Oh, She's Startin'

Not Here to Make Friends is a small magazine that’s obsessed with reality TV, in a good way. Its writers use shows like Dance Moms, Love Island, and, of course, the Real Housewives, as a lens through which they can view their own lives and the world around them, painting a unique portrait of contemporary society. We delivered the third issue to Stack subscribers in September last year, and I loved this story by Sophy Drouin, with its quiet power and disarming openness.

Watching Kyle Richards wander about her dream home alone, I cross myself.

“Please, let me not become that lonesome ghost; please let me not become Kyle.”

There are dogs, expensive furniture, objects everywhere, but her daughters are grown and her husband, Mauricio, is relishing his bachelor pad some dozens of miles away.

What was it all for?

I was compelled to watch The Real Housewives franchises by the director of a play I was in. She was trying to rouse my campiness, my clown, anything in me aside from “polite, docile woman acquiescing to it all,” and she was having great difficulty doing so.

An actor in training is a giant onion peeling itself, and what was laid bare for me was how brutally disconnected I’d become from my body and my joy. No matter how safe the room, or how silly and free everyone else acted, I couldn’t escape myself. I’d made my body a hermetic seal.

So, she gave me homework. Watch the closest thing to theater on television. “The Real Housewives,” she said, “will show you true action and reaction.”

Years before this play, before my director’s advice, before sealing myself, before I’d seen a single episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or known what the interiors of Kyle Richards’ home looked like – my dad was alive.

Back then, I would call him to say hi, call him when I was lost, speed dial when a car salesman bullied me to tears trying to get out of the too-good deal I’d negotiated. When I had bad news he made it better; when I had good news he made it better too.

I’d call him when I was late for school feeling like a failure, call him crying on the service stairwell of a Midtown hotel when no legit acting schools took interest in my auditions. He made me feel like a dreamer, like I was on a path somehow, collapsed against a concrete wall between floors fourteen and fifteen.

And then he died. Not suddenly like a car accident but suddenly like he’d been hiding a terminal illness from me for a decade and one day announced that he’d decided on euthanasia as a prelude for spring.

When the day came to gather around him in his favorite chair at home, my knees found the floor and I took hold of his left hand as a doctor prepared to inject one medicine, then another, and then one more to usher him out of his earthly body. A few days before this, dad had said that we could have all that was his, “where I’m going, they won’t let me take anything with me.” 

Panicked and snot-teared, I’d begged him to take me with him anyway. I couldn’t imagine a world without his guidance and the boundaries of his love. But as always, he’d been right. When the medication stopped his heart, I did not dance off with him into the next place. He did not take a single thing with him aside from the warmth in his palms.

One of the first Real Housewives I watched was Heather Gay. An integral part of the original Salt Lake City cohort, Heather is in the process of rediscovering herself after leaving the Mormon church. Before her divorce and the show, Heather had done everything she’d been raised to do: she’d abstained, proselytized, wore the garments that kept her humanity from ruining her womanhood. But then she began to see the misogyny of Mormonism operating on her three young daughters. Their experience mirrored her own back to her and disrupted her religious resignation: Was it fair that their fullness of self had been curtailed? That they were held to different standards based on their sex, and if they committed adultery they were excommunicated and sent to hell, while husbands could absolve themselves with a little cash or a promise to do better?

What drew me to Heather was her honesty: She didn’t know what the right answer was. Was she wrong to place her intuition over her faith? Was it worth risking her marriage and her family for the sake of extirpating herself from an organization that sought to trap her in her biology? I’d been recently asking myself similar questions. For a lot of women, it seemed men were a type of deity. In my case certainly, I loved them, wanted to honor them, and would suffer anything for their approval.

Heather’s journey rendered me speechless. Hers might’ve been my future. Her sense of humor pierced through the fog of my grief, and I felt suddenly seen by this person on television whose experience rhymed with mine. We’d both been lulled into some easier form of life that offered belonging in exchange for service. As I got to know her during each episode, I began to blink awake. Acting required a relinquishing of protective mechanisms.

Actors have to be open to their scene partners so they can notice small nuances in expression, body language, a tone to which they can then mold their response so they can obtain what they want from the scene. But hunger had been smoothed out of me. When my acting teachers would ask me (my character) what I wanted in a scene, I could never come up with an answer. Nothing, I would think, I’m fine, I won’t be a bother. And yet here Heather was, fighting for her freedom to want, and desire, and crave, and experience her own body in any and all ways she wanted to.

I was hooked. I found myself watching women twice my age – exponentially wealthier, married either for a long time or a number of times – and feeling more kinship with them than with the protagonists of Fleabag or Lady Bird, characters I was asked to see as contemporaries. I found myself in a curious state, mesmerized, saddened, enraged, elated all at once.

What was it about this supposedly vapid show that captivated my attention and spoke to my own increasingly complicated grief? Gradually, things became clear; these women were at once inspirational and cautionary tales for what to expect when men become the center point of a woman’s life. When suddenly the camera rendered them the focus, their pleasures, excesses, and dramas acquired a heightened authority. Heather helped me understand why society was in such a rush to write these women off as guilty pleasures: Because, without a man, a woman’s pleasure is always guilty.