Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

"I am obsessed with this book. I think that Rebecca Traister is phenomenal writer. America has a noble tradition of essayists, and there are shit hot female essayists working in America at the moment. I think of them as the Rebeccas: Rebecca Traister, Rebecca Solnit . . . just brilliant thinkers. I picked up this book in a bookstore in America when I was flying back to London from LA and I basically read it on the flight back. I couldn’t put it down. The reason I chose it in the context of failure is that she speaks so eloquently about women who have failed to lay stake to their own anger. But her thesis is that it’s a socially conditioned and sanctioned failure. Because the patriarchal society that we’ve been living in for millennia is not well served by women being in touch with their anger—because anger, in Traister’s eyes and in my own eyes, can be an enormous force for change. It can be fuel and it be drive and it can be ambition to change society for the better. “Anger can be an enormous force for change. It can be fuel to change society for the better” That’s why I found it such an incredibly invigorating read. And it is very timely. She must have been writing it in real time as the #MeToo movement came about, because she handled it so well. It feels both timely and timeless, and it really, really changed the way I thought about a lot of things. One of the examples that she uses is that of the civil rights campaign and Rosa Parks, who famously sat in the whites’ section of the bus. Rosa Parks is traditionally seen as this nice, quiet, little lady who was finally pushed to this act of extreme revolution—to sit in a different section of the bus. But actually Rebecca Traister looks at Rosa Parks’ life up that point and finds that she was an agitator. She was an activist. She was extremely angry about inequality. She spoke out about it. She lost her shit. It was so interesting to see it in that context. I had never read that about Rosa Parks before. Maybe actually a lot of women are provoked, not by sadness and not by meekness, but this groundswell of anger that they haven’t been able to admit to themselves. Definitely. And, to be honest, my life over the last couple of years has really changed how I think about it. It just so happens that this coincided with the #MeToo movement. There’s a whole chapter in my new book How to Fail: Everything I’ve Learnt from Things Going Wrong that I devoted to anger, which was specifically inspired by all this stuff I’ve been reading around it. I realised, through writing that chapter, that a lot of the time in the past when I felt sad actually I was transmuting anger into something more palatable. Some of the examples I give are: after someone breaks up with you—and this has happened to me—you are sometimes at pains, as the woman, to act like the reasonable one. To not show that you’ve been wounded, to maintain your pride and your dignity and I think that the effect of that is to silence your own rage at something that you perceive to be deeply unjust. “I realised that a lot of the time when I felt sad actually I was transmuting anger into something more palatable” In my particular situation it seemed especially unjust, because I was about to turn 39 at the time my ex broke up with me. He was a younger man and he didn’t need to worry about having babies and that was why we broke up—because I needed to start actively doing that if I wanted children and he didn’t feel that he could commit to that. And actually that is a source of not only my personal rage, but also a great deal of rage for women across the ages. I thought I’d be really sad after that breakup. And I was. But the sadness masked a fury that I now acknowledge, and the interesting thing about acknowledging that fury was that I felt so much calmer as a result. I was no longer trying to be someone different. I was acknowledging that part of me and that’s been a really interesting process. But like you, in the past, I’ve found it difficult. I spent a lot of time being a people-pleaser in my past. You can’t be angry and also a people-pleaser, because you want people like you. But it’s funny because, historically, when I’ve gotten behind the wheel of a car I would get proper road rage. I would unleash the foulest expletives against people who cut into me in traffic jams. I think that was one of the only socially sanctioned ways that my anger could get out. I’m much more in touch with it now, thankfully."