Certified high risk babygirl

Happy New Year! Thank you for reading Not Knowing How. I’m so grateful to readers of my work, here and everywhere. Your support provides an incredibly meaningful form of creative sustenance, and I wish you a safe and peaceful year full of discovery and love.

I’m excited to announce my first two live events in 2025! In the next few weeks, I’ll be in conversation with two brilliant authors about their new books at the lovely Sunny’s Bookshop.

Sunny's Bookshop is an independent family-owned bookstore at 18604 Ventura Boulevard, Tarzana, CA 91356. Sunny’s is owned by Sanaz Tamjidi. Its stellar events are overseen by Nikki Munoz, who publishes excellent book coverage and interviews at Sunny’s Journal. Sanaz and Nikki are both 2024 alumni of the Antioch MFA, of which I am the program chair. I’m very proud of all they’re accomplishing at Sunny’s and delighted to be part of this new L.A. literary hub.

On Saturday, January 18 at 7 p.m., I’ll be discussing Anita Felicelli’s new short fiction collection How We Know Our Time Travelers with Anita. RSVP here to join us.

And on Saturday, February 8 at 7 p.m., I’ll be discussing Jessica Ferri’s new book of cultural history, Buried Hollywoodland: The Cemeteries of Los Angeles with Jessica. RSVP link to come.

I’d love to to see you at these events at Sunny’s. It’s my intention to run short interviews with Anita and Jessica in upcoming issues of Not Knowing How, so stay tuned for that.

This essay contains spoilers for the film Babygirl.

Remember “Black Box” by Jennifer Egan? 

In my early twenties, Egan was one of my favorite authors. My admiration contained more than a touch of covetous jealousy. After she won the National Book Award for her 2009 novel A Visit From The Goon Squad, I bitterly remarked to someone—my mom, I think—that in its novel-in-stories form, Goon Squad sure was a lot like my first book, which agent after agent was then rejecting, and wasn’t that unfair?

The rejections had curdled my appreciation of writers I liked into a kind of personal insult. Fifteen years later, I can still quote the below email from memory.

I’m glad no one told me when I received this email in 2010 that I would endure another five years of rejection before a literary agent was willing to take me on. I’m glad that no one told me that the rejection never really ends; it just morphs, shifts, echoes, transforms.

These slights and negs, these ordinary and extraordinary disappointments—we carry them around in our minds and bodies, just as we do the great traumas of our lives. It’s all there inside, no matter how much processing we do or don’t do. The genius of “Black Box” is in its materialization of that emotional freight. Its heroine, a semi-ordinary American dropped behind enemy lines as a spy-courtesan, is implanted with a variety of Q-worthy recording devices; her task is to upload as much data as she can overhear, snoop, or acquire through the leverage of her body. She also carries under her skin a few gadgets with which she can communicate and call for help, but these are one-way only. Required to record everything she can, only once there is no other option can Egan’s heroine scream for help.

Parts of “Black Box” haven’t aged well—today the story seems more fascist than ever, although maybe that’s the point, and the protagonist’s longing for her Kenya-born husband struck me as cringey in a way I don’t think I noticed in 2012 (“You will reflect on the fact that your husband, coming from a culture of tribal allegiance, understands and applauds your patriotism”)—but its elegant and cutting evocation of the deployment of femininity as survival stands up thirteen years later.

Sometimes part of a song will enter my thoughts, but not the song’s name or creator, and I’ll spend days, even weeks, figuring out what the song is. The notes return to me because it is associated with some feeling, some moment of impression. After I saw Babygirl, I felt “Black Box” for days before I could figure out what I was recalling, the story’s name, its author.

There’s an image in the film I can’t get out of my head, a tight close-up on Nicole Kidman’s face, that familiar tool of art edited by man and by time, shot throughout (and for so many decades now) with claustrophobic, clinical intensity. It’s morning, and Kidman’s character, tech CEO Romy Mathis, is already tired, an exhaustion that carries its own buzzy energy in her taut, fragile skin. We watch this face endure Botox injections, insults from her family, the awkwardness of being the boss at the company Christmas party, her husband’s attempts at seduction. (“Want to play a little bit?” Antonio Banderas asks, soldering together a million thighs.)

In the scene I’m thinking of, Romy taps circles of cream blush onto her cheeks with her fingertips. For a moment before she blends, she looks like a clown.

A corporate leader whose successful innovation is robot-staffed warehouses, Romy has automated herself into an efficient machine that produces—capital, motherhood, leadership, romantic partnership—without stopping, without error. Perfection is the cage she has built to keep herself safe.

As much-hyped by its relentless A24 marketing, the subject of Babygirl is the relationship Romy enters into with Samuel (Harris Dickinson), an intern at her company. “Sexuality is often portrayed in stories, movies, and paintings as something that is so not the reality,” the film’s creator, Halina Reijn, says in The New Yorker, “It looks either very glamorous or very dark—but for me it’s insanely vulnerable, very embarrassing, and sort of stop-and-go.”

The body is the site of that exposure. In the languorous hotel idyll that forms Babygirl’s meaty center, Samuel tells Romy to take off her dress. When she is naked, he tells her that she is beautiful.

“No, I’m not,” she says. “I’m not.” She cries.

I cried, too.

I saw Babygirl the evening after undergoing an ultrasound of my breast, which was ordered after my first breast MRI, in mid-December, showed an area of “non-mass enhancement,” suspected to be related to lactational changes (I am still breastfeeding my son). I had this first breast MRI because I was informed at my physical this year that I am considered high-risk for breast cancer.

I’ve spent the last two months unpacking why this new categorization—a diagnostic tool intended to help protect me from dying from breast cancer—bothers me so much. It is premised in part on the junk science of my BMI, which I’ve combated for the last fifteen years by refusing to be weighed and initiating testy, repetitive conversations about BMI’s uselessness with doctors and nurses and patient care representatives. “I am an eating disorder survivor,” I have learned to say very quickly when they try to lead me to the scale.

Another factor that makes me high-risk is that I had a child after 35. You know, instead of in my twenties when I was in an unhappy marriage and working five jobs. My mother had me after she was 35, too, which she always talked about as the great joy of her life. “There was nowhere else I had to be,” she told me. “Nothing else I would have rather been doing than taking care of you and your sister.”

In my worst moments, knowing that “late” motherhood is a risk factor for breast cancer has colored my understanding of the happiness that my mom shared with me—the miracle, in her eyes, that at 37, when she had me, and 42, when she had my sister, she got to start over and have experiences she had stopped believing she would have. My whole life was shaped, and padded, by her insistence on that wonder.

Most of all, the high-risk categorization opens the central wound, deep and wide, of my mother’s cancer. Her death is the main reason I am high-risk. This clinical label connects my identities as a daughter and as a mother and three pivotal threshold experiences—my birth, my mother’s death, the birth of my son—to the looming specter of my own death, and now, to a lifetime of screening, imaging, and a new form of anxiety to manage.

At every stage of navigating my new status, I’ve encountered a medical system that doesn’t talk to itself, that seems at worst apathetic about how a person receiving this information might navigate it. When they told me I was high risk I realized that I had made a bargain with myself: I could survive my mother’s death, even find happiness without her, as long as that was the last time that cancer touched me. A silent, involuntary promise. A trade. I’ve explained this to doctors, too.

No one quite knows what to say.

It was a figment, a prayer that gave me five good years. New agreements must now be made. I became high risk, I had the MRI, I had the ultrasound. It found nothing at the site of non-mass enhancement, good news complicated by the recommendation that I would get a second MRI in six months, that I would need to wait to try to conceive again—yes, I would like to have another child—until after this second MRI.

The doctors need a history of my breasts, they explained; they need to be able to track changes in my body over time. Another record, another form of assessment, another self, another reality to manage. Another test to ace.

It was in this mood that I went into the theater to watch Babygirl. Earlier that day, trying to comfort me, my partner touched my stomach. “Please don’t,” I said, pulling away. I did not want to be known. I did not want to give my pain over to the comfort of touch. I doubted I could be touched in a way that would help me.

But in the theater, I was comforted by the story of pleasure and release, the dignification of a woman’s body, even if that body was one I’d looked at my whole life, even if I knew what it cost.

Kidman’s face and body are a cultural shorthand for wealth and power. Romy wears a girl’s dream of a professional wardrobe, the kind I would have once killed for, before I understood that those clothes (diaphanous pussy-bow blouses with lantern sleeves, pencil skirts, belted coats that cost more than my rent) don’t come in my size and would never look like that on me anyway.

The outift she wears to her first downtown rendezvous with Samuel is a fantasy of seriousness, a high femme business outfit tilting into camp. To what meeting could what corporate face wear an ensemble so glamorous? Her clothes look uncomfortable on her body, especially the fussy silk-and-lace camisoles and shorts in which she improbably sleeps. In the scenes when she is happy and relaxed, Romy wears a bathrobe, or Samuel’s tracksuit. We occasionally see Romy slipping her tired feet into Uggs or sneakers. But even to the rave Samuel compels her to attend (a scene which that reminded me of my favorite Liz Lemon line: “I’m 37, please don’t make me go to Brooklyn”), Romy wears her lethal-looking stilettos.

About Babygirl, Slate film critic Dana Stevens concludes, “If even someone inhabiting the celestially gorgeous body of Nicole Kidman can feel this degree of discomfort and dysmorphia, Babygirl suggests, maybe we should all just knock it off with the shame already and find a way, however comically bumbling, to let our freak flags fly.”

This assessment breezily minimizes the film’s thoughtful juxtaposition of Romy’s status with her hungrily untended inner life. It also sidesteps the film’s direct address of Kidman’s much-discussed cosmetic alterations; this is probably the first film I’ve watched her in that brings our awareness of those changes into the performance. When I told a friend that I’d seen Babygirl, he said that he can’t watch Kidman anymore, because of what she’s done to her face. I think that’s exactly why Babygirl deserves to be seen.

In The New Yorker, Reijn says: “As a woman, you feel so much pressure to be the mother, the lover—all these archetypes. I wanted to take this almost literally with Romy. At the beginning, you see her sexually. Then you see her as the mother with the apron. Then she’s the C.E.O.”

Isn’t this the kind of dress-up we all imagine femininity requires, in our little girl lives? Don’t we all imagine that performing in the right way, for the right amount of time, at the exact right tempo, will eventually deliver us to the mysterious other who will see through the costume to the yearning chasm of need beneath?

Once, speaking to a visitor to the MFA program I run, I referred to the fact that I was pregnant, something I thought was quite obvious—I was almost eight months along. “Oh, so that’s what’s going on here, I was wondering,” they said, looking me up and down.

How long have I spent questioning why they said this to me?

I crave visibility—as a body, as a woman, as a mother, as an author—and I fear it, and the sensation of that contradiction is shame.

I feel the nearness of death. I don’t want to die. It feels like a joke. I feel like a clown.

The film was successful as art: it made me less alone.