Susie Bright - Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

W. B. Yeats

Preface

Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself

H ow does a woman, an American woman born in midcentury, write a memoir? The chutzpah and the femmechismo needed to undertake the project go against the apron. I was raised with, Dont think youre so big. Yet to be a writer at all, you have to inflict your ego on a page and stake your reputation. To be a poet, the effect should be transcendent, and disarming.

I already knew the best result of my memoir, before I finished it. The days of my writing a couple years in earnest inspired many of the family and friends around me to write their story, to put a bit of their legacy in ink. Reading what they had to say was a revelation. If more of us knew the story of our tribe and carried it from one generation to the next it seems like the interest would pay off.

I know so little of my own family history that, when I was young, I often read memoirs in search of blood relation. I wanted to be Emma Goldman. I wanted to digest Doris Lessings Golden Notebooks like biscuits. I felt like Harriet the Spy, looking for a dumbwaiter to hide in, scribbling down all I witnessed.

At the onset of my memoir, I thought I would bring myself up-to-date on the autobiography racket. I researched the current bestsellers among women authors who had contemplated their lifes journey. The results were so dispiriting: diet books. The weighty befores and afters. You look up mens memoirs and find some guy climbing a mountain with his bare teeth the parallel view for women are the mountains of cookies they rejected or succumbed to.

The next tier of bestselling female memoirs, often overlapping with the diet tales, is the tell-all by a movie star, athlete, or political figure. The first two subjects are designed to exploit gossip the last are so boring and circumspect you wonder if theyre funded by government cheese.

The last group of popular memoirs and this goes across the gender divide are the ones in which the author unloads a great deal of weight in the form of psychic burdens from childhood. The subject is nearly driven mad by lunatic or intoxicated parenting, sidetracked by years of self-destruction bred into their family line, only to be redeemed at the end by a clean break from addiction and pathology.

Im as vulnerable as anyone to the toxicity of the American nuclear family. But I wouldnt call it disease or moral failure as much as I would point the finger at a system that grinds people down like a metal file. Who doesnt need a drink? Who isnt going to crack and lash out at the people they love? I have a lot of sympathy for the dark places in my family history, while at the same time repeating my mantra, This cant go on.

I came of age and became a sexual adult at the moment that women in jeans and no bras, of course were taking to the streets. Sexual liberation and feminism were inseparable topics to my best friends in high school. As I entered my twenties and feminists began to disown one another over sexual expression, it reminded me all too well of what I went though in the labor movement, civil rights, the Left let the weak fight among themselves. Radical feminists didnt need FBI infiltration the mechanism for sisterly cannibalization was already well under way.

When I was first involved in politics, it was part of our group ethos not to proclaim our names and so-called talent all over the map it went against our sense of the collective. When people ask me how I became a professional writer, I couldnt give them a climb-the-ladder scenario, because I went out my way to be part of a group. Everyone was supposed to know how to write, talk, run a web press, unclog a toilet, stage a demonstration.

I saw a news article today by a corporate headhunter who said he liked to get under his applicants skin by asking them how, exactly, they were most misunderstood. What an endearing literary question!

It was a good interrogation to ask myself, mid-memoir. What do people think about me that is off base? And how do I gauge this misperception?

Most people unfamiliar with my work imagine that anyone with the youthful nickname of Susie Sexpert must be an adolescent airhead, a happy but too-dim nympho, someone who set out to shock her strict parents or, alternatively, was raised in a den of hedonists.

They also think, along the dumb blond trajectory, that I just havent thought things through, about where sexual liberation might lead how a female Narcissus could drown in a pool of clitoral self-absorption and drag unfortunate others with her.

I would say, for one, I was motivated, always, from the sting of social injustice. The cry of That isnt fair! gets a more impulsive behavior from me than, I want to get off.