that I have been goaded) new treatments for ovarian cancer (no luck yet – all the trials require tumors of at least 10 mm. All of them! It’s infuriating. It’s not like I don’t have cancer, just because it appears in sandlike dust form!). But I am not sure that it has improved my life. My office contains boxes and boxes of letters from friends from every stage of my life, from childhood until the internet age. Letters from my parents full of advice, emotional letters from my sister, letters from people I met at summer jobs, people I loved, fellow actors. I love opening those paper letters, seeing the different handwritings. One of my boyfriends used shiny ink of many different colors and wrote on magazine pages. My best friend from highschool covered every envelope with drawings and quotes from her favorite songs. Emails have none of these personal flourishes.
All of my emails will disappear with me. When I attended a talk a few years ago at the British Library by the archivist in charge of their vast collection of paper diaries, he reminded us that every technology we use today will be obsolete in ten years. The only thing that survives, he said, is paper.
Very nice, very sweet
Thank you for this!