Years ago in graduate school, I drafted an essay I called
“How I Got to be a Hippy.” It was all about my transition from mainstream,
typical-American consumerism and a general disdain for
“environmentalists”—ingrained in me by conservative family and friends who
seemed to view them as pagan tree worshippers—to a label-reading,
high-fructose-corn-syrup-shunning, recycled-toilet-paper-using co-op shopper.
Reading that last sentence now, I realize how much more
complicated it obviously was, this evolution of my sensibilities, how
impossible it is even to summarize. It did not occur to me at the time of my
MFA nonfiction workshop, however, that in placing my husband Jordan in a
pivotal role throughout the essay, I was sketching him as an organic-or-die
czar, a dictator who spurned my makeup-wearing ways and molded me into the
submissive hippy wife he desired. My classmates said, "If we didn't know Jordan, we'd think he was a total jerk."
No, that’s not exactly how it happened. So let’s try to put
this back together another way. […]
Is that coming next, or are you going to link us to the rest of this essay, huh?
ReplyDeleteSo far it's still in my brain, likely to dribble its way into existence throughout the month. Stay tuned.
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