Smiling at the Baggage Claim was one of the first books my mom passed down to me. Like Grace Robertson, my mom was a single mother, but unlike Robertson she didn’t have the assistance of her ex-husband, her parents, and two households of considerable wealth. Nevertheless, my mom, like so many single women in the eighties and early nineties, felt a connection to Robertson. She was blunt and honest in a society that encouraged women to be anything but. She posed nude and has claimed, at age 70, she’s willing to do it again.
Her essays encouraged women to embrace their bodies, their age, and their viciousness. In her essay, “Unlikeable Women”, originally printed in Esquire UK (1986), she wrote:
“Women are not roses to be sniffed and admired. We are belladonnas, we are bloodflowers, wrapped in charmed packaging. Know that when you stumble home drunk and stink up the bedroom with your whiskey-soaked pores, your wife is not dreaming of stroking your hair as you nurse a hangover. She’s gripping her pillow and gritting her teeth. She’s calling upon the gods for the strength to resist suffocation.”
On the surface, Robertson is one of the most pro-woman authors living. But in our current “call out” culture no one is safe, especially women who are crowned feminists.
The thing is, while Grace Robertson is Problematic with a capital “P”, she’s never claimed to be a feminist. In fact, she’s rejected the implication on a number of occasions. Most notably, in a 1989 interview with the Paris Review, where she said:
“Who started this rumor that I’m a feminist? I don’t burn my bras and I enjoy having sex with men. I’m so deeply uncomfortable with being lumped in with those sorts of women. Especially because they have this notion that women are as strong men. We’re not, emotionally or physically, and that’s alright. Women should be allowed to cry because they’ve broken a nail, or scream because the corner store ran out of dark chocolate, without some other woman telling her she’s damaging our race. If there’s any damage to be done it’s by women who leave the house in sweatpants and sneakers.”
Robertson’s reasons for excluding herself from the feminist movement are reminiscent of many women who don’t understand what feminism means. Women like my mom (I love you, mom!) and her friends, who believe you can’t be a feminist if you want to be a stay at home mom ala Betty Draper. The same women who believe there’s no room for vulnerability in the feminist movement.
Vulnerability is the foundation on which Robertson has built her work. Mother May I is an unapologetic examination of her relationship with her then thirteen-year-old son, writer/director Francis Lyon.
“Most women are afraid to admit their biggest regret: the moment they decided against an abortion. It isn’t a constant anguish. It flares when our sons return home, soaked from the Hudson with a pair of police officers in tow. In our beds, we wonder how our lives would be without them. What if they were replaced with a girl? Or someone, anyone, else? Would we still feel the urge to slap and shake this mythical child? Would they still laugh in our face?”
Her vulnerability isn’t contained to her books. In a 2007 interview with Cosmopolitan magazine, she opened up about a fear my mom, and many other mothers, frequently have:
“You aren’t supposed to read into what your children say when you aren't around, but I’ll never forget — What was it? Vogue? They did a fluff piece on Francis. Nothing with meat, of course. Vogue lost it’s teeth with Vreeland. But they asked him about his favorite movie. He said, Les Quatre Cents Coups. You know, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. In it, the protagonist acts out because he hates his mother, so much that he would rather sleep on the street. I try not to look into things, but with something like that, how can you not?”
Proclaimed feminist or not, Robertson is a mirror in which many women see themselves. Women like Meryl Streep the Great, who after meeting Robertson on the set of Out of Africa, said, “She gave me the courage to speak up in a room full of men who were telling me ‘no’.”