Alone, we had become the lies he had told us. Together, we were learning to unravel it. We were building the chain. We were learning to replace him with ourselves.
In January of 2017, after leaving the clinic room in which she had taken the first dose of the abortifacient that her boyfriend had talked her into, Chimene Suleyman discovered that this boyfriend — the love of her life — was never who she thought he was, and now he was gone; leaving nothing behind but a text telling her that she was now ruined and unworthy of love. Suleyman would eventually learn that this man (never named) similarly ruined the lives of dozens of other women — defrauding some of them of tens of thousands of dollars — and by growing a mutually supportive community with these other victims, Suleyman was able to eventually find a place of healing from which to examine the persistent systems of misogyny that allow men like this to escape consequences. The Chain tells Suleyman’s story (as well as some details from other women’s relationships with this man), examines how society celebrates the playboy (while denigrating the women who get played), and concludes that women (and especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement) can find the power to fight back against this type of toxic masculinity when they band together, share their stories, and support one another. The details of Suleyman’s story are shocking and compelling, but it’s the thoughtful social commentary that makes this an elevated read. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
I reached for my keys, but put them away. I turned the handle on my apartment door and expected, rightly, that it would open. The shirts he left in my closet were no longer there. His T-shirts that had filled the bottom drawer, gone. His sneakers that had formed a neat line against my shoes, and some of my belongings too, gone with him. No one should love me. And I believed him. Because I had been taught to.
There’s a lot going on in this memoir: Suleyman is of Turkish Muslim heritage (not white but “white-passing”; what this boyfriend called “sandy”) and had emigrated to America from the Britain she was raised in. Suffering from Depression, a recent breakup, and other pressures from feeling isolated in NYC, Suleyman was a perfect target for this man who liked to lovebomb new girlfriends and then beg understanding for his own mental health challenges (claiming to have been diagnosed with Agoraphobia and Autism); what started as fun and exciting became this man needing to be taken care of, and if the woman had money, he’d clean her out for supposed stays in mental health care facilities or travel money to get to the big job that would allow him to pay her back. He accidentally-on-purpose got more than one woman pregnant (and talked them into abortions that not all of them wanted), he made a habit of taking pictures of his girlfriends sleeping nude without their consent (sometimes sharing them in a group chat with his buddies), and he routinely disappeared when the fun stopped. As a stand-up comedian, a lot of his material was about how dumb women are (four nights before her abortion, Suleyman thought that her boyfriend was sitting with his mother in Atlanta as she was dying, but he was actually in NYC doing a set about how much he hates Muslims), and it was a revelation for Suleyman to watch YouTube videos of his standup routines, in the aftermath of their breakup, and hear men in the audience guffawing at the most unfunny misogynist lines:
Comedy is an invisibility cloak for the men who hate women. It’s not objectification, it’s social commentary! It’s not chauvinism, I’m in character! It’s not a rape joke, it’s intellectual critique! It’s not bullying, it’s risqué! It’s not harassment, it’s banter! It’s not a slur, it’s a play on words! “Good” comedy is meant to push boundaries, meant to shock, meant to provoke. If you don’t like it, maybe you’re too sensitive, too literal, maybe you’re just not smart enough to get it.
Suleyman makes the point that while we might be shocked by the extent of the abuses committed by the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffery Epstein, popular entertainers like R. Kelly (in the lyrics of his songs) and Jimmy Savile (in countless interviews) told people exactly who they were and what they got up to, and the world just sang and laughed along (as underage victims of sexual abuse were silenced by this apparent cultural acceptance of their experience). Suleyman discusses quite a few male celebrities, and while I think it’s fair to examine the abuses of Bill Cosby and Louis CK (and maybe to a lesser extent, allegations made against Aziz Ansari), I don’t know if it is fair to lump Robert Downey Jr and Mark Wahlberg in with Chris Brown as similarly forgiven for past crimes (or to list celebrities like Ernest Hemingway, John Lennon, Johnny Cash and Russel Brand as all using the depression they suffered as an excuse for the women in their lives to clean up the chaos they created). It all makes the larger point, however, that when we excuse celebrities of their bad behaviour, we are setting a standard for how the unfamous are treated: many of the boyfriend’s buddies were disgusted when they found out that he had taken these women for so much money, but Suleyman demands to know why they weren’t similarly disgusted by how he used their bodies. The antidote, according to Suleyman, is for women to get loud, tell their stories, and join together; if men, and the society they continue to dominate, don't care about the mistreatment of women, women need to focus on caring for each other:
There is no singular experience of womanhood and we create the chain to remind ourselves of this. We stand beside each other in such a way that we may say, Tell me your story as a woman, and yours, and yours, and yours. I do not know what it is to be a Jewish woman, a Black woman, or trans, or gay, or disabled, or a sex worker, or a prisoner, or a pilot, or a seamstress, or four husbands deep (yet). Where I fall in our flawed verses of womanhood is that I am unlucky in some ways and fortunate in others. What we share is history. What we share is the need to talk, to say we made it or we didn’t. Survival isn’t enough and it musn’t be.
Overall, a compelling read. If I had a complaint: I don’t mind that Suleyman chose not to name the boyfriend, but I didn’t like that every “he, him, or his” she used to refer to him was italicised (I was mentally emphasising the word every time, and it became distracting), and similarly, she italicised “the chain” every time as well, and that felt cutesy and disempowering. Small complaints, good read.
