Elizabeth on Ellen Willis (and writing about Ellen Willis).
When people write about Ellen Willis, they tend to write in the first person. A friend pointed this out last week, after listening to me complain about trying to write about No More Nice Girls. It was so good, I told her, I felt like anything I wrote wouldn’t be on its level, wouldn’t capture the complexity of the arguments Willis—radical feminist, visionary cultural critic, revolutionary intellectual and intellectual revolutionary—makes so lucidly and hilariously and persuasively. How to say anything about someone who said everything, and so well? And so I was having a hard time—harder than the usual time, which is always hard, and inevitably reminds me that I’m stuck in here for good, sentenced to a life inside myself, with nobody coming to release or replace me. Maybe this was why people keep resorting to memoir: there was only one Ellen Willis, the rest of us are ourselves, and so the best we can do is report, from the inside, what it feels like to encounter Ellen Willis.
But even that seemed sort of futile, like when we try to explain to strangers—or even our friends—what makes the people we love lovable: she’s so funny — he has the best smile — she makes such good arguments about abortion and pleasure and marriage and liberty and America at the end of the 20th century. No matter how thorough the list, it always feels incomplete, providing all the measurements but never a sense of what is being measured.
