Throwback Edition: The Origin Story of Chicken Parm Girl
Plus, both sides of a breakup, a spicy poem, and the genius of Margaret Atwood
Dearest Readers,
I write to you from my last full week in Costa Rica. After nearly half a year of trying on a different life, a different skin, I am returning to New York. I’m not as sad as I expected, as this stint in Central America has made the future feel less scary and more clear. I intend to spend the remainder of this year traveling between places, figuring out what shape of life will best suit me in the longer term. But for now, here we are—returning to the US of A once again.
Today’s essay is one of my favorites, and I’ve gained an even deeper POV of Chicken Parm Girl since living abroad this past year. Being away from the systems in which I was raised has shown me that they are only that—systems. Suggesitons on how to live, what to value, how much time to spend working, of various configurations for community and family and support systems. Being away from those suggested systems has been a great relief to me. So many times I’ve felt there must be something wrong with me for not wanting the sort of life everyone I know seems to want, for craving more life, more adventure—for seeking a different way to live. Now I feel less strange, less strained. The world is quite big; there are countless ways to be in it, ways beyond the ones we see immediately around us. I hope you enjoy today’s essay!
And lastly, today is the last day to upgrade to a paid subscription with a discounted annual rate. As a reminder, the content portion of this newsletter will be paywalled for paid subscribers only moving forward. If you value this newsletter and my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Paid subscribers allow me to keep this thing going!
A Note From the Editor
It was sometime in late spring or early summer. The apartment was crowded with sweaty, smiling people, all just a hair younger than me, all beautiful, all seemingly close friends. I was skating around on the outskirts of the party, connected only by a thread of one other attendee. Everyone was white and I suspected everyone but me had at least one wealthy parent. My judgment was swift and harsh—everyone is wearing the same outfit, he laughs too loud, she needs too much attention—and the sharp edges of my criticism poked me in the ribs. Somewhere inside, I suspected my shrewdness was merely jealously in disguise, a learned behavior from a former bully: when you’re on the outside, armor up.
We were talking to a Cool Guy. He had an air of self-importance and he wore rings, which made him edgy in this crowd. When the conversation turned to a girl who was not in attendance, someone I knew in passing and had formed a faulty opinion on based on our limited interactions, I jumped at the chance to partake. The girl in question seemed to have it all, by our superficial standards back then. She was pretty, rich, buttoned up. She had a tall, beautiful boyfriend, also rich, but her personality was nothing to write home about. Most notably, she had very narrow ideas about the ways in which women should act, always in accordance with how their actions would be perceived by men. She played the game quite well, it seemed, for she had her pick of suitors. We wondered aloud why this might be the case. The Cool Guy was quick to explain it, and his reasoning was a line I would think about incessantly for years on end.
“She’s like chicken parm,” he said. “Every guy wants chicken parm.” Chicken parm was delicious, reliable. Simple. You knew what you were getting yourself into when you ordered it, it was practically impossible to mess it up. Chicken parm was a crowd-pleaser, it wasn’t ever going to be a great divider of people, unless those people were vegetarians. Chicken parm would be safe enough for your very-white-mother-and-father; your college bros would never be mad about a table full of chicken parm at the reunion dinner. You could class it up—even Carbone has chicken parm —or you could dress it down, stick it between two pieces of bread, and order it at a counter-service spot in the suburbs.
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She wasn’t born a Chicken Parm Girl. She was born like every other baby; a slop of genderless oatmeal, bland and malleable.
At the Start of Life, when The Almighty is doling out its bowls of baby oatmeal, the only thing that matters is which direction the bowl is sent in. It goes like this: The Almighty slaps a wet, heaping spoonful of oatmeal into a little styrofoam bowl and that bowl, in a long line with all the rest of the bowls, is carried along by a conveyor belt. In a split second, the belt branches off in a zillion different directions. One bowl is headed for a stark Christan town in Tennessee, another to a large Muslim family in the south of France, and another to a WASPY suburb outside of Boston.
And this is where our Chicken Parm Girl begins to take form, though she doesn’t know it yet.
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In the moment, I laughed at Cool Guy’s comment. I nodded along, that makes sense, but the panic inside of me had already started to rise, for I knew I was not at all a chicken parm girl. He didn’t need to tell me as much, my potty mouth and my undistinguished upbringing told me all I needed to know. To be a high-grade chicken parm, I needed to at least have an expensive education, ideally a family vacation home or two. To be a mid to low-grade chicken parm, I needed to have fewer opinions, a bigger cup size, and a quieter voice. In short, I had no chance at this seemingly sought-after form of womanhood.
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As a child, she had many interests She liked airplanes, butterflies, baseball, stickers, and zebra print. Only three of those five were acceptable. She wasn’t told this with words, but her kid brain picked up on the lilt of her mother’s voice when she asked to wear her brother’s baseball uniform for Halloween—girls mature faster than boys, so the story goes. This was the start of a habit that would carry her through life; noticing everyone else’s emotions and shifting her preference to optimize the ease of others. Her mother was pleased when she ditched the baseball uniform for a pair of sparkly butterfly wings.
Her sisters—all older, all beautiful—taught her the way of the world. Joey, her best friend all throughout elementary school, couldn't cross the line with her to sixth grade. She was already budding and bleeding, so from now on, boys were not to be trusted. Joey wasn’t interested in being her friend, her sisters assured her, and if he was, he wouldn’t be for long. She cried quietly in the shower that night. The next day, she sat with a group of girls at lunch. ignoring Joey’s hurt stares from across the room. They didn’t talk much after that.
She felt the eyes of men on her like tiny, pleasant pinpricks—her dad’s friends, her math teacher, her classmates. Oh, the boys at school loved her. They fawned over her, they wanted her on their arm. Her sisters told her how to play it—she should laugh, frequently and at everything, even if their jokes weren’t funny. She should never complain. She should bat her eyelashes, place a hand on their arms, let them kiss her, if she felt like it, but that was it. Nothing more.
“No one likes a tramp,” her sister said when she confessed that her date to the eighth-grade dance had tried to stick his hand down her pants. “Don’t put out unless he’s committed. Period.”
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I decided if she was chicken parm, then I was probably something like duck confit. Or rabbit soup. Or a bowl of cilantro. I wanted to laugh off Cool Guy’s comment, to tell the story to anyone who would listen as proof that he was a douchebag. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it because, in some way, I had always suspected his sentiments to be true. The chicken parm girls of the world existed everywhere. I went to school with them, I grew up with them, I was friends with various versions of them throughout my adolescence, and I always envied them because I knew I would never be like them.
They were always happy, or at least they seemed to be. They had to be easier to date because they were easier to please. They wanted a specific set of preordained circumstances and they always got what they wanted. They were simple creatures, but they were not simple-minded. I saw some of my more interesting classmates shift throughout the years, picking up on the never-ending supply of societal clues that life would be easier as a chicken parm girl. More boys would like you, your mom wouldn’t have to worry about you, and you would end up just fine. The world we lived in created these girls, telling them through fixed stares and movie scenes and sex education classes that this was the best way for them to be.
I prayed on my knees as a kid, kneeling at the foot of my bed, that I would wake up the next morning and become shy. I prayed I would learn to bite my tongue, to stop getting in trouble for my mouth and my attitude and my propensity to talk back. I prayed my fifth-grade crush would notice me at lunch—instead, he told my best friend that he thought she was prettier than me in front of the entire class. I read a haiku to my sixth-grade class about my crush, John Stevens. The poem was entitled “John Stevens.” I looked him in the eyes as I recited the final line of the poem, “warms and calms my heart.” After class, he told me he didn’t like me. I was not deterred or embarrassed, for I was too young to know shame.
So you see, there was no hope for me, even at the start. I would never be a chicken parm girl, no matter how much I learned to shrink.
______
She knew her fate because she had seen it play out with all of her older sisters. He would be tall, wealthy, and from a good family. He would have a brilliantly white smile and he would know exactly what sort of flowers to bring to her mother on Mother’s Day. He would get her a simple, stunning diamond on a thin band and the engagement photo would pull in at least 400 likes on Instagram, probably more. They would vacation in Aspen and Turks and Caicos, they would get whatever Doodle was most fashionable at the time. Later, they would leave New York City for a suburb they called “safe” but that really meant “white.”
They would have 2 children, a girl and boy, who would be delivered to them as piles of bland oatmeal, but whom they would do their best to groom into chicken parm and t-bone steak. They wouldn’t do it on purpose, just as their parents hadn’t done it on purpose, because they wouldn’t actually be thinking about it. Maybe that was the problem, nobody was doing any real thinking. They were too busy existing.
Chicken Parm Girl, now Chicken Parm Woman, would never stop to consider what she was teaching her daughter. Not stopping to think was a family tradition. And sure, her daughter apologized profusely for everything, even things she did not do wrong, but that was called Good Manners. And of course, she would buy her daughter a baby doll before any other toy, and of course, she would encourage her daughter to watch the movie where the princess awoke to True Love’s Kiss, and of course, her daughter would know better than to spread her legs for any old boy that came around. No one like’s a tramp, don’t put out unless he’s committed.
Chicken Parm woman didn’t make the rules, she only followed them. Maybe once, when she was younger, she saw these standards as rules, but today they were merely a way of life. And her life was easy and pleasant. But sometimes, on the nights when her husband was out of town and she could actually get some real sleep, she dreamt of being in the cockpit of an airplane, soaring high above everything she’d ever known. She was in control of the whole machine, the fate of an airplane full of commercial travelers was in her capable hands. Below her, she could just make out a conveyer belt with styrofoam bowls of oatmeal, all going in different directions, all destined to be shaped into something else, flavored with whatever was deemed acceptable.
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Cheers, my dears, and as always thanks for reading. I will never tire of reading about, writing about, talking about, and debating about the ways in which society tries to shape and contain women. For some related reading, here’s a piece from one of my favorite writers.