I Do…but I Don’t by Kamy Wicoff
When my editor rescued me from the very bad title I originally gave my book (The Rest of My Life Will Never Be Long Enough—a phrase I took from my wedding vows, but which may as well have been This Title is Long Enough to Hang this Book With), and came up with the pithy and perfect I Do but I Don’t, I had no idea how apt it would be. Intended to express the ambivalence felt by the modern bride, an ambivalence I believe stems largely from the mixed up mess of contradictory messages postfeminist women contend with when it comes to feminism and femininity, wifery and work, it quickly came to describe my ambivalence about the book itself. I did, but I didn’t, want to everyone who read it to love every minute. I did, but I didn’t, want everyone who read it to wince at least once. I did but I didn’t want to write a book that was warm, welcoming and nonjudgmental; I did but I didn’t want to write a book that was tough, uncompromising and opinionated. I still don’t know exactly which book I wrote. Which means I still don’t know exactly how brave—or cowardly—I was.
I am certain that the only book I can get any real publicity for is the nice, warm, and nonjudgmental one. This was best exemplified by the first big media break I got, back in May, when a personal connection at CBS resulted in a dream-spot on CBS Sunday Morning, focused on chapter four: “The Ring: My Baptism by Bling-Bling.” I was thrilled, confident that the arguments I make against the diamond ring “tradition” would hold up—not to mention hopeful that I could disparage one of the most popular and coveted items in American life in a compelling, likable way! My young IP was also thrilled and generously volunteered her friends for the girlfriends-sitting-around-talking-rings portion of the segment the producer desired. I felt good after the one-on-one interview in at my place the morning, but when I walked in at the conclusion of the group interview that evening, I was stopped cold by an atmosphere thick with resentment and anger. The reporter, I was quickly informed, had asked the women how many carats their nearly identical, sizable engagement rings were, and they’d been offended and angered by the question. This was a little hard to understand, given that the interview was about diamond engagement rings, and they had all—supposedly—read my book prior to the interview. I said as much, and my publicist immediately began peppering me with pointed questions: Who did I think my audience was, anyway? Didn’t I know it would be the kind of women who wanted diamond rings? Wasn’t I just telling my personal story, refraining from passing judgment on the choices other women made? Didn’t I know that if I came off as “negative” or “judgmental,” I’d never sell any books?
I was confused, to say the least. This woman had read my book (hadn’t she?), and “loved” it—but now I wondered, had I gone too far by writing in a style that was conversational and “fun,” failing to make my most important points as firmly as I ought to have? Had I made it that easy to ignore the feminist, and decidedly critical arguments in the book? (Though when hit with the inevitable non-argument that the only defense a woman needs when she makes a particular choice is that she has made a choice, period, I couldn’t help thinking of this passage from my book’s “Beauty Day” chapter: “In its most ridiculous and egregious form, the logic of “choice feminism” permits a woman who has her pinky toe sliced off (or ‘trimmed’) to better fit into her fashionable pointy-toed shoes to defend her decision as a ‘right,’ and, because it is a ‘free choice,’ as a decision exempt from others’ judgment.” That seems pretty damn clear.) In I Do but I Don’t, I don’t just tell my personal story, I tell the stories of the more than eighty women I interviewed, buttressed by research, and I draw firm conclusions, like, “diamond rings should go the way of dowries,” on each issue I tackle in its eleven chapters. But here was a woman who’d read my book, who was supposed to be helping me talk to the media about it, telling me that she was no longer sure just what the heck I had been trying to do.
I thought I knew, and vigorously defended myself, and my opinion that it was good to have opinions that went beyond “everyone should be free to do what she wants to do.” And then I hung up, dialed the CBS producer, and said, “Please don’t make it too negative. I’m afraid of alienating people.” I needn’t have worried: when the piece aired, everything controversial, and almost everything substantive, I’d said, had been edited out. I began to wonder, and am still wondering, if, in my attempt to write a book with big ideas and broad appeal, I had written my way out of effectively conveying my big ideas and missed the boat on broad appeal, too. The book has yet to be reviewed by anyone serious (its packaging and title place it squarely in a category that appears to be distasteful to intellectuals), and at least one major women’s magazine rejected the idea of excerpting it because it was too intellectual. (Meanwhile, Sherry Argov’s Why Men Marry Bitches flies off the shelves.) The CBS piece lead to some other television appearances, but to secure them I have had to appear as a kindly soul-in-sympathy with harried brides, offering my top five wedding “tips,” going easy on the cultural criticism. Morning television personalities express relief that I am pregnant with my second child, as though to reassure their coffee-sipping viewers: Don’t worry, she’s not one of those.
The truth is, of course, that I have been complicit in this, unwilling to be one of “those,” hell-bent on finding a third way. (My good friend, the feminist literary critic Nancy K. Miller, immediately responded to my description of having been called “negative” by saying, “sounds a lot like ‘angry,’ as in ‘angry feminist,’” a put-down that has been used to great effect against any woman disposed to do more than cheerlead and smile. But if I’m afraid of coming off “angry” and I’m angry at the very idea of cheerleading, what then?) At times I have worn my refusal write a book that could be easily categorized as a badge of honor, because I do believe the “she said,” “she said” polarization of the debate over the women’s movement, lately portrayed as a shouting matching between working women and stay-at-home moms—categories as fluid as they can be, let’s be honest—leads next to nowhere. As I discovered from my experience as a bride, I was neither a purely independent feminist nor a purely traditional miss, and the only path to progress lay in undertaking the hard work of disentangling all the contradictions I contained within myself, rather than pointing fingers at everyone but me. But at other times I fear that I am simply afraid—in a quintessentially female way—to be angry in public, something that, as a woman writer writing about things that make me angry, I am obligated to do.
If, as many of the publishers approached with this manuscript feared, this book falls through the cracks as neither polemic nor how-to, neither treatise nor chick lit, I may not have the opportunity do much of anything in public besides beg for a reader or two. I do hope to do battle on a bigger stage. I do but I don’t think I’m up to it.
Kamy Wicoff is an author and freelance journalist. Her work has
appeared in Salon.com, and has been anthologized in Why I’m Still
Married: Women Write Their Hearts Out on Love, Loss, Sex and Who Does
the Dishes. She is the
fiction/nonfiction editor of Women’s Studies Quarterly. I Do But I
Don’t is her first book.
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