And then this guy adds a few extra notes about me, including but not limited to the following: that I am nutty; that I am attractive.
The thing about being called nutty—and let’s just acknowledge that this misogynistic trope has been used to dismiss a woman’s voice/agency/credibility since the Greeks & their famous Wandering Womb--well, whatever. Nearly all of my most favorite people (artists/writers/actors/seekers) in this world or no longer in this world (DFW among them) could be described as nutty, and worse. So I’ll take it as a compliment, even if that wasn’t the spirit in which it was offered. It’s that old Kerouac quote which I, not at all a fan of Kerouac, still love:
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”
But to be called attractive—which is clearly not the same as being called pretty*—is what really hurt my feelings. (I’m not going to say that I would have preferred to be called unattractive or ugly; I suppose that might have hurt my feelings more.) But the thing is, it wasn’t a compliment. What the writer meant was that my attractiveness alone could explain why such an estimable man as the Author would be spending time with such an otherwise-worthless woman. Basically, the writer noted that I was attractive in order to forward his opinion (without knowing me at all, I should add) that my worth as a person is reducible to my looks/my fuckability.
I have no idea who this person is; I have no memory of meeting him or introducing him to DFW, as he claims I did. I’m not saying he’s lying; I’m just saying that clearly we didn’t have much of a relationship.
Still, this guy decided that he knew me well enough to know that my looks were clearly the only thing even remotely redeeming about me. This is what he felt confident in asserting to the DFW message-boards.
I know I shouldn’t care. Because anyone who has and does know me knows that, um, there is maybe a little more to me. (And also, that I’m not always attractive. Which, whatever.) But I would like to submit here that his summation of me-as-my-looks is further misogyny of the rankest order (which even our Author would find horrific) and is why I personally have never been entirely comfortable being called pretty or hot or attractive or whatever else women in their twenties get called. It’s not that being attractive doesn’t have its occasional advantages; it’s that it is such a limited way of understanding a person, a way that promises only to disappoint (the subject and the object) eventually. You have to come to like more of me if you are going to spend any time with me. (And, for the record, DFW noted that I was, while pretty, sort of funny looking. Which I am. That there was something off about me. He said this empathically, and that it was true for him, too. Maybe it was that we both had an underbite.)
The other thing this guy states without knowing me at all is that my entire way of being w/ DFW was as a hanger-on. I’d never heard this term and so looked it up on Urban Dictionary, where it was defined as a sychophant (does anyone really think Hanger-On is an improvement? Sycophant is such a good word.). I’ve hung on to a lot of people in my life, I guess. I’ve also let a lot of people hang on to me (but only certain people). I particularly hung on throughout college and (yes) grad school when I was searching for role models and teachers and mentors. I needed guidance. And I was lucky enough to go to schools where there were amazing people. Yes, I went to grad school there almost entirely because he was teaching there. As did most of my classmates at the time. Is that surprising? There weren’t many other reasons to move to a second-tier state school in Central Illinois. (Okay, there were a few other reasons.) But for most of us, his being on faculty there was huge. And he was well aware of this. He wasn’t always generous about it, either. He called someone I knew and liked “a sycophant” to my face—which I found rather rude, given the power dynamics involved and the fact that we, students and admirers, could hardly not come off as sycophantish. On the other hand, I didn’t go to grad school expecting to go to the movies with him. I didn’t expect to have conversations with him about taking Nardil, or about eating tapioca on the fifth floor. But I did. So sue me. I liked him. We liked each other. I knew he’d been involved with lots of women, including another female student who is likely the “three-day-weekend” the writer ruefully mentions. But you know, I wasn’t a baby. I’d had lots of serious boyfriends before I met him. I don’t regret it, certainly. You know that thing Freud once said about love and work? Well, he was right. Nothing else matters.
*Like, for example: they called Sarah Palin attractive.





