Touring Gendered Terrain
Stories of men, theories of women, and a midlife awakening. How writing my personal story is connecting me to great ideas and thinkers, and the crucial role artificial intelligence plays.
I’m writing a memoir called Things Men Gave Me, about my post-divorce decade when I spent ten years losing myself in romance before I found myself in art. The title alone might make you ask the question: Why would a smart, successful woman build her story around men?
In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir writes: “Humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being.” No wonder that when I sat down to write a memoir, I made man the lead and myself a supporting character.
I knew the truth from the start: the story was always about me, but more important, about how women at midlife can reclaim sovereignty, creative power, and a sense of authenticity that doesn’t depend on a man.
I’m serializing the memoir here on Substack, if you’re interested in following along.
When I first started writing the stories that make up the memoir, I was still caught in one relationship after another, with no perspective or distance and no idea where I’d end up. I didn’t know I would, in crisis1, move in with a man, together with him in what was ostensibly a long-term committed relationship. I was thinking I’d finally found what I was looking for, only to realize that had been a false goal. In getting what I wanted, I discovered it wasn’t what I needed.
As I build my memoir into a cohesive narrative, I’m finding, to my surprise, that the individual stories leading up to that turning point mean something different than I originally thought. They aren’t just stories of midlife romance and the gifts I received. They are trailheads into a mountainous land of meaning and theory that I wouldn’t otherwise hike to.
As I rewrite, the essays and chapters I had written contemporaraneously with the events they describe begin to shapeshift. An essay that was supposed to be about Internet narcissism discourse morphed into a celebration of a single woman’s sovereignty. A story that was going to be about when I crashed skiing chasing after the man I was dating became a meditation on women’s skiing styles versus men’s. The story of how I thought I was going to get engaged transformed into a story of two people seeking the past in a piece of jewelry.
If I keep this up, who knows where I will go, and what thinkers I might discover and study in trying to make sense of my journey. I’ve gone from a woman who wanted only to get a(nother) man to give her a ring with a proposal to a woman who focuses first on her art and writing and secondarily on her romantic relationship. This is rich ground for sense-making but I don’t want to bring just my limited understanding and frameworks to it. So as I write the stories, I never stop with my initial interpretation of what happened. I keep moving into thin and thinner air, finding lofty ideas from sociologists, philosophers, literary critics and other great thinkers. These ideas resonate when they’re brought down to earth through the stories I tell and retell.
Author Joan Didion said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
I agree with this as far as it goes. But to me it’s missing a key part of why I write: to learn what other people think, and thereby understand better what I went through and what it means, for me and for others. As I write the initial version of a story, I will have some inchoate idea about what’s really going on, some crude model or framework for interpreting it. Then I go seek out theories that might make sense of this. If not for ChatGPT, I might do this with a Google search. But large language models turned into chat systems make it a lot easier.
Consider my story about when a man I was dating gave me gigantic powder skis along with alpine touring boots and took me into the backcountry to use them. As I was writing the story I knew that the way Elijah and I were approaching skiing was very different. What I didn’t know was that there is an entire sociological discourse about how men’s and women’s experiences of adventure sports differ. ChatGPT pointed me to it and summarized it. I went and read some of the research myself, for example, about how skiing landscapes are constructed as masculinized spaces. Now, my female-coded experience of skiing growing up could be set against the male-coded version I confronted when I began dating skiers in my forties.
When I started this newsletter, I imagined it would be about philosophical ideas from a midlife reinvention perspective. And it is. But the way I’ve ended up entering that terrain is through the stories I’m writing in my memoir.
I doubt I would have thought to revisit de Beauvoir on otherness if I hadn’t confronted the way I “othered” myself in conceiving the memoir. I certainly wouldn’t have found sociological research on gendered adventure sports without reflecting on my own experiences of skiing.
In writing my story, I’m noticing how deeply gender scripts still shape me. The essays are personal, yes, but they unfold within a cultural frame too.
Much of what I read online doesn’t wrestle enough with the thinkers who could deepen the conversation. Too often it recycles the familiar instead of seeking out the difficult, sophisticated theories that aren’t already in circulation.
This is where artificial intelligence actually strengthens online discourse rather than weakening it: it lowers the barrier to those great ideas, making philosophy, sociology, and psychology more accessible in the flow of writing.
I don’t know exactly where this will go next—how my other stories will shapeshift and what other thinkers and theories will appear—that’s the journey. If you’re curious where this trail leads, I hope you’ll follow along with Things Men Gave Me.
In narrative, the crisis is the turning point, where the protagonist faces her greatest challenge, and must make a choice. In my story, I was choosing between continuing to seek definition in a romantic relationship or go out on my own and find myself that way.
I love this. It feels like a story not about writing but how to write to discover how to write, and in the process collecting different tools to write.