About circling the brain

We all have pet obsessions. But are they boring everyone else?

Authors love a theme.

Amy Tan set out her cultural inheritance and immigrant experience stall in The Joy Luck Club, perfected it in The Kitchen God's Wife, and hasn't strayed far off since—and it still works. Having inhaled everything he wrote up to Until I Find You, I think I was heartbroken along with John Irving when he finally admitted to writing his own victimhood into his work, having denied doing so for years.

Sometimes other authors can build on it too. My schoolfriend Beatrice Hitchman and I bonded as teens partly over my pressing Tales of the City on her; the resonance of found family clearly found its mark in her, and her own second novel—All of Us, Every Single One—sings with that sense of queer homecoming that's redolent of Maupin, even in early 1900s Vienna.

My theme, though I've neither finished nor published a single book, is clear to me—but I wonder if everyone else is a bit tired of it. To me it's very obvious what gnaws at me, but also I don't flatter myself that you read closely enough or often enough to see it. While at the same time worrying I've absolutely killed off the grass by treading and retreading the same idea. Basically: am I boring you? But also: have you noticed?

I'll make it obvious. I constantly return to nuance; to the idea of shades of grey, and many things being true at the same time. I'm told (I can see) I have lots of traits that suggest neurodivergence, but the one I can't resonate with is a tendency to black-and-white thinking (good thing it's a spectrum, really). Doing a philosophy degree suited me down to the ground because the idea of looking for answers was appealing, and the idea of finding them appalling. I love to know an author or filmmaker or artist's intent, and also to hold my own interpretation of their work. I know what my morals are, but feel absolutely revolted by the idea that I have to subscribe to a fully formed set of ideas in order to share some principles with a particular person or group.

I feel like we stumble into using the word ‘tribal’ perjoratively when we suggest small-minded, narrow, fixed ideas; this makes me uncomfortable. My husband's blood—and by extension, our daughter’s—is rich with the essence of tribal survival; with the deliberate continuance of tradition and identity, and resurrection of language and behaviour that thousands of years of expulsion and brutality and murder tried to erase.

Still: that same tradition is one of doubt, debate, and argument. There is a very clear community tie, but no monolithic Jewish thought or experience. That is, for me, the very essence of holding two things to be true at the same time: we are en masse defined by having membership of this group that you do not; we are not the same as each other, and fuck you if you think so. I love this. It's complicated. It's messy. It's honest.

You know how when you grew up you sometimes thought some family member or close friend was being an arsehole? And you vented about them? And someone agreed and you were apoplectic and defensive about it? Look, they're mine; I can complain about them, but you can't. I feel like this is where the reality of humanity lies. There is my experience. There is your experience. There is what happened. It's complicated. It's messy. It's honest.

I don't like labels, but I do like understanding more about myself and which groups I might overlap with; I do not seek membership. I write here, on a platform I know lets people monetise some truly horrible thought, because on balance I'd rather a platform existed that didn't decide what kind of thought was beyond the pale (even though I think some of those thoughts are). We talk about morality and mores shifting over time, but are so sure the ideas we hold now are the right ideas. We talk about social constructs as if the fact that they're imaginary makes them any less real.

I used to do life drawing, and I wasn't entirely bad at it. One of my flaws was always blending, blending, blending away at the edges; real life doesn't have any pure black shadows and few sharp lines, especially in nature. I wanted to ease into the contrast, but the result sometimes was that I had to get out the chalk to brighten up sections and, really, when you've gone full murky grey it's very hard to get the light back. My hands smudged the white space. I didn't want to blur everything into a soup of soft stains. I couldn't stand to leave things with hard edges.

I think that's what you can expect more of here, if I haven't put you off forever. The places where things don't fit neatly. Where there are pieces missing from the jigsaw. Where I’m mashing the Barbie and Ken together and finding there's just smooth plastic. Where ideas and identity aren't mystery boxes full of wholesale tat where you have to accept everything in them to find a buried treasure. Where the good kind—and I promise you there is a good kind—of cherrypicking happens.

It's my theme. And I'm sticking with it. You can too, if you want.