The Last Housewife (110)
As for Laurel, Shay has always given other people more grace and empathy than she’s given herself. I think that’s a very human trait, to forgive and understand things in other people that we can’t forgive about ourselves. And so she’s able to contextualize Laurel’s decisions, see the extenuating circumstances, from the beginning. That’s what drives her relentless attempts to pull Laurel out of the Pater Society. Shay and Laurel in some respects have opposite arcs: while Shay learns to view herself as more the victim of circumstances, she learns to view Laurel as less so. By the end of the book, I think Shay has let go of the idea that Laurel is a victim. And yet she still believes she’s worth saving.
While some readers might look at Shay’s refusal to give up on Laurel as naive or the result of Shay’s savior complex (and they might be right!), I also see it as an outgrowth of the fact that Shay believes she knows the real Laurel, that Shay understands that sometimes life puts us in the position to make bad choices that then become life-and identity-defining, and given all of that, she cannot abandon her friend. To do so would condemn Laurel to harm or death. And when it comes to Laurel, Shay simply will not abandon empathy. A provocative question is why Shay can forgive Laurel’s evils but not Don’s? That question may seem obvious or even offensive, but there’s been a lot of work in the justice reform world around radical forgiveness as a form of healing, and some argue forgiveness—even of people who have committed the very worst crimes—is more powerful than the kind of retribution Shay shows Don. The concept of justice continues to fascinate me because there are no easy answers.
The story of Scheherazade is a resonant frame for The Last Housewife. What attracted you to that myth? How does Shay differ from Scheherazade?
As readers might know, the story of Scheherazade is a frame narrative for The Thousand and One Nights, a collection of stories whose origins can be traced to India and Iran. The gender dynamics of the Scheherazade story are stark: It begins with a king whose ego has been wrecked by his unfaithful wife, and so he has her beheaded. Then, in a long, protracted revenge against women writ large (so it seems), he continues to wed a new bride every day and has her beheaded the following dawn. One by one, the kingdom empties of women until Scheherazade, whose father is in the king’s service as the executioner, steps in and volunteers to be the next bride. In some versions of the story, her sister aids her, but in all versions, Scheherazade essentially compels the king into sparing her life anew each night by hooking him with an unfinished story. This is obviously supposed to demonstrate both the power of stories and Scheherazade’s cleverness. But it’s always struck me that her victory—after one thousand and one nights, the king comes to love her and makes her his permanent bride—is such a horrible one. A life sentence, married to a misogynist murderer.
The myth of Scheherazade the storyteller has taken up a lot of my mental real estate over the years. I find it so powerful and gutting, the idea of having to tell a story every night with your life on the line. In a way, it’s what we all do. We live and die by the stories we tell about who we are, who our families are, what kind of community or country we live in, how the world is supposed to work. In the myth, Scheherazade is presented as a very clever woman who always seems to be one step ahead, but I envision this storytelling as frantic, constant, feverish work. I liken it to the work of weaving yourself together, the burden of having to keep yourself cohesive and legible.
The myth seems such an obvious parallel to not only individual identity construction but the contortions women have historically had to perform to be acceptable to men. To be intriguing and endlessly alluring but never threatening. There are so many stories that have been told—and that women have participated in telling—about what defines womanhood, what comes naturally to women. And this very need for constant storytelling, this feverish stitching together, this performance, reveals the fact that at its center is empty air. There is nothing that defines a woman, just like there’s nothing that defines a man—“essential” gender truths are in reality arbitrary stories repeated over time until they’ve concretized. The more I thought about Scheherazade, the more I became obsessed with the idea of a different ending: Scheherazade not just tricking the king into marrying her, but taking a more radical—if more violent—freedom and power for herself.
Don twists feminist principles to his own advantage as he courts Shay, Clem, and Laurel. How did their upbringings make this possible?
What makes Don good at being a cult leader is that he can ferret out people’s vulnerabilities and use them to manipulate people into doing what he wants. And so he’s able to home in on each of the girls’ needs, fears, and desires and hooks them in tailored ways. For Laurel, who grieves the loss of her father specifically and a parental authority figure more broadly (her mom abandons this role as a consequence of her own grief), Don offers himself as a father figure. He gives her comfort and attention, but also acts as the disciplinarian, playing on her trauma and fears about the world, and especially her guilt, offering her punishments in exchange for redemption. He also understands Laurel feels inadequate compared to Shay and Clem, and so by giving her a leg up and preferential treatment, he makes her indebted to him.
With Clem, he attacks her autonomy and iconoclastic instincts—the very things that make her a powerful force of resistance to him in the beginning—by twisting them into flaws. He plays on Clem’s pain over being so different from her family growing up, and her residual fear of being ostracized, to manipulate and bully her into submission. For Shay, Don uses the fact that she’s high on her own beauty and influence, her own sense of power, to make her think she’s in control of their relationship, that he’s in thrall to her. And by the time he pulls back the curtain to show it’s the opposite, that he’s been pulling the strings the whole time, it’s too late. Shay’s already done things she can’t take back, and he’s already wedged himself into her brain. But of course Don couldn’t have even gotten that far if he hadn’t been so successful in the beginning, luring them in by exploiting tensions within feminism over what makes good and bad feminists. Ironically, attending a progressive school like Whitney, where they were taught to think about such things, made them primed to be hooked.