Welcome to week 15 of CU This Tuesday writing group! This week’s writing session has taken an interesting turn. I’m writing into or maybe around an idea of a novel about a psychiatrist, Dr. Binet, working in an eating disorder clinic that is in an old hotel or manor on an island (based on a real thing here in BC). This week, Dr. Binet is wondering why the girls do it and has come to an interesting conclusion. Maybe this will take the novel on a strange, dark road? Yesterday’s Wordle answer was DROOP and my random number generator came up with 2, so we’re doing “droop” in second-person POV. Here are a couple of ideas for you:
A mother is trying to throw the perfect birthday party for her three-year-old in order to impress the other preschool moms and get in with their clique, but her balloons keep drooping (among other problems—the balloons are the last straw).
Your character is trapped somewhere—maybe down a crevasse, a mineshaft, a well. Maybe they’ve been kidnapped. And their hope of ever escaping is beginning to droop.
Writing prompt: DROOP in 2nd-person POV
It seems to you the droop was not a gradual process, but it just appeared, suddenly, right before your fortieth birthday. You noticed your skin folding, the sag—that horrible word. And you tell yourself it’s not vanity that makes this so horrific, but that it is a visible, tangible indication of your decay.
Every grey hair is a loss of colour in a hair follicle, your drooping jaw line, your creasing face a loss of collagen, of elasticity. Soon you will lose muscle mass, energy, your mind, your body. These are all steps toward death. Not a glamorous, Marilyn Monroe death, but a roadkill death—a maimed creature rotting in the sun, eyes pecked out by seagulls, face eaten by maggots sort of death.
And the girls! You want to grab their bony shoulders and shake them. They’re sprinting toward the decay. They all look like frail, eighty-year-old ladies. But perhaps nobody enjoys their youth. We see what’s coming for us embodied in our parents, we know how fleeting it is.
Is that what it is with the girls? Have you come to a grand, career-changing epiphany? They can’t handle the anticipation of The Droop, so they throw themselves into it? They feel death circling them in giant, clunking footsteps outside the cabin of their youth. You write this down, this is good! It is not the patriarchy, it is not Seventeen magazine, but death—which is ultimately life; we are nothing without our mortality—that beckons them to slip into its hands in the most demure, revoltingly feminine way possible. Starving themselves. Crawling toward death, withheld crumb by withheld crumb.
You do want to push them off a cliff and get it over with. You do wish they were less pathetic, bolder. If death is what you want, girls, then jump into the abyss!
They must not want to die, then. What is it that they want? You’re their doctor, you should know this. To disappear inside their own bodies. To punish not themselves, but everyone around them. To force them to witness the decay. To force everyone into the state of powerlessness these girls have occupied their entire lives.
You should parade them around, then, rather than trapping them on this island. You are not curing them at all. Perhaps all they need are the satisfying looks of horror and despair on the faces of their loved ones, their teachers, their classmates, their fathers, brothers, and uncles.
Perhaps all they need is to know they have the power to destroy, to take away from society that which it most values—their bodies.
And now you have a renewed admiration for the girls. Perhaps trying to cure them has been the wrong goal all along. You haven’t been listening. These girls aren’t masochists. They want to punish.
Afterthoughts
Ok so now after today I’m wondering if this book could take a totally different, more surreal turn. Perhaps we could give these girls power and agency by not seeing them as victims of the patriarchy but as people who are enacting a sick and sadistic revenge against the patriarchy by starving themselves? Maybe this could be bigger. Maybe all the girls in a town or something do this? Hmm. This is what I like about doing these little writing prompts! It brings up so many ideas! Let me know how your writing is going! I’ll CU Next Tuesday.