Let Them Eat Kate
We needed her to stay missing so we could maintain our thing. You know how much we love a worldwide web thing. Especially a binary thing. A missing thing. Or even better, an empty thing. We love it the way CNN loves disappeared planes and escaped balloons. A blank thing. A thing we can all stare at and turn over, adjust the focus of, and disagree completely on the reality or cause of.
We loved a princess that was either alive or dead, the same way we loved a dress that was either blue and black or white and gold. We loved determining whether it was her in the grainy pap shots or definitely not her. Whether she was well and walking casually beside her lanky prince outside a farm stand or something so terrible had occurred that they sent a lookalike to shut us up.
We love a faraway female body we can decide is not enough or way too much. We love an easy, elegant beauty who moves through the world with natural grace and a step so light she appears to be floating. We love a woman who seems to have everything but might actually not. We love a fugitive princess dancing with John Travolta in the shadow of Reagan’s White House. We love a lonely princess binge-eating in a palace kitchen late at night.
We love to zoom in so close the thing we’re obsessed with disappears. We love to zoom out until all that’s left are a trillion tiny pixels and our own projection. We love it the way some of us love a cluster of cells they pretend are human. Inventing a life where feelings don’t exist and there can’t be any words. We love catching the richest and most glamorous in classic Photoshop fails. We love a leg too short or a blurred arm that doesn’t quite match the empty space inside its sleeve.
We love it when a princess edits her children on Mother’s Day. Because maybe she doesn’t feel like all that’s hers here on Earth, spinning around in the middle of a fathomless void, is enough. Maybe even a lady with velvet capes and diamond crowns can be overcome with a sense of insidious imperfection and the gnawing ache of unarticulated shame.
They told us she was having abdominal surgery and that she’d be recovering until Easter. They told us, though not in so many words, that she was ill and would be in pain because that’s what abdominal surgery requiring two weeks of hospitalization by definition means. It wasn’t enough for us. And now look. Look at what we’ve done. We relentlessly hounded a mother of three young children who had cancer. We did it for months. As if there haven’t already been two suicidal princesses immediately preceding her!
Our online tone was what it always is when we have a worldwide web thing: shrill, mocking, and too clever by half. Our tempo was frantic, hysterical even. Demanding she answer us. Forcing her to apologize for a picture posted on her own account. And, in fact, someone else might’ve posted that photo instead because, as it turns out, she was undergoing chemotherapy at the time. But even if she wasn’t, who gives a shit?
Us, that’s who.
We needed the Palace to be in cahoots because we love cahoots. Any cahoots. We needed her to be punished for what she did to Meghan. We needed her to make up for what they did to Diana. We needed to know if it was a tummy tuck or a hysterectomy. We needed to know if she was vain or sick.
We needed to know if her husband fucked her friend. We needed to know this most of all because if her husband fucked her friend, then maybe she’s really just like us. Maybe she’s a woman who married someone promising a castle and a crown who turned out to be just another shitty guy. Bored when the adoring girl he scooped into a fairytale became a real-life woman and a wife, when her gaze inevitably turned away from his, still a prince, sure, but no longer dashing and no longer young, no longer desired by everyone, a shift in attention all grown-up mothers need to make, on behalf of their kids and for their own sanity’s sake.
You are not alone, she said.
Hashtag Kategate.
Hashtag stomach cancer.
Stars, they’re just like us.
Praying to a God she may or may not believe in. That the cells stop dividing at an out-of-control rate. That a portentous diagnosis doesn’t prescribe a too-soon end. And now that she’s met our imperious demands, now that she’s confessed, without a filter, in no makeup, now that she’s looked at us through the end of what we’ve deemed an acceptable camera’s lens, now that we can say — unless we’re crazy, but, that couldn’t be us, we couldn’t be crazy — it’s really her, alive but ill, maybe we’ll finally lay waste to our chase. Maybe we’ll stop binge-eating bytes of another woman’s life and stop subbing in lookalikes for our abdicant grace.
This is f***ing fantastic writing. Once again, Amanda Guinzburg has reminded us of the truth. Reminded us what human decency is (or at least what it’s SUPPOSED to be).
As if decency is “going the way of the Dodo Bird” — a rare species in danger of extinction:
“This parrot has ceased to be. This is an EX-parrot!!”
She’s one of the few who can spot that bird in the wild & cry: “Oh, yes! I know what that is! It once flourished on this continent. Now there are three of them left.”
Brava & thank you, Amanda.
The fact that this poor woman has to endure her own personal hell in the glare of the media, social and otherwise, is unforgivable.