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    Girl with Glasses: My Optic History
    Girl with Glasses: My Optic History
    Girl with Glasses: My Optic History
    Ebook182 pages1 hour

    Girl with Glasses: My Optic History

    By Marissa Walsh and Jason Logan

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Marissa Walsh's hilarious look at a life behind glass is both a poignant personal journey and a wry, insightful exploration of just what it means to be a glasses-wearing kind of girl.

    Being a Girl with Glasses isn't just a style choice; it's a way of life. If you've ever had your specs steam up when walking into a bar, squinted into the sun on the soccer field, or laid eyes on a new haircut only after your locks are strewn across the floor, you know what it's like to be a GWG.

    Marissa Walsh has worn glasses since third grade. Now—ten pairs of glasses, one pair of prescription sunglasses, and endless pairs of contacts later—she has fully embraced her four-eyed fate. As she recounts her optic history through the lenses of each pair of glasses—from the Sergio Valentes and the Sally Jessy Raphaels to the pseudo John Lennons and the dreaded health plan specs—at last she found them...the perfect pair.

    Peppered with pop culture references and complete with appendixes of resources, classic GWG moments, and helpful tips on finding the right frames for your face, Girl with Glasses will give you reason to commiserate with your short-sighted sisters and celebrate your less-than-perfect vision.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGallery Books
    Release dateNov 1, 2006
    ISBN9781416938736
    Girl with Glasses: My Optic History
    Author

    Marissa Walsh

    Marissa Walsh, a former children's book editor in New York City, is the coauthor of the Boston Globe bestseller Tipsy in Madras: A Complete Guide to 80s Preppy Drinking and editor of the anthology Not Like I'm Jealous or Anything: The Jealousy Book. She is a graduate of Smith College, home to many former, current, and future Girls with Glasses.

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    Reviews for Girl with Glasses

    3.5/5

    17 ratings3 reviews

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    • 2/5
      A rather tedious, repetitive memoir about a girl who speaks about the trials of growing up with glasses.
      Audio book that was short, fortunately.
    • 2/5
      "Girl with Glasses" was not meant to be read aloud all of a piece like this. It's a collection of essays and sketches and vignettes and lists; a few have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but more have just a beginning and a middle and left me saying "wait, what about -?" A few seemed like just beginnings that broke off. The lists were entertaining. But for the narrator – who did a very nice job overall, and to whom I would be happy to listen again – to just read this from start to finish, with little pause between essays or sections or whathaveyou, was awkward. There was one bit where it talks about how the author hired a homeless man to help her shift her luggage, which was immediately followed by a statement along the lines of "I had planned to sleep with him that night", leaving me wondering if the homeless man was an extraordinarily talented luggage shifter. On paper (or pixels) I'm sure there were line breaks that made that make sense, but read aloud I believe there was no more than the usual sort of pause between sentences. Audiobooks have directors, right? I don't think this director did a swell job. This was an almost coy sort of a memoir, a tease – "I will reveal a bit, and you will expect more, and you'll never get it". In places (probably the places that wouldn't result in lawsuits) there was detail; in other places no detail at all, including names (though why if she was concerned about the Bad Room-mates' or Bus Guy's reactions she couldn't have just done a names-have-been-changed-to-forestall-the-litigious sort of thing, just to maintain a consistency of *using* names, I don't really understand.). The part that irritated me most was the mention of a college relationship that never got beyond flirtatious emails, about which she wonders if glasses might have been part of the reason (along the lines of people of that age group were still learning to kiss, and kissing with glasses poses special challenges), and in the whole brief essay she is annoyingly vague, down to never using pronouns. If the person she was attracted to was a woman, why on earth not just say so? She'd already (in a roundabout way) said her first real kiss was with a woman, so...? As what she would call a fellow GWG (Girl With Glasses) – since second grade, I don't know how many pair without sitting and researching, and similarly having briefly worn and walked away from contact lenses – it was inevitable that I nodded a lot while listening to this, and found that "oh, you too?" sort of smile on my face quite a bit. It was a little like when I started discovering that I wasn't the only young geek to be completely obsessed with Star Trek; it's oddly unsettling to find that someone else has felt exactly the same thing you have. With something like the universal dilemma of "I have to pick out new frames, but I can't see what I look like in any of these frames because I'm blind without my glasses", or the shocking agony and terror of being sent out into the sunlight with dilated eyes. (How eyecare offices justify sending people out to drive home in that condition is beyond me. How I've made it home some half dozen times without dying in a fiery wreck is also beyond me. I have found there is no good meteorological situation for trying to function with dilated eyes; bright sunlight is obviously bad, but overcast or darkness is equally bad because streetlights become damn near fireworks, and oncoming headlights are twinned points of horror. And then there was that snowy evening I had to drive some ten miles to get home...) But I never really thought about anyone else eschewing contact lenses in part to avoid the sheer nakedness of not wearing this framework on my face. I hated it; I hated being able to feel wind in my eyes (car windows couldn't be down, suddenly, no matter how warm it was); hated the exposure. One thing where we differed a bit was in the skittish question of someone else taking off one's glasses. She mentions it as a level of intimacy, and controlling how and when is happens (and who by). I've never yet met the person I'd allow the liberty. It's only happened to me once, or nearly (I dodged back in time to avoid it), and I was never so outraged in my life by the invasiveness of it. Like the author, apparently, I am legally blind without my glasses (and wasn't that an odd thing to be told not all that long ago), and so not having glasses means I am extremely vulnerable (and can never time travel anywhere glasses would be anachronistic, alas). For someone I barely knew to reach out to take my glasses off was tantamount to having him start unbuttoning buttons. In other words: don't do that. The main area where we two GWG's differ, though, and this actually annoyed me, was when she blithely tossed off the information that she had never lost or broken a pair of glasses. I've never lost a current pair (backup, yes, but not current) - for the simple reason that if I am awake they are on my face, almost without exception (and sometimes when I am not awake). By "never", she - and I - mean "never apart from those times when they get knocked off the night table and end up taking an excruciatingly long groping time to find" - the I-need-my-glasses-to-find-my-glasses moments that punctuate my life with panic … she states that that only happened to her once. I'm not sure I buy that. It's a bit like having a Kindle. It's a rather expensive little apparatus (depending on the type), which becomes such a vade mecum that one becomes more careless of it than one ought. My glasses are literally always with me, and it's easy to forget that they cost the earth (over $500, last pair). I broke my frames a few months ago - and I loved those frames; they were the first ones I ever cared about - and because I haven't had an insurance in years that covered glasses (have I ever?) I had to wear old ones while the current lenses got put into the closest frame I could find, which have a ridiculous loud print on the earpieces... Ah well. Hopefully I'll get a new pair this summer. But that wasn't the first time I've broken a pair. It's happened a few times - once dropped onto concrete-underlaid flooring at work; this last time carelessly left beside me in bed while mostly asleep only to be squashed in the morning. There is nothing quite like the sick feeling of holding in two hands two separate pieces of what used to be one's glasses, and trying desperately figure out a way to jury-rig them back together (preferably without looking like an idiot), wishing desperately for Hermione to come along and say "Oculo reparo", trying desperately to remember where the old pair are, so that one can drive to - hopefully - get them fixed, or, more likely and more expensively, replaced. (When the frame snaps at the nosepiece, the reaction to "can they be fixed?" is basically "ha ha ha no".) She's apparently never had to keep wearing the same glasses for years because of financial reasons; go her. TL;DR = cute idea; not great execution.
    • 5/5
      Any girl with glasses should read this book!

    Book preview

    Girl with Glasses - Marissa Walsh

    I’m going to take you somewhere. It’s time you began to see the world. You’re eleven years old and it’s time you saw something.

    —OLE GOLLY TO HARRIET, Harriet the Spy,

    LOUISE FITZHUGH

    CAROL BRADY: Jan, I think you may need glasses.

    JAN BRADY: Glasses! Oh no, Mom! Not glasses! They’ll make me look absolutely positively goofy!

    —The Brady Bunch

    The First Pair

    7

    1980-1984

    Wait and See

    The first test I ever failed was a vision test. It was third grade, and the people who came to school every year to test our eyes and ears showed up with that portable machine with the View-Master binocularlike window, except that instead of picture slides inside, there were letters. Which I couldn’t read.

    Before the eye and ear people came, I thought maybe it was my teacher’s fault. Mrs. Babin liked to write math problems on the blackboard for us to copy down. One day I couldn’t read the numbers on the board anymore. At first I chalked it up to the glare from the sun coming in the window. There was also the fact that I hated math; it was my worst subject. But the problem recurred—even on rainy days. I didn’t know what was wrong. But I ignored it, thinking eventually my vision would return to normal. It didn’t.

    I had spent many hours at my grandparents’ house sitting in their dark living room, reading. When Nana and Papa saw me, they would always switch on the light and say, Don’t read in the dark; you’ll hurt your eyes.

    I hadn’t listened.

    When Mrs. Babin gave me a note to take home to my parents, I knew exactly what it was for. The jig was up. I was tempted to forget to give them the bad news, but like most GWGs, I was too good a girl. And nervous about my math grade.

    As a baby I had been diagnosed with asthma, but that condition had set in too early for me to remember life before it. It and its limitations had always just been a part of me. Glasses had not, and I didn’t want them to be. The only person who wore glasses in my family was Nana Walsh, and she was old. Very old. How could I need glasses? I was just a kid.

    The only two kids I knew who had glasses were my younger cousin Eric, and one of the many girls in my class named Michele, who was cross-eyed. I did not identify with either of them.

    Private Eye

    I was not alone in my newfound nearsightedness. My brother Steven, fifteen months my junior, joined me in the four-eyed ranks around the same time. Steven was never one to let me have my own thing for very long. I don’t remember what kind of glasses he got—I don’t even remember how his revelation came about. I’ve obviously blocked it out. He wears contacts now.

    My parents were confused. They didn’t wear glasses; their siblings didn’t wear glasses; my other brother, Joseph, didn’t wear glasses. Where had this glasses-wearing gene come from? They were also probably embarrassed that, like the inevitable head lice, it had been discovered not at home or at our pediatrician’s office, but at school.

    The Purchase

    Failing the vision test meant that I had to get glasses. And as a soon-to-be girl with glasses in Lynn, Massachusetts, it meant that my mother brought me to the aptly named Mr. Specs on the corner of Western and Chestnut. Mr. Specs was on the same block as the toy-slash-craft store where I bought my latch-hook rug-and-potholder-making kits.

    Mr. Specs was a bespectacled gentleman (just a face, actually) in a top hat—sort of a cross between Mr. Peanut and Mr. Tux. I’m not sure how old Mr. Specs was; he seemed ageless, like he had always been there, waiting.

    Sadly, Mr. Specs had only one small children’s section. (I was a discriminating shopper.) Regardless, I embraced the ritual of picking out frames. Every Girl with Glasses knows this is the best part. I am sure I tried on every pair of acceptable girls’ frames they had, and examined myself in the mirror while asking my mother’s opinion, before choosing beautiful round plastic frames in my favorite color, purple. The purple was subtle—almost lavender, really. My first pair came with a bright red case to keep them safe.

    I loved them.

    At First Sight

    At the Tony Awards a few years ago, Nicole Kidman walked to the podium to present an award, put on a pair of glasses, and said, "I need these, unfortunately." (The emphasis is mine.) I was as shocked as anyone when Nic pulled out those specs. How far away was the teleprompter she was trying to read? If she needed glasses for distances, did that mean that the rest of the evening (sans glasses) she couldn’t see? Had she waved to Nathan Lane thinking he was Hugh Jackman? And, really, isn’t that the definition of celebrity? We can see them but they can’t see us.

    I, too, was a Part-Time Girl. At first. Why ruin my red-carpet look when I only needed glasses for two minutes a day to read my own teleprompter, the blackboard?

    I dutifully carried my little red case to and from school every day in my bag with my lunch. When I got to school, I put the case in my desk, and put my glasses on only when I needed to read the board. I never wore them otherwise. I was never photographed in them. The only people who knew of their existence were my fellow third, fourth, and fifth grade classmates. (And some of them probably hadn’t even noticed.) Seeing was good, but I wasn’t ready to have my appearance defined by my glasses. They were not a part of me. Even if they were purple.

    Eye for an Eye

    My best friend at the time was a girl named Cindy. Her real name was Cynthia with a y, and I always wondered why we didn’t call her Cyndi instead of Cindy. She was the one who had the sleepovers where we did séances and tried to levitate the slightly plump Tracey. She was the one the boys liked. Not coincidentally, she was also a Pop Warner football cheerleader. The head cheerleader. The captain. During recess, Cindy taught us—the noncheerleaders—cheers, and we followed along, clapping and shouting in unison (BE AGGRESSIVE! B-E AGGRESSIVE!). We didn’t cheer for anyone or anything in particular.

    My parents would not let my brothers play football or hockey. (Too violent!) And they would not let me be a cheerleader, probably for the same reason. They didn’t care that I already knew all the cheers, that I’d be a shoo-in at tryouts, that I was losing my best friend because I wasn’t involved in the thing that was most important to her. Cindy and I used to scheme about how I could try out without my parents knowing. But I never did. And maybe deep down I knew that being a cheerleader might not be the right fit for me. But oh, how I longed for that color-coordinated outfit! The snug sweater! The short pleated skirt! The pom-poms! The saddle shoes!

    Michele with one l, a full-time glasses-wearer, did try out. Now recess featured two real cheerleaders. And the rest of us. Before long Michele started looking at me sideways, and I began trying to get Cindy to say that I was her best friend. I’ve since learned that if you need to make someone tell you that she is your best friend, she definitely isn’t.

    Eyes Without a Face

    Things changed around the sixth grade. This is when it usually happens. Some girls are wearing training bras, and you are not. Some girls are dating, and you are not. Some girls are cheerleaders. I was not.

    During sixth grade, out of necessity, I began wearing my glasses for more than just reading the board. I became a Full-Time Girl. I made the decision one day at soccer practice. My friend Chrissie and I had been dropped off early and were hanging out at the field waiting for the rest of the team to arrive, when I heard two girls yelling my name. Some shapes in the distance waved and shouted hello.

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