You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In: On Girlfailure, Insecurity, and my Return to the American South
Written by Sophie Abbott
It’s been a year and some change since I graduated on a rugby pitch in London, hungover and wearing the wrong shoes for the occasion. My only pair of heels were packed and halfway across the Atlantic, so I wore heavy, leather Doc Martens with my sundress -- a yellow number bought on impulse after I couldn’t bear to stare at myself in Soho changing rooms for a second longer. I had thrown up five hours prior and brushed my teeth with the last squeeze of Colgate I had to my name.
I spent the last three years of my life in one of the largest, most important cities in the world. I came of age in a foreign country, in a dizzying, half-drunk, whirlwind way and the whole thing was coming to an anticlimactic end. I hadn’t written in weeks, and wouldn’t write for months afterwards. The next morning, I boarded a plane and wound up back in the States, in the South, the place I always swore I’d get out of if it was the last thing I did.
A month after I moved back to Georgia, MJ Lenderman released Manning Fireworks, an album that I am not normal about at all. It’s only nine songs long: thirty-eight minutes of slacker rock, folk twang, rollicking nonsensical tragedies about dudes who are, to put it bluntly, total losers. As a twenty-three year old woman, I really have no business being so entranced by this type of thing -- the Denis Johnson of it all. Even so, Lenderman’s soundscape and lyricism are so undeniably American that I clung to this album as the reverse culture shock set in.
After stepping foot in a Walmart for the first time in three years, I was overstimulated and nearly unable to speak -- it seemed impossibly stupid that something as mundane as glaring fluorescent lights, shopping carts, screaming children and sixteen boxed mac-and-cheese options was enough to send me over the edge, and yet… The same thing happened getting a flat tire in Downtown Atlanta, and again driving in a downpour on the spare to get it fixed. I sobbed behind the wheel and cursed myself for this regressive, teenage anger. I’m not exaggerating when I say the only thing that provided immediate comfort was Manning Fireworks. Lenderman’s slow-rolling voice, his stories that you can sense are being told with a nonchalant shrug, his observations about the South that elicit something funny, sad, and familiar -- it soothed me like the first drag of that drunk cigarette, the one that doesn’t count.
The irony of writing about a man’s music for a blog about girlhood is not lost on me in the slightest. I wanted so badly to throw myself back into my Joan Didion phase, to relate to the Southern gothic, bad-girl landscapes of Lana Del Rey or Ethel Cain, to dance my feelings away in a Brat-green halter top, but the girls seemed to have it together -- when they fell apart, it was still in an ostensibly chic way. Even Wednesday, the phenomenal, female-led band that Lenderman has belonged to for years, seemed too cool for me.
When the term“ girlfailure” gained traction, and was eventually colloquialized to“ girlflop”, I had never felt more seen: finally, a term for girls who feel like they’ve lost the manual to their own femininity. Girls who feel more like someone’s deadbeat uncle. Girls who want, more than anything, to get back to their most authentic selves, but can’t remember where they left it. My argument for MJ Lenderman’s relevance in this blog is that I was truly obsessed with his album, and girlhood is about leaning into what captures your attention, no matter how cringe it makes you look.
Leaving London was like breaking up with a toxic girlfriend -- she was beautiful, expensive, and so cold. I needed to process my feelings like the true Southern girlfailure I was: by hanging out in dive bars, smoking Marlboro 100s, and cracking Miller High Lifes in the shower. This was the newest phase of my girlhood, and it was set to the tune of Manning Fireworks, an album that never judges its listener because it knows you’re already judging yourself. Like anyone going through a self-inflicted life change, I thought about myself incessantly -- what if London was the most interesting thing about me? Who was I now that I had returned to my home state by choice? What did the South even mean to me anymore? I had always viewed it as something to escape, and now it was my life again, and I no longer had a telltale you’re-not-from-around-here accent, a conversational crutch. I was now Sophie Abbott from forty-five minutes up the road. My individuality complex had taken a hit. I started bartending full-time, trying not to think about my college degree and group of gorgeous, accomplished, Londoner friends five thousand miles away. As Lenderman sings on“ Joker Lips”, Every Catholic knows he could’ve been pope.
“Leaving London was like breaking up with a toxic girlfriend -- she was beautiful, expensive, and so cold.”
My first attempt at making friends was clumsy, quite literally, as I lost my balance walking around Little Five Points, tripping over my feet and my words. I had accidentally invited myself along to an established friend group’s plans and -- fun fact -- my balance worsens when I’m nervous. At one point, one of the friends said they were getting secondhand embarrassment every time my foot caught on uneven pavement. I checked my phone twice in traffic on the way home, hoping for Instagram follow requests that never came, as“ Rudolph” buffered on the stereo. How many roads must a man walk down ’til he learns?
My missteps didn’t stop there. After a night out with coworkers in the East Atlanta Village, I violently puked up amaro for eight hours straight and had to cancel the hair appointment that was supposed to turn this whole trainwreck around because I couldn’t open my eyes without the room spinning. My boyfriend, coolheaded as ever, fed me singular Extra Toasty Cheez-Its between careful sips of Gatorade. In the haze of hangxiety and regret, I could hear nothing but the sad squeal of the violin in “Rip Torn,” the biting, heartbreaking turns of phrase. You need to drink some water / It’ll kill the need to puke / You need to learn / How to behave in groups.“ I don’t know what I’m doing,” I told him, over and over again. His response never changed.“ You’re gonna figure it out.”
And, remarkably, I did. I wish I could tell you the exact moment I stopped caring so much, stopped trying to create a divide between my London self and my Atlanta self, stopped analyzing exactly how everyone I met might perceive me. I wish I could tell you the exact day that I broke my streak of listening to Manning Fireworks every morning.
It wasn’t the day of the gynecology appointment I didn’t realize was over until the next patient walked in to see me half-naked, with my feet still in the stirrups. Or the day I was diagnosed with Bipolar II. Or the week I visited London to see my friends and got emotional at the pub, because I missed them but did not miss the city, and how could that be? Or the moment I got a casual voicemail from the boy who shattered my trust in a king-size bed years ago, during my first year of university --“ Hey, Sophie, I hope you’re doing really well. I was just calling to check in with you. If you’re open to talking to me, I’d really appreciate it if you call me back…” Or the time I drank two coffees and cough syrup on an empty stomach and shit myself, for the first time in my adult life, at my place of work. All in a year’s work!
Girlfailure, I’ve realized, is a state of mind. And it’s okay to live in that mindset, to wallow in it, to tell yourself that you’re just as downtrodden and unworthy of success as any of the characters in MJ Lenderman’s world, or any beatnik sphere. Eventually though, you’ll hit your limit. Insecurity, self-loathing -- it’s loud and grating and exhausting and inescapable. One day you realize you’ve listened to the same nine songs on repeat for twelve months and you’re ready for something new, something that’s not about you anymore. It wasn’t until I gave up on trying to figure out what my return to the South meant that I realized I had already solved the riddle. My neighbor John grows cherry tomatoes and leaves fresh-cut flowers from his garden on my porch in the spring. I call my little sister every Sunday, for at least an hour, no matter what’s going on in our respective lives. I make birthday cards for my bar regulars, and they bring me life updates and homemade egg rolls and the latest work drama. My friend Madeline has a laugh that, when you earn it, genuinely feels like winning the lottery. My London girls blow up my phone constantly with encouragement, poetry, song recommendations, grievances, Pop Crave updates. My world didn’t end when I moved back to Georgia -- it was just getting started.
During his Atlanta show at Variety Playhouse this past January, I watched MJ Lenderman breeze through most of Manning Fireworks without batting an eye. It wasn’t until he introduced a new song, something completely unreleased and never before played, that he paused to draw a breath.
