cool for you? confusing for me.

Eileen Myles is also a poet. Her memoir-ish novel often reads like poetry. It’s beautiful at times. At other times, it’s difficult to penetrate her prose, but easy to imagine the acid trip that undoubtedly produced it. I particularly liked her style of connecting two seemingly unrelated sentences with short one or two word comments. The connector sentence could be commenting on the previous sentence or the following sentence. For example, “All the rich girls’ parents would worry about them and send them to therapists. I’m so screwed up, they’d wail. Pathetic. Cuase then the kid would wind up convinced” (13). What exactly does pathetic refer to? The crying rich girls wailing that they’re pathetic to their therapists? Or the fact that the girls eventually become convinced that they’re screwed up? Another example: she describes her friend Janet – “She was smart enough, she wasn’t ambitious.” Are they two separate comments? She’s ‘smart enough,’ but she also ‘wasn’t ambitious.’ Or are they related? She was ‘smart enough’ to know not to be ambitious. Final example: in the only description of a woman who she has a sexual relationship, Myles paints a vivid snapshot of them lying on a raft and talking about which one of them should get pregnant. “Years later, well about one, I learned that my girlfriend was having an affair with a man that summer. It really chills me. The August light. All that reflection on the pond” (111). What exactly chills her – is it the fact that her girlfriend cheated on her with a man, or is it that strange scene – discussing her pregnancy at age 41 on a raft - that haunts her?

Myles suggests, both indirectly and directly, that the answers to these questions about ambiguity is: “why not both?” She has a conversation with a man who takes her to a football game; he tells her that he “was at a point where he was going to have to become either a Jesus freak or a fag” (131). “He was weak,” she decides. “People who think there are two choices are even worse off than me” (131). These confusing poetic phrases are often a testament to that idea – why string words together in such a way that they can only possibly have one logical meaning? Why not leave the meaning purposefully clouded? Why not have one sentence relate to two sentences, connecting their seemingly incongruent topics together by sandwiching an ambiguous connecting sentence or a comma in between them?

The protagonist in Cool For You seems to follow this advice – she does not force herself into neat little boxes; she is Irish, Polish, Catholic, white, alcoholic, not-straight, a poet, not wealthy. She sometimes self-identifies as queer, other times self-identifies as lesbian. At the same time, however, I was slightly confused by how her refusal of picking between two choices related to her notions about her gender expression. At many points in the novel, she claims that she wanted to be a boy. The favorite son. She was always a tomboy, and her mother – also a tomboy – felt threatened by that and decided to send her to ballet classes. “Being a woman,” to her, means getting her period, and she devotes a chapter to how much she hates that experience. She rarely says anything that could be interpreted as positive about the feminine aspects of her body. In this way, I did not get the impression that the protagonist felt she had more than two choices about her gender identity; she did not seem to enjoy being a woman, and instead wanted to be a man. Not androgynous, not both woman and man, sometimes woman, sometimes man – but a man. I’m really curious about how you felt about her constant descriptions of wanting to be a man – does it suggest gender duality or androgyny? How (if at all) did her ideas about her own gender identity and gender differences in general affect the way you read the book? Also, on a less-related note, what did you make of the drastic differences between her descriptions of sexual experiences with men and women? Her experiences with men seemed disgusting, cold, and unfulfilling. Her experiences with women seemed to be little more than fantasies; she did not describe sex with women. What did you make of the lack of pleasure in the novel?