#37: Little Women and Money

2 May 2022

I leave New Haven tomorrow. It's been such a good, strange, lonely semester, which was also somehow full of friends and companionship and love. A lot of the weekdays involved me, and my book, and writing in a way that now, a couple weeks removed, feels unreal, and then going home to an apartment where I rarely cooked dinner. Weekends were spent jetting around to Boston or New York or having people visit me from New Jersey or Philly--seeing friends I hadn't gotten to see in nearly three years of pandemic time, getting to be myself in a different way than anywhere else.

I started thinking about Little Women again after listening to the podcast You Are Good's episode on the 1996 Winona Ryder adaptation. It was inevitably lightly compared and contrasted to the 2019 Greta Gerwig adaptation, and to Louisa May Alcott's book itself. I re-watched the Gerwig, skimmed through the book, took notes on how it felt to hold it up against my own life.

Before going on, a quick note: when I tweeted that I was starting work on this letter, about three different people directed me to this twitter thread, where Peyton Thomas, a writer who has done a considerable amount of research into her biography claims that Alcott was trans. I find the argument interesting, and pretty convincing for something that's about 300 words long in total, but I am also going to use the pronouns for Alcott that Alcott used throughout her life. This is not to say that Alcott wasn't trans, didn't take deliberate steps to experience what was clearly euphoria in those moments in which she was perceived as masculine, that an Alcott growing up in a roughly contemporary period wouldn't have chosen different words and pronouns to describe who she was, but it does mean I'm pretty uncomfortable assigning someone different pronouns than those they used in their lifetime on the basis of a twitter thread.

The thing that first made me sure I wanted to write about Little Women was a line in You Are Good, in which maybe either Sarah Marshall or Jamie Loftus talks about Little Women as this vehicle for nostalgia--of what childhood, or specifically girlhood should be, specifically in New England. I also grew up like this. Days on windy beaches, tramping through the woods with boys from down the street, playing dress-up and putting on elaborate plays, cooking and scheming and imagining your life as a grownup as being this but more free. I was a Jo, of course I was a Jo--I longed for a garret to write in, wanted to read books and eat apples in trees, imagined a bigger, a wilder life for myself.

Being back in New England, and particularly a few weekends ago, when I went to the North Shore of Massachusetts with Missy and Haley and we walked up and down a cold beach and ate fried clams and bought very silly things at thrift stores and Haley told us about her favorite ecosystem, tidal flats, and we watched the water rush in as we ate hot dogs and roast beef sandwiches and then again as we ate clams--all of that made me nostalgic in the same way Little Women makes me nostalgic. This comes at a particular point in my life when I'm really living a life that hews close to what I thought a dream adulthood might be like, but is also lonely and strange in its own ways.

I love the 1996 movie, which is both a bildungsroman and structured a bit more like a romance--there's a lot of emphasis on Jo's relationships with Laurie and Bhaer (who, side note, this five-part investigation is critical to understanding), and some with her sisters, but very little on her writing. The reason I love, I'm obsessed with the 2019 version of the movie is because of it's emphasis on sisterhood, and more germanely to this letter, how it thinks and talks about Jo's writing, the money she makes from it, and what that means for and to Jo as a woman.

This is obviously centered around the one perfect and beautiful scene that is oft-memed but still somehow resonates.

Jo talks about how women have to be good for more than just love--she knows this, all the way down, and yet here, in the aftermath of her sister's death, when it's just her, an adult, rattling around in her empty childhood home, the thing she cannot get over is that she is lonely.

I have, for a lot of different reasons, been thinking about loneliness. This time away from my husband and my dog has been both a time of profound loneliness--there have been full days when I don't talk to anyone, really--and also a time of absolute exhilaration at getting to sit down and work at what is essentially a job I've always wanted and feeling like, as it turns out, I'm really fucking good at it. This is not to say that, the first time Jason came to visit me, I didn't end up sobbing for longer and harder than I remember doing in recent memory with the knowledge that actually, it was ok if I was unhappy, between working and writing and finding joy in my creation, it was ok if the tradeoff was feeling lonely or sad. It's not an accident that it's in the aftermath of Beth's death that Jo starts what the book often endearingly calls "scribbling" but is actually work and writing--the Gerwig movie shows sputtering candles, Jo asleep with a pen leaking into her lap, pages spread out on the garret floor. I've known what that feels like.

My time at Yale has also been a time of huge financial privilege--I'm getting paid about as much as I get for a full year of work at my nonprofit, plus a housing stipend, and being able to have time to work exclusively on my book means that I'll (hopefully) be able to access the other parts of my book advance, scheduled for delivery of the manuscript and for publication of the hardcover and paperback, a little faster. Which leads me to the other part of the 2019 Little Women, which is the way it thinks about money.

We're shown Jo in New York, getting a whopping $25 for one of her short stories, on the condition that the girl gets married at the end, we're shown her inkstained fingers, the editor promising her more work, and the telegraph coming in, saying Beth is sick, really sick this time, and so Jo is able to fly home to Concord and take Beth to the beach. This beach trip is, up to that point, the thing Jo actually wanted to accomplish with her writing. She is able to provide comfort, and safety, and luxury to her sister, who she loves more than Laurie, more than Bhaer (the particular fictionality of whom the 2019 movie quite neatly captures). This is why Jo sells her hair, why, beyond the writing itself, she actually writes.

Very often in the book she talks about her writing as the thing that's going to lift her family out of poverty, that she's going to "take care of all of them" with her scribblings, tells Meg to hang on, Jo will buy her silks and jewels and fun. So when Jo is able to take the money she has made from her big, wild life in New York City, money as much from doing childcare as it is from writing, and take her sister on a trip to recover her health, that was Jo's writing fulfilling what had been, up to that point, it's end. It is here that Beth says she is ready to die, here that Jo begins writing the sketches that will become her masterpiece, here that Jo realizes that money won't save her sister's life.

It's not til the third act of the movie that we see what we've been building up to--that gorgeous scene of the book being bound, while alternate futures (Bhaer) flash by--Jo, the Jo that is real, the Jo that is maybe closer to how Louisa May Alcott saw herself stands in the window, jaw set, as her book becomes a thing she can hold, a thing that, as she establishes in a negotiation with her publisher, she owns, outright.

I'm thinking about the ways in which loneliness, and love, and care and work all flash around Jo's life as a writer, a little bit in the book but I think I'm largely talking about Gerwig's adaptation here. There are ways to have all three, but even today, at least in my life, it feels tricky to balance all three, to be able to give them and receive them all at the same time. I'm not working to lift my family out of poverty, there are, if anything an embarrassment of riches in my life right now, embarrassing not because I don't deserve them, but because everyone does. Even here, now, with writing as a career that is as materially viable as it's ever looked to me, I have to acknowledge that money, even that money earned with the kind of work that makes my heart sing, is still money, with all it's strange power and frustrating limitations. Writing is a lonely job, which is something I knew when I took it, but it's still strange to be reminded of that, in this nearly-empty office on a cold, wet spring day.