The Queenager: Eleanor's Letter (February 18th 2024)

Dear Queenagers

Hope you have all had a fab weekend – mine has been rather too eventful, my head is a bit foggy as I was out till 2am dancing last night.

I went to the pond this morning to try and wake myself up and was rewarded not with the downpour I was expecting but bright sunshine, white gulls winging over the water and…. a kingfisher. That distinctive flash of iridescent blue, whizzing across the brown water against the skeleton trees is like a little moment of magic – a rare blessing. It was the first time I’d seen one this year which added to the feeling of spring – warmth on the naked skin as I changed, the Woo, Woo of a wood pigeon, the brrrrrrr of a wood-pecker and the happy tweeting of myriad oiseaux singing of warmth and renewal. Heaven. The pond is always my happy place!

It was a good reminder that it is the simple things which reliably bring us joy, not the flashy big ones. I was thinking about this because on Friday I had a hot ticket – a pal invited me to the gala opening of The Picture of Dorian Gray, with Succession actor Sarah Snook.

I love Snook, who is one of those life-enhancing Australians who has cracked into TV royalty while still being herself (ie NOT a blonde size zero). She is a wonderful actress, in Succession the twitch of her cheek, or her face turning away from the camera semaphores worlds unspoken.  By contrast in The Picture of Dorian Gray, (a play based on Oscar Wilde’s novel of the same name) Snook plays 26 characters – it is a one-woman show – at maximum volume from the start. Sure it is a bravura chameleon performance, showing her immense range (she is doing it once or twice a day for the next 14 weeks, while still breast feeding her new baby! A major physical feat, I respect.) But it doesn’t work for me as a show. Since many of the parts she plays are pre-recorded, they are projected on screens which means that although it is a ‘live’ performance, most of the time you are watching her on telly,  which kind of loses the point of being there.

Dear Queenagers, I’m afraid that despite the show’s many five star reviews (not all, the Times and the New Statesman weren’t keen) I absolutely hated the play. If I could have left after twenty minutes I would have. When it ended, rather than feeling sad for dead Dorian, I felt only relief that it was over. I felt like I’d been yelled at for two hours. The theatre was cold and uncomfortable and the entire time I was there I wished I was at home watching One Day on Netflix. (Or Ted Lasso, or The Morning Show, or Anatomy of a Fall, won the Cannes D’or, great Queenager tale).

I tell you this because it is so easy to be filled with FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)- thinking that we would be happy if we were out and about. I get particularly bad cultural FOMO because I live in London where there is always an exhibition/film/concert I could be seeing. But don’t assume the grass is greener. Take it from me a veteran of such evenings, theatre premieres, awards dos like the Baftas tonight, film openings … they usually involve, queues, tedium, rubber chicken and forced smiles… (At the end of Dorian Grey we gave the producer’s after party a miss and bolted for chips instead. We couldn’t face having to pretend we’d enjoyed it or, worse, point out that the emperor had no clothes.)

The experience did have an upside though, yesterday I re-read Oscar Wilde’s original novel The Picture ofDorian Gray because it deals with many Queenager-relevant themes, primarily fear of ageing. [Quick recap: Dorian Gray is a beautiful young man who is painted in his youthful prime by a society artist. Gray is so vain and in love with his young and gorgeous self that he makes a bargain with the devil: the portrait will age, but Gray will remain forever young.] It is a good conceit for this Queenager newsletter. Would we, given the choice, choose to keep our 20-something looks forever? In a culture like ours that glorifies youth and beauty, it sounds like a great deal. But it turns out to be anything but. In Victorian upper crust society, Dorian is feted for his looks and charm even as he becomes debauched, dissolute, addicted to pleasure, vice and hedonism – eventually murdering the artist who painted him. Rumours abound about his dark side (Wilde’s immortal line “There is only one thing worse than being talked about, not being talked about” comes from this novel)  but Dorian Gray is forgiven because he is so beautiful no-one believes the horrendous gossip. How could one who looks so innocent be so guilty?  Interestingly, eventually it is Dorian himself who becomes sickened by the chasm between his surface appearance and who he really is. He cannot live with the truth of himself and so is driven to stab the portrait where all his sins are writ large in the hope that by killing it he will remove the sin, erase the rotten-ness of his soul which haunts him. But in stabbing the painting, he  kills himself. When his servants find him, on the floor is a disgusting, corrupted corpse (the true Dorian Gray) and on the wall is the original portrait of Dorian in his prime.

Since I spend much of my time thinking about ageing I found this story, written in the 1890s, surprisingly prescient and modern. Of course in the production there are lots of crude parallels drawn – Snook is injected with Botox, the ‘portrait’ is produced with insta filters – yes, we get it, our society is obsessed with staying young. But Wilde’s point is more nuanced. The novel is really about art; it is only in works of art that the epitome of our existences, those moments of truth or revelation, or perfection that exist outside of time are captured. Wilde’s point is that it is ok to capture them, freeze those spots of time, in a painting, or a book. But if we, as people, try to fix ourselves in that one point, if we resist ageing and get stuck in a youthful version of ourselves,  then we miss the point of the richness of life’s unfolding experience and how our actions in the present define and enrich our future selves. Wilde says that the point of all of our existences is to mine who we really are, to become the people we were always supposed to be, to mature ourselves into our fullest exposition. By trying to fix ourselves in eternal youth we negate that becoming.

As time passes we reflect in our bodies and faces all the things we have done, the people we have loved, the beauty we have allowed ourselves to be penetrated by – as we age, it is all of that that is written upon us. Those markers of the time we have lived aren’t to be escaped, they are precious, a record of all that we are, all our mistakes and triumphs, all that we have experienced. The real moral of Dorian Gray is that rather than judging ourselves against some 20-year-old ideal we need to embrace our wrinkles, or the stretch marks where we bore our children, or the scars on our legs from swimming into caves with barnacles, or being kicked by a horse (I have all of those) as a physical record of what and who we are. What we have become. When I look around me at the Women’s pond I see the bodies of women who have lived and are living, the richness of their stories is all there. We should be proud of this, not seek to erase it.

After all, let none of us forget, that it is a privilege to age. That we are truly some of the luckiest humans that ever lived in terms of the lifespan we can expect and the heatlhspan that modern medicine and science has bequeathed us. Last weekend I wrote about my best friend who died aged 17. Yesterday I read everything I could about Alexei Navalny, 47, the brave Russian opposition leader who died in an Arctic penal camp likely beaten by Putin’s thugs. He is a true hero, what courage, to return to Russia,  knowing he would likely be killed, but to do it anyway to keep the flame of resistance, of another, freer, way, burning in the darkness of Putin’s Russia.  [I highly recommend this article from the New York Times (it’s a Gift Link from me so you should be able to read it free) and this by Owen Matthews in the Spectator about why Navalny matters.]

I have been a close observer and participant in the news and its cycles for the last 30 years – I can’t remember a time when the world felt so dark. But conversely, there has never been a time when it has been so important to stand up and be counted. As Navalny says, all that it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to say nothing. So let’s make sure we vote in the elections to come this year, and that we stand behind those who use their voices for good – whether that’s Navalny or this leading UK Jewish Rabbi who spoke out against any invasion of Rafa last week. In a digital age where algorithms love extremism, the challenge is to reach out into the middle, into the place of nuance and compromise – the only place where any connections or any peace can be made. We need to find common ground with those with whom we disagree, not shout at, or ‘other’ them and fuel the fire of hate. It is easy to feel helpless as the world seems a scary place but as the Dalai Lama says: think about how a tiny mosquito can drive you mad – never feel you are too small to make a difference.

In the great unfolding of things, our time here is short. Let’s not waste it worrying about wrinkles but do what we can to aid the progress of the things that matter. So, also, don’t succumb to FOMO or think because something is glittery and on a red carpet it is fun. It often isn’t.

So do what makes you happy, follow your joy, reach out with love… take action on the things you care about. Whether that’s informing yourself or donating to a cause. If all of us do what we can, we can change things; whether that’s the story we tell about ageing, or changing political leaders.

The highlight of my weekend was seeing that kingfisher and recharging myself by dancing to African drumming in a frenzy of movement, lost in the beats and the motion.

Oh and re-reading Oscar Wilde – maybe every cloud really does have a silver lining !

Lots of love

Eleanor

Ps a note for your diaries – Friday 8^th of March, 6pm UK time – Big Noon Birthday Circle, online with me and some Noon special guests to mark not just International Women’s Day but our third birthday. All Paid Subscribers welcome – I’ll send out more details and a link in due course.

By Eleanor Mills