Tessa Gratton Newsletter #37: Under Pressure
It’s my birthday today and I started the morning as usual: watching the sunrise with a cup of coffee, a cat in lap, and fanfic on my phone.
The only thing I did differently is that when I set out on my morning walk instead of putting on a playlist for my current project or a walking meditation, I set my music to shuffle for a little bit of easy birthday magic. What song will the algorithm or whatever give me for today and the year ahead?
Friends, when the first notes began I laughed. It was “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie. A great song, by two great queer icons, and the video is images of economic depression and the rat race and protests and terrible political situations cut with scenes from classic horror movies like “Nosferatu.”
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The first time my birthday was ruined by a presidential election was exactly 20 years ago! Wow. I was turning 24 and to be honest I would not have had a good day even if John Kerry (milquetoast) had defeated George W Bush (ugh) and Dick Cheney (evil). It was my last year of graduate school in a second wave white feminist program, my mom and I fought hard and nasty every time we talked, my dad was in Iraq with Marines in the province with the highest US death rate, I was struggling hard with gender, second guessing all my life choices except Natalie whose parents were in the middle of a terrible divorce, we could not afford any presents, and the US was committing war crimes around the world!
Twenty years later a lot of the details have changed, but the US is still committing war crimes.
I think 24 year old Tessa would have a lot of complicated feelings about 44 year old Tessa. On one hand, that was the year I decided to focus on becoming a professional writer and affect change in the world that way instead of joining a liberal think-tank (LMAO) or feminist lobbyist group, and I have been a full-time professional writer for nearly 15 of the intervening years. On the other hand, as a writer, especially a midlist writer, it’s difficult to see evidence of how my work impacts the world, except in tiny snippets, and I have little to present to my past self that the choice I made back then has improved the arc of justice other than the fact that I’ve managed to stay relevant enough to continue selling projects that matter to me.
The 2004 election was the first time I felt betrayed by my own ideals. I still believed that people vote with their brains, or at least considering a greater good even if their greater good doesn’t look like mine. To be faced with the irrefutable proof that people aren’t actually good, don’t actually think about their neighbors next door or the next state over or the next country was devastating. If you can’t argue with people to change their minds, because they don’t listen to facts and don’t care about dominant verses counter discursive power dynamics then how do you change their minds and get them to be better, act better, or at least pretend they care?
That’s when I suddenly changed my thesis from something something queer identity and dissociative narratives to a thesis focused on public policy. Polling data. The culture wars.
It did not go well! For a thousand reasons I could write about in a different newsletter (and mostly boil down to a lack of imagination on the part of my program and white feminism!). The point for now is that my takeaway from the entire fiasco was not a graduate degree, but an understanding that the only way people change their minds is through relationship and the stories we tell ourselves.
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I sold my first book less than a year after Barack Obama was elected. November 2008 was the first (and only) time I had a birthday that was positively affected by the presidential election. Though as president he eventually went on to support US participation in war crimes (the real American way), I will never forget the elation of caucusing for a presidential candidate I genuinely liked and thought would make the world better! And damn, could Obama tell a great story. Unlike every Democratic nominee in my adult memory.
Then two months later I signed with my agent and in Sept of 2009 I sold my debut novel! The world was great, and I was great. At the time I genuinely believed we were crawling out of darkness. Forgive me for not imagining that a near-future candidate could not only be evil, but evil and disgusting!
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I carried a lot of anger with me out of graduate school. Anger at the world, my mom (sorry mom), my neighbors, white women pretending to be feminists, lesbians (sorry lesbians), the Catholic church, everyone who didn’t agree with me about justice and empathy, and it was very difficult to deal with. Not for me, I was fueled by fury, but for the people around me.
When I caucused for Obama and later saw him elected, I felt like maybe I didn’t have to be furious at absolutely everyone. The kind of coalition building happening at that time was what I’d wanted from my graduate program and didn’t get, what I had to look for on the internet, in spaces where I was usually not welcome because despite (because of) my education and queerness I was correctly not trusted due to being white.
But I wrote a lot. I wrote from a dynamic combination of anger and joy. Anger at the continuing state of the world, joy at knowing I wasn’t alone.
Those books from the start of my career are wild and special, kind of messy, but messy in a way where when I look at them a decade later I am proud of what I was trying to do, and occasionally succeeding in. Even if they need some revisions.
Then in 2014, after we learned the hard way that even a great man and solid president like Obama can’t do much when the rest of the government is actively working against him (and also the war crimes), my fifth book was cancelled.
It took me two years to sell anything else, after numerous tries and rewrites and submissions pulled. The books I finally sold I wrote from anger, yes, and pain and desperation, and hope and also looking back at who I was in 2004 when I decided to be a writer in the first place. When I knew the kind of work I needed to put into the world. They are books about my queerness and gender, about the pressures we put on kids to save the future, devils, kings, power and power dynamics of family, nations, race, love. Choice, choice, choice, about who to be, who to strive to become, and the secret is that it’s the people who choose empathy are the ones who survive. I am so happy with those books.
I finally sold both Strange Grace and The Queens of Innis Lear in mid-2016.
Ah, yes. 2016.
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Listen. We aren’t going to get into that. Suffice it to say that I thought no election could hurt quite like the 2004 election—and I was right! It hurt very, very differently.
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2020 was only marginally better. My mom was dead, we were in the midst of an ongoing pandemic, I’d never been less convinced that the world deserves an arc toward justice. I started writing for Star Wars, which 2004 Tessa would judge both incredible and disappointing. Just like I think she’d judge everything I do these days, but I know she’d like the sycamore tree in our backyard and the fact that despite everything I’m still here.
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This week I am old, this week I am disgusted. That’s not a good place from which to do my work. I think anger has to come arm in arm with hope, to keep it burning, and that’s something I feel has been ground out of me. Like I said, not a good place from which to do work.
But it’s my birthday, and I am working.
I’ve been working all week. First on the pass pages for The Mercy Makers, then on drafting the sequel, and tomorrow I have to start working on a final developmental round for the Jecki Star Wars book.
Without anger, and in a drought of joy, I’m struggling to find the emotional resonance to make what I’m doing matter. The Mercy Makers is about really fun things like sex and taboo magic and identity porn and arranged marriage and caged gods and falling in love and criminal masterminds…but the underlying theme is the ways people in power, people with power in an apartheid state, can be radicalized against their own interests and toward rebellion. Very important topic in this day and age!
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That's the terror of knowing what this world is about
Watchin' some good friends screamin', "Let me out"
Pray tomorrow gets me higher
Pressure on people, people on streets
Da-da-da, mm-mm
Da-da-da-ba-bum
Okay
“Under Pressure” has been in my head all day, which is not a terrible situation. It’s a good song, and a great birthday song for November 8, 2024, the day I turn 44 and am struggling to keep myself who I wanted to be when I was 24.
I’m glad I didn’t go into politics. I wouldn’t know any of you, and I’d never have written The Strange Maid or Strange Grace or Lady Hotspur or Temptation of the Force for all the good they have or have not done. Maybe I’d have done good someplace else. Maybe I’d be super powerful and rich and Natalie never would have married me because of how mean I got. Maybe I’d be living in a Buddhist monastery where I never have to talk.
But the joke’s on all of us, especially 24 year old me: I did go into politics. Storytelling is politics. Politics is storytelling. Donald Trump is very good at telling stories (white) people want to hear. The only way to counter a good story is with a better one.
I’m not telling stories on the national stage, but I am telling them right over here, passing stories along, arguing, creating relationships, and I hope you are, too.
Can't we give ourselves one more chance?
Why can't we give love that one more chance?
Why can't we give love, give love, give love, give love
Give love, give love, give love, give love?
'Cause love's such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
Under pressure
Under pressure
Pressure
I’m going to heat up some sake, because it’s cold and dreary, and take notes for the next scene I have to write, or maybe convince Natalie to go watch our current C-Drama for the rest of the day even though she has deadlines, too. Or snuggle my cat and read. Either way, it will be a good.
Thanks for reading,
Tessa
