"Isaw Woody Allen onscreen for the first time as a 17-year-old, a senior at an all-girls Catholic school in a small New England town called Riverside. In the middle-class Rhode Island suburb where I was brought up, the type of person Woody Allen plays in Manhattan -a glib, disaffected, neurotic, middle-aged TV writer-did not exist. Or if they did, I had no knowledge of them-and that's probably the way it should be,"
"They opened me up to the then-unthinkable possibility that life was about something other than gainful employment and relationships designed to lead to marriage. That an adult could not only write for a living but could tire of that work, could quit because they found it too boring, as Isaac Davis, the protagonist of Manhattan does, was strange to me, surrounded as I was by adults who worked far more strenuous jobs in order to live much more modest lives,"
I first saw Woody Allen onscreen at 17 while attending an all-girls Catholic school in a small New England town. The neurotic, middle-aged TV writer archetype Allen portrays felt absent from my middle-class Rhode Island suburb. Allen's films revealed alternatives to lives focused solely on gainful employment and marriage-bound relationships. The films suggested that adults could write for a living, grow bored, and even quit their work. My community's adults performed strenuous labor, supported children, sent money abroad, and maintained respectable veneers despite fraught marriages. A decade later I left home, moved to New York, and published a novel.
Read at The Nation
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