Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

Thanks, @mariabustillos. The photo is to illustrate something I talk about in the introduction. It's EveryFace, from Everywhere. It's my accent, not my face, that tells people I'm foreign. Otherwise, no one guesses that I'm not from these parts, wherever they are.

https://twitter.com/mariabustillos/status/1041736806377545734

And this is true across a surprisingly wide geographic range. My face blurrs into the background pretty much everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
Otherwise, it's only when I start talking that people say, "Where are you from?" So if I were to lose my accent,

I'd be in very bizarre emotional territory, because there's a payoff to being an outsider. My accent is my all-purpose excuse, Special pleading for being weird. If I have an accent and do something strange If I didn't have that accent, I'd be expected to conform---

--to local social conventions. I don't know if I can do that. That, I realized, was one reason I was too afraid to try too hard to integrate. Not that I really risked losing my accent. I'm way past the age of natural language acquisition, so I'll always have an accent.

But even the *idea* of not having one unnerved me. I wondered why. This is related to a larger theme of that maybe comes out in this diary ... Expatriate life attracts people who never quite fit in in their native countries. It makes sense of being a little weird.

I didn't feel *hugely* foreign and alienated growing up (not at all), but I did feel a bit weird. You remember the weird one in grade school? That was me. I was always doing something slightly wrong, socially. Not terribly wrong, just sot of not-how-it's-done.

That's why it felt so normal to me, why I felt so relieved, when I realized that outside the US, whatever weird thing I did would be seen as some charming, foreign thing. "Oh, yes, of course she ate the priest's daal and parathis, she's American."

As opposed to, "What the *hell*? She ate the priest's *lunch*? Is she trying to curse us?"

I guess the weirdness comes directly from my parents, and in turn I'm sure comes from theirs ...

(They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.)

.... and in turn from their own experience as refugees and immigrants,

(But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats. ... )

That be the verse. But by the third generation this seems a lame excuse. Still: My father read a lot to me when I was a small child. He found children's books boring, which they are, so he read the books that interested him.

So he read the Iliad to me when I was four years old. (A children's version: we weren't so weird that he just threw down with the Lattimore translation and a four-year-old.) So I acquired a vocabulary that seemed weird to my classmates and teachers.

I didn't know which words were normal ones and which were weird. (Remember how Alexander Portnoy thought "spatula" was Yiddish? Same idea.) I didn't know that other first-graders would not consider "catharsis" a normal word.

So I'd say things like that, and suddenly the other kids wouldn't want to play on the jungle gym with me at recess. Also, my mother was a cellist, so she was deeply wary of activities that might lead to a hand injury. So I did no sports at all. When I first went to summer camp,

I had *no idea* how to throw or catch a ball. We'd never done that at home--you could hurt your hand that way. (This could sound self-pitying, but that's not at all how I mean it: My childhood was great. I'm so glad I know the the Iliad and that I have two uninjured hands.)

I'm just making the point that other children thought me strange. And that actually persisted until adulthood. So I found that living in a very foreign country offered me both a familiar feeling of strangeness and an excuse for it. *

I don't know how to fit in? Of course I don't, I’m a foreigner.
I say strange things? Of course I do, I’m a foreigner.
Things here aren't right? Of course not, it's not home.

Being a foreigner is the all-purpose excuse for every social failing or pain.

Here I describe the scene where I ate the priest's lunch:

amazon.com/Screw-Beautifu…

I so often inadvertently tripped over some local cultural taboo in Turkey that @0kanAltiparmak once came up with the idea of trailing behind me with a camera and turning my life into a comedy show called “Borat in Reverse." ricochet.com/archives/borat…

So not only is that problem--being weird--solved by being an expatriate, there's a bonus consolation too: I can pretend to myself, after so many decades away from the Motherland, that I come from a mythic paradise–America!--where I fit in perfectly.

A place where I understand every nuance and word. (At least half true. In America I do understand every word. So eventually, I constructed an imaginary autobiography: I am from a shining City on the Hill where everything is bigger, better, faster, and open longer--

-- and everything works perfectly and everyone is free and happy. I only *seem* weird to you because *your* country is weird. So living in an ever-more alien series of foreign places has offered me both a familiar feeling -- strangeness -- *and* an excuse for it.

Being an expatriate is like being the child who pretends her parents are actually her adoptive parents. Her real parents (picnic, lightning) were as special and gifted as she is; her real parents would have understood her, nurtured her, given her a pony for her birthday.

You might raise your eyebrows at me in Switzerland (because of that unfortunate laundry incident) or in Laos (not going into that one, not even now), but it doesn’t count and it doesn’t hurt because your society is uptight, or it's a Mekong boot in the human face, forever ...

So I wouldn’t want to fit in. It would speak poorly of me if I did. But it’s hard to avoid the thought, in the still small hours of the night, that some kids avoided me in the third grade, too. I don’t think they hated me for my freedom.

They just thought, "What a weirdo."

So, that's what's coming up, in this Acting Diary. I'm trying to figure out what it really means to be French, not just some American passing through town--

And failing that, learning to act like it. And failing that, learning something else.

So please stay tuned.