Lola Kirke: "All the Women in My Family are Cursed”
On the cover of the workbook, there’s a cartoon drawing of a daisy with eyes, smiling at her reflection in a mirror she’s holding in her little white-gloved hands. I joke to the group that I’m gonna get the image as a back tat. Precisely one person thinks this is funny.
Even though I am thirty-three and essentially perfect, I often still feel the same messy pain I did when I was a kid. According to the self-help group I’ve recently started attending, this is because I am an “adult child,” i.e., I respond to many adult situations the way a child might. When you grow up fast, as I did in New York City, I think, you never really grow up. For a moment this makes me feel very cool. I picture myself wearing a beret tilted just so, exhaling smoke from a candy cigarette, because I’m trying to quit. Then I recall a magnet I used to look at on my old math tutor’s fridge: put the fun back in dysfunctional!
When I was a kid, this sentiment made me feel seen: My family puts the fun back in dysfunctional! Then I’d ask my tutor to do the rest of my homework so I could lie down. But now that one of my sisters doesn’t talk to my mom, my mom doesn’t talk to my dad, my dad believes my mom tried to have him killed, and our collective love language seems to be talking shit about each other, I’m not so sure how fun our dysfunction really is.
Fill in the tree below with the names of your family members and their corresponding addictions! the tree barks. So I do. Once I begin, I am surprised at how little I really know.
Mom’s side: well, her sister died of a heroin overdose... so that. Then there was the gambler. Lots of shopping. Etc.... I can just about complete it through my maternal great-grandparents when I realize I have no idea what their names were or what, if anything, they were addicted to. Since they were Jewish, I’m going to assume they didn’t drink much (most of the ones I know don’t—sensitive stomachs). And since they lived in olden times, I’m going to further assume their lives were somewhat war-torn and fully sepia. They had four kids. They worshipped. They left Baghdad for Manchester. But with them, they brought the curse.
My dad has told me about “the curse” of my mother’s side several times. This is likely because he can’t remember having told me about it before. Because imagine a goldfish. Now imagine a rock star railing cocaine off a pair of perky ’70s tits. Put those things together inside an older man in a soft cashmere sweater, and there you have my father. Make no mistake, I have long benefited from the gaps in his memory. I can dependably impress him simply by repeating old achievements. Still, it is a bit of a drag to hear over and over about how all the women in my family are cursed. There’s a whole backstory I’ll skip over, but the curse is essentially: the women on my mom’s side of the family are doomed to be bitter and angry, while the men, as far as I can tell, are doomed to be completely fine, just bald. While this sucks for us gals, I like to think the joke’s really on them. With every year that their hairlines recede, I grow more hair! And in places I never thought possible, like my chin, neck, nipples, and in coarse black patches on the backs of my thighs.
Wild West Village: Not a Memoir (Unless I Win an Oscar, Die Tragically, or Score a Country #1)
In truth, I have been hairy since day one. With a shock of tall black hair and many chins that spilleth over, I was born looking like I’d left my husband of thirty years for a woman named Pat, then started collecting reptiles.
“Let’s hope she’s intelligent,” my grandmother said upon first seeing me, her accent like acid flowing from a perfect mouth. With her Hitchcock-blond looks, she had an icy beauty, which she successfully passed down to subsequent generations. Successfully, it seemed, until me.
“She will have great character,” she concluded.
Of course, I never actually heard my grandmother say any of this because I was an infant. I just know that she did because my mom told me all the time. You see, beauty was very important in my family. For as long as I can remember, I have been surrounded by it. Our dogs, willowy golden retrievers, were beautiful. Our English gardens, lush with tulips and benevolent foxes, were beautiful. My parents seemingly had no ugly friends. It would be easy to mistake our early family photo albums for a coffee-table book on London’s answer to Studio 54: everyone was just as glamorous, and I’m certain there were as many drugs. Photos of beach vacations show my mother and her brigade of ever-topless friends, diet-pill-thin and laughing. Cigarettes burn in their mouths while their children burn in the background.
Turn the page and...
Oh, God no, go back! Actually, don’t. Stay. What—I mean—who is that?
Well, it’s me, smiling cross-eyed.
Suddenly, the album has transformed. You are no longer behind the scenes of a fun ’80s remake of La Piscine. You are now touring the studio that brought you Dinosaurs.The annotations cease to be hot, funny comments about nearby celebrities or how great someone’s butt is. They are literal, straightforward.
“Lola laughing,” one reads, under a picture of—you guessed it—me laughing, with the haircut of a squat, forgotten member of Spinal Tap.
“Lola getting ready for a nap,” reads another. And wouldn’t ya know? I am lying down.
“Lola looking at something,” reads the caption to another snap of me, staring cross-eyed, drool pooling into the folds of my chins.
It’s not just the photos that are less alluring than their precedents. The handwriting captioning the photos is different too. Unlike my mother’s spunky script, it’s bubbly and belabored. Like me. Because it’s my handwriting. I added my own photos to the family album. Attempting to fit in to their glamorous and cool narrative, I crowbarred myself into it, achieving the reverse effect and standing out even more.
This theme started early. After an accident with scissors when I was four—turns out you cannot cut your hair longer—I received a scarring emergency pixie cut, which set me back from my goal about thirty inches. Far from looking like my beautiful big sisters, as intended, I now looked like a stand-in for a young Brad Renfro.
Shortly after, we moved from London to New York City. Immediately, things were off to a rough start. First, our suitcases were stolen out of the back of our taxi from the airport, leaving us with no choice but to outfit ourselves in the decidedly basic Gap. But it wasn’t until we turned the key in the door of our newly rented apartment that things got truly frightening.
She was above the fireplace. Naked, with legs cut off at the knee and bleeding. The hair at her groin was full and undulating, like a nest of snakes. Her eyes were red and pleading. My mother and sisters tried to explain that she was only a painting. She wasn’t real. But this made no sense to me. A child, I still believed art was just supposed to be pretty. She was ugly. Confrontational. Suffering. I avoided the room entirely until one day when my mother laid a bedsheet out on the living room floor, encouraging my sisters and me to decorate it however we wanted. In black Sharpie, we drew flowers and fairies with wings and wands. A castle in the distance. Shortly after, the sheet was draped over the canvas. The room became my favorite in the house.
In that moment, my mother taught me the sacred art of transforming a woman’s pain into beauty. It was a journey she was well versed in. With a bold lick of paint or an antique piano shawl, charmless rentals were made inviting. While her gift for visually creating the world she’d rather inhabit had its complications, it has always been inspiring to me. But I’ve also come to learn that transforming pain into beauty is no small feat.
Copyright © 2025 by Lola Kirke. From the forthcoming book WILD WEST VILLAGE: Not a Memoir (Unless I Win an Oscar, Die Tragically, or Score a Country #1) by Lola Kirke to be published by Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.
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