disclosure
Domenico Starnone’s book Trust begins with two lovers in a tumultuous relationship telling each other the worst secret they have and then, some days later, mutually breaking up. The protagonist, a man, feels a loss of control and profound sense of endangerment as a consequence of this exchange. That feeling is a facet of his life for the rest of the book; even as he grows older, marries, has children, and rises in his profession, he is haunted by the possibility of the revelation of his secret. Jhumpa Lahiri translated the novel. She writes in the afterword that she translated the title from Confidenza, which more literally translates to “confidence”; in English, she thought the word “trust” made more sense. Another way to get at this elusive thing, confidenza or trust, might be the word disclosure.
Disclosure perhaps smacks of legal documents, or clinical remove. An email from Your Benefits Center, subj. line: Disclosure About Your Retirement Plan.
The word “disclosure” comes from Latin via Middle English and Old French. Claudere: to close. To make secret or new information known.
I hate not knowing something because it feels like standing by a locked door. To disclose is to open a door, reveal a room.
Disclosure has many uses. Starnone’s characters bind themselves to each other for life without needing to touch. The protagonist calls it an “ethical marriage,” putting it on an equal or even higher plane in comparison to his real marriage, a physical and legal one.
“Secrets are the currency of intimacy” — Frank Warren said that in a TED talk. He founded the website PostSecret, where millions of strangers sent in secrets on the backs of postcards. The whole idea behind PostSecret is that there’s power to sharing a secret, and seeing it too, the moment you realize you’re not alone. I dropped a postcard in the mail to them once, when I was a teenager. Telling something lightens a load on your soul. It’s like Florence and the Machine sings, “Tonight, I’m gonna bury that horse in the ground.”
Why wouldn’t you disclose?
It’s always strange to me when someone apologizes for saying something personal. I didn’t mean to dump that on you a friend said when I ran into her. Are we supposed to walk around in our own little rooms and keep the doors closed, the curtains drawn?
There’s the specter, of course, of being too much. I remember standing on the steps of a Bushwick apartment, some party spilling out of a basement concert, wreathed by cigarette smoke, PBRs, this girl coming up to tell me about her shitty ex. Has everyone met someone at a party like this, the person who tells you about their shitty ex? I was sort of glad and entertained, in the same way I was glad and entertained by the woman I met at a birthday party another week. She told me about her terrible ex-roommate who fed her laxatives via spiked brownies. I always love the sentences that follow This might be a bit personal but. I love them more than the tall What do you do? guy in boat shoes and earnest How long have you been here? woman in a camel sweater and all the rest. Tell me about what you miss about your hometown and what made you feel all fenced-in, like you were a guppy swimming up against the glass. Tell me about what makes you angry. Give me your private life for a moment, or what else are we doing here?
I don’t say that to strangers, Give me your private life, because that seems grasping and invasive. A tabloid piece about the friendship between the actors Henry Cavill and Millie Bobby Brown, who work on a show together, describes how Cavill has strict “terms and conditions” for his costar, who is a couple decades younger than him. One of these is asking no questions about his personal life.
I have more Henry-Millie friendships now, friendships where we don’t really talk about anything. That’s not true: we talk about assignments, events around campus, hug each other at parties, enjoy the silent solidarity of sitting in the same places at the same times. This isn’t nothing. It’s strange, though, I told one of this year’s new friends: for so long I was used to developing intense relationships with people one-on-one, creating worlds of our own, the way lovers do. I grew aware, as I said this, of my nearness to her on her couch, and I quickly laughed, as if to wad up my remark and throw it away.
I almost cried in front of a different friend this morning. We were sitting in a doughnut shop eating bland breakfast sandwiches and drinking coffee and I was telling her about an argument with an older graduate student in her department that had left me shaken. He had been rude and dismissive, interrupting often to yell at me across a long restaurant table where I was the lone person from outside their department. After the dinner and argument I put a good face on to have drinks with people, including the person who had yelled at me. My friend said, Sorry, I had no idea this was going on. Why didn’t I disclose more that night? It would have done no good and some harm, I felt. I was an outsider to their group; if I had caused a scene, demanded an apology — which I doubted would have been forthcoming — it would have disturbed this little pack’s cohesion. Perhaps I didn’t even realize how frightening and lonely it was until later. This is one reason not to talk about things: to give them time to settle, to understand how you feel, to understand how that might be different from what you want to say.
I love songs from pissed off women who don’t seem to be hung up on disclosing resentment. Marina singing, With every careless action you let me slip away / If you just bought me flowers, maybe I would’ve stayed, Carrie Underwood taking a Louisville slugger to both headlights, Mitski’s plaintive yet insistent love me more, Brandi Carlile’s I’m gonna raise hell. Dodie Bellamy writes in The Buddhist about how in her working-class upbringing complaining volubly to your community about the son-of-a-bitch who did you wrong was expected, you’d get celebrated as a sort of valorous martyr, but that that’s seen as undesirable whingeing by upper-crust types. I was so quiet retelling the bad argument story to my friend, more even-toned and paced than I would be summarizing a lecture — probably a reflection of a norm I’ve inherited from my own cultural milieu, in which showing strong emotion, particularly as a woman, is discrediting. I think about how much work I’ve done in my life to try and jettison anger, and how the songs don’t, they stay squarely in the can you believe what this asshole did/didn’t do? land.
I said to my therapist that — despite all the fair criticisms — I appreciate holidays like Valentine’s Day because it feels like the rules are right there. If you don’t get your flowers, chocolate, dinner or something like that, a certain tender emotional experience, you’re allowed your disappointment, in a way that feels less true on other days. If you are not Dodie Bellamy writing in The Buddhist disappointment is a really hard emotion to disclose socially. I admire the woman at the party with the ex-boyfriend, the woman with the ex-roommate, because they feel no embarrassment about telling a story in which they chose the companionship of somebody who failed them. That’s the double-edged sword of choice, isn’t it? To the extent that our secrets are about outcomes at least partially borne out of our decisions, blame sits on the other shoulder from acceptance. So you tell some girl with a wide face and dark eyebrows who you’ll never see again. Thanks for the confidenza.
Image: a photograph of an Edward Hopper drawing I captured at the Whitney exhibit a few months ago
Some things I read this week:
“He’ll never see it” - from the sociologist Allison Daminger’s Substack. Does a great job summarizing recent research on gendered perceptions of affordances (what you think a thing is for - so when you’re in a kitchen, do you look at the counter and think “huh, there are crumbs there and maybe I should clean it” or “huh, I could set my mug down there!”) that I found super interesting.
“Good conversations have lots of doorknobs” - made me think a lot about how I talk with others, and how you do too
“The agoraphobic fantasy of tradlife” - I’m just really obsessed with the trad wife subculture!