C'est Too Much

On Proust, Deadloch, Twin Flames Universe, and returning to Paris the week of my ex's wedding

Hello from somewhere over the middle of the U.S. I’m en route to LA with my Benadryl-doped dog under the seat in front of me. Here’s some of what’s been on my mind in the past two weeks, from least to most personal —

Deadloch

This show on Amazon Prime is amazing, and nobody I’ve mentioned it to has seen it (except for my friend Jessica, who recommended it to me. Thank you, Jess.) It’s an Australian crime procedural satire set in a small Tasmanian town that has been gentrified by hipster lesbians. A serial killer is on the prowl, targeting only men. There’s some of the quirk and warmth of Schitt’s Creek, but it also becomes a genuinely suspenseful mystery in its own right, and it doesn’t succumb to that satire-pitfall of flat characters. The series opens with two teenaged girls coming across a dead man who has washed up naked on the beach. Terrified, one of the girls drops her cigarette and inadvertently sets the man’s pubes on fire.

For a taste, here’s a one-minute clip from Episode 1 of the town’s a capella group rehearsing “I Touch Myself.”

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Proust

I’ve been trying to limit screen time lately to prevent my brain from short-circuiting and heal my goldfish-level attention span, and because this is how my brain works, I thought, maybe it’s time to read all of Proust! That would be a reasonable and measured approach! Sure, I could try sleeping with my phone in another room or setting app time limits, but no, I think devoting myself to a 4,000+ page novel makes more sense. Proust is on top of the list of authors who I’ve read just enough of and about in order to sound passably knowledgeable but not enough to actually enjoy or learn from. I knew going in about his psychological acuity and winding sentences and that famous madeleine and going to bed early in Combray and writing in a cork-walled room for complete silence, but what I didn’t know was how funny he can be.

E.g. this passage from Part II of Swann’s Way, about Swann’s love interest, Odette -

Of course she claimed she loved “antiques” and assumed a rapturous and discriminating air when she said she adored spending a whole day “collecting curios,” looking for “bric-a-brac,” things “from the past.” Although she persisted in a sort of point of honor (and as though she were obeying some family precept) in never answering questions or “accounting” for how she spent her days, she talked to Swann once about a friend who had invited her to her house, where everything was “period.” But Swann could not manage to make her say what that period was. After some reflection, however, she answered that it was “medieval.” By this she meant that there was wood paneling.

I wish we talked more about humor in “serious literary fiction” and considered it an important quality as opposed to something unworthy of attention if a work is doing Other Important Things.

I’ve finished Swann’s Way, and am about to start book two. If anyone wants to read along with me, please do! I know my friend/wonderful writer Natasha Joukovsky is also on book two. She’s reading the Moncrieff translation. I haven’t decided which to read yet and am open to advice. I read Lydia Davis’s Swann’s Way, and I wish she had translated the whole series but I understand she has other things to do, as evidenced by her recently published story collection Our Strangers, which I have been dipping into. Her characteristically compressed prose is a nice counterweight to the Proust.

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Twin Flames Universe

I just watched both the Netflix docuseries, Escaping Twin Flames, and then the Amazon one, Desperately Seeking Soulmate. If you’re familiar with this madness, please comment, I’d love to discuss. If you haven’t seen but are curious, I’d recommend watching the Netflix series first, then (if you’re hooked, as I was) the Amazon one.

If you’ve never heard of Twin Flames, here’s my quick and dirty primer: The concept of having a twin flame partner is all over spiritual circles, and it’s essentially another term for soulmate except somehow more holy and mystical? This couple, who go by Jeff and Shaleia Divine (birth names: Jeff Ayan and Megan Plante) have started an organization (cult, it’s a cult) that promises if you take their series of ‘ascension’ courses, you will find your one harmonious twin flame union and be happy and fulfilled and maybe also even newly rich like Jeff and Shaleia, who delight in showing off the luxury items they’ve bought with income from their followers.

It seems to start innocuously enough, as these things always do, with advice about loving yourself and pursuing your desires and believing in your future happiness, etc…And then it gets darker.

The company is structured much like an MLM scheme but registered under the umbrella of a religion for tax-avoidance purposes and also because Jeff decided/discovered, a while into the project, that he is in fact Jesus Christ. He grew out his hair and everything. Accordingly, he’s the only one who can determine someone’s Twin Flame. At first, in the early days of the organization, your twin flame could be anyone - and if you ever mentioned anything about, say, an ex or a person you had unrequited feelings for, he was likely to say, that’s the guy! (it was usually a guy; most of their members are heterosexual cis women). He and Shaleia then encouraged them to pursue this person no matter what. Even if, as in the case of one woman, said target was an ex with an active restraining order against her for stalking. Egged on by Jeff and Shaleia, she kept violating the restraining order and ultimately ended up in jail for a month. Anyway, after a certain point, they weren’t getting enough successful Harmonious Unions, and since they promise 100% success if you follow their teachings, this was a problem.

So they changed the rules, and now your twin flame had to be a member of the organization – i.e. someone who has already bought in to this system. Smart. But, problem: most of their members were straight cis women. Their philosophy claims that every union has a “divine feminine” and a “divine masculine” coming together like a perfect yin/yang. Thus: they announced that some of their members who had always identified as female were actually men! And only Jeff could determine this! They’d tell two women, you guys are twin flames, congratulations! So and so, you’re the divine feminine, and other person, you’re the masculine. The newly-decreed “divine masculines” were expected to change their gender identities accordingly!! Some resisted and left the group, but many complied. Multiple members have undergone top surgery.

Jeff and Shaleia now have a baby daughter, Grace, who they say is the final member of their harmonious trio (apparently they are in a triple union), and because Jeff and Shaleia are so spiritually ascended, Grace is an uber-ascended baby destined to be celibate because, in her father’s words, “she can satisfy herself completely and give herself all the sex she needs.” She’s not supposed to have any sexual partners…except for God. She’s apparently allowed to have sex with God. Reminder: Jeff believes he is Jesus. There aren’t alarm bell emojis enough for this.

As I watched the documentaries, I kept thinking, these guys? Who would really believe these guys are anything but narcissistic swindlers?

Threads on Reddit r/cults (which, yes, I found myself browsing for the first time this week) are full of comments to similar effect. But - as other commenters have noted - it’s easy to say that watching from a distance, with no personal emotional investment. Manipulative schemes like this work gradually - it’s a frog in a slowly boiling pot of water scenario. As are most destructive relationships.

It’s not so different from Swann’s relationship with Odette in Swann’s Way.

Swann thinks himself into love with a woman he doesn’t even like or respect, and it becomes an obsession that consumes and devastates his life. Part of Proust’s genius is his ability to deconstruct every step of Swann’s downfall in such an astute and granular way that the reader completely understands how and why it happens. The chase, the fear of rejection, the progressive rationalizing, the widening gap between your fantasy of a person and their actual behavior, how little you become willing to accept and how much you’ll do and put up with to get it.

That’s how many unhealthy relationships work. And though well-meaning friends might remind you that you both deserve and will find better, it’s hard to believe in the abstract, especially if you’ve never experienced anything better. In the case of Twin Flames, all their members come to them because they desperately want love, have failed to find it on their own, and think they need an expert’s help. It’s a self-selecting group of particularly susceptible people.

Wildest to me is that, usually, when cult documentaries come out, the cult in question has been discredited and disbanded, but Twin Flames is still going strong, and their membership is growing. The home page of their website now contains a long statement from Shaleia that alludes to the criticism from “others on the internet.”

I watched Escaping Twin Flames on my way home from Paris a few days ago. Which brings me to…

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The latest in my life

I’m writing a novel set in Paris – a book I started while I was living there and have worked on off and on over the past couple years. I’ve battled - and have finally overcome - a nagging concern that I lack the authority to write a book set in Paris, even if I’m not purporting to be an expert on French history or culture or even putting myself inside the mind of a French person, even though my book is in fact about Americans in Paris (less Emily in Paris, more Fleabag, but Jewish).

It’s no mystery where those insecurities originated. Still: amazing how persistent certain earworms can be.

The issue: Paris didn’t exist for me before my ex. I moved there because of him, and I got to know it with and through him. I knew very little about Paris and French culture more generally when I visited for the first time in 2017. In school, when offered the choice between Spanish and French, I chose Spanish. Between AP European History and AP World History, I chose World. I had read Madame Bovary twice, and thanks to Moulin Rouge, I knew “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?” That was about it.

It turns out it’s easy to fall in love in Paris. Who knew? (Everyone. I get it.)

I fell in love in Paris and developed real affection for the city, but the latter seemed inextricable from the former. I left when we broke up for the first time in 2020 and hadn’t been back since.

For a while, I worried it would trigger upsetting memories and that traveling there solo – something I love to do, generally – would be particularly hard. Finally, I decided I was ready. It had been long enough. There were time-limited exhibitions I wanted to see and book research I wanted to do. I was ready to reclaim Paris for myself. I booked flights. The next day, I learned my ex was getting married that same week. Because of course.

It felt like the universe saying hey, I know you’ve moved on and are doing well…why not dial up the emotional pressure to test how well? Wouldn’t that be fun? One year post-breakup and he’s now married to someone who went to your elementary school while you still own pantry items he purchased, which suddenly seems weird although it shouldn’t be significant because they’re just, like, lentils and dried mushrooms, and what were you supposed to do, clean out the kitchen as a symbolic move, as if you’re getting rid of chametz pre-Passover? but anyway good luck not thinking about any of that as you wander the Rive Gauche where, oh yes, you used to live together.

All of which is to say: I flew to Paris last Tuesday bracing for an emotionally intense experience, but, to my surprise and delight….it was an easy and pleasant trip. I went to Paris Photo and to the sculptor Chana Orloff’s former studio turned museum, where her granddaughter gave a talk in French that I understood approximately 70% of. (See the preponderance of question marks in my notes, e.g.— “She married quickly. Her husband was friends w/ Apollinaire? He had a cardiac issue? Something happened in 1918. Did he die? Spanish flu! Yes, he died.”)

I went to the Modigliani exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie and then listened in on a group of schoolchildren discussing Monet’s Water Lilies and visited the reproduction of Proust’s bedroom at Musee Carnavelet. I took myself out for oysters and wrote in cafés and walked almost everywhere.

I had forgotten just how much time I spent on my own when I lived in Paris. Then, I spent my days alone and looking for ways to be less alone. I joined a gym where most of the top Google reviews were for its restaurant/bar and the women at the reception desk wore a uniform of cream turtleneck sweaters. (“Best Cocktail Bar in Paris! A must visit place. My favorite drink is the Santiago” reads one review. Another: “We had brunch on Sunday, it was good but after one hour they asked us to leave.”) I took intensive French classes at the Alliance Française – 4 hours a day, 5 days a week—which enabled me to nod with comprehension when a woman who wore a perfect red lip to spin class informed me I was using the wrong micellar cleanser for my skin type but not to participate in further dermatological discussion.

In 2019, I wandered the city agonizing about things over which I had limited control:  Would the book I had spent years writing sell? Would my loved one who had just been diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer respond to chemo? Would my relationship with my mother ever improve? At that time, the only thing I felt secure and confident in was my love life.

Last week, I was under less emotional duress. The answers to the previous questions are all, miraculously, yes. My novel is now out in paperback (please buy it? I know I’m a self-promotional broken record, I’m sorry; this is the life of an author in 2023 bc have you seen the news about literary fiction sales numbers these days? ). In spite of the dismal odds, chemo has successfully halted the stomach tumor’s growth. And next week, I’ll celebrate Thanksgiving in LA with my family – my brother and both of my parents, who have been divorced for 23 years. All of us will have dinner together for the first time in years, and I’m really looking forward to it. I never thought I’d be able to say that.

I’m not happily married or anything close to it and the world is a terrifying dumpster fire and I don’t know what the next year of my life is going to look like, but…I’m doing okay. I’m full of gratitude for what I do have as opposed to preoccupied with what I don’t. And for that I’m thankful.

That said: if you know any wonderful single men, feel free to send them my way.