The Best Girlfriend You Never Had (Criticism)

Criticism

Chris Semansky

Semansky is an instructor of English literature and composition who writes about literature and culture for various publications. In this essay, Semansky considers Houston's characterization of Lucy O'Rourke in "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had."

The process of creating characters in fiction varies from writer to writer, but key ingredients of characterization include a character's physical appearance, how she talks and interacts with others, her thoughts, and her personal history. Houston characterizes Lucy O'Rourke largely through her dialogue, behavior, and thought, but she also characterizes her through her personal history and her profession — photography. Lucy's passion for taking pictures is more than just a profession; it is a way of seeing the world, and it is integral to the way that Lucy tells her story.

The structure of Lucy's story resembles a photo album. In between her descriptions of the day she spends with Leo, Lucy sprinkles verbal "snapshots" of herself as a two-year-old child, as a teenager, as a young adult, and as a thirty-one-yearold newly arrived resident of San Francisco. Photo albums are intensely personal in nature and often are structured to tell a story — about an individual, a couple, a family, etc. — in pictures. The person compiling the photos chooses, consciously or not, photographs that illustrate how the subject changes over time. Conventionally, photo albums contain "happy snaps," that is, snapshots showing the subject in the best light, smiling during a birthday party or goofing around with the family at the beach during a summer vacation. Photographs of unhappy moments or of events that undermine the idea of a less-than-content childhood or less-than-perfect family are rarely taken. Lucy's life, however, is recounted as a photo album chock full of just such moments and events. She remembers them because they illuminate her emotional impasse.

Four of the fourteen sections in the story are verbal snapshots of Lucy interacting with her parents. Like Houston, Lucy is an only child. These interactions help to characterize Lucy, giving readers a glimpse into her personal history. They function as a kind of explanation for why Lucy is the way she is. In all four sections, Lucy focuses on her father and the ways in which he withholds love from her. When she describes her parents together, they are fighting. Perhaps the most telling snapshot, if you will, is of a time when Lucy was four years old and she accidentally toppled a large urn onto herself, breaking her legs. She writes about her six weeks in the hospital, exclaiming that they "were the best of my childhood." Lucy loved the attention, "I was surrounded by doctors who brought me presents, nurses who read me stories, candy stripers who came to my room and played games." What's telling about this memory is that Lucy begins her story of the accident by writing that she was told this had happened. Her "memory" of the event wasn't so much triggered as it was instilled by years of hearing the story told over and over again by her parents or other family members. This is similar to the way in which photographs construct memory by focusing readers' attention on what they see. What is excluded is forgotten. By having Lucy retell the event in the context of the larger story, Houston uses Lucy's personal history to create an image of the character in readers' minds.

Lucy's memories, however, can't be so easily dismissed. She is a credible narrator who presents the facts as they appear to her. Houston establishes Lucy's credibility both through Lucy's own self-deprecation and through the ways in which other characters respond to her. For example, when Lucy is stopped by Officer "Mad Dog" Jenkins for driving erratically while squiring her parents around Phoenix, and he witnesses the parents bickering about Lucy, he lets her off with a warning, remarking, "There's nothing I could do to you that's going to feel like punishment." Lucy's admissions about her consistently bad choices in men and her desperate need for male approval help both to establish her character and to establish trust with readers. By describing the incident at Point Reyes in which Gordon humiliates her and she lets him, Lucy presents herself as someone who is unstable but who cannot help herself. This kind of apparent honesty is heart-winning, as many readers are drawn to vulnerable characters that acknowledge their own flaws.

It makes sense that, as a photographer, Lucy thinks in images, so instead of telling readers that she has endured emotional abuse as a child and has repeated the pattern by seeking out a similar kind of abuse in the men she dates as an adult, Lucy shows this information to readers through description. The order in which she presents scenes describing her past is thematic rather than chronological. That is, she doesn't present episodes starting with her childhood and then work her way up to the present. Indeed, the last flashback she offers, near the end of the story, is of herself as a two-year-old. This kind of storytelling is organic; that is, Lucy presents the material as it comes to her, similar to the way that she "looks" for things, people, and situations to photograph. This kind of narration resembles the way that memory works, triggered by particular incidents in the present that have resonance with events from the past.

Lucy's profession as photographer is apt if one considers that by her own admission, she has difficulty separating herself from the objects she shoots and the men she loves. Photographs "freeze" action and in that way order the world, which is just what Lucy was looking for when she moved to San Francisco. Lucy writes that in Colorado she was becoming lost in the very things she photographed: "I had taken so many pictures by then of the chaos of heaved-up rock and petrified sand and endless sky that I'd lost my balance and fallen into them." Of San Francisco, she writes, "I thought there might be an order to the city: straight lines, shiny surfaces and right angles that would give myself back to me." Ironically, Lucy's practice of letting her photographic subjects choose her, instead of choosing photographic subjects herself, means she has not yet learned to impose order on the world. She is drawn to her photographic subjects because they signify for her the life that she wants, but that has thus far eluded her. In San Francisco, she falls into what she photographs, just as she did in Colorado. At the wedding party, she snaps a photo of the groom kissing the bride, and later she takes a shot of swans swimming in pairs and rose petals on the sidewalk. These photographs become icons of sorts for the lasting love Lucy desperately seeks. In "An Interview with Pam Houston," which is part of the "Reading Group Guide" included in Waltzing the Cat, Houston, an amateur photographer, says she made Lucy a photographer so she could "use the metaphor of photography for talking about writing." Houston says:

The two art forms seem similar to me in terms of framing, the way everything depends on what you leave in and what you leave out. I often construct stories as if they're a series of photographs, a series of sharp and particular images, a physical landscape that will stand in for the story's emotional landscape, that will carry and convey the story's emotional weight.

Lucy's desperation gives her story a sense of urgency. Even though very little happens in the present tense, the accumulated details of her history create a portrait of a woman on the brink of a breakdown or a breakthrough. These details result from Lucy's self-interrogation, and by "confessing" to them, she is taking part in the process of healing herself. The popularity of "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had" is directly related to how Lucy tells her story, for it shows readers a character capable of self-understanding and change. It assures them that second chances, and third and fourth and fifth chances, can happen, and that change is possible.

Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had," in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

Susan Sanderson

Sanderson holds a master of fine arts degree in fiction writing and is an independent writer. In this essay, Sanderson examines the character Lucy O'Rourke and discusses how images of pairs in "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had" reflect aspects of Lucy's interior and exterior life.

"The Best Girlfriend You Never Had" is the first in a series of linked short stories about Lucy O'Rourke that make up Pam Houston's book Waltzing the Cat. The story serves as a kind of introduction to Lucy and her life; Lucy remembers her childhood, her life as a young adult before she moved to the West Coast, her experiences in the San Francisco area, and her inclination toward dangerous activities and environments.

Lucy's character is a study in dichotomies. Images of pairs abound as Houston draws Lucy as a young woman caught in the struggle between her interior and exterior lives and between a life that is orderly and one that is frantically out of control. The movement and disarray that define Lucy's life prevent her from confronting the fears she has. The recurring double images are particularly poignant given that Lucy is in her thirties and gloomy over her prospects of ever finding the right romantic partner.

Lucy's exterior world is defined by couples, some successful and others less so. When the story opens, she and her friend Leo are sitting in a San Francisco park reading love poems out loud to each other and watching Asian couples celebrate their weddings amid beautiful black swans. This is an activity the two friends pursue on a regular basis. In fact, before they come to the park on the weekends, they typically have breakfast at a restaurant named for a couple, "Rick and Ann's."

But in Lucy's social circle, pairing off is not simple or perfect. She observes that she lives in a community where "all the people you know — without exception — have their hearts all wrapped around someone who won't ever love them back." Leo loves Guinevere, a woman who can hardly remember his name when she sees him. Guinevere loves a man living on the East Coast who once told her, Lucy remembers, that "the only thing better than three thousand miles between him and the object of his desire would be if she had a terminal illness." Though Lucy is dating a dangerously jealous man, Gordon, she is "a little" in love with Leo, who is emotionally unavailable and tells her he is "the best girlfriend you never had." Lucy desperately wants her parents to love her, but they are too self-involved and drunk most of the time to connect with each other, let alone to be of any comfort to their daughter. One of the few happy memories of childhood for Lucy involves being in the hospital after an accident and having a cadre of caring doctors and nurses focused on her well-being.

Lucy's persona is split into two parts, as well, and much of the story is focused on her attempts to resolve the divisive inner issues that are apparent through her actions. It is as if there are two voices speaking to Lucy and, despite her exterior bravado, she does not know what she really wants or understand what she really feels. In "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had," Lucy obliquely refers to an episode during which she failed to listen to her own fears about rafting a wild Colorado river and nearly drowning. The event is explored in more depth in the collection's second story, "Cataract," where it is revealed that, though Lucy is an experienced river guide, she let a less experienced partner talk her into doing something she knew in her gut was foolish and dangerous.

The skirmish between Lucy's exterior life and her interior voice continues after she has moved to Oakland. Here, too, she has trouble listening to her own feelings and admitting when she is afraid. At the park, Lucy and Leo examine a flyer that warns of a car-jacking epidemic in the city and urges motorists to drive to a convenience store to exchange information with anyone who bumps their car from behind. Leo doubts that Lucy could ever follow this advice, because it would mean she would have to appear frightened. "You're the only person I know who'd get your throat slit sooner than admit that you're afraid," he charges.

Lucy's desire for dangerous situations is evident in Oakland: "I'd walk even the nastiest part [of Oakland], the blood pumping through my veins as hard as when I first saw the Rocky Mountains," she notes, and she gleefully recounts to her friends how she was "baptized" in one of those tough neighborhoods by a man urinating in public. The city streets provide her with the rush of adrenaline she needs — "all those lives in such dangerous and unnatural proximity." Even when she is mugged, Lucy does not let on that she experiences fear.

Chaos surrounds Lucy, as indicated by her history as well as by her choice of men. By the time she is fifteen years old, Lucy has survived sixteen car accidents. When she is eighteen, Lucy is stopped by a police officer who says, after tailing her for a few miles and observing her break nearly every code of safe driving, "I really don't know where to start." The photographs Lucy took while living in Colorado are filled with disorder, and she remembers, "I had taken so many pictures by then of the chaos of heaved-up rock that I'd lost my balance and fallen into them." She mentions to Leo that she can't blame men for not wanting to commit to her, because "if I saw me coming down the street with all my stuff hanging out I'm not so sure I'd pick myself up and go trailing after."

Lucy is a woman always in motion; before moving to California she lived in Alaska, in Colorado, and on the East Coast, and, as noted in the collection's other stories, she has pursued numerous physically challenging and often risky adventures around the world. Even when she decided to leave her rural life in Colorado for what she perceived as the stability of the city, her decision seemed rash. She packed up everything she owned for the trip to the West Coast but then "left behind everything I couldn't carry." Her move is an attempt to recreate a life away from the chaos and the danger. "I thought there might be order to the city: straight lines, shiny surfaces and right angles that would give myself back to me, take my work somewhere different, maybe to a safer place," she reflects.

Lucy's attraction to dangerous situations and her inability to listen to her gut feelings get her into difficult situations with the men she dates. For example, not only is Gordon insanely jealous, but he also displays a chilling violent streak after Lucy attempts to break up with him. He leaves messages made from cut-out letters taped to her front door and hangs scarves tied to look like nooses in her trees. Thinking back on Gordon's early declaration that "I take the people close to me and try to break them," Lucy wonders why "I could hear and didn't hear what he was saying, the reason why I thought the story could end differently for me." Lucy's interior voice — the one that comes from her gut — is speaking here, but she chooses not to listen to it. She has not had much experience paying attention to the self-preserving interior voice that advises her to run to safety, choosing, instead, the bravado that has helped her face down a mother bear and her cub, a mugger, dangerous rapids, and a fractured family. The skills she learns from these experiences, however, ultimately cannot help her successfully deal with an abusive boyfriend or understand why she feels so alone.

But Houston has not created a character who is completely beyond self-awareness and the promise of a better life. Lucy is a very sympathetic protagonist precisely because of her many quirks and faults, and her eventual redemption — or, at least, the moment when she decides to push beyond the noise and distraction of her exterior life and listen to some of the very smart things going on in her head — is hinted at in the story. In a series of admissions, Lucy lets on that she has a vulnerable side. She begins by asking Leo if he is ever afraid "that there are so many things you need swirling around inside you that they will just overtake you, smother you, suffocate you until you die?" She goes on to admit that she is worried that her life has progressed too far to ever change.

Lucy's emotional breakthrough, of sorts, occurs when she realizes the substantial yet artificial dichotomy between her interior and exterior lives. After experiencing the thrill of winning an impromptu sailboat race, Lucy notices that she is "still so high that I can tell myself there's really nothing to be afraid of." Suddenly, she knows that this is a lie — there are things to be feared in life — and she begins to list the things she has until now tried to forget: her car wrecks, the fact that she is without a loving relationship, and that Gordon might be waiting for her at her house with a gun, for example. At that moment, Lucy begins to see how she has used the chaos and constant movement of her exterior life to cover up the fact that her interior life is in shambles. When she tells Leo "I'm scared," he says he cannot help her. But when Lucy returns to the park where she watched the weddings earlier in the day and says again, "I'm scared," she is saying it to herself, "stronger, almost like singing, as though it might be the first step toward something like a real life."

Source: Susan Sanderson, Critical Essay on "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had," in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

Erika Taibl

Taibl is an English instructor and a writer. In this essay, Taibl examines how the episodic structureof Houston's story illuminates the story's larger meaning.

In Pam Houston's second full collection of short stories Waltzing the Cat, readers are introduced to Lucy O'Rourke, a landscape photographer with a penchant for failed relationships. Throughout the series of interlocking stories, Lucy's character is revealed as if by snapshots, where each story is a separate moment in Lucy's life. The episodic form the collection adopts, in which the stories remain separate yet loosely connected, allows for, as Randall Osbourne says in the introduction to his 1999 Salon interview with Houston, the voice of a dawning wisdom, the kind you find and lose repeatedly, and then begin to find more often. By the end of the collection and many of the stories, Lucy is finding wisdom more often and revealing it to the reader. Houston uses the snapshot effect in the collection to build Lucy's life but also in several individual stories to build a story's individual meaning.

Through these short, narrative interludes that resemble in words what photographs reveal through images, Houston ties together a day-in-the-life of Lucy O'Rourke with a smattering of other stories that ultimately give shape to Lucy's future. Together, the snapshots within the story portray much about how individuals learn about themselves — often little by little as a composite of experiences build into self-understanding. The composite Lucy is left with at the end of "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had" helps her to accept her single life and define a life as one that is not bounded by failed relationships with others but defined by a healthy relationship with herself.

Just as the photographer works with negative images to create a positive image, the brief, illuminating and factual narratives that comprise "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had" tell just enough about a situation in order to imply something more. In her interview with Osbourne for Salon, Houston talks about photography as the one visual art form she has any talent for. She says, "It translated very well into what I was trying to talk about with stories and the way you make or save or erase your life with the stories you tell." In "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had," the narrator, Lucy, chooses to recall certain stories or snapshots that illustrate her life. Some are destructive narratives. Some are victorious stories. Together, the stories help Lucy see herself in a new frame of reality. What have been negative images of her past life become positives. And what is not shown, to herself or the reader, but implied becomes as important as what is shown and explicit. The resulting image shows Lucy an accurate picture of herself and provides for a new image of the future.

What is explicit from the onset is Lucy's present — the one day in her life spent with her best friend, Leo. Glimpses of this day appear throughout the story and act as a frame for the various other recollections. Leo and Lucy spend their day, a perfect day in the city, acting out the perfect date. They begin by watching elegant weddings at the Palace of Fine Arts, an icon of romance in America. They read poetry and sail a boat. They almost torture each other by acting out an ideal that they know is not possible for them. Not only do they watch picture-perfect weddings with the knowledge that they are a seemingly impossible dream, they also dream impossible dreams about the people in their lives. Leo says, for instance, "The only Buddha I could love is one who is capable of forgetfulness and sin." That desire is an inhibited one for Leo, since he loves a woman who does not love him but who loves another man — another man who thinks it would be ideal if she had a terminal illness. Here, illness is used as a great tease, a way to accentuate the romantic obstacles that enflame desire. Why such an emphasis on what cannot be had — the impossible? For Leo and Lucy, it just makes life easier. Being in love with the impossible is much easier than living through the risk that real love entails. The only big problem with desiring the impossible is that it creates a cycle of emptiness without fulfillment, what Lucy later calls, that want that won't let go of you. When Lucy begins to understand the dichotomies of her desires, for instance, how deeply she fears both love and the absence of love, she begins to understand the toll of unsatisfied wants and that satisfaction resides in herself and not in her relationships with others.

Leo, the best girlfriend Lucy never had, helps Lucy define a healthy relationship with herself. As the girlfriend, Leo is the one who shows Lucy what she is afraid of, what they need to and can be for each other, and what Lucy needs to be for herself. Their relationship is not complicated by sexual attraction and confusion; they are friends. He is the one to hold up the mirror and tell her, "you're the only person I know who'd get your throat slit sooner than admit you're afraid." When Lucy finally admits, "I'm scared," Leo is the one who says that he cannot help and implies that now she needs to help herself. By not having the answers, Leo is the best kind of friend, the kind that listens but does not give advice, the kind that supports and cheers without leading, the kind that lets the mistakes happen and is around to help pick up the broken pieces.

The best girlfriend Lucy has never had, though, is really herself. Sure, Leo is the best kind of girlfriend on the perfect day in the city. But, Lucy is the one who has been missing from her own life for all this time. Lucy admits she is afraid twice in the story. Once, she admits it to Leo, who not only tells her he cannot help her but implies that she must help herself. The second time, she admits her fear to herself in the park. Ultimately, Lucy is the one who must believe she is afraid and learn to cope with the consequences. The fact that the conclusion of the story implies that she is going to begin to live an honest life full of fear, as well as real possibilities instead of impossibilities, suggests that she is becoming the best girlfriend that she has never been.

Interspersed throughout this day with Leo are stories recalled from two sources, Lucy's own past experience and the lives of friends and strangers. Stories from Lucy's past reveal both moments she is sure to want to forget and moments when strength and courage are revealed to her in surprising ways. Sometimes, these are one and the same. Embarrassed, she remembers begging Gordon to take her back, and then she proudly remembers telling a would-be burglar to get lost. She remembers the story of her father and mother fighting in the car and her mother's suggestion that her father hates her. Then, she remembers surprising both him and herself as a young child by swimming far and fast. After confronting stories of rejection and disappointment in relationships that can perhaps never be healed and realizing that she's been waiting for everything to fix itself and that maybe, just maybe, that isn't going to happen, she decides to integrate the lessons the stories of rejection and the stories of victory are telling her. She learns that she is capable of surprising herself and that she may be stronger than she perhaps believes.

The stories from friends and strangers also fuel Lucy's growing revelations. Guinevere tells Lucy about her own failed relationships and serves as an example of living life on her own terms. When Guinevere pulls a new age card from the deck that she disagrees with — one that suggests weakness or submission — she tosses it in the garbage. She is not taking the cards that have been dealt her; she is taking control of her own story. Guinevere is one of the characters to whom Susan Salter Reynolds, in her Los Angeles Times Book Review article, could be referring when she says that Houston's stories are full of useable wisdom. Guinevere is the one who tells Lucy, "You only get a few chances to feel your life all the way through." She also gives Lucy permission to escape her choices. Lucy recalls her saying, "Choices can't be good or bad." There is only the event and the lessons learned from it. Similarly, the story's use of episodes or snapshots mirrors this piece of wisdom as each narrative avoids passing judgment on characters or situations and presents the scene or situation as a photograph is presented — as image without commentary.

Toward the end of the story, the stories of others really help Lucy define her own story's future path. Lucy wonders about the girlfriend of the robber who kidnapped Leo. "I wonder how she saw herself," she says, "as what part of the story, and how much she had invested in how it would end." Lucy is realizing, at this point, that she is invested in her own story. The composite image that the snapshots are slowly revealing to her is helping her to really see herself. In her own voice, she says, "I could tell you the lie I told myself with Gordon. That anybody is better than nobody." Here, Lucy starts to see herself clearly enough to become her own best girlfriend. Her sage advice is imparted through her own story. She admits that she lied to herself and implies that she did so because she was afraid to be alone.

The final episodes share common themes of survival and victory, and bring together the three types of stories that illuminate Lucy's future: those of strangers, of past life, and of the present. One story that Gordon told her recalls two suicidal bridge jumpers who meet up there on the walkway and find out they are both survivors of a previous jump. She doesn't tell us what this means for her, but the power of definition is implied. When one is suddenly found to be a survivor rather than a possible victim, life changes. The power of definition changes perceptions in life, and the implication as Lucy begins to change the definitions in her life is that she is changing into a survivor, too. The second story from Lucy's childhood recalls a story where Lucy's father threw her into the surf and waited to see her sink or swim. She swam like a pro, surprising herself and her father. This story implies that Lucy is capable of surprising herself and others — that this is still possible. The final scene returns to the present and the stories of brides. Lucy returns to the site of the weddings to take photos of the swans. Here, even the swans have paired up. Symbolically, Lucy bows to an imaginary husband and admits that she is scared. She is alone, finally and truly, and for the first time, she feels like she has a real life, something true, and wise, and lasting. The relationship in the end that defines all others is Lucy's relationship with herself. The composite image left after all the snapshots is a future with and as her true self. Echoing Karen Karbo's New York Times Book Review article, the story, like the collection, is far from perfect, but then, so are the characters and themes in Lucy's messy life. In a struggle for identity, future path, and happiness, self-knowledge is the gem that Houston unearths and polishes using a click of the camera shutter to reveal the self frame-by-frame until the whole, true picture is revealed.

Source: Erika Taibl, Critical Essay on "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had," in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

What Do I Read Next?

• Critics often compare Houston's stories to those of Richard Ford. Both write about the American West and the complexities of love. Ford's A Multitude of Sins (2002) collects stories and a novella on these topics.
• Cowboys Are My Weakness (1992), Houston's first collection of stories, established her reputation as a serious writer. Houston writes about failed relationships and her adventures in the wild in this well-received volume.
• Many of Houston's stories take place on rivers. The Whitewater Sourcebook: A Directory of Information on American Whitewater Rivers (1990), by Richard Penny, is one of the most comprehensive coast-to-coast whitewater reference books available.
• Houston wrote the text to accompany Veronique Vial's black-and-white photographs in Men before Ten A.M. (1996). All of the photographs are of men as they wake up in the morning, including celebrities such as Peter Falk, Robert Altman, Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, Gary Oldman, Wim Wenders, and John Singleton.
• John Updike and Katrina Kenison co-edited The Best American Short Stories of the Century (2000), in which Houston's "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had" appears.