Sublimating Malcontent

I want to parse my sentiments about Ms. Weiner a little further. I do not resent that a female author who answers for my younger sister's middle brow frustrations found her niche. I emailed her, in light of her public television essay to tell her to take pride in what she achieved and stop ducking, among a few other things. Good in Bed wasn't a bad novel, and I could see why little Stephanie found some resonating quality in Weiner's voice. If I had been able bodied, still battling the family predisposition toward obesity, maybe I would have finished the book, and reconciled with the heroine as she found a stable relationship, but this seems all that American women are able to do, within the confines of the MFA paradigm, and it holds little interest for me. The only difference between Ann Beattie and Jennifer Weiner is a) mechanics-- Weiner is more frank about finger fucking without veering off into an erotic subgenre, whereas I've never read Beattie making the same observations b) urbanity-- Beattie needs Manhattan the way Woody Allen needs jazz and Farrow's adopted daughter; Weiner is more homespun, behind the windowpane c) self-assurance-- which Weiner lacks. This is the only real reason I wrote her, perhaps intimidating her a touch when I told her I had been "reported to the FBI," and as I assumed, my psyche punished me for my independent living center hatreds as black as ocher.

Shins buckled on a bad pivot, shins the surgeons carved so that if they touched the back of my thigh, my ligaments would flare with excruciating pain, asking myself if I wanted to lie there, dehydrate until Thursday and see what would happen and instead I copped and telephoned EMS after a wriggle bout. I landed oddly, and you may trust, when Grimes tells his son "you're never safe," had I waited and not exerted myself to sit up-- Trudy Richardson, Debra Horne, Presby, all this seemed relatively unimportant-- giving my notice seems neither here, nor there, and I am probably taking the plunge. Not that my father is obligated, and it is his demented wife's property, not his, but I can afford to return to Springfield, and perhaps not everyone is a secret Ariel Castro. [ I am not by the way-- my heinous darkness leans toward quick kills; torture is boring, and my body simply absorbs the pain.]

What I mean is that lack of appreciation is a come down, and I'm utterly indifferent to Jennifer Weiner's own subversive tactics, and wish women would try something else now and then, not only along the lines of Muriel Spark's wicked social intelligence-- it is this which pierces insularity, that matters of taste make our hard work a bucket of polluted water, saturated with cleaning agents.