by Jennifer Anne Gordon
“Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”
It is this line that I think of often, the words of the young Cecelia from Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. These words were her response to a doctor who told her, after her first failed suicide attempt, that she had no idea just how bad life could get.
That quote, though not my favorite, or even the most powerful from Eugenides’ book, is still the one I hear the most, ringing in my forty-blah-blah-year-old brain.
No.
He did not understand.
That fictional doctor.
He couldn’t.
When I was thirteen, I stole a silky white bustier from a friend’s older sister, she collected rabbit figurines, joint clips, and lingerie.
When my mother was out playing bingo, and my father was asleep I would close the door of my bedroom and put on the bustier. I would transform from greasy-skinned, too young to be so old Jennifer, into something else, something fictional.
I look back at age thirteen, and I don’t think that things were easier then; they were not.
At age thirteen I was not a person … I was only gangly limbs of un-suntanned skin and half picked off scabs. I was raw all the time, somehow both terrified and alive. Becoming beautiful and awkward, sexual and forlorn.
I was not a Lolita; I was a Cecelia.
I didn’t know this until I was older, but Jeffrey Eugenides saw me.
I was a thirteen-year-old girl.
Ouija Boards, Catholic saint cards, bracelets, love of trees, depression, and a diary …
I felt back then that anyone who looked at me could see all the gross and beautiful things that made me a thirteen-year-old girl.
I still slept with a stuffed animal — Kitty Cuddler — I started to masturbate and had elaborate fantasies of being crushed by a building and Tom Cruise coming to save me, I forged better grades on my report card and could recreate my mother’s signature on all school documents.
I was terrified that my parents would find out, and that my entire world would collapse on top of me and Tom Cruise would not be able to save me — white silky bustier or not.
As a forty-blah-blah-year-old, I recently reread The Virgin Suicides after stumbling across one of my favorite photographs: Amanda in the Mirror by Nan Goldin. Seeing that photograph, I heard Cecelia’s words ring in my head. “Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”
Nan Goldin’s Amanda looks at herself in the mirror, makeup pallette in hand, her face both determined and apprehensive.
She was not a Lolita.
She was, in many ways … me, the same way I was Cecelia.
These are things that Eugenides’ fictional male doctor could never understand.
These are things that all the male doctors of my not fictional past also could never understand.
Goldin’s Amanda in the Mirror sent me down a rabbit hole into her life’s work.
Much like the unnamed narrators in The Virgin Suicides, Goldin is an observer, she is a diarist, she is an unrelenting yet loving set of eyes into the private lives of her subjects. With her candid style, harsh flashes, and raw emotions, she reads the internal stories of every person she photographs — and flips through the pages of their most secret thoughts.
Her photographs are fingers on their bodie; the viewers can’t only see them, but they can also read their lives and emotions like braille, letting fingers follow the light of her photographs, feeling their worlds and secrets … almost understanding …
Goldin, like a Greek Chorus, witnesses.
She feels their pain, their beauty, their innocence … She tells their stories.
We can only hope to hear them.
She is asking Amanda what it is like to be a thirteen-year-old girl, and Amanda, and Goldin, are whispering it into our ears.
Fearless.
Nan Goldin is telling Cecelia’s doctor what it is like, and he still refuses to hear her.
He is incapable of understanding.
When Nan was 11 years old, her teenage sister Barbara committed suicide. Her world shattered, her family was broken … but Nan, the artist, was born.
I burst into tears when I read this, like I somehow should have known by looking at Goldin’s work over the years, I should have understood what her inner thirteen-year-old was telling me.
Am I the doctor that didn’t understand?
Maybe.
Maybe we all are.
Somewhere between Eugenides’ book and Goldin’s images, there is a muffled scream into a pillow about how hard it is to be a thirteen-year-old girl.
There is also a dried flower pressed into a book. A song played over the phone lines. A powder blush that sits on a shelf collecting dust.
There is a love letter to loss.
It is a love letter to the seemingly life and death emotions that surround the precipice of becoming.
And there is a reluctant acceptance by us, the reader and viewer, that we are no closer to understanding any of it …
I was a thirteen-year-old girl, and I still don’t understand it, though I spend my creative life trying to unravel the mystery of … me … of Amanda in the Mirror … of Eugenides’ Cecelia and her sisters.
Of what it means to be blah-blah-blah years old.
Now that I am peri-menopausal, if given the opportunity I would still steal a white silk bustier and fantasize about being crushed by a building, though I have grown out of the Tom Cruise as savior portion of this blurry sepia toned dream.
I think of Amanda without her mirror, and Cecelia without her doctor, finding me in my stolen silky bustier … pulling the world off me — forged report cards from thirty years ago be damned.
We are real.
We are fictional.
We are a mystery.
This is what Cecelia’s fictional doctor could never understand.
This is what I am still trying to.
Jennifer Anne Gordon (she/they) is an award-winning horror author (Kindle Award Best Horror Novel 2020, Lit Nastie Best Short Story 2023 and more) Podcast host (Vox Vomitis) and essayist with works in Lumina, Miniskirt, Wildscape, Horror Tree, and Nerd Daily. She is a member of HWA and MWA.
After the Art 