SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 32
detached from their true selves, but it shows carefully selected and airbrushed aspects of them,
a self devoid of strangeness. Roan’s authenticity contrasts this approach. She isn’t playing at
normalcy. Instead, Chappell leans into eccentricity and strangeness.
Roan frequently references drag as a source of inspiration. Drag is a genre of performance
art where the physical body is a canvas for the creation and a platform of personal expression.
She uses her body as a source of expression as much as her music. Her outfits are political,
historically referential, and full of surprising juxtapositions. She connects sexuality with
whimsy, space taking with hyper femininity, political commentary with leather culture.
Her lyrics and costumes are revealing in a way that feels sexual but also playful, referential
of another genre of performance—burlesque. Both drag artists and burlesque performers
use their bodies to tell stories, to entertain, and both frequently make their own costumes.
Chappell’s ensembles often have a homemade quality. They are meticulously imperfect and—
unlike the outfits of other pop stars—they don’t create an unattainable polish, but a sense of
vulnerability. Chappell’s body jiggles when she dances. She wears clown-like white face paint,
a pig nose, and an intentional lipstick stain on her teeth.
And it isn’t just the costumes that are complex and dimensional. Her music also conveys
a complex persona. A great example is the song “California.” I’ve heard this song described
as the inverse of her song “Pink Pony Club,” which in itself creates a compelling complexity.
But to me that description feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of a song that is both
an expression of despair and a parody of the idea of giving up on your dreams. The speaker
in the song begs to be taken back home, but the things she claims to miss—dead leaves,
red dirt roads, a lifeless town—are unappealing, while California is described as a place of
dreams and light and sea. To me, this is a song that challenges rather than embraces the idea
that you should give up your dreams because you haven’t achieved immediate commercial
success. It holds the nostalgia of the familiar—however dreary it might be—while also asking,
why should I go? What is there to return to? It is a contradictory song, one where the self is
comprehensible but also somewhat inconsistent.
The most compelling creative nonfiction allows for a similar weaving together of seeming
contradiction. JoAnn Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” is a classic example. The essay is
about a mass shooting that occurs at the author’s workplace, but instead of focusing exclusively
on that singular event, it moves between it and other aspects of the author’s life — her ailing
dog, her recent divorce, an infestation of squirrels in her attic. Moving between these different
threads emphasizes the way tragedies and struggles of different sizes overlap and compound.
The narrator in the essay is gentle with the dogs, helpless with the squirrels, overwhelmed and
detached in the face of tragedy, competent at work and in her friendships, and the essay holds
all these aspects of her and more. It is an essay that unnervingly emphasizes how the horrific
and the mundane coexist.
Melissa Febos’ memoir Abandon Me is another great example of complex persona. It
moves between scenes from a troubled love affair with a domineering partner to childhood
recollections of an absent father, thematically connected as sources of abandonment. The
essay also explores these two aspects of Febos—the daughter and the lover. The story is
nonlinear both in terms of timeline and in its exploration of personal growth. Febos leaves
the controlling partner and returns multiple times. She has insights about what is happening
but also shows how those insights don’t always lead neatly to changes in behavior. There are
moments in which her child self is surprisingly mature and moments where her adult self is
quite immature.
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