"You are just bitter"

Thoughts on anger, truth, and sucking lemons

My beautiful book, This American Ex-Wife, is out in the world now. Thank you to everyone who has already read it and loved it. It was Esquire’s book-of-the-month pick and I really enjoyed this interview with Amanda Marcotte in Salon. If you haven’t read it yet, I hope you do. It’s funny, and fun, and argues for a better way to build our lives and our loves.

Last June, I visited the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha to give a talk about hope and how to keep fighting in a world that wants to silence you. On display was the work of Jennifer Ling Datchuk, an artist who uses ceramics, mirrors, and hair to create sculptures that explore her layered identity as a Chinese American, a woman, and someone who grew up as a third-culture child. The installation was called “Eat Bitterness,” a Chinese idiom that describes enduring hardship without complaint, sucking it up, suffering in silence.

One video, titled “Tame” (2021), depicts Datchuk holding a basket of porcelain figurines as her hair is being yanked from behind. Hair-pulling is sexual. It’s punitive. It’s also a mechanism of control. Each pull rattles the fragile porcelain. But that is the only sound. Even as the artist's neck jerks back and forth, she never cries out, never complains. The only sound is the clinking of small figures ready to break. But they never do. And the video loops. Her hair is pulled. Over and over. I could not stop watching.

Strangers online love to call me a bitter woman. Every time I have written about love or marriage, someone will pipe up to dismiss me because of my bitterness. In her 1994 article “Being Dismissed: The Politics of Emotional Expression,” the feminist philosopher Sue Campbell describes bitterness as an emotion that is collaboratively formed. It is often ascribed to a person by another as a way to demean and dismiss a message, often one of pain and betrayal. Telling someone they are bitter is meant to “block the strategy of anger by both shifting attention away from blameworthy behavior to the mode of expressing blame and by shifting the responsibility from the people who could do something about the blameworthy behavior to the expresser herself, who is now meant to account for her behavior.”

Or as Audre Lorde wrote in 1984, “I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, ‘Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.’ But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change?”

Is it the way I am saying it? Or is it what I am saying?

And I am a woman, 41 years on this earth. I don’t know my time of death, but I can safely say I am middle-aged. But at this point, I’ve tried saying what I need to say with a smile or a wink. I’ve said it in gentle tones and through tears. I’ve laughed and I’ve cried all these words but it’s never enough. 

The truth is there is no tone that I could use to say what I have to say that would ever make my message more palpable, more acceptable to the power and the patriarchy I am trying to change. Let them call me bitter, I think. I am bitter sometimes. Bitter at all that’s been done. Bitter about the reversal of rights, the legislation of gender that is leading to violence. Why shouldn’t I be bitter about that? What should I be? Calm? 

In her 1991 essay “What’s Wrong with Bitterness?,” feminist theorist Lynne McFall described bitterness as reciting “one's angry litany of loss, long past the time others may care to listen." But these losses are important to tally. Because in them we can see not just personal failures but systemic and structural failures.

I have always loved bitter foods. I ate lemon peels as a child. And I still do. I fish them out of my drinks at bars, relishing each sharp bite. Sometimes my friends or bartenders will stare and comment. “You like that, huh?” I won’t even notice what I am doing. Dark chocolate. Coriander. Cranberries. 

My parents tell a story about me as a baby — 9 months old, left at a table at a Mexican restaurant with my father, who saw me reaching for a jalapeno. He passed it to me. I ate it. And I refused to spit it out. I didn’t cry. My mother will pick up the story here, slapping my father on the arm in punishment. “And I came back from the bathroom and saw you with one big tear rolling down your face and your father laughing.”

It’s one of those stories of family lore. Did I shape myself into the fire-eater because this is who I was as a baby? Or did the story itself make me want to be her?

I love to swallow bitterness, to let its sharpness rest in my mouth. 

There is a deep reservoir of bitterness in our culture. It doesn’t take much to tap into it. Simply exist as a woman or a person of color online (or offline, for that matter) and have an opinion. Four years ago, I matched with someone on a dating app and he unmatched with me when I told him I was a journalist. I jokingly tweeted that I was going to check public court records to see what this person was hiding. I don’t even remember his name. But that tweet lives forever in Reddit forums. Whenever a story I have gets widely shared or something I do attracts attention, a horde of people online will bring it up. “Aren’t you that journalist who doxxed a man?” They’re angry over a slight never given. An injustice never meted out. 

I joke in response. I laugh at them. “Why are you so obsessed with me?” Or “For four years I’ve lived rent-free in your head?” 

I know too that bitterness is a vast and terrifying thing. 

I don’t want to become that. I know that I am not. But I also know I will be seen that way as long as I exist and tell the truth of my life. And sometimes it’s hard to know the difference between who I am and what people tell me I am.

In a 2023 study, researchers found that people perceived feminists to be more hostile to men then they actually were. In essence, “Participants … underestimated feminists’ warmth toward men, an error associated with hostile sexism and a misperception that feminists see men and women as dissimilar. Random-effects meta-analyses of all data showed that feminists’ attitudes toward men were positive in absolute terms and did not differ significantly from nonfeminists.’”

Am I bitter or am I just seen as bitter because I won’t be quiet?

Bitterness, like anger, is a morally neutral emotion. It’s how we wield that feeling that gives bitterness power and moral weight. Is it a cudgel or a force for uniting? Philosopher Kathryn Norlock surmises that bitterness can be an active force for good when it is used to unite people in understanding the past to create a better future.

I think of all I have swallowed. All the bitterness I’ve eaten. And I think — I believe — it is part of what makes my work so clear. “You are so bitter” is used to brush off what I write, but it is also what helps me keep writing, keep going. I am bitter about what is unjust, and it is my pleasure and my power to eat the lemon peel because not everyone can. And so that not everyone has to. 

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I am going on a little book tour! You can find more info about these events on my website.