What Amy Griffin, Belle Burden and Yesteryear Have in Common

When I recently stumbled across a thread populated by women blithely declaring that they hated the ending of Yesteryear, I felt an emotion I thought I’d taught myself not to feel for strangers on the internet: anger.

How dare you, I wanted to chime into the conversation.

I’m happy to report that I did not chime in because though I’m not above feeling angry at strangers, I know better than to instigate a fight. Besides, how can you instigate a fight over how someone feels about creative material? Surely we’re all entitled to feel how we want to about writing, since “good,” “great” and “bad” are all subjective.

And yet I believe that anyone who finds the ending of Yesteryear “bad” is quite simply wrong. The people on the thread kept comparing Yesteryear to another novel that focuses on trad wives—a book I read and found fine but not even in the same league as Yesteryear.

I had been relatively late to the game on Yesteryear so by the time I was breezing through the “fun” 90% of it, I’d heard there was a big twist that I did everything in my power to avoid discovering accidentally. When I reached said twist, I was getting a nail fixed in the salon and, reader, I burst into tears that leaked all over the acrylics that keep me from biting my nails to the quick.

This was mostly notable because I’m highly medicated and so crying is something that I do roughly once a year, if that. I feel great shame about the fact that I don’t cry, always remembering how, as a kid, my family would laugh at me when I cried—until I taught myself not to. The point is that when I do cry these days, it tends to be accompanied by an emotion I assume most people don’t feel when tears start dripping down their face: pride that I am indeed a human and not just a highly medicated automaton.

The reason for my tears—SPOILERS ahead, btw, if you’re currently in the position I was in before I got to the Yesteryear twist—is probably mostly related to the fact that I’m a relatively new mom. The thought of my child being taken away from me—by one of my other children, no less—is worse than any nightmare I could conjure up.

But it was more than that. The way Natalie said goodbye so casually when her kids were leaving somehow turned my heart inside out. The fact that we, the reader, are slowly realizing as she does it that she’s batshit made it worse. I know that I spent 47 years—up until the time I did EMDR—believing that I was crazy, before realizing I had never actually been the problem. Seeing Mary’s words when she realized that for herself penetrated my soul.

I came home from the manicure still crying, still very proud of myself for it, alarming my boyfriend—the only human who cries less than I do. I scooped up our son and continued to cry, rambling about how lucky we are to have him and how I’d never let anyone take him away. By the time I’d dried my tears, I’d probably freaked my son out, too. My boyfriend did his best to understand why a novel had upset me so much but mostly looked relieved that I seemed to be back to what he calls my “tough Russian” self.

All of this is to say that when I saw people casually saying they hated something that had moved me so much, it felt like a personal attack. I wanted to explain to them that their “hatred” probably stemmed from the fact that the ending was devastating and devastation isn’t always palatable (unless you’re someone who’s proud of herself when she cries). I could call them all idiots but my God, they’re readers and when only roughly half of the population even reads at all, they’re a part of the solution and not the problem.

Taking sides around various women’s books has become more of a game than ever lately—especially in non-fiction. When Belle Burden’s Strangers came out, readers seemed overwhelmingly able to overlook her enormous privilege and wholly sympathize with her experience being married to a horrible person. Even when The New Yorker tried to take her down with evidence that she wasn’t in nearly as financially precarious a position as she presented herself to be in Strangers, most people (me included) looked at The New Yorker and not Burden with disdain. Hasn’t this woman been through enough, the collective thought seemed to be.

And yet when the similarly privileged Amy Griffin became the subject of allegations that she had fabricated parts of her story of sexual abuse, most gleefully piled on. Part of this was due to the fact that the public-facing facts about how Griffin and Burden “did” their privilege were so different. Burden became a lawyer only to do pro bono work while Griffin used her background to become a venture capitalist who invested in brands created by people like Gwyneth Paltrow. She worked her way into a position on Oprah’s couch and Time’s Most Influential People list. Burden, meanwhile, got her book deal because a “Modern Love” she’d published in The New York Times (one she’d secured by blindly emailing The New York Times) blew up. From a reader’s perspective, one privileged woman ignored her potential connections while another ruthlessly pulled strings with each and every one.

We all come at these books—and women—with our own collection of hurts, traumas, joys and experiences, which makes each of us feel entitled to have an opinion about them. By putting themselves out there, they are the puppets we get to project our own agonies onto—whether it’s jealousy over their wealth, judgment over their desire for fame at any cost when they already seem to have so much or anything else that makes us see them as having more than us. The fact that our opinions are more about them as people than about their books is, of course, unfair. I know that even as I do it.

I still remember how hurt I was when the now defunct Bitch magazine’s book critic said, about my fourth and most personal book, something along the lines of how she not only didn’t like the book but also that she didn’t “believe” me. (I actually wrote her an email saying that the book may not have been her taste but that it was at the very least my truth. I had so much respect for her when she wrote me back, explaining that she usually wrote about fashion and not books and thus hadn’t known what to say in her review.) Still, it’s a very specific form of powerlessness when someone else gets to publicly declare something about your life.

It isn’t easy to put yourself out there as a writer but there’s comfort in remaining, for the most part, under the radar. Writers like me who have carved out careers but nevertheless toil in relative obscurity are safer from the projection of people’s issues onto us than those who hit the mainstream. Whether it’s long-term recovery or just fatigue, I’m grateful for where my journey has taken me; I feel blessed1 to have been able to make a living through my craft without having to be ripped to shreds the way the mega successful are. Being happy about this turn of events is only shocking when compared to how I once felt—determined to have the sort of mega success and fame that Griffin probably now regrets having desired. Selfish as it is, I like being one of the people who’s in a position to judge mercilessly and not be judged mercilessly.

All of which is to say that my Thriends better be ready for me to reconsider fighting with them if they don’t start leaving Yesteryear alone.