Reading suicide blonde
Darcey Steinke’s feminist cult classic is (alarmingly) the most relatable book I’ve read as a woman in my 20’s
I am 24 when I read Darcey Steinke’s Suicide Blonde for the first time.
A matter of months have passed since then and I cannot stop thinking about this book. I feel compelled to draw my thoughts together and formulate a wider meaning, to adequately explain the mastery of this novel and why it has such a lasting impact, to explore how it encapsulates the female experience so truthfully.
‘Writing well isn’t easy for anyone’, Maggie Nelson says in her introduction to the 25th anniversary edition praising Steinke for her ‘languid sureness’ of prose. And girl, these words are ringing in my ears right now - it feels an impossible task to do justice to the excellence and ease of Darcey Steinke’s writing with my own, to explore her protagonist’s ever so carefully crafted thoughts, but here goes.
Reading the first hundred pages of this book, I was borderline unsettled at how it crawled into my brain and scooped out its most inadmissible thoughts. It’s pleasant when art feels like it was made for you - and I was sure passages of this book were extracted from the deepest crevice of my soul. But judging from conversations with my friends and various Goodreads reviews, I know many others feel the same. I conclude that this book can reach its hand deep inside a woman and pull out the parts of us that are most difficult to grab.
My best friend (the first person who I made read this book immediately after me) made the guy she was dating at the time read it after her. He enjoyed it, but self-professedly so, just didn’t get it. Discussing this with said best friend and my own boyfriend, the book was compared to Palahniuk’s Fight Club - or more honestly in this conversation, David Fincher’s film adaptation of it.
“What do you mean?” I hear myself say. I have watched Fight Club (I think?). It must have been a few years ago, although if I have, clearly, it didn’t stick in my memory.
“Just a book that only women will get”, is the reply on the Suicide Blonde/Fight Club comparison.
“Like, Fight Club is so about masculinity, and it captures a man’s experience so well. I think all men in some way relate, I can’t explain it.”
I feel there is something to say about universal experiences pertaining to gender here. And this book certainly covers a lot of ground when digging up the darker, more insidious components that to me, make up what it means to be a woman.
One of the first social phenomenons I’d like to address in this book whacks you in the face in the opening paragraph as our protagonist, Jessie, answers her existential breakdown and relentless heartbreak by dyeing her hair blonde. Head hung lifeless over the bath, suffocating at the hands of intoxicating bleach fumes, she ponders:
“If I were brave enough to slit my wrists, would I bother to dye my hair?”
In my experience changing my hair - whether it be dying it dark, bleaching it white, chopping it off, making my fringe thicker, attempting to feather out said fringe - usually comes at a time of crisis. There’s no doubt about it, dyeing hair is a form of therapy. It is an ode to girlhood, and to womanhood. To transformation. When you hate yourself so much that erraticism wins and tells you if you can change your hair, then good lord you can change who you are. I’m not crazy - first of all, I’ve seen countless memes of girls across social media cutting bangs with captions like ‘me at the slightest inconvenience’ so I know I am not alone, and secondly Coco Chanel said it first: ‘a woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life’, so I have some clout here.
But back to Steinke and Suicide Blonde, although not before I add the introspective, critical rhetorical question that is why, when in a moment of emotional crisis, like Jessie, must I turn outwards onto my appearance? I’m reminded of a quote I read or heard somewhere about women and the patriarchal force of capitalism that said something along the lines of society manipulating us so well because if we spend all our time critiquing ourselves in the mirror, we won’t have time to critique the world around us.
Jessie dyeing her hair is a trade off for slitting her wrists. She bleaches her hair blonde, stripping away its natural pigment, symbolism of her stripping away her sense of self. Her hair dyeing is the start of her process of getting into lingerie at home, all in an attempt to garner the attention of her distant, unpredictable boyfriend, Bell. Throughout the novel, particularly at the start, it seems Jessie’s being relies and revolves around Bell, she says: “he thought that when he left me I froze, and when he slipped back he set my life moving again, and the thing I hated most was that lately this was true.”
I believe we all live for others. And we must choose to. If we didn’t, what would be the point of it all? It’s a comforting thought in ways. But I have also experienced a darker side to this world view, in moments where I’ve felt like I lived solely for someone else. There was no hope and no happiness without the promise of the impending presence of *that* person. The entirety of my inner world, the equilibrium of my emotions rested upon the actions of someone else. Let’s say that person were to leave, then what would happen to me? It’s a terrible state of mind to be in, to feel you have nothing to offer, that you are nothing, but suddenly someone else can make you feel everything. That is probably the scariest part, your heart being in someone else’s hands.
Jessie’s need to please Bell is always at the cost of her own desires. Sex is a main theme throughout the book, and it is one of the key ways Steinke explores and consolidates Jessie’s contradictory feelings: “I knew I wouldn’t try to stop him. Even though this was not what I wanted, it was a semblance of it. I convinced myself that him wanting sex meant he wanted me”. Sex is how Jessie connects. It is a tool. I think there is a harrowingly relatable element embedded in this about how women, and dangerously young women too, use (and perhaps sometimes mistake) sex for intimacy. Here, Jessie takes sex because it is the closest thing to what she really wants and needs. And I don’t doubt we have all at one time or another accepted things we don’t want, due to the lack of the thing we truly do.
There are many other times that Jessie craves the sex she has with Bell, as it reminds her she is alive while also allowing her to disassociate entirely:
“I felt the bed fall away, and the floor, and the ceiling and the walls, and I had the sensation we were floating out the window. Time lifted too and left us because when you’re fucking it is impossible to think of the next ten minutes or the next ten years. Because fucking, when it’s good, seems like everything and there is pain in the pleasure when you remember that things are horrible, until you’re hardly alive, and so many times good things turn bad that you decide to live the life you fear most, the ordinary one, the one that is easy and hard.”
The language here is a mixture of life and death, of opposites: pain and pleasure, good and bad, easy and hard. The drawing together of these binaries occurs often, poignantly, a minister delivers a speech to Jessie as she drifts in and out sleep in a hazy passage that could be either a dream or the recalling of a string of memories: “love is a rare possession”, the minister says, “almost inane and unnatural these days. It is associated with pleasure, but it is no stranger to pain.”
Sex is quite literally the embodiment of this fusion of pleasure and pain - for women especially - I’m thinking about the fear mongering around virginity, the breaking of the hymen etc. And sex for Jessie, is both a positive and negative tool. It acts as a gateway into the discovery of her inner world, her true desires, allowing her to give in to them and in doing so be free. It later allows her to escape herself entirely; to leave the flat she shares with Bell instead of wait around aimlessly for him, to gain agency, but by doing so she enters a harsh and cruel ‘world beyond all boundaries’ - a world of prostitution, exploitation, abused power, relentless desire.
It is being in this world, and going to the other end of the spectrum that we see her for who she really is: she realises she cannot go down the path of those around her, who end up hurting others because the world has hurt them too many times, nor can she be like her mother whose “sense of rigid honesty has crippled her in this dishonest world.”
Navigating a happy, fulfilling life for Jessie is living between a rock and a hard place. And this embodies the female experience. In the book’s refractory period, Jessie turns her back on her previous forms of self-destruction and realises that she does not want to hurt herself anymore, not for the sake of anyone: “even love has its limits. You had to act a prescribed way to be loved. You’ll ruin everything and we’ll be left with nothing.”
This is my paramount takeaway today - on international women’s day, no less - we all have our limits and none of us should hurt ourselves, literally, physically or mentally trying to fit into someone else’s mould, instead we must create our own.