I am a woman with wide, bright eyes and an infectious laugh. I am often called "cute". So, when an adorably jovial woman writes something that is not funny or adorable, naturally, there are questions.
Oh my god, I didn't know you felt this way. Whoa, sort of heavy. Is this really the way you view life? Are you alright? My, my, what a scary place your mind is. Why did you write this crazy thing?
So, why did I write Eudaimonia?
Because I wanted everyone to ask me how to pronounce it. Joking. (it's like pneumonia)
For real though, it was a way to process thoughts and feelings.
Two things happened kind of close together. The first was a conversation I had with a client who came in for a haircut. He was maybe twenty-one. As we all know, it is customary when meeting a woman to ask if she has children. Always. Even if you are a twenty-one-year-old kid going to a fancy liberal arts school that your parents pay for and you don't know the first thing about making it on your own and providing for another living soul. As we also know, it is customary for a woman to answer. Preferably in the affirmative. When she scoffs and says, "Nope", this makes people uncomfortable. She shouldn't do that and now it is her fault for making said asker uncomfortable.
He said, "I think I read somewhere that Caucasian women's birth rates are declining."
Yeah. I'll be honest, this was a new one for me. Hundreds of people have asked me about my child-bearing plans over the years but I had never heard this. I responded, "Well, I have to work."
I meant it as a segue out of this wildly inappropriate conversation with a stranger. A stranger I was about to take scissors to. A stranger who I was going to ask for money at the end of this transaction. I needed us on the friendliest terms possible. But, he insisted, "Our species will probably go extinct because you wanted a career."
I sh*t you not, that is what this stranger, (child, really) said to me. He was lucky I didn't cut his ear off. But, these are conversations people think they can have with a woman, even if they don't know her. I know we are progressive and I know we are the future, but we still seem to have deep-seated feelings about another person's reproduction. And once I got over the initial indignation, it made me curious.
The second was the whole conversation over California's Prop 8 vote, the debate over same-sex couples' legal right to marry. I remember thinking to myself how surreal it was that, in this modern age, this issue was still being hotly debated. This should be a no-brainer, right? I remember thinking, I'm probably safe. But what would it take, what would have to happen, for a middle-class white woman to have her government tell her what to do with her body?
I decided that it would have to be bad; a full-on catastrophe so big that it would disrupt the entire society around it. Why else would such long-standing and established rights be taken away? Yes, it would have to be a terrible, world-changing event. (The irony of the recent overturning of Roe vs. Wade is not lost on me. But, hey, this book started a decade ago.)
These events and the thoughts and feelings they brought up began to turn and swirl together in my mind tightening into a more concentrated idea.
I love the way Ursula K. Le Guin explains it in her introduction of The Left Hand of Darkness, "Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, 'There! That's the truth!' "
I think people write about the things that bother them. We write about the things that make us worry. We write about hard-to-understand feelings and questions that have no good answers. Books are a safe place to explore those questions. We write to describe where we are; we write to process, and we write to gain clarity. We write to distill into words what others might be thinking but don't know how to say. We want to understand. We want to survive. We want to know that it will all be ok in the end.
-Meghan Godwin