Week Four: Couplets
JUNE 28, 2023 • CAMP TOB WEEK FOUR
Couplets
with Activity Leader Moti Lieberman
Hello! This week, we round out our first month of Camp ToB 2023—and with it, this month’s vibe of “every story is a love story”—with our discussion of the second half of Couplets by Maggie Millner.
And now here’s Activity Leader Moti Lieberman (aka capfox in the Commentariat), who will take us through the rest of Couplets. Moti, it’s all yours!
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A woman lives an ordinary life in Brooklyn. She has a boyfriend. They share a cat. She also has dreams: of being seduced by a throng of older women, of kissing a friend in a dorm-room closet. But the dreams are private, not real. One night, she meets another woman at a bar, and an escape hatch swings open in the floor of her life. She falls into a consuming affair—into queerness, polyamory, kink, power and loss, humiliation and freedom.
This has been excerpted from the publisher’s summary and edited for length.
Moti: Thank you! Here are this week’s discussion questions.
The relationship between the narrator and the boyfriend seemed more interesting to me after it had broken up, and particularly because there's a contrast between her initial statement in the Proem (“My eye loved everything it fell upon. And then one day it fell upon a mirror. And he was nowhere in the mirror.”) and the sections at the beginning of chapter three where the narrator sees the ways in which he's cropping up in her mannerisms and interactions with her new girlfriend. Do you think this is a matter of not noticing the connections when they were together? Or of a shift in influence after the fact? Does it change your view of who they were together, to see the influence he has on the last two books?
Here we are in a period of changing attitudes towards queerness, with more promise and many remaining challenges. In Poem 4.3, where the narrator and her girlfriend visit Willa Cather’s home, they feel tentative in a space belonging to a historic sapphic writer. And then there’s the trip they take to visit Millner’s family, as well. In what ways is Millner commenting on what’s allowed now vs. then, and when and where? Did you feel the mood of the story change in these parts?
Speaking of women writers, Millner is directly in conversation with a number of them over the course of the book—not just Cather, but Woolf, Gornick, Lorde, Léger, more. How did you feel about her place there, and her perspectives on these different authors?
There are some good thoughts about gender, and not just in the authorial conversation. I particularly appreciated Poem 4.5, about the expectations put on a young woman, and the unruly nature of her desire and the yearning for a “fierce, untrammeled feeling.” How did you feel that Millner’s gendered experience played into the story or the form?
Finally, I’m curious about everyone’s thoughts about the role of love in the story and the author’s life. In 4.11, Millner quotes Gornick about how romantic love isn’t at the center of our modern stories, because we don’t believe it to be worthy or capable of the changes we want to see. But, Millner says, that’s the power of poetry. Did you feel more moved or the story more believable given the form it’s taken and the liberties we extend to it? We had a discussion during the first week about how the characters in poetry are allowed to be sketchier. Does that make it easier? The narrator does seem changed in the coda, even if the romance didn't survive. Does that feel like proof enough to you?
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