Wiving by Caitlin Myer

Dear Caitlin Myer,

When I was barely twenty, six months into beginning HRT, I lived alone in Tartu, Estonia for a semester. It’s a small, cold, lonely sort of place. Winter comes in the first week of October. The sun sets at four, and soon after, everything closes but the bars. I didn’t speak the language, so had to get by with some extremely shaky Russian and what few key phrases I could remember: tere, aitӓh, vabandust. It remains one of the happiest times of my life. 

Your book, Wiving, is a love letter to being alone as much as it is a memoir of escaping the constricting role of the Wife, in all her various forms — the Mormon homemaker, the eternally supportive girlfriend, the mother who gives up everything for her children. What does it mean for women to live in a world where they are expected to define themselves only relationally? Where they are caretakers and “pleasers” before they are individuals? As you point out, the seemingly opposed categories of wife and mother vs. whore or victim in fact “grow from the same, sticky narrative… Eve is still with us, all our stories built on her shoulders.”

We’ve lived very different lives, but this book resonated in its depiction of failure, of shame, and of the desire to be accepted by one’s community only to finally flee from it. Disidentification from traditional womanhood leads to a name change and the pursuit of a new, fuller kind of life. The narrative is complex, traveling through space and time, from a chaotic Mormon upbringing in Utah to a supposedly more liberated life in San Francisco and abroad. You consider a number of different issues — the demonization of female desire, sexual violence and the expectation for victims to forgive their abusers without question, mental illness and how it can work, alongside patriarchal structures, to deprive women of their independence and keep them “chained to a bed;” infertility and the feelings of alienation it causes — but treat them all with poignancy and compassion. 

Most powerfully, you describe the need to live one’s life for “something larger” than the happiness and comfort of another person. Though you were married only once, you “have been wiving since [you] were a little girl,” and your divorce is a necessary step towards freedom. Even the most loving of relationships can be constricting when it means living within a particular role. The losses of stability and security are worth it for the expansion of your world, “[smashing] through the roof… to open out to the sky.” Living in Estonia was my first experience with independence, with people who knew me only by my chosen name rather than my birth name, with the freedom to go wherever or do whatever I liked without seeking permission. Even in that small, freezing, isolated place, the world felt wide open to me.

This is not to say that being alone is safe, or easy. There are emotional dangers, since of “solitude” and “loneliness,” “one flips into the other in a flash.” There are also physical dangers, especially for women, or any other population particularly vulnerable to sexual violence. The book opens with an anecdote of the men who still approach you in bars and on the street, demanding to know “why a beautiful woman like [you] is alone,” why you are “breaking the rules of the story” in which a woman must always be attached. One night in Tartu, taking a back road home, I was accosted by a drunken man who pressed his forehead to mine and asked me, repeatedly, if I was a foreigner, if I was visiting, if I was alone. You say that the first word you learned in Portuguese was sozinho, alone. I was a poor student of Russian, but I always remembered izvinite, pardon. Eu quero ficar sozinho. Izvinite, prostitye. 

Late in the book, you describe the Mormon equivalent to hell, called the Outer Darkness: “No fires there. The only torture is utter isolation. You are cut off from God, from everyone you love. For Mormons, hell is loneliness.” But loneliness, you point out, “is at the center of being human.” At the end of the book, you have settled in Portugal, single and unattached, but not unconnected. You, like everyone, are part of “a bright web that spans the globe.” You still meet people, still love them, but you also “make a conscious effort to take up the entire bed… stretch my arms and legs to all four corners,” giving nothing up, feeling complete in yourself, “nobody’s wife.” This is the kind of life that ought to be possible for everyone who wants it, not just men. It’s not enough for us as individuals to “break free of the story” when “the whole world lives inside the story;” the story itself must change. No one book can do that sort of undoing work, of course — but this one comes close.

With admiration,

Emory Russo