I Hear She's a Real Bitch - Hardcover

Agg, Jen

 
9780385686877: I Hear She's a Real Bitch
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385686870 ISBN 13: 9780385686877
Verlag: Penguin Random House, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

A sharp and candid memoir from a star in the restaurant world, and an up-and-coming literary voice.

Toronto restaurateur Jen Agg, the woman behind the popular The Black Hoof, Cocktail Bar, Rhum Corner, and Agrikol restaurants, is known for her frank, crystal-sharp and often hilarious observations and ideas on the restaurant industry and the world around her.
I Hear She's a Real Bitch , her first book, is caustic yet intimate, and wryly observant; an unforgettable glimpse into the life of one of the most interesting, smart, trail-blazing voices of this moment.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JEN AGG is the owner of The Black Hoof, Grey Gardens, Rhum Corner, Cocktail Bar in Toronto and Agrikol in Montreal.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.


CHAPTER 4: KID STUFF
 
The first time I could’ve gotten drunk but didn’t, I was eleven. We were at Greg Harper’s* house playing a make-believe game of Star Wars. Greg was a lanky ginger into sci-fi and British comedy and he was mildly funny so he coasted on that. He played the comedian so well that you almost forgot his nerdish leanings. The premise of our game was flimsy: Greg and Alan were Han and Luke, and Kristy was Leia because she had sprouted boobs and was really pretty, which of course meant all the girls whispered about what a slut she was while maintaining phony friendships with her.
     There was nothing to suggest at that time that Kristy had ever even kissed a boy, though even if she had, it wouldn’t have made our slut-shaming any less awful. The way we interacted as eleven-year-old girls was a good introduction to female group dynamics, and I was definitely not just a casual observer. As an adult, I’ve noticed these childish patterns on a loop and can still shock myself with how callously dismissive I can be of women—men too, but I tend to be more generous with men’s shortcomings. I’m an admittedly bad feminist; I know that I have this horrendous, learned double standard. It’s just that I have a strong negative reaction to what I see as a wishy-washy need to please and I find that trait more often in women than in men. I wish I could be more patient, as a woman is expected to be. If I allowed myself to clearly and fully remem­ber the awful things I whispered and gleefully took in back then about “Titsy” Edmunds (not our best work—it didn’t even rhyme) I know I would be horrified. What I do remember well is the feeling of belonging and the power of gossip: alliances constantly shifting, hopping back and forth between the two most popular girls, the hypocrisy of these relation­ships a baseline for how women exist in group friendships, especially as children. Two “friends” are always finding com­fort in talking shit about their other “friend,” who may be prettier, or better dressed, or more popular with the boys, or none of those things. (But a judgment that a girl is “prettier” is often at the heart of it. The patriarchy’s culturally agreed-on baseline for prettiness in those days defaulted to skinny-yet-curvy white girls—thank christ that’s starting to change.) Kristy’s social status was confusing, both relying on and hin­dered by the power of new breasts, but it didn’t matter—she always got to play Leia, and I always got stuck with C-3PO.
     After our game ended (once the Death Star had been destroyed, presumably) Greg casually sauntered into the base­ment with a six-pack of beer, like it was something he did all the time, and my first reaction was, “No! Drinking is bad and we aren’t supposed to do it!” My rebellious nature was still a couple years from maturation, but my fight-y nature wasn’t, and I argued with and shamed the boys, going so far as to dump at least one lukewarm beer down the toilet. It was Miller High Life, and it was 1987, when Miller High Life was pre-ironic, yet even with its third-banana (behind Pabst and Labatt 50) iconic hipster status just a decade away, the toilet still seems like an appropriate place for it. It got me thinking, though. If Greg and Alan were refusing to speak to me for weeks over this small thing, dumping a beer down the toilet, they must’ve been pretty mad about it. And if they were so mad, drinking had to be awesome. It was a primitive logic.
     As girls of eleven or twelve-ish, we were at the age where our parents could leave us alone for an evening and didn’t have to worry about boys rapping on windows with cans of warm beer looking to “be boys”—that was still a couple of years off, despite Greg’s early adopting. In grade 7, I would shoot up a fast few inches, becoming very Skinny Legs and All, the book by Tom Robbins that I eventually read for its title and loved for its everything. When I see eleven-year-old girls today, sashaying around in crop tops and jean shorts cut so high that I’m discomfited, I wonder if I’m remembering “eleven” wrong. But I think it’s a pretty different “not-quite-a-girl-not-quite-a-woman” world now—something about the Internet.
     I mean, obviously the unattainable beauty standards for women are rooted in the patriarchy, but now that most west­ern kids can fall through Google’s looking glass and have total access to everything, girls are too quickly, within a pack mentality, making themselves into miniature versions of their sexy popstar heroes. I don’t want to be all old-man-shakes-fist-at-cloud, but though we still learned our roles—to be the prettiest, the sexiest, yet somehow demure—it just wasn’t as fast a slide into clothing as sexual display when I was a kid. We didn’t even grasp what was happening, even if, biologi­cally, the approving looks from boys were a jolt we knew we liked. We are raised to compete with other women, but within a societal expectation of “sisterhood”—a challenging para­dox that ends up supporting the patriarchal status quo.
     Perhaps it was because I intuitively rejected the social cues I was picking up as a girl, but for whatever reason I had more fun playing with boys. They wanted to build forts and climb trees and play Capture the Flag. They were my people—a friendship preference I haven’t been able to shake. I’ve been on a constant search for equality-based female friendship, but it’s eluded me, especially as I age and my requirements become ever more specific. Where are the forty-something stepmoms who are fundamentally it-getty and can afford occasional elaborate dinners? Are they at bars? Is there a Tinder for cool stepmoms? Not that I don’t have close female friends, but I’ve always felt more at ease with boy-besties. And yes, I realize how “not like other girls” garbage this sounds.
     Dwayne, my first boy-pal, lived at 10 Scarbelle Lane, the cul-de-sac that sprouted off the top of Scarboro Avenue (Scarboro, no “u-g-h”—how many times did I say that as a kid?). We bonded immediately. Not in a crush sort of way—I had no special feelings for him “down there.” (“Down there” was something I had discovered at nine or ten thanks to my love of shimmying up and then sliding down the poles that supported the swings in the school playground—a precursor to my mother’s as yet undiscovered “shoulder massager.”) Dwayne had a ramp for jumping his BMX bike. Either my parents wouldn’t buy me a BMX or I decided it veered too strongly into representing myself as not a girl (for all my tomboy leanings, I definitely wanted to be the kind of girl that boys liked). But that didn’t stop me from racing Dwayne’s bike up and down the street and sometimes finding the cour­age to go up the ramp, though never committing quite enough to really catch any air. One afternoon, I’d gotten up a lot of speed and was screeching toward him when, out of nowhere, he jammed a stick in the front wheel spokes. I flew over the handlebars and scraped myself up pretty badly. I was so upset and shocked, I grabbed my non-BMX bike, which I’d lazily dropped on Dwayne’s lawn, and limped home so he wouldn’t see me cry. I was so embarrassed and pissed off. Was this what boys did to each other? Stood there while you hobbled off muf­fling your tears? Laughed at skinned knees with little stones and...

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Verlag
Penguin Random House
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385686870
ISBN 13 
9780385686877
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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