That’s a coping mechanism for a lot of people, romantic fantasy. She feels unattractive and then immediately after that feeling of “I’m ugly,” she has this fantasy of seducing someone, and that makes her feel all the oxytocin, the oozing, warm calm that allows her to go to sleep. Johnson’s prose hurries along, embodying Vivian’s anxiety. Vivian is high-strung, funny, and cynical, musing about social and racial injustices, the objectification of women, and the complexities of relationships. Early on in the book, we see Vivian fantasizing. Readers get a glimpse of the root cause of her deep trauma when she goes to the extreme to avoid her immediate family. There’s a generation of positive feeling that comes from fantasy, like a self-soothing feeling. And she hates men that are predatory and she confronts them, but then secretly she’s restricting her food intake and engaging in these body measuring rituals and really wants this hot guy to love her. And she hates the Pauline character, who loses all this weight and is a simple white dumb bitch. On the one hand, she’s giving angry, strident, feminist rants. I think Vivian’s body issues and food issues are a way I play that out.

But what is going on in your mind, in the neural circuits that have been activated since you were eight or nine years old? It’s very difficult to slough that off.Īs you get older, feminists often find a disconnect between what they believe they should be feeling and experiencing and what they are actually feeling and experiencing. It’s easy to state your politics online and curate an image of yourself as a leftist, progressive, feminist, anti-racist, blah blah blah. For me, as a novelist, I’m interested in the gap between women’s politics and the execution of their politics. And that is part of the thing about gender that I find really interesting, especially when you’re a feminist.

She engages in and perpetuates that oppression as well. Vivian loves women, but she also feels deeply oppressed by other women. On the gap between women’s professed politics and their lived politics:

Post traumatic by chantal v johnson