Genna G > Recent Status Updates

You have to be ruthless to be a writer. […] but really the ruthlessness comes from grabbing onto myself and saying “this is me. And I will not go where I cannot bear to go.”

About potentially being judged for passing the time in the hospital reading a gossip magazine: “but that is how sensitive we both were. My mother and I. There is that constant judgment in this world. How are we going to make sure we do not feel inferior to another?”

Her mother had not treated her well, she said. And so when she had her first baby she became very sad. And her psychiatrist said she was feeling grief because of everything she had not received from her own mother.

There is now a large interest in ancestry and that means names and photos and court records but how do we find out what the daily fabric of life was?

Then I understood I would never marry him. It’s funny how one this can make you realize something like that. One can be ready to give up the children one always wanted. One can be ready to withstand remarks about one’s past or one’s clothes. But then a tiny remark and the soul deflates and says, “Oh.” I have since been friend with many men and women and they say the same thing. Always that telling detail.

“To imitate people. To try to have the gaps in my knowledge about pop culture go unnoticed. Although it was not easy, that part.”
I relate so much 😅

[…] Or maybe, because I talked about it, because I wrote about it, because I didn’t pretend it was ok, I have stopped something?”

Belle is thinking about her kids’ future relationships: “Will they repeat patterns because of what is embedded in their biology l? Will they repeat what they saw? Will they attract partners that betray them? Like me, my mother, my grandmother? Will they leave their marriages in middle age failing to warn or explain? […]

The past is not merely what happened. It is what continues to live within us. Something can be over and still be worth preserving

[…] But they also exist in our kids’ minds. In their skins and bones. In their souls. And in mine. James changed our present and our future but not our past. This is the gift of an abrupt departure.”

On whether she would have to rethink her memories with James: “even in my lowest moments, even in the Naders of hurt and betrayal, I still believed in our love story. In our happiness as a family. Those stories are preserved in the words we write to each other. In the movies James made. In the albums I made. In the life we collected over the years. […]

Is telling the truth selfish?

Or is it sometimes a form of care?

I don’t think there is a universal answer.

But I do think that writing a memoir, while simultaneously being deeply concerned about what your children might someday learn from it, means grappling with this tension… Not whether to tell a story, but what responsibilities come with telling it.

[…] What if seeing their mother rise, seeing her claim her life, giving clarity to their experience, if the greater gift? Isn’t this possible too?”

[…] I could see that many of my detractors said nothing about James leaving. Somehow a woman writing about a man leaving was worse than the man leaving. […] when I was wrestling with the harshest judgement leveled at me, of being a bad mother, another voice started to emerge. What if telling the story publicly, saying what happened to us, actually helps my kids? […]

On James not being criticized by her social circles for the divorce: “I can see they were defending something bigger. A way of life. The safety it get them. I could see that when I was told I was too upset, too hurt, too open, words used against me the first day after James’s departure, it shifted the narrative. Once a woman is painted as a hysteric, the rest of the story is washed away. […]

Because of the divorce, she made hundreds of small decisions on her own behalf not because she became fearless but because she had to. Those decisions were their own kind of training.

Early in the memoir, Belle repeatedly worries that she missed signs, but in this passage she realizes that something important was happening all along, completely outside her awareness. Just as the endurance was developing before she raced. The race merely revealed what was already there.

Late in the book, after the divorce, Belle runs a foot race that she didn’t train specifically for yet she beats all her previous times. “All the walking. Miles and miles over two years must have increased my endurance. Without intending to, I had made myself stronger. “

This feels like a metaphor for her life after divorce.

Belle doesn’t conclude that she no longer wants protection. Humans need protection. We need support. We need help. We need each other.
The revelation is:”Protection that requires abandoning my own authority is too expensive.”

She doesn’t say: “James controlled me.” but focuses instead on her own participation in the arrangement and now that she recognizes it she can decide whether she continues surrendering her authority.

Safety is usually considered an unqualified good.
Control is usually considered a bad thing.
But Belle is recognizing that, in her marriage, they were entangled.

“And I could see that the cost for feeling safe was being controlled. They were two sides of the same coin. Protection and control. […] I knew that once we were divorced, continuing to defer to James, continuing to abandon my own authority would feel intolerable.”

“I like myself more now.” Seems like the emotional destination of the book to me.

She’s shifting attention away from her deficiencies and toward the cost of the role she occupied.

I think this passage may be the answer to the revelation about self-erasure I felt was missing at 79% not because she explicitly says, “I erased myself” but because she notices a change in her own body and mind after the marriage ends.

Afterwards, “Something in me had opened. Something in me had mellowed. What was it about losing my marriage that had made me looser? Why was I more at ease with myself? […] Maybe James’s distance, his not quite being there made me closed? Maybe steering the ship of our family alone, carrying the emotional load alone is what made me tense?”

Human beings do not live directly in reality. We live in relationships with reality through stories, memories, interpretations, and connections.

Many conscientious people default to a position of self-blame and sometimes that’s true, but there is a limit to how much responsibility we can reasonably assume for information that was never actually communicated. You cannot reliably respond to needs that remain hidden, denied, or unspoken.

Once something is spoken, it becomes shared. If there’s asymmetry of knowledge, one person is making decisions based on information they have not shared and the other person is trying to navigate with an incomplete map. Two people can genuinely inhabit different realities, but once one partner realizes that their reality has fundamentally changed, there is a responsibility to communicate that shift.

A piece of relationship wisdom that people repeat almost automatically: “The end of a marriage is always 50/50.”

I’m not convinced that’s universally true.

Responsibility is multidimensional.

You can contribute to relational problems without contributing equally to the failure to address them.