Self-loathing as a form of narcissism: "It's not you" by Elizabeth McCracken

I will confess that what I enjoy most about reading literature is examining themes. Maybe this is a bit adolescent of me, the way I like to find and underline the passages in the story that operate as keys to deciphering the whole text. I recognize that this need I have to find the "right" passages and explain why they're the right ones is very "diligent school boy" of me. (And oh, how delicious when, as a student, I would find the professor calling out the same passages for the same reasons, meaning I "got it.")

But it's not just the school boy in me wanting to be told he did a good job that makes me appreciate themes in literature, not just my narcissistic need to be told I'm a good student. It's an even deeper need than that, the need to find wisdom for how to live, how to think about the very weird fact that we are here. That's why my favorite stories tend to be the ones where the author, in an act of extreme kindness, has left a clear breadcrumb trail to the main treasure. Stories like Elizabeth McCracken's "Thunderstruck," which made the Best American Short Stories collection from 2015. That story contained several passages that all but screamed out, "This story is about how impossible it can feel to do parenting right." I've thought about that story nearly every day since reading it, because, well, I feel every day like I'm not doing a good job of being a parent. "It's Not You," McCracken's entry in the 2020 BASS, isn't quite as generous when it comes to pointing the reader toward its themes. 

Here, perhaps I should quickly digress into what a theme is, although I've done this many times before. A theme isn't a subject. So when you read, as you will on many, many literature-focused blogs and websites, that the theme of work X is "love," they're doing it wrong. A theme is an attitude toward a subject, like, "Love sucks," or, "Love is different from infatuation, because love involves sacrifice." The subject is still important. You need to figure out the story is about love in order to then do the work to figure out what it's saying or implying about love. It's just that it's only one step.

"It's Not You" holds its cards a little close to its chest about what it's saying about its subject, but it is very gracious in letting the reader know what the subject is. It does this by screaming at us several times the name of the hotel where the protagonist stays throughout the narrative: The Narcissus Hotel. And just in case we were tempted to think that no, there's no way this story would give us a symbol so obvious as to name the hotel for a character from Greek mythology, it then describes the hotel in such a way to make the link undeniable: "it sat on the edge of a lake and admired its own reflection."

There is clearly a boob in this painting. Art is awesome. 

The Narcissus Myth

In case you've forgotten the myth, there are several versions, and details from different versions seem to matter for "It's Not You." Overall, it goes something like this: Narcissus was the son of a minor god and a nymph who was renowned for his good looks. The nymph Echo fell in love with him, but because she had been cursed by Hera (long story there, but it has to do, like all Greek myths at some point, with Zeus being horny) to be only able to repeat the last words someone said to her, Narcissus ignored her. She eventually faded away until only her voice remained, while Narcissus, depending on the version of the story, either stared at his own reflection in a pond until he died or threw himself in, longing to be with the beautiful person he saw, and drowned. However he died, a flower bearing his name grew up in the spot by the spring. 

Both Echo and Narcissus Matter

Narcissus isn't the only Greek mythological figure impacting "It's Not You." Echo is also important, because our main character is bad with faces but remembers voices. She's also been told before she has a great voice. She works in radio, but not as on-air talent; she works in HR.

Our unnamed narrator, a twenty-seven-year-old woman, has checked into the Narcissus Hotel on New Year's Day 1993. We know she is telling the story from some time near the present, because she is frequently interrupting the story to reflect on how things were different in those days. This has an effect on the tone of the story. Rather than learning what the character learns as she learns it, we are getting it from a woman who has already absorbed the meaning (or lack of meaning) of the story. This is a story from experience, not a story of innocence. 

The narrator has gone to the hotel to drink and feel bad in order to get over a breakup. It's a good set-up for a country song, because she's brought with her "one change of clothing, a cosmetic bag, a bottle of Jim Beam, a plastic sack of Granny Smith apples," and she plans to cry herself over the blues, to "feel bad as fast as I could in highfalutin privacy, then leave the tatters of my sadness behind, along with the empty bottle and six apple cores." 

Anything coming to you, Lurleen? 

This could be empowering, if it were a country song, where a woman would plan to cry hard for a while and then get over it, but there's something a little perverse about the narrator's attachment to sadness. She doesn't own a TV at home, but in the hotel, she plans to watch TV to help her cry, because it allows her to achieve a "self-excoriating" level she can't without TV. Baths are also a big part of her plan. 

We later learn that she'd only been in this relationship that's got her so down for a few weeks. What was so devastating about it to her wasn't the time spent, it's how it ended. The lover had "...apologized and explained enormous deficiencies, self-loathing, an unsuitability for any kind of extended human contact." In other words, he's used the "it's not you, it's me" line on her.   

This might not have been so bad if the guy in question hadn't then ended up conspicuously necking a few weeks later with someone else in the small town where the narrator lives. The message she received from this quick transition from "It's not you, it's me" to "I'm in love with someone else" is that it was very much "her." It wasn't a lost love she was crying about, it's how that lost relationship made her feel about herself, a thought so maudlin in its self-pity, it nearly wipes away any pathos one might feel for her: "Even at the time, I knew I wasn’t weeping over anything actual that I’d lost, but because I’d wanted love and did not deserve it. My soul was deformed. It couldn’t bear weight. It would never fit together with another person’s." 

Enter Echo

We as readers can see that the narrator is being foolish. Even the narrator isn't trying too hard to sidestep her own youthful foolishness. We can, of course, be kind about her foolishness, remembering that we, too, have likely been there at some point, feeling the pain of rejection mostly because of what we think that rejection says about us. The mature narrator paints a portrait of herself as a younger woman in which the younger version is a bit of a Narcissist, drawn to the spring of the bathtub, reflecting on herself too much. 

Her plan to drink, cry, and bathe her sorrow away might have worked, but probably only for a while. There'd be another heartache to absorb, one that would have hit her just as hard. But fate intervenes when she overhears Dr. Benjamin, a radio advice-giver, talking to the waiter at the hotel, and she recognizes his voice. 

Like a lot of counselors, Dr. Benjamin mirrors back some of what the narrator tells him. Echoing is, in fact, a key component of therapy. Anyone who's ever been to therapy is familiar with the, "What I'm hearing is ___" formula. At first, the mimicry from Dr. Benjamin registers as possibly playful, flirty banter, and the reader wonders if this run-in is leading to something romantic that will allow the narrator to get her groove back:

"What are you doing in this neck of the woods?"

"Is it a neck?"

The two do, in fact, go to the good doctor's room. But he's not into her, not in that way. She can see that she comes across to him as more a girl who needs to get her act together than someone sexy. The mirroring that Dr. Benjamin does of the girl moves slowly from sounding flirty to sounding clinical, like an exchange between therapist and patient:

"...How long?”

“How long what?”

“Was your relationship with whoever broke your heart.”

“He didn’t break my heart.”

“ ‘Was mean’ to you,” he said, with a playacting look on his face.

I did the math in my head, and rounded up. “A month.”

“You,” he said, in his own voice, which I understood I was hearing for the first time, “have got to be fucking kidding me.”

It had actually been two-and-a-half weeks. “Don’t say I’m young,” I told him.

“I wouldn’t,” he said. “But someday something terrible will happen to you and you’ll hate this version of yourself.”

“I don’t plan on coming in versions.”

“Jesus, you are young.” Then his voice shifted back to its radio frequency, a fancy chocolate in its little matching, rustling crenellated wrapper. “How mean was he?”

“He was nice, right up until the moment he wasn’t.”

“Well,” he said. “So. You’re making progress. Wish him well.”

“I wish him well but not that well.”

But that wasn’t true. I wanted them both dead.

“The only way forward is to wish peace for those who have wronged you. Otherwise, it eats you up.”

Dr. Benjamin, Echo that he is, has used the narrator's own words back on her. "Was mean to you" were her own words. He has also pretty clearly provided a way out of the woman's narcissism and the unhappiness it causes her.

But it's not that simple

Dr. Benjamin isn't a magical radio therapist who appeared right when the narrator needed him to give her the magical words to get over. He was there to meet with one of his frequent callers, Dawn from Baton Rouge. And while Dr. Benjamin doesn't seem to have predatory designs on the narrator, his interest in Dawn does seem to be romantic. He bought her a collectible stuffed rabbit, and not long after revealing to the narrator that he had come to the hotel to meet Dawn, he tells her that "in another life, (he'd) have been a better man," which seems like a pretty obvious lament that he hasn't been faithful to his wife, the "love of his life" he talks about all the time on his show. 

Furthermore, Dr. Benjamin allows the narrator to first get incredibly drunk off the mini-bar, and then to get naked and into the bath of his suite. Perhaps he is actually going to have sex with the narrator after all, we think, but when he comes into the bathroom to talk to her, he again seems to be there more for her good than his own desires. 

When he comes into the bathroom, the narrator describes herself as not covered by "a little cocktail dress of bubbles" that would have made her more modest. She says that perhaps she would have been so covered in "another version of this story," which is something of a sly nod to the fact that much of the story is playing with the mythology. 

In the version that's there, however, Dr. Benjamin seems to be, if anything, turned off by her in all her nakedness. "Just like you to bathe in your birthday suit," she imagines him thinking. She has explained that she doesn't like bubble baths because bubbles are a "form of protection." They "hide you from your own view." In other words, the baths she's been taking as part of her break-up ritual are the severest form of her narcissism, because they force her to see herself completely naked. 

We tend to think of narcissists as people obsessed with how wonderful they are, but self-loathing can also be a form of narcissism. Whether you're staring at yourself to see how beautiful you are or how ugly you are, either way, you're staring at yourself. What the narrator needs to do in order to get over isn't actually to do MORE introspection, as is usually the case, but less. She needs to focus outward, not inward, and accept that her recent breakup, and in fact many of the rejections life throws at her, really aren't about her. When someone says, "It's not you," she needs to believe it, even if it's true in a different way from how it's said.

A weird denouement I'm not sure how to parse

The narrator asks Dr. Benjamin while he's sitting on the edge of the tub to tell her to change her life. He's reluctant at first, because he's more into the empathy kind of counseling than the "straighten up and fly right" brand. But he eventually relents, and he mirrors back what she's asked him to say. He then says that if he keeps sitting by the tub, he's going to fall in, which seems to indicate he's realizing that he can't fall into the same trap that killed Narcissus. The story could have ended with him walking away, and we'd assume that the narrator eventually got over.

But it doesn't end there. His last words to the woman are actually, "You know where to find me," suggesting that he might be up for sex if she gets herself out of the bath. Or maybe he's saying that if she gets out and puts some damn clothes on, they can talk some more, because he's not looking to get in the tub and have sex with her self-pitying ass. 

The woman wakes up, face-down in the tub, having somehow jolted awake as she was about to drown. The water is running, and someone from the hotel is banging on the door, because the water was running into the room downstairs. The narrator nearly died from passing out drunk in the tub of a radio personality. The hotel helps her find replacement clothes for her soaked garments that were beside the tub. She walks home, sort of wishing her ex and his girlfriend well as she goes past their house.

What the hell happened? Why was the tap on? Did Dr. Benjamin turn it on, or did she while she was blackout drunk? Here, suddenly, the narrative is uncharacteristically stingy about helping the reader out. The narrator tells us that, "There isn’t a moral to the story. Neither of us is in the right. Nothing was resolved. Decades later, it still bothers me." What on Earth does that mean? "Neither of us is in the right" and "decades later, it still bothers me" tend to suggest that something happened off the page that the narrator isn't telling us about. There are various versions of the story that are possible in this myth, too. 

It's also not clear from what position the narrator is speaking to us years later. She has actually learned something from her time at the hotel, but she almost brushes off this epiphany as though it wasn't the point and it's not that important: "I would like to say that this was when my life changed. No. That came pretty quick, within weeks, but not yet. I would like to say that the suggestion of kindness took. That I went home and wished everyone well. That I forgave myself and found that my self-loathing was the curse: forgiveness transformed me, and I became lovely. But all that would wait." Even when it does come, she doesn't embrace kindness beyond its pragmatic utility: "I became kinder the way anybody does, because it costs less and is, nine times out of ten, more effective."

Does this kind of epiphany really pull the woman out of narcissism? We can't be sure. She used to hate the way not being loved made her "vivid to herself," but now, she tells us, she is "loved and in black and white." She also is told everywhere she goes she has a familiar voice. She won't tell anyone why, but we do know they found a new host to Dr. Benjamin's show when he died of a heart attack a few months after he met the narrator. Did she take over somehow? Is she now referring to her callers as "caller," because calling them by their names is too personal? 

One possible version of this story--and I think ultimately, true to its mythical origins, there are only versions, not one version--could see the ending as something of an authorial intrusion. The story need not be historical for it to be partly auto-biographical. The author can insert her own thoughts into it anywhere, even if she never got naked in a radio host's bathtub at twenty-seven. Is the woman who is loved "in black and white" the author, whose texts appear in black and white? Is this also the person who is refusing to reveal her identity to the curious at the end, the one who doesn't mind if people figure out the secret, but who isn't going to be kind enough to help them, because why be kind when life itself isn't? 

If not, I'm not sure how else to take it, although there are, quite by design, other versions of this story that are possible. While McCracken wasn't quite kind enough in this story to give us the keys to the mystery, she was kind enough to tell us what box the answer was hidden in, and that seems like kindness enough. At least, for a riddle as fun to puzzle over as this one was. 

Other readings:

Karen Carlson at a Just Recompense, who really did a lot of research on the mythical aspects of this story.