Return of Glinda

I pissed off someone from my past, and have learned zero lessons

Dr. Waffle, Secret Bully

Looking back on it now, I realize I should have used a fake name. It turns out that there are a million women named “Emily Chase” out there on the internet, and because I couldn’t figure out which Emily Chase was my Emily Chase, I thought it was okay to call the character in my essay (whose name was Emily Chase) by her real name, which is also Emily Chase.¹ And if I’m honest with myself, I kind of hoped she would—so to speak—chase me down. Be careful what you wish for.

Another thing I did wrong was to use her actual picture. Again, it’s possible that I was trying to flush her out of hiding. But in my defense: it was a postage-stamp-sized square snipped from an ancient class photo that had hung on the wall of my study for decades, bleached from the suns of nearly fifty summers,² blown up and blurred beyond recognition. And I (quite cleverly, I thought at the time) pasted a black bar over the eyes in the photo when I reproduced it, which not only rendered Emily Chase even more unrecognizable, but also gave her the rakish air of a bandito in a spaghetti Western.

Perhaps I should not have called the essay “I Hate Emily Chase.” Or at the very least not repeated the assertion in its first line: “I hate Emily Chase, and I will take that hatred to my grave.” I can see, now, that if your name is “Emily Chase” and you recognize yourself as a person referred to, in an essay entitled “I Hate Emily Chase,” as Emily Chase (that is, you are indeed the reviled Emily Chase so named), you would not take kindly to coming across this sentiment in both the title and the first line. It might seem like overkill.

In addition, the essay itself was pretty much a hatchet job. It described how Emily Chase ruthlessly stole a part from me (Glinda the Good Witch, in case it matters) during casting for a third-grade production of The Wizard of Oz, even though I was clearly the better fit for the role. I mentioned also how terrible an actress she was. I believe at one point (if memory serves) I referred to her as both “a bratty kid” and a “tap-dancing schmo.” I can imagine how these small details could rankle.

Things are about to take an ugly turn

That said: it was not really an essay about Emily Chase. It was rather an essay about the lasting power of picayune childhood traumas, our astonishing ability to hang on to them, and the wisdom of letting go. The conclusion of the essay contains the line “Emily Chase neither thwarted my ambitions nor enabled them, and I think it’s probably time to stop hating her.” The parts where I mock her acting ability are clearly focalized through third-grade me—I am sitting on the cold linoleum floor of a multipurpose room, a captive audience to Emily Chase’s performance, as I nurse my bitter anger. It is fairly clear that the 50-something woman who wrote the essay is a different person from the 7-year-old who thought those thoughts. Or so I believed.

So I was taken aback by the vehemence of Emily Chase’s response. Nearly two years had gone by since I’d published the essay, and in all that time no Emily Chase from my past had reared up to condemn me, so I had pretty much forgotten about the whole thing. Then, out of the blue one Tuesday afternoon, as I was re-reading Roland Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author”³ for a grad seminar I was teaching that evening, an email alerted me to a comment on my Substack:

What a bitter person you are to have carried this resentment with you since third grade! Mean girl energy! No amount of “engaging vocabulary” can mask the ugly person who wrote this. Schadenfreude in third grade? What was your favorite hobby back then? Picking the legs off of daddy long legs or something? To use a real picture, too, egads! No amount of framing this as a writing exercise lets you off the hook. I’d say, when people show you who they really are, believe them. In this case, your writing shows it all. Carrying this from third grade?!? And relishing recounting your “rating” (as a third grader, not someone from Juilliard) is just horrid! As a third grader would say: go suck an egg!

At first I was confused. I have only one real internet enemy that I know of, or at least only one who has sunk to the level of leaving anonymous abusive comments on my published essays. But I didn’t think this was the work of my usual hater. I deleted the comment and attempted to move forward with my life—in this case, with Roland Barthes. Five minutes later, another email alert popped up:

I rocked my blue Good Witch gown even if I had to stuff socks in the top! Seriously Deanne [sic], seek professional help.⁴ Emily (yes, the villain)

This got my full attention. For this commenter was clearly The Real Emily Chase—she had reminded me of a salacious detail from the long-ago drama that I had repressed. It is indeed true that Emily Chase had requisitioned a gown for her Glinda costume that was meant for an adult woman: it had a full bodice with generous bust darts that an 8-year-old girl could not hope to fill out on her own. So she stuffed it—which created, to put it generously, a bizarre effect. It was both harrowing and painful to watch a prepubescent Glinda teeter on heels in an ill-fitting gown, her hypertrophied bosom tipping her forward as she waved her wand at her attendant Munchkins. I suddenly remembered, vividly, how scandalized my mother was by this particular detail—while she was outraged on my behalf by the entire affair, Emily’s be-sockèd bosom truly horrified her. And now, here, in the present, in my email in box, was the actual Emily Chase from my distant past—an angry adult woman who was also, incredibly, still proud of how she had filled out the bodice of her costume as an 8-year old. In just a few seconds I oscillated between surprise, chagrin, amusement, and annoyance—but I landed on regret that I had not remembered the socks in time to include them in my original essay.

I deleted the comment and tried to return to my class prep. I had moved on to Michel Foucault’s 1969 essay “What Is an Author?,” widely considered to be a reponse to Barthes: “[T]hese aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological.” PING. (I should have turned off my email alerts. Why do I never remember to turn off my email alerts? And now it was too late, for I was Alerted.) A new message informed me that my essay entitled “I Hate Emily Chase” had been “restacked”—which presumably means re-posted by another user on Substack. What are the chances this is a coincidence? I wearily wondered to myself.

Your rant against me over not getting a part in an elementary school play over 50 years ago is hilariously sad. Seek professional help Deanne [sic], seriously.

The Substack page was entitled TheVillainHerself and it had zero followers.

I could tell it was going to be difficult to concentrate on Foucault.

But even worse: as soon as I had hastily deleted the latest message, cupped my hot cheeks in my palms, taken a sip from my water bottle, and stalked around my office a few times in a tight circle—as soon as all these rituals were completed, I had the sudden and horrible realization that I was going to have to think about Emily Chase’s anger. She had presented herself to me, out of the internet void, as an actual living human being with her own memories and her own perspective. The half-remembered, half-imagined faerie demon of my childhood, the implacable cipher who had blasted my tender hopes of thespian greatness and then disappeared from my life forever, had magically reappeared as an outraged middle-aged woman whose feelings I must now consider. No more ironizing, no more dehumanizing, no more joking around. God damn it.

And yet... There was a glimmer of hope. She is obviously a terrible reader. She cannot discern irony. She is clearly humorless, self-important, and weirdly smug (those socks!). Could I not detect in this new incarnation of Emily Chase the same personality traits that had led her, so many years ago, down the yellow-bricked path of priggish snitchery and cynical opportunism that had occasioned my animus in the first place? Is the Child not the father of the Man? In other words: Perhaps I don’t need to consider her feelings after all?

I stalled. I posted something on Facebook about what had happened, with a link to the original essay. I texted a couple of friends and asked for advice. Essentially, I outsourced my moral dilemma to the internet—not an uncommon response these days, but no less cowardly for that. The first responders were gleeful about the unfolding drama—bemused that the near-mythical Emily Chase had reappeared after all this time and delighted by her angry response. In other words, they responded as people are wont to do on the internet, with popcorn-munching memes and witty rejoinders. Several people requested a follow-up essay (as if that hadn’t been my first thought, cynical opportunist that I am) and even suggested titles: “Emily Has Chased Me Down” and (my favorite) “I Still Hate Emily Chase.” These bantering replies were certainly entertaining, and I joined in with gusto, but they didn’t help me with my ethical dilemma.

I tried to put myself in her shoes. Imagine Googling yourself and among the top results finding a screaming headline that proclaims “I Hate YOU.” With a picture. And a linked essay all about how you (or third-grade you, at any rate) are detested and reviled. That has got to be a punch in the gut, and I felt absolutely terrible imagining this scene of horror. It wasn’t meant to go down like this! I never thought the actual Emily Chase would see my jokey screed; only my friends and a few oddball “fans” read my essays. I had even begun to doubt, after all my searching, that she was even alive.

I wrote to her. The only way I could reach her was by contacting TheVillainHerself through Substack. I apologized sincerely. Explained that I had tried to find her before writing the essay, and how I had assumed she would never see it. I swore it was all meant in good fun; I did not really hold any animus toward her; I had even fantasized about one day sharing a laugh over the whole thing. I apologized particularly about the picture, and changed it right away. I also offered to change her name throughout if she would prefer.

Of course I didn’t offer to take down the essay. I’m not insane.

This was months ago now, and there’s been no response. Either TheVillainHerself doesn’t check her Substack messages, or Emily Chase has no interest in my apology.

And that just leaves the two of us—you and me, dear reader. It appears that I have started another essay about Emily Chase. Even though I changed her name, there is still a real risk that she will see this essay—and moreover, that I must acknowledge that risk. No more plausible deniability. I have doubled down on my feelings of dislike by extending them to the adult version of bratty Glinda, so I can no longer claim it’s “just” about a silly incident from elementary school, all in good fun, and of course we’re all adults now.

Are we?

It’s not lost on me that Emily Chase’s reaction was not merely the justifiable rage of someone who has discovered an essay using her name and her third-grade picture and accusing her of bad behavior. Emily Chase was also mad because I had messed with her image of herself—not just as a person, but as Glinda. Nowhere in her many vitriolic comments did she refer to the crime of which I had accused her: the opportunistic theft of a plum part, the trampling on another child’s hopes and dreams. No, she was much more interested in shoring up her memory of herself as deserving the part and performing it well. (The socks!) And yet, so was I. That was the entire point of my essay, after all. As the brilliant and redoutable Joan Didion once wrote:

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

Is this not what Emily Chase said, in somewhat different words, in her initial screed? “No amount of ‘engaging vocabulary’ can mask the ugly person who wrote this.” I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself an ugly person, but “secret bully” is pretty close to the mark. Yet even as I re-read La Didion’s chiding words, a secret little thrill passed through me. I am a writer! I have a sensibility! I grapple with the same ethical dilemmas as one of the greatest essayists of the twentieth century! I’m happy to accept the mantle of bully if it means I get to be part of this club. Perhaps it was not only acceptable, but even admirable, to admit my guilt. I had cruelly—if unintentionally—thrust my arm deep down into Emily Chase’s memory place, grabbed ahold of a precious relic (the socks the socks the socks), and yanked. Now I held a bleeding, beating lump of red goo in my hand and had to decide what to do with it.

So I wrote another essay.

1. I have since had a change of heart, and changed the perpetrator’s name throughout both this essay and the first one. The horse was gone, but at least closing the barn door could keep the cows inside.

2. While some of those years were passed in Vancouver, and therefore relatively sunless, some of them were passed in North Carolina and Mississippi—so I think it all averages out.

3. I realize that sometimes actual things that happen in real life strain credulity because they seem too perfect. But as God is my witness, I was indeed reading a philosophical essay about the projection of intention onto authors when this message came through.

4. I love the idea that “seek professional help” is supposed to be an insult. Honey, if only you knew how earnestly and for how long I have “sought professional help.”