In the past three days, The New Yorker’s published two supremely important personal essays tied to the #MeToo Movement: earlier today, this one by Junot Díaz that everyone’s talking about, and this one by Molly Ringwald from the weekend.
While Díaz’s is a gutwrenching revelation and Ringwald’s is a nuanced analysis of the sexual politics of John Hughes movies, both are fascinating in the way these unearthed, underlying narratives of sexual abuse and assault put the respective art in question — Díaz’s novels, Hughes’ “wholesome” teen films — in a whole new context.
More on Díaz: If you haven’t yet, give yourself 20 min today to read/reread “The Cheater’s Guide To Love,” one of his best known short stories published in 2012, alongside the essay, and note the parallels.
On its own, the short story is a dramatic tale of male sexuality and vulnerability, sure, but in the context of Díaz’s essay, you realize it’s actually incredibly autobiographical but in a kind of revisionist way. It’s as if all along, Díaz hasn’t so much as concocted fictional stories as he was rewriting the way he wanted to remember parts of his life.
Anyway, this is all to say that as the #MeToo Movement lays bare the structural damage that has been all around us for so long, there’s never been a more crucial time to continuously recontextualize the art and literature we think we already know.
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