How to Be a Heroine

I don't know if I'll get a happy ending. But why worry about a happy ending? Why worry about any ending at all? I don't know where I'm going next, and for the first time in forever, I don't want to. I want my life to be picaresque. Fantastical. I want to say yes and.

But you can't rescue people; you can only help them rescue themselves.

It's probably unwise to romanticize everything- and I'll probably always do it.

...all readings are provisional, and that maybe we read heroines for what we need from them at the time.

After three years of English at Cambridge, being force-fed literary theory, I was almost convinced that literature was all coded messages about Marxism and the death of the self. I crawled out of the post-structuralist desert thirsty for heroines I could cry and laugh with. I was jaded. I craved trash.

I felt let down when I could see the writer too much at work on a character because it reminded me forcefully that of course I don't have a writer working on my story, guiding me to safety, bending the laws of reality for me, bringing me in a hero to rescue me or transporting me to a happier life by the stroke of her pen. No writer is writing me a better journey. No writer is guiding me through my misunderstandings and muddles and wrong turns to reach my happy ending. And then I realize I am the writer. ...we all write out our own lives.

But maybe I've changed. Or at least: maybe I am changing.

All my heroines, yes, even the Little Mermaid, even poor, dull, listless Sleeping Beauty, have given me this sense of possibility. They made me feel I wasn't forced to live out the story my family wanted for me, that I wasn't doomed to plod forward to a fate predetermined by God, that I didn't need to be defined by my seizures, or trapped in fictions of my own making, or shaped by other people's stories. That I wanted to write my own life.

I wanted a love so intense it could send me into a brain fever or cause the man who loved me to gnash his teeth and dash his head against a tree till he bled. To dig up my grave and be so blinded by love that he'd swear that even after seven years in the ground my face was still my face, uncorrupted.

I can't help thinking that a heroine should be able to love without being erased.

I love the fact that Perrault's princess goes on living and struggling after she finds her prince, and that Perrault doesn't shrink from the weirdness of Sleeping Beauty being over a hundred years old but having the body of a lithe young thing. When the prince wakes her, he considers telling her she's wearing the kind of clothes his grandmother used to wear, but decides it's best not to mention it just yet.

-maybe we read heroines for what we need from them at the time.

I don’t think anyone is ‘born to be a heroine’. It takes effort, valour, and a willingness to investigate your own heart.

And then I realize I am the writer. I don't mean because I write. I mean because we all write our own lives. Scheherazade's greatest piece of storytelling is not the stories she tells, but the story she lives.

Angela Carter who started bringing me back to fairy tales. Her revisionist stories, in The Bloody Chamber (1979),

Though I’m beginning to think all readings are provisional, and that maybe we read heroines for what we need from them at the time.

And yes and feels like the secret of life, not just improvisation. We have to keep making choices, keep transforming

For a moment I have the alarming thought that maybe I want heroines so I can be their best friend and loyal sidekick without ever facing the challenge of becoming a heroine myself.

We have to keep making choices, keep transforming. Scheherazade’s stories never end. Every story in the Nights opens a door that leads on to another story. I don’t know if I’ll get a happy ending. But why worry about a happy ending? Why worry about any ending at all? I don’t know where I’m going next, and for the first time in forever, I don’t want to. I want my life to be picaresque. Fantastical. I want to say yes and.

tough message of Lolly Willowes is that women turn witch to show their ‘scorn of pretending life’s a safe business’. Laura comes to feel part of a community of angry, outsider women: ‘When I think of witches,’ she says, ‘I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded … Nothing for them except subjugation and plaiting their hair … But they must be active.’ Yes we must.

I was Isabella, fawning on Heathcliff. And no one wants to be Isabella.

I knew that the Von Trapp family walking out over the Alps was somehow the same as the Jews packing up the shtetl, and that both were no different from my family leaving Baghdad, and the Little Mermaid leaving the sea. These stories helped me grapple with fears I couldn’t articulate, terrors of displacement and separation and loss. I hadn’t lost my home, my language or my country, but I was picking up on the grown-ups’ fears.

My Hebrew teachers said I should like Esther for saving the Jews, but I was more interested in the bit before that, where she gets her king by winning a beauty contest. I imagined her as pretty as Sleeping Beauty, but a brunette. With green eyes. All right, I imagined her as a gorgeous, grown-up version of myself. And she was Jewish, and she did become a queen. (At Hebrew school, we skated over the fact that she married a man who wasn’t Jewish. Everything was forgivable in a heroine who saved the Jews.) Later,

At this point, harking back to the stuff about souls, Andersen bolts on a perplexing Christian salvation message about how the Little Mermaid can earn a soul if she is good for three hundred years, but every time she sees 'a rude, naughty child', she'll get more time in purgatory. Don't be rude or naughty or the mermaids will suffer? Please. Even as a child, I knew this was ridiculous.

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