Lilly Dancyger: There Are So Many Different Ways to Be Angry
“Every woman I know is angry,” Lilly Dancyger writes in the introduction to her incendiary new anthology Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger. In its pages, twenty-two of those women examine where anger lives in their bodies, and how it surfaces in their thoughts, words, and actions: the ways it shrinks them, and the ways it makes them bigger.
Dancyger, an essayist and outspoken feminist, was surprised by how tamely many of the writers approached the subject of anger in their early drafts; she found herself encouraging them to get the full truth of their experiences on the page. With that, the floodgates of repression burst open and the stories thundered forth.
Take Rumpus editor-in-chief Marisa Siegal. After years of suppressing rage at her drug-addicted father, he locked her out of the house, prompting Siegal to smash through the window. “There was something beautiful about the glass exploding into diamonds,” she writes. “I think, maybe, the beautiful thing was me, allowing my anger to manifest.”
Melissa Febos writes about spending a summer-camp day at an all-female nude beach as a young teen. When a man in a canoe lingers too close, Nadia, the counselor, “strode across the sand, her long body rippling with muscles, breasts bouncing as she marched into the water,” shouting at the man to leave. He did. “There was no self-hatred in it,” Febos reflects here with wonder, “only the
