Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

by Carrie Brownstein

And then there was that time we were pulling the car into the garage and from the backseat I yelled the word “penis” for no reason other than that I was eight years old and at that age it’s fun to call out the words for genitalia in a loud voice. One day I’d come home from kindergarten and repeated a term I’d heard on the playground: “mother fucker two-ball bitch.” Whether it was at my ignorant daring or at the perplexity of the phrase itself, I’m not sure, but my parents laughed. Here I was now going for the encore. But saying “penis” in front of my father, while he was trapped in a car with me, and thus trapped with that word, and whatever he pictured in his mind when he heard that word, whatever feelings he felt about that word, that thing, resulted in me being dragged upstairs and getting my mouth washed out with soap. Oh, we also received the International Male catalog, a men’s underwear catalog that is essentially a showcase for big European cocks. Only in retrospect can I find clues to my father’s gayness. Sometimes the dull detritus of our pasts become glaring strands once you realize they form a pattern, a lighted path to the present. I have to turn over and reimagine certain moments from my childhood and make them conform to a different narrative, a different outcome.