1/ Everything is awful so I’m tweeting a thread about my kids that has nothing to do with the news.
My daughter, 21, is a literary soul who just wrote a long and complex essay on nationalism and folklore in the Brothers Karamazov.
My son, 18, is a Equally Serious film major.
My daughter, 21, is a literary soul who just wrote a long and complex essay on nationalism and folklore in the Brothers Karamazov.
My son, 18, is a Equally Serious film major.
2/ Last month each of them extracted a promise from me that we would go see Little Women when it opened, which here in Ithaca was Xmas afternoon.
I said yes to both but forget to say that the other one was coming too.
I said yes to both but forget to say that the other one was coming too.
3/ Quelle horreur. Major parent screw up. They were each furious that their sibling was inserting themselves into this momentous occasion.
Faith bc the book was a shared experience between the two of us; we took turns reading LW aloud when she was 9, and it was transformational.
Faith bc the book was a shared experience between the two of us; we took turns reading LW aloud when she was 9, and it was transformational.
4/ She did not want to deconstructive film theorizing by her brother poured all over lierary characters who mean so much to her.
5/ Elijah was in high dudgeon bc didn’t he didn’t want to hear his sister complain about all the ways the film departed from the book, which is an unfamiliar text to him.
But mom was the one with 3 advance tickets to a sold-out show so off we went. Yes I sat between them.
But mom was the one with 3 advance tickets to a sold-out show so off we went. Yes I sat between them.
6/ We made a rule that no one was allowed to talk about the film after it was over after F said, on the drive in, “you don’t know anything about the book you should at least let me give you a plot summary” to which E replied “I will let the director tell me about the characters!”
7/ So the movie is amazing on multiple levels. After the credits rolled we three walked out in silence. We then drove in silence to a Chinese restaurant for Xmas dinner—which was packed—and stood in silence at the end of a long line of hungry non-Christians doing the same thing.
8/ Finally Elijah couldn’t stand it and began to opine the cinematic choices at the end of the film and then the two of them were off to the races, getting louder and louder. Faith had a different view of the film’s treatment of authorship and Elijah said she was was wrong.
9/ Listening to the two of them go at it, I was toggling between being blown away with the vocabulary of their argumentation and mortified—as I was when they were toddlers—at the regressive possibility that we were going to be asked to leave.
10/. Who are these grown up kids? And why are they so INTENSE?
11/ Then something amazing happened (from a mom POV).
12/. Other people in line started JOINING THE ARGUMENT—siding with one or the other kid, fact-checking competing claims, googling on their phones and offering their own views. And as passionate as the discussion was, no one gave away spoilers. (Which my son would never abide)
13/ So that’s really the story I guess. It has a happy ending, and I learned a lot about narrative strategy and cinematic techniques listening to my kids hold forth in a Chinese restaurant.
14/ Louisa May Alcott was a bad ass, and Greta Gerwig is a genius and a dangerous fool sits in the White House and my kids and everybody’s kids deserve so much better than this. WTF everybody.
15/ Also my son is boycotting the Golden Globes tonight because no women directors were nominated. I am proud of him—and his smarty-pants older sister so loyal to authors. Life is precious. THE END ROLL CREDITS
