ALSO BY BONNIE FRIEDMAN
Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life (HarperCollins)
The Thief of Happiness: The Story of an Extraordinary Psychotherapy (Beacon Press)
“Coming of Age in Book Country” was published in Ploughshares and earned a Pushcart Prize “Special Notice.”
“Surrendering Oz” was published in the Michigan Quarterly Review under the title “Relinquishing Oz: Every Girl’s Anti-Adventure Story” and was chosen for inclusion in The Best American Movie Writing, 1998, and The Practical Stylist with Readings.
“My Gertrude Stein” was published in Sister to Sister (Anchor Books) and in The Thief of Happiness, reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.
“Beauty from the Underworld” was published in About Face (Seal Press, Perseus Books Group).
“The Watcher” was published in Image and named a “Notable Essay” in The Best American Essays, 2012.
“Becoming Visible” was published in Ploughshares.
“In a Room Beside the Sea” was published in Shambhala Sun.
“The Vagabond Queen of Craig’s List” was published in Shambhala Sun and reprinted in Utne Reader. It appeared in The Best Buddhist Writing, 2013.
“The Button King: The Discipline of the Notebook” was published in Image.
“A Summons to Riverdale” was accepted for publication in The Sun (to be published under the title “Final Ceremonies”).
© 2014 by Bonnie Friedman
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher:
Etruscan Press
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Published 2014 by Etruscan Press
Cover photograph by Lisa Morrison
Cover design by Michael Ress
Interior design and typesetting by Susan Leonard
The text of this book is set in Garamond Premier Pro.
First Edition
14 15 16 17 18 5 4 3 2 1
“The Thief of Happiness” by Bonnie Friedman
Copyright © 2001, by Bonnie Friedman
Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston
Metamorphoses translated by A. D. Melville (1986), used by permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Friedman, Bonnie, 1958-
Surrendering Oz : a life in essays / Bonnie Friedman. -- First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-9897532-1-0
1. Friedman, Bonnie, 1958- 2. Women authors, American--Biography. 3. Women teachers--United States--Biography. I. Title.
PS3606.R556Z46 2014
814’.6--dc23
[B]
2014015293
Please turn to the back of this book for a list of the sustaining funders of Etruscan Press.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Sabotage
My Gertrude Stein
Beauty from the Underworld
Becoming Visible
The Watcher
The Masquerade Guest
In a Room Beside the Sea
Beyond Comparison
The Vagabond Queen of Craig’s List
The Button King: The Discipline of the Notebook
A Summons to Riverdale
Afterword: Message from the Shades
Acknowledgments
The woman’s adventure story—unlike the man’s—often involves an episode of coma, a kind of prolonged death-in-life. From the moment I noticed this, as a young woman, it worried me.
In Psyche’s version, which I discovered in my early thirties when I myself felt lost, the woman falls into an enchanted sleep. In Dorothy’s Hollywood portrayal, the Kansas girl collapses while crossing a field of poppies. A saturating torpor descends just after the woman has won her prize—exactly when everything ought to be perfect. After all, she’s achieved what the authority figure said was required. Psyche is supposed to fetch a box of underworld beauty. And she does! Dorothy possesses the witch’s broom, at last! So why does their success trigger an annihilating stupor, this triumph of the unconscious, or rather, of unconsciousness?
And why, for many real women, does something similar still occur, although it’s certainly no longer supposed to, not after the very real alterations that feminism’s achieved? Because, despite everything, it still happens to some of us that we land the job, win the award, celebrate the marriage—and succumb to a certain bewildering joylessness, a familiar sense of fraudulence, an inability to feel the anticipated pleasure. The sensation of being insufficiently alive, of being internally even quite blotto, can afflict a woman, and a man too for that matter, for a month or a decade or an entire adulthood.
This book concerns experiences of awakening from a numb condition and springing into an enlarged awareness. It is a work of personal (often intensely personal) essays, not academic scholarship, and its focus is the disturbing, buried, radiant aspects that have been disavowed, and what happens when one repossesses them. In my own life, over and over I have struggled to accept emotional reality, tending to choose what I think ought to be true over what is true, as if I would perpetuate a soothing dream. I tend to defer anger, mourning, outsized craving, mess, whatever destabilizes, whatever demands a confrontation because in some profound way I don’t