Against Self-Actualization

On Susan Minot's 'Don't Be a Stranger'

Egon Schiele, Cardinal and Nun (Tenderness), 1912, Oil on canvas, Getty Images

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An older male friend once gave me the single best piece of dating advice I know of, even if, like most good advice, it’s sometimes easier to articulate than to abide by. I was in my early twenties, new to the city and eager for connection when he told me not to approach potential new relationships as if I am auditioning for the guy, as if my interest is already secure, and I am just waiting to find out if he reciprocates or finds me good enough—this is a trap, my friend said. Instead I ought to be auditioning the guy.

Ideally, this wouldn’t just be a switch up, a girl-power move, where I wrest the upper hand away from jerky men and keep it for myself, in order to “win” at dating. In the early phases of dating, my friend said, both people should be auditioning each other, watching to see how the other person thinks, what they are like, what they value, to find out if there is real compatibility and the potential for mutual respect. This approach is, he told me, how people form successful relationships. It is also, decidedly, not how Ivy Cooper, the protagonist of Susan Minot’s sad, raw new novel, Don’t Be a Stranger, proceeds when re-entering the world of dating after a painful divorce.

Accomplished and intelligent, Ivy is also in a vulnerable place psychologically when the book begins and is almost embarrassingly susceptible to the charms—such as they are—of a younger musician named Ansel Fleming. Within hours of meeting him, Ivy is keenly aware of his presence at a dinner party, as if wherever he is “held more dense molecules than were in the rest of the room.” His pull on her is not due to Ansel’s sparkling conversation; he is borderline rude. When they sit next to each other for dinner, Ivy watches as Ansel places “two BlackBerry phones” next to his plate.

Expecting a call? she said.

He looked at her without answering.

Ivy is a writer. Over dinner, Ansel tells Ivy that he has a copy of her book. She waits for him to say more. He doesn’t. This might be seen as tactless—or as an attempt, if not to neg her, then at least to make her feel unsure of herself. It works. Without his having said or done anything particularly notable—nothing one could point to as interesting or kind—Ivy cedes the power to choose to him, assuming the role of supplicant, the one seeking his approval. “Ansel Fleming,” she thinks, “felt like a glass hill she was sliding on, trying with an ice axe to find a place to stab and stick. Which she was finding she very much wanted to do. But the pressure was making her mute and she glanced down at the table.”

Someone less lonely, less sad, seated next to a near stranger, making halted conversation, would likely have assumed he and she simply didn’t click, and move on, but Ivy not only takes responsibility for the conversation’s success or failure, she also begins attributing nebulous qualities of superiority to Ansel. She “felt he was apart from” the other people at the party, that “he was more real, even than herself.”

It's hard for the reader—at least for this reader—to get his appeal. Yes, Ivy thinks he’s good-looking—a “beautiful face ,” long hair (“a shiny mass of tangles, with a part down the middle, and bound in a ball at the back of his neck”)—but still: Is that enough? We’d like to think Ivy—who is 52 and the mother of an eight-year-old—isn’t that shallow. But she may be a little too moved by superficial qualities. Although Minot doesn’t say so explicitly, it seems likely Ivy is also drawn to Ansel’s aura of minor fame. Ansel put out one successful album with a band in his early twenties and then became a bit of a cause célèbre in certain circles for having been sent to jail for seven years, beginning in his mid-twenties. (Long story.) It’s hard to imagine what else she sees in him. She found Ansel’s cooing reaction to an elderly couple holding hands “sentimental” and possibly put on; in the course of the evening, he’d laughed at something she hadn’t thought funny and failed to laugh when she’d cracked a cynical joke.

But when he emails her after the dinner party, she responds by suggesting they get dinner or a movie. He waits a week to reply: “What about Thursday at my place? I’ll give you some music.” She gratefully accepts this truncated plan. At his apartment on the appointed day, he offers her white wine, but it isn’t chilled—he drinks beer and apparently didn’t think to put the bottle in the fridge beforehand. She asks if she can put an ice cube in it; he becomes pouty. Ivy blames herself, a pattern that will repeat over and over again. But she doesn’t see it. She decides she is the one being “ridiculous.” When she tells him that both her parents died when she was eleven, he fails to ask about that.

But this doesn’t matter because in his bathroom, she discovers Ansel has “the exact same body lotion she used,” also the same coconut shampoo. Their toothbrushes are also similar, and he uses the same brand of soap, although a different scent. “It was like The Twilight Zone,” she thinks about the commonalities. “She knew it was a coincidence, and yet.” A besotted heart will, I suppose, ignore callousness and cling onto anything, even overlapping taste in disposable consumer goods. They wind up in bed a few minutes later.

I was a freshman in college when the book, “The Rules”—which advised women to play hard to get and especially to withhold sex until they were sure of commitment—became a runaway bestseller. Naturally, its retro assumptions about what men want (sex) and what women want (commitment) enraged feminists. I was, and am, with the feminists. While sex can complicate things, the real issue, as my friend implied, is power and the need to hold onto a measure of it. The problem, in other words, is not that Ivy goes to bed with Ansel too soon; it’s that she allows him to be the judge of her worth, from the get-go. In this context, the fact she enjoys having sex with him—apparently, he’s better at sex than he is at conversation or wine-chilling—doesn’t help. It feeds her obsession, cementing a dynamic in which she wants him more than he wants her.

The disastrous affair that follows will probably be familiar, in its broad strokes, to most of us, but it’s depicted by Minot with a psychological acuity and intelligence that’s impressive, even if the novel doesn’t entirely succeed as art: there is a flatness to the book that makes it feel as if it is being written in real-time by Ivy herself—that is, by a depressed person stuck in her own head—rather than by a more playful and ambitious authorial intelligence capable of giving us both Ivy’s sad point of view and a vivid, multidimensional fictional universe, something that Minot, the acclaimed author of nine books, including her excellent debut, Monkeys, published in 1986, is certainly capable of. And yet Don’t Be a Stranger is ambitious in the true and best sense of the word—one feels Minot isn’t being precious or faux-serious, isn’t angling for literary awards by writing about subjects that are fashionable but is rather wrestling intelligently with the kind of pressing but quotidian, unpretentious questions that keep real people up at night. This is what the best, the most timeless novels do—even if doing so tends to cut against writers in terms of certain transient status markers.

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Relationship probably isn’t the right word for what develops between Ivy and Ansel: it is an arrangement designed by Ansel for Ansel. They see each other only when he wants (she is almost always available when he chooses to call or text, even if it’s been weeks or months since the last time). He sleeps with other women. They do not go on dates but meet at his place or hers, often late at night or midday. He has parties to which she is not invited, and he refuses invitations to her parties. But Ivy knows if she complains, he will only become annoyed; if she annoys him too much, he may choose not to see her anymore or to see her less. She fears those possibilities, so she mostly tries not to annoy him.

She tells herself that the sex is good, at any rate. And that has to count for something, right? So says our aimless, consumerist, individualistic culture at least, which is apt, when convenient, to endow sex with special, quasi-religious significance, as if good sex means something, signals connection just as much as words—conversation—or acts of kindness do. It doesn’t, at least not in the opinion of this reader. (It should be in addition to, not in lieu of, she says primly.)

Of course, Ivy is no fool, and there were reasons she was so quick to cede the power to judge and choose to a self-important prick like Ansel, who—among his other winning qualities—likes to chide Ivy about things like not working enough, not writing enough: “It’s important to keep at it,” he says solemnly to a woman who has accomplished far more than he has. As if he knows anything about trying to stick to a strict writing regimen as a single mother—or even what it’s like not to be a selfish piece of shit, i.e., to have obligations to other people that one takes seriously.

But Ivy is still reeling from the breakup of her marriage. Her ex-husband, Everett. is an asshole, too, although a different kind of asshole than Ansel: Everett is the sturdy, dependable, quietly contemptuous kind. “He was one of those people,” Ivy observes, “who found it easier to be kind to strangers and who let himself become progressively more irritable and unbending the closer he drew to a person.” Even more than a year after the divorce, Everett remains angry with Ivy for moving with their son Nicky from his farmhouse in Virginia, where she was isolated and without work, to New York City, where she has friends, the only bit of family she has left (since her parents died when she was a child), and the possibility of finding teaching jobs—which is crucial since her finances are in shambles as well, a constant, pervasive source of stress for her throughout the book. Everett extends no sympathy or understanding to Ivy for her predicament, the difficulty of making this choice. Meanwhile, Nicky is also angry with her—for taking him away from his father. But Nicky is a child; Everett isn’t.

Given all of this, it’s perhaps more understandable—if not advisable—that Ivy seeks refuge from her pain in Ansel, in the high she experiences after sleeping with him. In those moments,

[t]houghts tumbled around in her, light and soft, so different from the heavy ruminations of divorce she’d been dragging around. She had pictured Nicky, displaced atop a wagon piled with upended chairs and baskets, rolling off in a swaying caravan down a muddy road, away from his father. Having allowed for that to happen, she deserved nothing good.

This would be fine, of course—a no-strings-attached affair is a perfectly good strategy for coping, if that’s what both people want—except for the fact that Ivy has fallen so hard for Ansel. She and he both know she wants more. One day, after sex, she initiates yet another “relationship” conversation:

I’m starting to get attached to you, she said keeping her tone light.

That’s not a good idea, he said in the same tone.

It’s not?

No.

Why? She said with the same inflection of Tell me again, though he had not in fact told her this yet.

It’s not what I’m interested in, he said simply.

Maybe the worst thing Ansel does with his power is pretend to be a nice guy. When Ivy semi-playfully calls him mean in a text after he refuses an invitation to a dinner party she is hosting, he brings it up the next time they see each other, telling her, “I hate mean people, and when you wrote that I was mean, then I realized this was taking on a bad dynamic.” Oh, really, Ansel? And why is that? Needless to say, if, in a relationship, one person’s unhappiness or disappointment is not allowed to be expressed, if that person is punished for it—threatened with the end of the relationship—then the relationship is taking on a bad dynamic, and it’s not because of anything the unhappy person has said or done.

Over time, Ivy’s hours of happiness after being with Ansel grow shorter. Meanwhile, he begins to call her less. Eventually, Ivy can’t take it anymore. She stops sleeping with him. She grows depressed. She starts sleeping with him again. Years go by, and finally the “relationship” peters out. The book shifts to the fallout. Ivy turns to therapy, to yoga, to 12-step programs, to psychiatry, to all the usual types of help on offer today to emotionally distressed people. By book’s end, she seems to have come to believe that the fault was all hers, that another person couldn’t hurt her unless she allowed him to.

In a perceptive and original double review of Don’t be a Stranger and

Miranda July

’s hit novel All Fours in the online magazine Compact, critic

Valerie Stivers

questions the familiar, pop-psych analysis Ivy has mostly embraced by the end of the book, a take that is of course premised on the largely untested—and untestable—idea that passes for wisdom in our culture as currently constituted: that our happiness is entirely internally derived and shouldn’t be dependent on other people. Such conclusions, Stivers writes,

are terribly cynical, and also don’t seem right, given the passion and commitment of [both Minot’s and July’s novels] to describing the relationships, and given the commonness and perceived importance of exactly these tormenting human experiences. So what if both of these experiences were love—the genuine article? And what if this love proposed something right—a life ordered around a profound romantic, intimate, and sexual bond—instead of suggesting something wrong? What if the “problem” is not that [Ivy and the un-named protagonist of All Fours] can’t do monogamy or have a twisted, needy psychology, but that both, in an inchoate way, yearn for a better connection with a man and a more ideal family?

I think Stivers is right. Sure, it would have been better if Ivy hadn’t been so vulnerable to a jerk like Ansel Fleming. But learning to be more careful about not falling for jerks is not the same as learning—or trying to teach oneself—not to need anyone, not to need romantic love at all. And yet wide swaths of our culture have, it seems, embraced the idea that the desire for love and romance is something we should strive to overcome, or master, in the name of something like self-actualization. In fact—if we’re being real—we ought to acknowledge that self-actualization is a concept as little grounded in evidence as the belief in religious miracles, in that I’m pretty sure no one has ever witnessed self-actualization or knows what it looks like in practice. Rather, it always seems to be just around the corner, slightly out of reach, something this or that influencer or celebrity is about to attain now that he or she has finally realized this one new “truth” and has only to apply it, for all the pieces of their life to click into place. At least happiness in love—if rarer than we might like—is something we’ve all seen with our own eyes, if we haven't experienced it ourselves.

Adelle Waldman is the author of the novels Help Wanted (W.W. Norton, 2024) and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (Henry Holt, 2013). She lives in New York with her husband and daughter.