'Pick me' girls are borrowing powerA chat with Gemma Hartley, author of ‘No One Loves an Angry Woman,’ about growing up aligning herself with boys, unlearning purity culture, and what it takes for men to carry their fair share at home.
As the Cornell rape case has brought women’s anger to the surface, I’ve been thinking about Gemma Hartley’s No One Loves an Angry Woman, a sharp and timely look at Christian patriarchy. Hartley’s book is passionate and intellectually energized, weaving together feminist analysis and moving memoir. It’s also a testament to the power of anger, as a tool of personal awakening and collective change, as well as a warning about what happens when our anger is suppressed—whether through the “good girl” conditioning of an evangelical upbringing or the shame taught through purity culture. Last night, I was in conversation with Hartley about her book at Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley, and I got to talk with her about everything from growing up as a “pick me” girl to what it takes for hetero men to change. Here, I’m sharing just part of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity. Your book captures how political events brought your anger, as well as past traumatic memories, to the surface—specifically, Donald Trump’s election, the Kavanaugh hearings, the overturn of Roe v. Wade. What has it been like launching this book against the backdrop of the Cornell case, in the midst of what some folks are calling Gen Z’s #MeToo, and what do you make of this cultural and political moment? In many ways, it feels like time is a flat circle right now. It’s bringing back that same feeling that I had when I originally had to reckon with all of my anger. And it feels different this time around. I felt a lot of grief as the #MeToo movement was coming forward and everyone was sharing these stories. There was rage there, too. But it feels all rage this time. I would say that the overwhelming emotion that I’m seeing expressed is just a deep rage that this is still happening. The #MeToo movement was before my first book published, eight years ago. And now here we are doing the same thing all over again. You know, #IAmJaneDoe is exactly the same acknowledgement. We have all been through this. And even if we have not, we have been taught to fear that we might go through this. It feels like a powerful moment to not be quiet anymore. What did you learn as your anger was brought to the surface, and how can anger more generally be instructive to us? What knowledge do we lose—about ourselves and our world—when our anger is suppressed? The uncovering of my anger has been a really long process, because I had this initial reckoning that was drawn out of these political events. And I was reckoning really with the specific example of my sexual assault. And I was like, This is the thing that I’m angry about. There were so many layers underneath that anger, which was really the journey of this book. There is that inciting moment. And then there is everything that is uncovered. How did we get to this point? Why did I stay quiet for so long? Why did I take the shame and the anger and bury it and think that it was only mine to bear? And so uncovering it was, you know, a process of grief. It almost felt immensely dangerous when it first came to the surface, because I did not know how to handle it. I’d never been instructed in how to move through anger in a way that wasn’t going to result in destruction or chaos, which is, I think, how we very often view anger. We view anger through the lens of masculine violence and outbursts, things that are actually dangerous and scary. What I’ve learned about my own anger is that it can be very instructive and healing to allow my anger, because if I’m suppressing my anger, I am also suppressing the fact that something needs to change. That is the most instructive part of anger for me—it’s pointing to injustice, it’s pointing to something that needs to change. I am only able to grow and heal and make change in my own life, and in such a way that I hope inspires more systemic change, by being attuned to my anger. You talk about how drinking became habitual for you in motherhood, in part because it was a way to cope with the inequities of motherhood. But it also kept you from looking at the systemic realities beyond your own suffering. You write:
How did you begin to move toward this systemic perspective? I had to get sober. The reason for that was that I needed to stop drinking because it was affecting my life in negative ways. I read so much literature in the sobriety space that brought the systemic aspect of it forward for me. So it’s not like I had this epiphany on my own, like Holly Whitaker’s work was really important in this. And being able to move from that personal to systemic blame was a big part of my deconstruction journey from Christian patriarchy as well. It is such an easy way to dampen our rage at what is happening. And the feeling of powerlessness that comes with so many systemic issues that we are not able to change individually that require so much collective action that often feels out of reach. I also talk about how drinking both played a role during the night that I was assaulted and a lot after, because I needed a way to dampen the trauma. I don’t think that I had the skills to move through my life without it until I was ready to finally let go. You write in this book about how telling the truth about your anger, including in your writing, allowed for your marriage to change. Your husband responded to the call. In some ways it sounds like it revolutionized your relationship. Can you tell us about how that happened, and what it takes for hetero men to recognize and respond to inequity within their relationships? I don’t think it takes anything more than enough imagination to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. The skill of being able to imagine what your partner is going through, and caring about your partner, that’s literally all it takes. If men care enough, they will change. I think so often we again put that blame on ourselves. Well, I’m not asking in the right way. I got a little bit too angry. My tone. I asked for change in the wrong way. I need to shift it so he’ll understand better. But I am able to put myself in the shoes of others all the time, all the time. And so it is not, you know, for our lack of trying or our lack of skill that men don’t change. I think it is a lack of care that is happening. The thing with my personal relationship was that the care was always there, but the way that I had been raised was to bear all of my burdens alone. And so I had not ever asked for more than help. I had never asked for equal partnership. I had never said “this is difficult for me” in any real way until the essay that led to my first book, Fed Up. That’s one way to launch a conversation at home! It really was. I was like, “So, there’s this piece I put on the internet this week.” It was the first time I’d ever written about him, ever, in all of my essay work, and that was the one that took off. He read it and it was an eye-opening experience, and an eye-opening year-long process of writing the book. Conversations are ongoing, growth is ongoing, but what I tend to tell people is that the desire for change should be immediate. The change should start immediately. It’s not gonna flip overnight, but it should start the moment you say something. That is what is missing from so many of these conversations. You’re not waiting for the perfect right way to describe it. You’re looking for ongoing change, ongoing conversations, but for change to happen immediately. You write honestly and insightfully about how you were—in current internet parlance—a “pick me” very early on in childhood. You aligned yourself with the boys. Tell us about that. Originally, this was not a term that I was familiar with. I had written about this many, many years ago as “cool girls,” you know, being the girl that can hang with the guys, being very low maintenance. So that you don’t ever have to be an imposition. I found very early on in childhood, I remember essentially being a pick-me girl in sixth grade because I had realized that the boys had more freedom. And this was very true, because I was going to this insular Christian school. I found myself going to that role over and over again, as a position of borrowed power. And we see that a lot. It’s not true power. It’s not liberation. It’s not freedom. But it gets you a little seat at the table for a time, if you can follow all the rules. I talk about some of those rules being the willingness to throw other women under the bus, because “you’re not like them.” You’re better than them. It’s placing yourself higher on the hierarchy of other women, but you’re always below men. For the writers and memoirists in the audience: How did you take care of yourself while writing this book and tapping into traumatic memories? It took a lot of somatic work. I’m a yoga teacher as well. I teach five to seven days a week. That’s a really grounding practice for me. I would take off my shoes when I was writing and I would plant my feet on the ground so I could stay rooted, because it was so easy for those memories to pull me in so far that I would lose my sense of time, my sense of place. I would build time around my writing so that I didn’t just have an hour to get everything down on the page. I was like, “You have all of this time and you’re gonna use some of it to walk and you’re gonna use some of it to cry and today might not actually be a day that you get through much.” I would hit a point where something powerful would happen in the writing and I would just need to lay down for the rest of the afternoon and cry. My partner is incredibly supportive. He would come in and be like, “Do you need someone with you or do you need to be alone?” And there was never any rhyme or reason to which of those I wanted, but I always had both options. And it was really comforting to me to know that if I wanted to be alone with this, I could. And if I didn’t, I would never have to be.
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