7. I watched Little Women three times

and the first time was most true to how I usually feel after watching a movie, meaning it was when I cried the most but had the least to say. It might have to do with the fact that in December I was more under the spell of the holidays and cynical about love and deeper in isolation, but it’s probably more just that I’m a giant crybaby sucker for Little Women, and anyone who doesn’t cry as soon as Jo and Laurie begin dancing that perfect, secret number is cold-hearted and wrong. I cried beaming so big my cheeks could practically touch my eyes. I cried watching Beth dying, even though obviously Beth would die — there can’t be a version of Little Women in which Beth doesn’t die — and Greta Gerwig rewriting Amy with such goodness and strength that makes it impossible to dislike her anymore and Jo giving voice to a loneliness so specific she became more relatable to me than she ever was in the book — but more on that later.

Point being, I cried a lot the first time around and just let it sort of wash over me. I tend to leave it at that, feeling movies a lot more than I think them, but toward the tail-end of the film is a scene I couldn’t hear perfectly and was hopeful to revisit. I saw it again last weekend, and thank God I did, because it’s practically the cornerstone of the film, when Jo says no one would be interested in reading her novel about domestic struggles and joys. Writing doesn’t confer importance, it reflects it, she says. Amy disagrees, though, proposing instead what Rachel Syme accurately calls the movie’s thesis: No, writing about things is what makes them important. 

My sophomore year I read Lydia Maria Francis Child’s The Mother Book for a nineteenth-century women writers class. It’s a manual for mothers and children in the 1830s arguing for the strict regulation of fiction, on the premise that girls are too trivial to truly appreciate serious literature. “I know very few young ladies … to whom a book is really a pleasanter resource than visiting, dress, and frivolous conversation,” Child wrote. For one, I love that Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women never so much as gave a nod to this notion of frivolity, but instead serves as a massive fuck you, brimming with visiting, dress, conversation and books. In Alcott’s original, the sisters’ literary society pays loving tribute to Charles Dickens with ridiculous names like Mr. Snodgrass; in Gerwig’s adaptation, Florence Pugh and Eliza Scanlen bring life to these absurdities with their adorable cigar clicking and foot stomping. The Pickwick Club practically toasts to girly imagination, but that doesn’t reduce its value — it only increases it. The girls write themselves into fiction, weaponizing it against the mundane. So, when Amy tells Meg and Jo that writing about things is what makes them important, she speaks from their experience. They’re the first ones to have done it.

Alcott’s whole shtick is incredibly cyclical — her characters domesticize writing, and she (and Jo) in turn writes that domesticity back into her novels. She takes the idea that girls don’t read important books and turns it upside its head, not only creating fictional characters who do appreciate them, but also proving exactly what Amy says and what Gerwig’s entire movie feels like an homage to: publishing that importance into one of the most well-known books in the American canon. Gerwig’s Little Women, then, is a reel of all the things that desperately need to be written down, and in that way, every scene is a scene about writing. It’s layer after layer of Gerwig saying there’s a straight line from what (Alcott) did to what I’m able to do now, writing humble, small, shameful things because they deserve to be written down. What I adore about Alcott’s Little Women is that it’s a proud collection of littles, a declaration in the face of skeptics like Child that no detail is unimportant, and no sister goes overlooked:

The garden had to be put in order, and each sister had a quarter of the little plot to do what she liked with. Hannah used to say, “I’d know which each of them gardings belonged to, ef I see ’em in Chiny,” and so she might, for the girls’ tastes differed as much as their characters.

Meg's had roses and heliotrope, myrtle, and a little orange tree in it. Jo's bed was never alike two seasons, for she was always trying experiments. ... Beth had old-fashioned fragrant flowers in her garden, sweet peas and mignonette, larkspur, pinks, pansies, and southernwood, with chickweed for the birds and catnip for the pussies. Amy had a bower in hers, rather small and earwiggy, but very pretty to look at, with honeysuckle and morning-glories hanging their colored horns and bells in graceful wreaths all over it, tall white lilies, delicate ferns, and as many brilliant, picturesque plants as would consent to blossom there.

Gerwig honors that: I wanted to make a movie that answers the call to authorship and says you can write it down, and it counts for something. Meg’s marriage, Marmee’s anger, Amy’s selfishness. They all deserve to be written down, and they count for something.

There’s something incredibly un-Jo in Gerwig’s movie about how little she believes in herself. How she anxiously awaits Professor Bhaer’s reaction to her work and does that thing all women are used to doing as preemptive self-protection, discounting your own talent before anyone’s even said a word: “They’re just stories.” Just. How she burns her writing after Beth dies, or how she literally pitches her manuscript to the publisher by saying it’s probably not that interesting. In these moments, it feels like the movie is almost for Jo herself, Gerwig pleading with her to just get something, anything, on paper anyway. Write it for me. Do it for someone else, Beth says. And so Jo proceeds to write her a short story on the spot, and it’s not until the second time seeing this movie that I realize she calls the post office a “capital little institution.” It’s the word she uses when she first meets Laurie — Europe?! Oh, that’s capital! — with that perfect, slangy teenage tone that makes me assume this is the 1860s equivalent of saying something as cringey as dope, or rad. It’s the word Meg warns Jo not to use in proper society, but Gerwig lets her get away with it in her fiction, and I love that. It’s a permission slip of sorts. Write something down, even the things you’re not supposed to say, and make them important.

The third time I saw Little Women was Valentine’s Day weekend, when I’d been thinking about singleness — namely, the singleness represented in popular discourse. The blubbering, post-breakup single person inhaling takeout and ice cream, or the empowered one who gives up dating to Find Herself, or the one fresh on the market, ready to find love. Regardless, singleness is almost always when we’re not taken, or in between bouts of togetherness. But the thing about not only being single, but only ever having been single, is that this doesn’t apply. Sometimes I can’t help but think there’s a specific type of person who just is single, for whom singleness is not a relationship status, but default. You don’t necessarily have to always be single to be a single person, like having a big dick doesn’t imply big dick energy, but I’m thinking of those among us who’ve never quite fathomed the idea of togetherness or whose visions of 10-years-later never include sharing a bed with someone. Of course, Jo is an easy spokesperson for this.

It wasn’t until recently that I felt myself go from the Jo who tells Laurie she loves her liberty too much to ever get married to the Jo who breaks down to her mother that maybe she should have just told him yes. It may have been the strange pressure that comes with birthdays and new years, but I spent a few months experiencing singleness as a crisis for the first time, a question I needed to answer for. And while I’m largely at peace with it again, I’m left with the precarious takeaway that I’ll never quite know, that the only real answer is to somehow continue embracing a perpetual uncertainty about love. So, when Jo gives her spiel, it’s not even her final admission of But I’m so lonely! that hits me so hard. It’s the brief pause before it, the hesitation as her breath catches in her throat, the transition between women being worth so much more than just love, but still, I’m so lonely. All the contradictions of singleness live inside that but — that sometimes we have to accept things without understanding them, that it is possible to crave something without wanting to work for or earn it, that perhaps aloneness without loneliness is an unattainable paradox.

The cynical part of me remains unsure whether Jo marries Professor Bhaer because she actually loves him, whether I can take her as a single person story of hope. But I guess that’s why I love the ridiculous spectacle of Little Women’s ending so much, because it lets us decide whatever we want to be true. I’m not usually one to believe Amy when she says we have some power over who we choose to love, that love isn’t something that just happens to a person. Instead, it feels unjust, wrong almost, that her love for Laurie happened to her, while he loved her as a choice. That’s why her words are so perfect when he first goes after her and she says, “Stop it. You’re being mean,” because it is so reductive yet true. Being loved in a way you don’t want doesn’t feel like love; it just feels mean. I wonder if Jo’s love for Professor Bhaer is any less mean than her letter to Laurie was, but maybe we just have to take Laurie’s word for it that you can never love two people the same way. It’s the ambiguity, the coexistence of Jo the married heroine and Jo the unmarried writer, that lets me find comfort, instead of fear, in the not knowing. In that world, as fiercely as she wanted to stay alone, she can just as quickly decide to change her mind.

I would have loved Little Women in any phase of my life, but there’s something about its timing, in a year of questioning — whether anything I write can be important, or what to make of my first real encounters with loneliness — that makes it particularly special. Much of this movie is also about seeing. The way Professor Bhaer turns around in the theater to watch Jo watch the play, or the way Laurie is always gazing at her and Marmee sees herself in her, or of course, the way girls, as readers, have always felt seen by Jo for her bold, boyish brashness and confidence. Gerwig definitely preserves that, but I believe she also lets us really see Jo for the first time — lost, helpless, voracious. It’s not the Jo who shamelessly proclaims no one will ever forget Jo March that I hold dear, but the one who desires so desperately for that to be true, not just as a writer, but as a woman. I saw Little Women once and it was beautiful, twice and it was about art, three times and it was about love, but through Jo, these all kind of became the same thing, the wanting to be grand, the wanting to be loved, the wanting to be important.