Janis Ian, Anna Karenina, and Sadness

It cannot be said that Tolstoy understood women, yet his famous introduction to Anna Karenina can just as well be applied to women as families:

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Are women not the head of the household? This is a complicated statement, but even in such patriarchal visions as upper-class Russian families of the 19th century women were powerful home economists, expected to ‘turn the head any way she wants‘; the household she runs, the children she raises, must therefore be expected to reflect the woman.

Women are also unhappy in their own way as characters in Janis Ian’s incredible song At Seventeen (link for the uninitiated). We have our protagonist who is not beautiful, she thinks, or suave; we have the hint of the unhappiness of the “high school girls with clear-skinned smiles”, which appears to be confirmed by the hometown queen who “marries into what she needs” loses both money, yes, but also love; we get nothing more about the “brown-eyed girl” except a hint, from her advice to a speaker who “cannot pronounce” her name, that her own platonic outreach is not returned with eager companionship. All of these women are unhappy, and “dreams were all they gave for free” – perhaps not only to the “ugly duckling girls”, but also to the rich and pretty.

My mother’s name was always called when choosing sides for basketball – not only was she a semi-professional sportsperson in her youth, at the same time she was head girl at school, appreciated by both teachers and teens. Popularity among her peers was hers, and an escape from humdrum working class life through a scholarship, and yet she relates to this song – and to that line in particular. It resonates with me, too, who had a different sort of popularity when I was young: a notoriety built on an excess of maturity and unusual priorities.* Notoriety is not love, and neither is a life lived as the invented self who did go out and dance. Dancing with her so-good-he-might-have-been-invented lover didn’t make Anna Karenina happy, either.

There is no answer for unhappiness. Ian’s song ends with her self-reflective, 24 years old, cheating at solitaire. 24 is nothing, but the art she made spoke to so many people it made it onto the charts. Her story goes on, but At Seventeen continues to live and speak to people’s sadness. The answer Tolstoy presents in Anna Karenina is more conclusive: 28 years old, so wealthy she’s clad in anachronistic Chanel, realising that she is happy neither in the gilded cage nor freed from it, Anna (rather famously) chooses death. Regardless of wealth or privilege, says Tolstoy, ‘we live in a society’ and it stymies us all; be like Levin and farm.

It isn’t clear to me if books and music help – on the one hand, my emotions are seen and understood by artists I respect whose work I enjoy; on the other, I find the universality of unhappiness lacks hope, and seeing how little the human condition has improved over the past centuries encourages a rational despondency it is hard to break free from. Is not being alone in your sadness really better? Is burdening the people you love with your own insatiable ache an improvement? But then, what is this art for if not to give a piece of your own heart up in exchange for… perhaps nothing at all?

I love sad art. I find myself compelled by the characters’ interiority: even in my favourite comedies are the leads rightfully anxious, creating trouble for themselves or finding it in complex humanity. I want Tolstoy and Janis Ian and their wordy doubt, their lyrical restlessness. I want to be rooting for a doomed team and for there to be no cure and to understand with every fibre of my being the nuance of the unique, as if I have lived it myself

Whilst I write my own interminable novel of female sadness, listen to my ‘sad girls of mild hyperpop’ playlist, and journal so furiously I’m aware of every flaw I ever had, here are some sadness

Pay somebody to listen to you.

I don’t care how myopic my concerns are, my therapist is paid to listen to me. Also, my thoughts are NOT selfish, and the right therapist will poke at them in the right places to find how and why they are not.

My honest advice for the girlies who cannot afford this is to go to a Quaker meeting (unprogrammed only! You can find them online if there isn’t one near you!) At first the silence will feel pregnant, then it will feel crushing, and then you will find yourself surprised by it. The Quaker ‘holy book’ is literally just a collection of life advice from ordinary people spanning 1650 – 2013 and semi-regularly gets updated, and it is shocking how much The Sadness™ has not changed.

The core thing is that whoever is holding you up needs to be somebody you don’t fear burdening – one day, that heaviness will get too much to share with somebody you love, and you still need a person who finds the thread of light to pull on, even when you’re trying to drive your loved ones away.

Kali Uchis

Listening to music in Spanish (a language I don’t know a word of) is helpful. I’m sure Kali is experiencing a world of emotions, and I have enjoyed engaging with them from her English-language lyrics, but in Spanish it’s just music and aesthetic that’s speaking for her.

This also applies to classical music which matches your current ‘vibe’, other languages you don’t speak, and other Spanish-language artists. It does not have to be Kali Uchis.

Read some trash

I can knock out a Meg Cabot in a day and see my mood improve sevenfold. Charming little romances, cosy crime, a heartwarming fairytale retelling… all of these are beyond frivolity, landing slap bang into powerful mood enhancement. The best quality ones should only take around four hours to read – a good amount of time to disconnect and remember you’re a human.

I have the utmost respect for these writers. Imagine being able to shut yourself off from the cynical world or shine such a lens on adversity and have art result from the positive.

Touch some grass

Yeah I like it better in my house, too, but just reminding yourself that there’s a world out there people are living in will do you a power of good.

* Whew, doesn’t that just sound like a lyric from this song? It even scans.

On This Topic:

• Get read to filth by Dido Armstrong in order to remember that sadness doesn’t make you special
• Bring sadness back to the West End!
• I am once again begging Disney to put the West End cast recording of Beauty and the Beast online literally anywhere so I don’t have to listen to the shitty Broadway Beast.

To-Do:

• Read more of Barbara Claire Freeman
• Prep for study trip
• Fix bike / get bike fixed

Today’s Culture:

• The best Ghibli film, with Cary Elwes in his best role (fight me)
• Seeing a Rumors tribute is quite exciting for me – I literally don’t think I’ve ever seen a tribute act? Certainly not intentionally
• I’m reading short books to try and catch up on my target after a couple of long reads – my TBR is Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Dostoyevsky, Anita Loos, and Turgenev, at 324 tight pages between them.