The Urge to Disappear
Why do so many women fantasize about running away from home?
Maybe you, too, see them in your feeds: the memes that, in their pithy meme manner, speak to a desire of leaving it all behind, entering the forest, becoming a bog witch. What does it mean when the algorithm suspects what you thought was your secret wish?
There are plenty of good reasons why a woman might want to disappear. Most obviously for safety, to protect herself from an abuser. When women writers choose to vanish like beleaguered sexologist Shere Hite, or hide in plain sight like pseudonymous novelist Elena Ferrante, I wonder if it isn’t a version of this same instinct. The world feels, if not outwardly violent towards her, certainly spiritually inhospitable to what she wants to do—which is to live as she wants and do her work in peace and be free. And so she leaves the country, or adopts another name. She finds a way to get free.
It makes sense, too, that public figures sometimes need to forcibly duck out in order to get a minute to breathe. Look at Taylor Swift’s infamous year-out-of-the-spotlight (and wistful songs about staying there), or the current Cynthia Nixon play “The Seven-Year Disappear,” about a famous artist who seemingly vanishes. One can see the nutritional value of stepping out of the spotlight. But for most of us, in our dimly lit lives, this desire manifests differently.
And thus, the surprisingly common feminine urge to run away from home.
It feels contemporary (see also said memes), but I find it’s a theme that perpetually surfaces in literature. I know first hand because there was a time in my life when I devoured a specific flavor of books. It was a random sampling, catholic in terms of era, tone, and style, and it was only in retrospect that I was able to see the shared themes so starkly: Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go Bernadette; Paula Bomer’s Nine Months; Marcy Dermansky’s Red Car. Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. Laura Smith’s memoir The Art of Vanishing. None of these protagonists are pathos-inducing victims of abuse, or are cinematically running from the law. Part of what interested me, in fact, was their very lack of clear inciting incidents. I was drawn to characters who were less Thelma and Louise, more Wanda. Bored or frustrated women who just said, You know what? Fuck it.
In many of the books I devoured, the women desired specifically to get in the car and just drive and drive and drive, as in Sheila Ballantyne’s Norma Jean the Termite Queen or Lara Ehrlich’s short story “Burn Rubber.” There were novels populated by mothers who couldn’t even go that far, who merely fantasized about running away: Anne Roiphe’s Up the Sandbox; Ursula Hegi’s Intrusions. I steered clear—this now seems eloquent to me—from any real stories of mothers who abandoned their children. Even in the fictional stories, the running away had to stay fictional for me to enjoy it.
I just wanted to know that other women had had the urge. Other women rushed home from the office wondering what would happen if instead of picking up the kids from school they stayed on the train and took themselves out for a drink somewhere they’d never been before and simply sat alone in a dark bar, or maybe flirted with a stranger. Other women disassociated while making dinner the millionth time as the children bickered and their husband said, you used to be fun. Other women wondered what it would be like to alone on a beach, enjoying life, even if it had meant they have done something drastic, like Olivia Coleman’s child-abandoning character in The Lost Daughter, the ferocious Ferrante adaptation that was so harrowing my best friend and I had to watch it together, just to survive its honesty about motherhood.
I was intrigued by the sheer volume of these “mad housewife” novels that had been written in the 70s and 80s. So my own mother’s generation experienced this itchy restlessness, had access to this literature that was so honest and raw? So my own mother’s generation experienced this itchy restlessness, had access to this literature that was so honest and raw? The mom-blog hadn’t invented this ineffable angst? I guess I’d forgotten about second-wave feminism—overlooked, like a lot of us, how this “problem without a name” didn’t exactly get solved with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. In her famous 1963 book, Friedan writes of the dissatisfied midcentury housewives that she interviewed, “Sometimes a woman would tell me that the feeling gets so strong she runs out of the house and walks through the streets.”
Like Friedan’s restless housewives, I often wanted to run out of the house and just go… somewhere. This was impractical, so in addition to reading these books, I did all the usual things: yoga and meditation, dutifully observing the woman-heal-thyself orthodoxy of Wellness Culture. During the work day I took myself on little Artist’s Dates, devoting lunch breaks to Julia-Cameron-lite laps around galleries and stationary stores and walled gardens. I made gratitude lists, chiding myself that things weren’t so dire, this was just middle age and I might as well get used to it. I didn’t even wonder what had happened to my sex drive, assuming that too was meant to vanish in middle age.
It was around this time when I shared a quote from Jenny Offill’s novel The Department of Speculation on Instagram:
“She has wanted to sleep with other people, of course. One or two in particular. But the truth is she has good impulse control. That is why she isn’t dead. Also why she became a writer instead of a heroin addict. She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts. A character flaw, not a virtue.“
My husband—I had a husband then—was not amused.
It might have been better, safer, somehow, if I really did want to sleep with other people, rather than run away from home. Sleeping with another man, in particular, was a desire that remained legible within the structure of the patriarchy. What’s more destabilizing, I think, is admitting to a desire to slip away from all of it altogether.
To be clear, I didn’t want to be the kind of mother who thinks about running away from home. There is something so taboo, not to mention fairy-tale-witch-level terrifying, about the mother who leaves. Who was I, Doris Lessing? I felt guilty for even wanting a small break, for ducking out on weekends to write for a few hours. I love my children, obviously, and like Offill, I had strong impulse control.
The thing is, it’s all a set up. The educated woman with a career who finds herself devaluing her own work in favor of making life smooth for the family—is there any wonder she gets restless? Countless complicated issues flick the surface here: the inequities of straight marriage; the imbalance of domestic labor and the mental load in many families’ lives; all the cultural and structural scaffolding that upholds this for even the most thoughtful and educated and woke of couples. It’s systemic, babes.
The fact remains: It’s hard to be a fully actualized person when you don’t have any time to yourself.
We’re meant to work like we don’t parent, parent like we don’t work, keep our partners happy, keep ourselves happy, stay fit without ever admitting what that means is to be as small as possible, look good on social media without seeming obsessed with looking good on social media, it goes on and on. How can we remember how to be our true selves? Why can’t we ever just be?
As reactions go, taking off into the unknown is even worse than having an affair, existentially speaking. An affair would just imply that a woman wanted a different flavor of what she already had. But what the runaway woman wants is none of it. Not a different man. Not a different house. None of it.
What I did with my runaway feelings was—now it seems so predictable to me that I have to laugh, but I didn’t see it all so clearly at the time—I wrote a book. And within the book is the story of a writer who is feeling squashed by her life and who one day decides to disappear. She does the thing we all dream of: she just takes off walking and doesn’t stop. (It might well have been driving off in a car, but she’s a New Yorker.) She protects her selfhood by choosing obscurity.
My own version of speaking a resounding fuck it into the universe happened to be getting divorced. I’m not saying this runaway-rumble is the reason why my marriage ended. What I know now is that the feeling shouldn’t be ignored. It’s a symptom of a deeper wound. If you feel it, it’s worth interrogating what in your life is making you feel like a trapped animal.
And I can report that stories of women running away from home do not resonate in the same way for me anymore. I still parent my children. I still live in the same city. I still work in the same field. I haven’t run off into the woods or begun a whole new bogwitch life. But I don’t feel that restless itch anymore. I haven’t felt it in years.
Amy’s on tour – find her in your city and pick up Dear Edna Sloane at your local indie!
Exit sign photo by Keagan Henman on Unsplash
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