How I could have lived my whole life without seeing this masterpiece of social commentary? This omission has been a tragedy I didn’t even know existed in my life. The original movie is very different than the remake I had seen. It isn’t FUNNY at all. It’s scary ... it’s a HORROR movie, in fact. And all I can think the whole time I’m watching it is, “this is where I live. I live in Stepford. My God, why haven’t I seen this before? In my obsessive quest to extricate myself from East Texas, I traded Redneckville for Stepford without even realizing it.”
It was such a relief to realize the underlying thing that nags me, haunts me, makes me crazy about the “perfect” place I live, is its Stepfordness. It isn’t me or my broken boobs or my imperfectly textured rear-end, or the fact that I choose to work or that I have a love/hate relationship with my mini-van or that I’m secretly thankful home-baked goods aren’t allowed at classroom parties. It isn’t that I don’t like to garden, or sew, or even other people’s children for that matter. It isn’t that I don’t spend hours at the gym so I can look like I did when I was twenty or that I don’t feel like I have enough money or desire to “fix” my boobs to look like every other woman’s in Stepford. It’s not me ... its Stepford. And then I thought something unimaginable ... something I had never considered ... something very Un-Stepfordlike ... something radical.... “What if my boobs really aren’t broken? What if this is what they are supposed to be like after forty years, three pregnancies and two children?”
It was as real of a moment for me as I’ve ever seen in film, when the main character, Joanna, is asked by the gallery owner who is interested in her photography, “what do you want out of this?” and Joanna says, “I just want someone to remember I was here.”
And that one statement from a character in a movie from 1975, based on a book published in 1972 when I was five years old, answers the question people often ask me when they find out about my writing.
“Why do you write?”
“I just want someone to remember I was here.”
