Secretary Returns...
...to the scene of the crime
I have a (fictional) story in The New Yorker this week. For some days I hesitated to post a link to it here because there’s a paywall. But I decided I would because even if you don’t have a New Yorker subscription, I’m pretty sure they allow anyone access to a few pieces a month. Plus I’m including an essay I wrote some years ago that probably just about none of you have seen.
So the story is titled Minority Report and it revisits a story called Secretary which I wrote in 1985, which was rejected by every magazine I sent it to and finally published in my first collection Bad Behavior. Secretary is a spare story about a very young, very awkward and sexually inexperienced girl named Debby (I don’t say her age in the original story, but in my mind she was 17) living in a ridiculously stunted psychic landscape, and who, on getting her first job, is ridiculously spanked and jerked off on by her employer for typing errors. It sounds like a porn cliche but actually I took the idea almost directly from a newspaper story. And, when I imagined it, I took it seriously, telling it as the story of a young woman of “of unformed strength and intelligence, [traits] which have never been reflected back to her by the world around her and so have become thwarted, angry and peculiar.” Someone who’s apparent passivity “is so willed and extreme that it is an act of mutually annihilating aggression.” Not someone broken or weak, but someone who’s fierce desire to live and feel has been ignored and thus twisted. (Quotes from essay referenced above.)
Even if you have never read this story, you may know of it because in 2002 it was made into a movie starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal. The movie also took the story seriously—the director (Steven Shainberg) seriously went about turning the painful bewilderment it depicted into pure, delighted affirmation. This was made plausible, sort of, because the secretary in the movie is in her late 20s and is sexually experienced, with a boyfriend and everything; even if her masochistic desires have never been realized, unlike the girl in the story, at least she knows what they are. Unlike the girl in the story, she has a remarkably uncomplicated and unconflicted disposition—although she is just out of a mental hospital she is incredibly sunny and clear-headed. When the spanking and wanking happen, she is so thrilled that she rockets past mere consent and takes full participatory control, even successfully proposing marriage to her confused boss. It’s all good!
If I could have just magically forgotten that this movie was based on something I had written I might’ve enjoyed it as a goofy entertainment. It is visually inventive and both Spader and Gyllenhaal are appealing, clever and fun to watch. Throughout the 80s I had enjoyed watching Spader play minor, sexy villains in an excitingly gross way, and, back in 1984, if I had known that he would be playing a character of mine in a mainstream movie, it would’ve given me the strength to go on.
But I could not forget the person I had written of, a person who, although she was truly fictional, was real to me. Because I had known people like her, actually grown up with people like her: lonely, backward, unable to connect socially, their passions knotted and smothered but nonetheless ardent and tender as those of their better-adjusted peers. Someone with a degree of humble toughness and integrity who would nonetheless be extremely vulnerable to anyone who touched her emotions deeply and unexpectedly. Someone so vigilantly self-protective that the touch would almost have to be violative. Someone who would be ambivalent about the violation because she is so hungry for powerful, even overwhelming contact. I felt bitter that the film version had basically erased her, stripping out any hint of her depth, her uncharming fucked-upness, supposedly in the name of “compassion” (as I recall the film was lauded for its compassion) basically in order to make a mainstream feel-good movie.
Of course I knew that the very thing I disliked about it was what made it popular. I could even understand it; it’s natural to want to feel good. (At the time the movie appeared, people who practice consensual BDSM may’ve felt especially good to see their humanity acknowledged; understandable.) My character Debby is a victim, not only of the man she works for but of the simultaneously destructive/creative way her psyche garbles love and indifference, love and contempt. I include the word “creative” because, like so many invisible people at whom it does not feel good to look, she has to do that to make sense of her life, to feel love or even just sexual pleasure in a world which, to her, feels “unrelatable.” And in spite of the decades-long complaint that people want to identify as victims I think the reverse is true. I think we remain deeply discomfited by victims unless their victimization is clear-cut and looks like it might be remedied by rational, socially mandated action. What goes on inside Debby does not fit into that category.
I am not saying it very thoroughly here and it won’t make sense if you’ve only seen the movie. I said it better in the essay quoted above, an essay I wrote in 2003 for Zoetrope (which was at that time an online and print magazine) in a maniacal attempt to un-erase my character, to make people understand her as I did: uniquely dignified even in her bewildered submission, in her impossible confusion.
I don’t agree with everything I say in this essay; it was written with a distinctly 90s sensibility which, from my point of view now, is far too breezy and sanguine about sexual cruelty. I don’t think now that my 17-year-old character is “equally responsible” for what happens to her. Still I stand by most of what I wrote because I feel that it gives Debby respect without airbrushing out what is unbeautifully painful, hapless and sad.
I am not sure why it is so important for me to remind the world that such people deserve respect, particularly the respect of seeing them as they are. But it is. Which is why I wrote Minority Report.
Thank you Mary for writing this. I was raped and sexually abused by my therapist two to three times a week for 11 months after a year and a half of relentless grooming by him. I was raped at least sixty times by my calculation, a number that is hard for me to accept or comprehend. The entire experience is hard for me to comprehend. It was far more complex and strange and slippery and horrific than I would have imagined something like this would be before this happened and it left me annihilated, empty, suffering frequent flashbacks, nightmares, dissociative moments, and also, revoltingly, pining for him, or pining for some illusion of comfort and safety and care and love he conjured in me as my therapist. Oh god, it is so awful, truly, when I think about it, which is every day, for long periods during every day, for months on end. The worst, in some ways, are the unwelcome, unpredictable, moments of pining, which make me nauseated and fill me with deep, deep shame. My mind is obsessed with what happened because I cannot make sense of it, I do not understand it, I do not understand my self during it (or after), I struggle, even now, after many hours of therapy (with a good therapist) and obscene hours of thinking about it, to understand or feel any sort of clarity about what happened to me except that this man, a monster, a true monster, took control of me slowly over time using his access to me and my trust and all of my most personal fears and moments, and then used me as something akin to a sex doll for months on end. As I said, it was an annihilating experience. If someone said, "I was raped by my therapist," I would have had some somewhat straightforwardly fraught and horrible event in mind. But the reality is far more complicated and in that way, perhaps more terrible, at least for me, than I would have ever imagined. I have to think this is true of so much abuse, that is an unimaginable human experience unless you have the misfortune of enduring it. Thank you Mary for capturing the complexity of this unfortunate part of the human experience.
I would also love to know from Maggie Gyllenhaal’s perspective whether her view of the character has evolved now that she’s a director and has stated how she feels that the female gaze on stories is different since Secretary was directed by a man.