Shelly Oria - Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings From the Me Too Movement

YOU KNOW THE BEGINNING: In October 2017, a major newspaper broke a story about a famous producera serial predator, a man who wears his ugly on his skinand our communal ether filled with womens voices sharing private horrors, amplifying and echoing one anothers words, all stamped with a hashtag. Id recently finished writing a short story about a woman who murders men, a tale about the potential consequences of sexual harassment, and I emailed Kristina Kearns, then Executive Director of McSweeneys, asking if shed like to publish it. I used the words quick and soon. I used the word timeliness. I thought: how many news cycles do we have left? I assumed that in a week the hashtag would stop trending and the world would resume its collective disinterest in everything it revealed. I spent those early days of #MeToo feeling devastated in advance.

Sometimes I laugh at my 2017 self for her fear. Here we are two years later and that news cycle still hasnt ended; it birthed a global movement. But most of the time Im still scaredthat well stop trying to change the reality we exposed, or that well keep trying and ultimately fail. That our country will keep electing Presidents and confirming Supreme Court Judges who have abused women.

My email to Kristina initiated a long exchange between us about the role art and literature should play in a crucial cultural moment. What is the point of being a publisher or editor, Kristina asked me, if one isnt responding toand deepeningthe conversation? We need a book, she said. When she asked me to be the editor, I could not have been more thrilled.

Books invite concentrated focus and offer an immersive experience. Kristina and I both felt that giving physical form to a revolution that lived predominantly on the internet would be a meaningful act.

At that time, the end of 2017, the stories of beautiful actresses, most of whom were white and straight, dominated the forming narrative (even though a black woman, Tarana Burke, founded the #MeToo movement in 2006). It felt essential to meas a queer woman, as a writer who immigrated to this country at age twenty-five, and also as a person aware of her own privilegeto start the work of compiling this book by reaching out to writers of various backgrounds. I wanted to hear from black writers, Latinx writers, Asian writers. I wanted to hear from writers who identify as queer and writers who identify as trans. I also wanted to hear from writers who were adults before I was born, who could offer a broader perspective.

Which is to say that I wanted these sentences from contributor Honor Moore: I remember the beginning of Womens Liberation. I dont remember particular conversations, but I remember the feeling I got when a woman declared she didnt need any movement. And this one, from contributor Gabrielle Bellot: I had read too many stories of trans women who went to the police after men harassed them and were told by the cops that it was their own fault; what do you expect, the officers asked, when you dress like a woman? And this one, from contributor Syreeta McFadden: I know to expect the requisite bullshit that comes with being a black woman in the world. I know wrong is not my name.

I wanted all these words before they were written, before they landed on the pages of this anthology. So I emailed writers and artists, people whose work had made me gasp in the past. I asked how they were doing, and I asked if theyd be willing to write about how they were doing, or if perhaps they already had. And in my email I said: give me essays, stories, poems, anything. It felt imperative to not limit the scope of this book to one genre. When collective pain and trauma yield art, our job as a society is to receive that art in all the forms it takes, in all its different garbs.

In September 2018, as I assembled these artistic testimonies, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford took the stand and shared the details of her trauma with the world. Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, she said of the men who victimized her. That one of those men was subsequently confirmed as a judge on the highest court in our land is proof like no other that, to borrow Quito Zieglers words from these pages, were at the early stages of a reckoning. Our fight has only just begun.