LEAVING LETTERS: "Having my career and bank account made it easier to leave..."
postcards from readers
Dear Kellyโ
My husband and I left print-outs of this comic as part of the wedding favors on our guestsโ tables.
Months after I left him, I bought a collection of Tom Gauldโs comics as postcards, and when I saw this one, I thought: What will I ever be able to do with this?
Your Leaving Season Postcard Project gives me a place to send it out into the world acknowledging all the sadness, longing and ultimately pride that it representsโbecause having my career and bank account made it easier to leave.
This postcard made me laugh out loud when I first pulled it from my postbox. Then I reread it in my car and cried.
I just finished Sarah Mangusoโs wild and thorny Liars an hour ago. Along with being a searing portrait of marriage and all the lies and contortions it requires, Liars is a frank examination of the relationship between money and autonomy within a partnership. Iโd planned to send this postcard out as this weekโs Leaving Letter before I even had the book in โmy hot little handsโ (IYKYK), but now it is even more perfectly timed.
About halfway through the novel, Manguso writes:
The purpose of marriage was to get stuck, I thought, so that one was forced to fix the marriage in lieu of leaving.
Enter the need for a Feminist Fairy Godmother. This is why I love this postcard (and postcards in general) so much. Life returned this image to the writer and then she found a way to transform the memory. I think if it were me, I would probably sit with the image from my wedding favor, thinking about what it meant that it had resurfaced, what it was trying to tell me.
Then I would burn it.
Iโm glad she didnโt. Iโm grateful she sent it to me, though sending it to someone else feels psychically similar to her lighting a match and torching it, in a cleansing kind of way.
I spent some time with the brilliant filmmaker Irina Patkanian this week. She shared her work-in-progress stop-motion film called Firebird and we talked about the long history of women and fireโwitches being burned and burning others, charring things, setting them alight. Burn it down is a common refrain when a woman leaves. In Slavic folklore, the firebird is a woman with a rare beauty and power (to give immortality). She is difficult to possess. Of course, men are driven mad by this; they want the magnificent creature for themselves.

At one point in the film, we see the firebird, in a dress made of fiery feathers, in a cage. The cage is slowly raised, bit by bit, so that you imagine someone just off camera hiking the cage up with a rope, hand over hand over hand, until all we see are her dangling feet. She is silent throughout.
I suddenly found myself struggling to breathe, wondering why she was silent. Why was she submitting to the cage? Why didnโt she just burst into flames and rage? It occurred to me later, of course, that she would need to set herself on fire to destroy what was around her.
Did this postcard writer lay these Tom Gauld images out on her wedding tables as a warning? Or did the joke seem so funny because it felt so far-fetched? Either way, thank goodness she was her own feminist fairy godmother. There was no need to set herself on fire, to sacrifice herself. She had her own career and bank account. She never had to submit to the cage.
โฆall the sadness, longing and ultimately pride that it represents.
That doesnโt make the leaving less painful, of course. I love the way she piles sadness, longing, and pride alongside one another.
This is what I felt in watching and reading about the firebird, all of these experiences each their own feather of fire. Iโm grateful to be able to hold them here for this postcard writer, to guard the flame.
To share it with you.
The Leaving Season Postcard Project was born out of my love for postcards and a suspicion that we are all leaving things, all the time. If youโd like to send me a postcard, please check out this link for instructions.
Want to be part of The Leaving Season Postcard Project? Or use the postcards in your classroom or bookclub? Send me a note!
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Buy The Leaving Season here, Welcome to Shirley here, Wanting: Women Writing About Desire here, and This is the Place: Women Writing About Home here.