introducing girl on girl, a new bi-weekly column on the Rumpus

I have written about Monica before, here. I have also written about her here, here, and here. She has written about us, here and here and also here and here.

There is a chapter devoted to her in my book although her name has been changed to Danielle — which is now her legal last name. (I love that so many women I know have dropped their patriarchal names and replaced them. I think its extremely powerful and DADDY as fuck and if I didn’t adore my father/Woolf wasn’t the greatest last name of all time, I would be Rebecca Ruth all the way.) Monica and I were deep in the throes of a long-distance mildly obsessive affair while I was writing All of This during lockdown in 2020 and I do not think it would have been possible to write a book that didn’t center male feelings if I wasn’t in love with a woman while writing the hardest parts.

In many ways, I have always written for her. And All of This, down to the cover — has Monica all over it.

A few months back, Monica and I decided to take our daily conversations (she also spends the bulk of her time in the car) and turn it into a podcast. We called it CARPOOL POD and the idea was for us to record the conversations we were already having in the car about motherhood, womanhood, sex, relationships and aging — between drop-offs and pick-ups.

We ordered all the equipment, learned how to use it (well, she did, anyway. I was kind of a bust!) and then recorded our first episode/accidentally didn’t record the video/realized we needed a do-over.

A week later, Monica, who was out of work at the time, got a full time day job thus forcing us to shelve our podcast.

And then…

A few months later, the iconic Debbie Millman, who recently re-launched the iconic the Rumpus with her iconic wife, Roxane Gay, asked if we would be interested in writing a column that was essentially just us writing back and forth to each other every two weeks. The name, Girl on Girl an homage to our beginnings as twenty-something “Mommy Bloggers” (Girl’s Gone Child + The Girl Who) whose careers began on the early 00s internet. And while, two decades later, we are no longer “girls,” we are still, in many ways, experiencing girlhood; helping each other learn how to grow old, while unlearning all of the ways we were instructed to.

We were thrilled to accept the offer. Especially after CARPOOL’s sputter and stall, so of course we said yes and our first introductory “week one” went live last week. In it we talked about why women don’t need more advice we need more witnesses and that it what we hope to accomplish with this column.

Women bearing witness to each other has always been central to our survival and true love is definable in many ways.

I keep thinking about the delicate gold necklace you gave me all those years ago, the one that says I see you. At the time, I thought it meant being known, validated, maybe even chosen. But lately I’ve been wondering if it was less about being seen and more about learning how to see.

Maybe that’s what we’ve been doing every time we text each other another gray hair, another line, another inch of ourselves we were taught to fix. Aging is failure. Correction is empowerment. That’s the story we’re still being sold. To see our bodies as projects instead of homes.

So when you send me the silver coming in through your bangs and I send back the evidence of time gathering on my face, it feels less like checking than finding. Whatever this thing is between us—love and friendship and motherhood and sisterhood and that strange place where desire and recognition become impossible to separate—it has become a flare gun, a way of recovering reality from a culture that profits from our distortion. Who gets to author what a woman’s body means? We do.

You can read our week one here and tune in bi-weekly as we continue the conversation we have been having with each other for almost twenty years.

And if you aren’t already subscribed to Monica’s substack, you can remedy that immediately here. I don’t know that there is an easier person to love.