Extraordinary Machines (aka Ladies) in Literature
In which I muse on periods, medieval badass nunneries, and all the oppressiveness of the patriarchy
A long, long time ago, a friend was reeling from the shock of an unexpected breakup, and in an attempt to offer my support and unwavering love for them I started combing the internet for badass music videos of women espousing their pain and righteousness in inspiring ways. In the process I stumbled upon a live version of Fiona Apple performing “Extraordinary Machine” that has become a lifelong elixir for my own frustrations and pain.
The song itself is an amazing testament to human strength and the ability to shoulder and absorb great disappointment and pain. It includes the mantra-worthy line, “I still only travel by foot and by foot it’s a slow climb, but I’m good at being uncomfortable so I can’t stop changing all the time”—which I must repeat to myself even now, as I try to squeeze the time to write and think into the tiny window that motherhood and capitalism and all that is adulting will permit.
I also felt the need to call up this video before I prepared to muse on a few recent books that I read—Three Women by Lisa Taddeo, The Red Zone: A Love Story by Chloe Caldwell, and Matrix by Lauren Groff—all of which explore the ways in which the discomfort of being a woman is a miracle that breeds strength, but also often fucking sucks.
Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, a nonfiction book that reads like three separate novellas, explores this in both literal and figurative ways as we travel with these women into some seriously uncomfortable sexual situations. The three women, who as far as I know are still alive and navigating our glorious modern world, are portraits of the many ways a woman is defined by and thus contorts herself in response to her encounters with men. Reading this book feels a little like being privy to some sort of therapeutic retreat/trauma circle. The way these women describe their sexual encounters is cray-zee in terms of the detail—but somehow even when I found myself cringing or frustrated or completely shocked by the way they fell into their high school English teacher’s trap, or fucked their old crush by the river in their family minivan, or acted as a strange conduit sex slave at the behest of their husband—the psychology behind the slip into these personal hellscapes is also familiar. Even if we ourselves are living reasonably functional lives, I feel like it’s not a stretch to say that we all know these women and in moments of weakness could maybe be one. Taddeo is reaching for a through line, and she creates one with a braid that consists of three stories full of small, sad details that many women will recognize, private ways of explaining the hurt of rejection away with hairbrained logic, signing up again and again to be treated like shit to the point where others feel justified in saying that “she’s asking for it.” It hurts to read this book, but you can’t look away. It’s like a Lifetime movie. It also leaves no real answers. Maybe that is the point.
Or is the point to realize that having older men come on to you, having high school boys try to gang rape you, and being beholden to unrealistic beauty ideals are par for the course when you are born with a vagina?
Or is it just to bleed?
Onto menstruation! The only true constant for those of us with vaginas and all the magic, life-nurturing sorcery that exists therewithin. Recently, as I felt the cramps and irritation of yet another cycle rounding the bend, I found myself contemplating the insane fact that I have been bleeding pretty much like clockwork every 28 days since October of my sixth grade year, which I believe was 1991, which means I have been bleeding for almost 32 YEARS!
(Also, how have I become so suddenly old? I saw this coming a long way off, but still, am I really in my 40s?)
Like most people who menstruate in this world, I still remember the moment I got my period. It was a Tuesday or a Wednesday. The night before was a middle school skate night. My “boyfriend” Neil and I were having a couples skate, our sweaty palms clenched together, my heart pounding with anxiety, and I told him as we traced the outline of the rink with our wheels that I just wanted to be friends. It was so hard to say these words. But the truth was it was just as hard as saying yes when he asked me to be his girlfriend, which I never wanted to be. The middle school pressure of relationships was a world I wasn’t ready for, and I’d felt relief from the tiny victory of warding off whatever responsibilities came with being a girlfriend, only to wake up the morning after this first break up to panties full of blood. Luckily I have the kindest mother, who let me stay home from school and took me out to lunch at Friendly’s and encouraged me to eat an enormous peanut butter cup sundae. (Love you Mom!) But while I ate that sundae she told me that her own mother never even told her about her period, and that no one mentioned it at school—that the day she woke up with blood in her panties she thought that she was dying, and that when she told my Mom-Mom that this was happening, my Mom-Mom just threw a belt and some pads in her direction as if they were a bottle of Mr. Clean, a bucket and some rags. “You caused this mess,” the message seemed to be. “Go clean it up.”
I guess this shows that women are getting better, generation by generation, at supporting one another and their bodies, but it’s also kind of horrifying how close we are even now to a world where we were living in total shame and denial of our corporeal rhythms.
I like to think that breaking up with Neil the night before I started my cycle is symbolic in some way, that I was claiming some sort of womanly truth, that I was possessed by my truth-bearing hormones—but maybe it’s just a coincidence. I’ll never know. I never charted my period until after I got pregnant at 33—and by then I mostly mapped it to make sure there were no more surprises on the way.
But I do love talking about my period and all the fascinating truths of being a cyclical being in a world that is obsessed with straight lines, which is why I decided to take a deep dive into how the releasing and shedding of unfertilized eggs isn’t just something that happens to us, it’s an essential part of who we are—which is what The Red Zone is all about. Chloe Caldwell, for those who have never read her before, is just good company on the page. She makes me laugh the way my favorite friends have, and I can sense in her style that she is on a journey. She asks questions and doesn’t always care if she gets an answer, and I’m happy to be along for the ride.
My favorite part of the book is the way she collages Reddit responses about PMS and PMDD symptoms alongside her personal narrative. Maybe I was PMSing myself when I was reading her book, I can’t remember, but I legit laughed so hard one morning when reading this book that I cried and could not speak for like five whole minutes, and when I tried to explain my reasons to my very baffled husband, my gestures towards certain lines on the page were met with total confusion.
And yes, I think if you are a menstruating person this book will make more sense and will resonate in a different way, but does that mean that it’s a “girl thing?” Because everybody is different, regardless of their born-sex, even if it’s also true that people born with vaginas are different from people born with penises in both very identifiable ways and also ways that are impossible to define in an ever-shifting spectrum—which brings me to Lauren Groff’s Matrix.
Matrix is just an insanely badass book. If you are not a general reader of literary fiction, it might take you a chapter or so to settle into the cadence of the language and visualize the words on the page, but it is worth the effort, especially if you have a penchant for the renaissance-fair-weirdness of medieval times.
Groff says she decided to ensconce herself in the world of the middle ages after Trump’s election. She was interested in the many holes in the story of the 12th century poet and nun, Marie De France, whose writings are some of the few that survive from the time period. Anyone who has spent time researching the middle ages—I myself have just started dabbling into this time period recently—knows how little concrete information we have from this time period. This makes it ripe territory for literary imagination, and Groff does just that.
Matrix basically reimagines De France’s life as that of a righteous, masculine, lesbian nun who turns a failing abbey into a feminist dreamscape of *mostly* celebate women, whose collaboration under De France’s visions (which are passed on by God, but are also just moments of inspiration) yield a utopia that outshines the surrounding monasteries and proves the strength and worth of both the women of the abbey and De France herself.
Matrix begins with Marie being exiled from the court by the queen. Though Marie herself has royal blood and a right to live in the safety and luxury of the court, after her mother dies the queen—whom Marie is in love and obsessed with—punishes her for being different, gay— unwomanly and yet a woman. Emaciated and rejected, motherless and alone, Marie is forced from the castle on a sad old horse and made to travel through cold, piercing rain for miles and miles, thrust into a life of service in the church with nothing but a lifetime of solitude and squalor awaiting her. But yet what emerges from this exile is a ferocious strength. It seems anything is possible when you accept your circumstances outside of the box, allow yourself to connect with your fellow outsiders, and collectively tap into the rage of rejection to fuel your renaissance.
Once you’re invested in all of the quirky characters of the abbey, you can’t help but cheer for them as they execute each jump towards independence and prosperity—from competing with nearby monasteries as scribes, to milking goats, to waging full-on bloody war against the men in the nearby town.
It’s funny, because I feel as if this book could in some ways be written in verse, like a modern Beowulf. The fact that it’s not, that it is medieval in nature but modern in its language and form, sometimes left me scrambling to figure out what lens to view the entire story through. Still it left me with important questions that resonate across the ages. Is Marie a hero or a villain? What is the source of human ambition? Should we honor our drive or see it as a curse?
It’s unclear at the end whether Marie’s life was a “success.” But what does it mean to be successful anyway? Success is just another story we tell ourselves to get through a day of adulthood.
I kind of think the point of all of these books is in some way to be aware of the ways we are capable of changing, of surviving, and of starting over, again and again. The women in all of these books deal with some serious shit, even if it’s *just* the looming depression of another hormonal storm on the horizon. Who cares if you’re married, divorced, if your kids go to good schools, if you have kids at all, if you like where you live, if you love your partner, if you like your job or if you’re looking for a new one. And please god who gives a fuck about your net worth. Success is not money, or followers, or any measurable thing beyond the ability to refuse to be defeated—which is pretty hard to do.
Like Fiona says, “If there was a better way to go than it would find me/ I can’t help it the road just rolls out behind me / Be kind to me / Or treat me mean / I’ll make the most of it I’m an extraordinary machine.”
I’ll leave it at that.
2023 summer goals: ride the waves of my extraordinary machinery, one cycle at a time, and toast all the hardworking ladies I meet in my life, both out in the world and on the page. It ain’t easy, but we will get it done—whatever “it” is.
*Note* - Feel free to share! I will one day make this substack more than an annual thing! xo