Claire Conger

Dear Ms. Field,
Thank you for your heartfelt book, In Pieces. I am awed by your openness.

So many aspects of your life parallel mine: the usual teenage fog, the mixed messages about sex, the anger as a young working mother responsible for your household.

It’s the feeling you describe as “wanting something I couldn’t ask for because I was unable to find my voice” that I find intractable. I am sometimes so unable to find my voice that my throat will tighten and I will be unable to speak, especially when I am with men who interest me. I fear being ghosted.

This inability to speak seems to have affected your experience with Jimmy Webb. He interested you, and you, wanting him to call, found yourself by the phone, “waiting breathlessly, in proper girl fashion.”

“I wanted to be someone I wasn’t, someone Jimmy would like.” That’s how girls were trained in the 1960s, trained to pretend to be someone we’re not because we think we need to in order to get a man, which was, until the second half of the twentieth century, a girl’s meal ticket. It still is for some of us.

We get caught in this quagmire even when we are able to provide for ourselves. What was it about Burt Reynolds that held you? The same je ne sais quoi that charmed your mother? He wanted you to be the realization of some image, and you experienced his disapproval when you expressed a more authentic self. To stay with your man, you danced to his tune . . . until you couldn’t stand it anymore.

Can we outgrow this pretense? I direct the question at myself: I need to grow up. This presupposes that other women feel no need to be someone they’re not, but now I know, having read In Pieces, that there is at least one other woman who has had this experience: you, Sally Field.