Andy Whitfield and My Primacy Effect

Today, the bit of entertainment news that I've been dreading for a year: Andy Whitfield, star of the series Spartacus, died yesterday. He was 39, he died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and damn, he was one of the few men on screen to really light my fire.

Sure, as Spartacus he was not just chiseled but principled; but I now know that for me, what really got me going was that Andy Whitfield -- specifically the two-and-a-half to three inches of his face including and framing his ever-so-slightly hooded, wideset grey blue eyes, his unmanscaped brows -- triggered in me was what's known among social psychologists as "the primacy effect." Just that slice of Andy Whitfield's face reminded me of the first man I ever loved and was loved by, of the first time in my life where passion and safety co-existed.

When I see an image of Andy Whitfield, I see someone else, I am somewhere else: on Ocean Beach together at dusk marveling over the miracle of falling in love, waiting for him to roll up his sleeve as he did every time he held my hand, the way he carefully wiped his shoes on the doormat. Time travel in the face of a stranger, if for an instant.

Thank the primacy effect for how vividly you remember your first kiss, your first heartbreak, your first sighting of your college roommate's shoes, your first taste of beer. First experiences sear our brains unlike any subsequent ones -- the intensity of the emotion and the novelty form "flashbulb memories" that will light our way until our deathbeds.

Strangely, I had a dream about this man from my past last night, probably just hours after Andy Whitfield -- let's face it, a stranger -- died, but many hours before I read that he had died. And it was a sad dream -- one in which I felt helpless, worried, and nostalgic.

I'm no mystic, but I wonder what to do with that sliver of coincidence, if one can even call it that. It's as if a perfect stranger, on his way to the great beyond, stopped by to say, "This is the last dream." This particular primacy effect of mine, the trigger linking one face to another's, a TV screen to some of the most meaningful moments of my life -- will now forever be overlaid with sadness that such a talented stranger, who by all accounts was a lovely person as well, died too young.

Goodbye, Andy Whitfield.

Getting myself to a nunnery...or at least into a few books about nunneries

Among the many things I don't understand (grits, polenta, heavy metal, hominy, the allure of Sarah Palin, rottweilers) are nuns. I always feel a little squirmy when I see one. My internal dialogue goes something like this:

Respectful me: "What a nice thing to devote yourself to making the world a better place."
Feminist me: "Of all the things a woman can be now, you chose being a fucking NUN?"
Agnostic me: "Bride of Christ?"
Fashion me: "I'd shoot myself if I had to wear those shoes."
Nymphomaniac me: "It must suck to really need to get laid and then remember, oops, you're a nun."
Cynical me: "How many  school children have you beaten? Bitch."
Guilty me: "I hate myself." 

But seriously, the little I know about nuns is shrouded in...Julie Andrews. In my limited experience, nuns are either young and just waiting for their Captain (whom I bet likes nothing better than a good spanking behind closed doors), or old but still good for belting out Climb Every Mountain. And the only nun I ever knew personally left the nunnery for the love of her life, who, it turned out, wasn't so much Jesus as the woman who lived down the street from us when I was a kid.

So here I am, in the name of heartbreak, immersing myself in nunnery history. We know women got banished to nunneries for behaving badly (meaning shagging men they weren't supposed to shag, sometimes also referred to as falling in love), but how often did that happen? Like was there one whore of Babylon at every nunnery, so they were evenly distributed, or were there nunneries that specialized in imprisoning women who fell under dopamine's spell?

A stack of academic books on nun history, including one published by the University of Chicago Press titled Nuns Behaving Badly, is sitting on my coffee table now, along with an amber ale.

Got a question about nuns? Then I suddenly appear to be your girl. (But not your bride of Christ).
 

On camel toes and muffin tops

Body metaphors are among the many things I'm exploring in The Little Book of Heartbreak. I'd never stopped to think about it, but while I've never met a metaphor I didn't like, those that play on the body are typically my favorites. What's not to love about "brain fart", "muffin top" and "camel toe," I ask you?

Part of why I love about them is remembering the very first time I heard each one. A co-worker once used the word "brain fart" in a meeting with our humorless boss; my friend Kelly -- always the arbiter of hip -- taught me "muffin top," and while I'm not certain I first read "camel toe" in a blog reference to Paris Hilton, in my mind the term means Paris Hilton.

Turns out that "heartbreak" is a little different than camel toe or brain fart, or even brown nose. It's what's called a primary metaphor -- it's rooted in a bodily sensation associated with emotion, and pretty much no matter what the language, it will translate more or less the same way. In short, ask a native speaker of Berber what "camel toe" means on a metaphorical level, and even though he might be deeply familiar with camels and their toes, he'll have no idea what you're talking about (and not just because north African nomadic women aren't known for wearing bikinis or vinyl hot pants). But ask him how "heart" + "break" translates and he'll know exactly what you're talking about.

Apologies here to linguists who specialize in metaphor, because I know I'm vastly oversimplifying your professional life, but "heartbreak" is, I think, similar to other metaphors that are more or less universal: anger is hot (often a hot, overflowing liquid, in fact), fear is cold, happy is up, sad is down.

And now my challenge, dear reader: pair your favorite body metaphor with another metaphor and see what you come up with.

Try this one on for size: "brain fart" + "pillow talk."

The lowdown on my book about heartbreak (FAQs)

For those of you who want the skinny on what my book, The Little Book of Heartbreak (LBH), is about and why I'm writing it, here are the FAQs, real and imagined:

What is LBH about?

LBH is about the notion and experience of romantic heartbreak: about why getting dumped feels as bad as it does, about the universality of not just the experience but also the term "heartbreak", about wallowing, about what music, literature, history, science, and popular culture can tell us about love gone wrong. LBH will touch on subjects ranging from neurobiology to medieval history to the genius of Nick Cave.

Why are you writing LBH?


I'm a firm believer in bibliotherapy. Books can heal, and I don't mean in a new agey, pop psych kind of way -- I mean that by engaging with our pain on an intellectual level and feeding the beast with knowledge, we can get to a higher level of understanding about it AND distract ourselves from the immediacy of the daggers in our chests.

I owe my life to both nonfiction and fiction titles that explore depression and heartbreak, like The Noonday Demon: The Atlas of Depression, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears, but whenever I was in the throes of heartbreak, I found myself craving a book that didn't yet exist: a tome that explained why I was acting like such a nutter, engaged me intellectually, gave me perspective, and looked at what I was experiencing through different lenses. A book that helped me to recover but wasn't self-helpy, trite, or just plain stupid.

So I set out to write that book. 

How did you come up with the idea for LBH?

When I was in graduate school in journalism at Berkeley, I did a radio piece on love gone wrong that specifically covered what exactly the pain of heartbreak feels like and why social psychologists think it exists. I was struck by how engaged people were with the story -- everyone who I interviewed and I knew listened to it had something to share. It struck me perhaps nothing is more universal in the human experience -- we don't all become parents, we don't all get cancer, we don't all chuck it all and join a commune -- but nearly every one of us has his or her heartbroken.

Why you?

I'm a recovering expert. Although I'm happily married now, before I met my husband, it's fair to say I got dumped as often and predictably as it rains in Seattle. Okay, so I exaggerate, but according to my scrap paper tally, I was dumped at least a dozen times, about half of which resulted in medium heartbreak (the kind that makes you cry, qualifies as profound disappointment, but you can concede after awhile wasn't so bad because the guy wasn't "the one" and/or had red flags sprouting around him like hair on an old lady's chin), and a quarter of which resulted in extreme heartbreak (the kind that makes you wish you were a lemming because hurling yourself off a cliff sounds like a great idea because he really did seem to be "the one").


I've been ditched after moving across the country to be with someone, via email and over instant messenger, in a Honda Civic, in my own kitchen, and on my birthday.

I'm also fairly certain I've broken the hearts of three or perhaps six individuals, several of whom barely spoke English, and one of whom I almost regretted dumping because he introduced me to the band Hem. 

So, yeah, I think I have a fair amount to say on the subject. 

Who is your audience? 

Let's be real: men who will read a book about heartbreak are likely few and far between. My guess is that women will dig this book -- women like me who read broadly (medieval history! pop reference! best sellers! Mary Roach! Madame Bovary! obscure books about the history of dirt in London!), have been known to overindulge in Two Buck Chuck, are left cold by self-help books, and are confounded by the perils of the modern dating paradigm (did I sleep with him to soon? what does that cryptic email mean? what do you mean I shouldn't text him until he texts me? should I not have done a bong hit in front of him? was it the ratty red thong or the fact that I identified a little too much with Bridesmaids?)

When is the book coming out? 

LBH will be published in February 2013, which means that my manuscript is due in, uh, six months.

Are you scared? 

Do bears shit in the woods? Totally. But I'm also happy like a Mai Tai on the beach.

On the broken heart of Henry VIII

The Brokenhearted King?

Watching the last season of the Tudors was like eating cold oatmeal with a side of collard greens, but it did make me revisit my thoughts about Henry VIII, about whom I'm read an embarrassingly large amount. Sure, he was vain, arrogant, cruel, gullible, mercurial, dastardly, possibly brain damaged, and later in his life, fat, stinky, in chronic pain, and likely impotent, but you have to remember: he must also have been simply brokenhearted by the flock of disappointments that descended on his not-at-all-private life.

Sure, we all know the stories of the six wives, but when you really stop to think about the stack of losses, betrayals, and assumed betrayals were, it's awful to think about the impact on his interior life.

Historians think that Catherine of Aragon, good wife that she was, had a total of six to nine pregnancies, only one of which resulted in a healthy child (a girl, later Queen Mary) -- the rest were either stillbirths or miscarriages, and one son, also named Henry, who lived 52 days. Can you imagine? The thought of those disappointments alone chill me.

Then we move on to Anne Boleyn, clearly the great passionate love of his life -- she successfully produced an heir (albeit also girl, Elizabeth), and thereafter had, many historians believe, multiple miscarriages. Stress could have been at play, or just the vagaries of pregnancy in all eras before the 20th century, but one theory I find intriguing is that Anne might have been Rhesus negative (Rh-). If Henry was Rh+, then after her first pregnancy (Elizabeth), her body would reject any Rh+ babies thereafter. Now, of course, your OB will run tests and give you an antibody shot if there is potential Rh problem, but then, there would be no explanation aside from God hates you. And not just a little: at this point, Henry was up to, oh, maybe 8-15 failed pregnancies and two wives who "failed" at the one thing that was required of them.

Let's move on to Jane Seymour -- probably the best long term "fit" for Henry -- they probably could have been happily married for years. She produced a son (Edward) about a year and a half after they married, but then she pegged out immediately, probably from puerperal fever (which killed his mother as well). Yet another terrible loss, and the only explanation, yet again, would have been that God hates you, when really it was likely more that there were a lot of unsanitized hands messing around in the royal birth canal. So now on top of two failed marriages, and multiple miscarriages/stillbirths/early childhood deaths, Henry's wife has died just trying to produce a child.

At this point, the equation looks remarkably like Henry pays, quite literally, for children with the lives of his wives. And that God has it out for him particularly, above all others.

We'll skip Anne of Cleves -- much as that situation was a bummer, grief and heartbreak don't seem to have played a role, though from her perspective it must have sucked to think you're marrying the hot king of England and instead you wind up with a foul-tempered fatty who has the audacity to tell the world that YOU smell bad (and that your boobs sag).

Moving on: Catherine Howard, aka the ninny. By this time, Henry was 50, fat, grumpy, and stinky, and surely delighted to be bonking a hot 17-year-old. Still, no children (maybe because wives made him so nervous he couldn't get it up), and then, because she wasn't just young but also STUPID, she had a liaison with his favorite courtier (not to mention plenty of previous unqueenly dalliances that at best people of my mother's generation would call "heavy petting.") Can you imagine how he felt? You're the King of England, god dammit, you've had a shitty time at family life, and your hot young dumb wife has the audacity to CHEAT ON YOU? He was probably off his rocker with rage and heartbreak at that point; no wonder he said off with her head. (Not that I'm in favor of that. Or burning heretics. Or drawing and quartering. But you get my drift.)

Then we have Catherine Parr, to whom he was married for about three years, until he died at 56. No kids, presumably because he was impotent by that time since she did have one child later, at age 35 and with Thomas Seymour. She died 6 days later -- likely because of dirty hands in the birth canal, yet again.

Sure, at the time, many families lost many children, and women spent most of their fecund lives either pregnant or nursing. But Henry's situation -- the drama of it, the stakes, the mystery of it, the sheer relentlessness and bad luck -- deserves, I think, a small helping of a more sympathetic look. 

How many times must have his chest felt like it might collapse from crushing despair?