Out on the wily, windy moors

Let me in your window…

*cue the windchimes*

folks, i read Wuthering Heights. i don’t know why i always get surprised when i enjoy a “classic” novel but it happened again.

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This is one of my favorite books I’ve ever read. These brats are mean! I was by turns cackling at and hiding from these pages. my anticipation of this baby was a ghostly love story. and yes, she did deliver. but the portrayal of generational abuse took the foreground for me, propelled me forward through the pages. (I mean, everyone has the same name. those cycles are repeating in a plainspeaking way.) That, and feeling Brontë’s relish as she was thoroughly in her bag. I could feel her cackling away at the pages with me as the story flew from her fingertips. I’m being presumptuous, of course, but I could not shake that feeling of her specter riding along with me.

It would be one thing if Catherine and Heathcliff were merely bozos in love who can’t seem to get it together, (why is it always the oblivious ones think they know everything?), but it’s their desire to take it out on everyone and seek external validation that turns this business into torture and abuse. I was tickled by this pair of jerkstores, but I ached for Hareton, Cathy, and Linton. Not just withering on the vine in their captivity in this dreary neighborhood. stomped. cut at the quick. growing through the crack in the pavement only to be rooted out and blanched with poison.

Sometimes it’s best to die. Sometimes it’s best to go away. Absence can be restorative. and with each mounting cruelty and the passage of time, I was no longer tickled by Catherine and Heathcliff. There is love that will burn the world down and there is love that will grow and raise gardens around it in a ripple effect. the big torrid love affair is often an abuser’s trap.

Ooh, let me have it. Let me grab your soul away …

despite the relatively optimistic ending (the idea that two wandering ghosts are finally at peace??? i love it, double since that math feels wonky—like when you show your work and it’s “wrong” but the answer is correct), this is not the soft life. hopefully the soft life awaits the living in the epilogue.

in the alchemical mixture that has been life since 2016, probably since 2011 if I think about it, probably the whole time to be frank; I’ve been fumbling and clawing toward that soft life. and finding the courage to get there (enter therapy and deep dive research mode on breaking generational cycles).

rebuking abusive inheritances, such as:

• gossip
• triangulation
• performative self-loathing
• complete emotional dysregulation
• feeling like i’m always in trouble, particularly if i’m doing something pleasurable or meaningful
• being unsure of what reality is
• you’ll have to claw and scrape and bleed for every penny you ever make.
• the notion that money is king. resign yourself.
• relationship is transactional, love is conditional.
• ghosting (different from no contact, for example)
• codependency
• you are not worthy.
• your body is wrong.
• you’re too much.
• perfectionism or why bother!!
• we hate you. there’s nothing you can do about it. it’s just you, who you are.

so i hope that Hareton and Cathy in their return to the Grange spread out in their softness and unfurl the beach blanket in the warm sun that is the rebellion of self-love. Emily Brontë didn’t write that part so I have no compunction about writing this fanfic-style epilogue for them :) plus! their shared love of reading and journey through Hareton’s literacy suggests to me they’re on the self-love track.

other notes—

Mr. Lockwood: I love a straitlaced, aghast witness who can’t wait to get the hell up and out of here but is also rapt with attention to the gossip and can’t seem to leave.

Nelly Dean: a pragmatist and nurturer stuck by class in the completely impractical, feverish moors. hopefully this woman gets a rest in the epilogue.

what i’m reading - watching - into these days:

• Bama Rush
• quietly hostile: essays by Samantha Irby
• Little Birds: Erotica by Anaïs Nin
• Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History by Mark Girouard
• The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne Freeman
• Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (I own the Cowley version but am reading it in the order of the first edition version.)
• all this PGA Tour hubbub
• all this ocean hubbub (orcas, Titanic)
• @delaneysayshello, always.
• @BeeBabs, always.
• readying for CLUB RENAISSANCE this July!!!!!!
• sitting with my thoughts and feels in the aftermath of this Vanderpump Rules saga that i don’t think will truly end.

if you have any book recommendations, please do share; they are always welcome.

I hope you are bravely, swiftly, and easily rebuking your abuse inheritances, sending them up in smoke.

With love,
Kate