Either/Origin: On Rachel Anne Jolie's "Rust Belt Femme"

Rachael Anne Jolie | Rust Belt Femme | Belt Publishing | 2020 | 150 Pages

Raechel Anne Jolie’s Rust Belt Femme has carved out shelf space among contemporary memoirs that at first blush may seem rather crowded. Jolie, a Millennial white woman from the Midwest who identifies as queer, tells a story of overcoming poverty and trauma on the way to earning a PhD with a focus on Marxist thought. Is this the female narrative counterpart to J.D. Vance’s  2016 Hillbilly Elegy, about rising above the socio-economic determinants of one’s birth? Or is this more akin to Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 Wild, where a woman forgives her parents as she embarks on a journey of self-discovery? Is this a tale we’ve already heard, albeit with punk cover art aesthetic?

While Vance’s and Strayed’s memoirs are apt touchstones of white authors whose epiphanies around family and hindsight resonate with Jolie’s, Rust Belt Femme is singular in the way it is grounded firmly in the suburbs of Cleveland from which the author hails. Jolie does not romanticize her industrial roots but bears witness to the steel industry’s decline with unforgettable imagery. Jolie writes that once upon a time, the belching Cleveland smoke stacks were “a sign that our city wasn’t dead--it was a volcano.” Yet, as if invoking Akron native Chrissy Hynde’s lament "City Was Gone" in the next breath, Jolie writes that in watching her grandfather become suddenly quiet as he drove by LTV Steel, she learned the word “layoff.”

Jolie writes with authority about the tentacles of poverty that touched her young life, namely itinerant housing, violence, alcoholism, and abuse. She acknowledges, however that while her own birth parents were unable to provide economic stability, largely because of the brain injury her father sustained when Jolie was very young, she was loved deeply by her mother and grandparents. This love, coupled with the advantages of white privilege, helped give her a chance to escape difficult circumstances that could’ve smothered her possibilities completely.

Jolie focuses much of the first part of the book highlighting the shoulders upon which she stands, and these are the passages that make Rust Belt Femme especially poetic. She is haunted by the souls that built the Erie Canal, on whose banks she was raised. She imagines the graves of all the indigenous people “who were killed and buried in split logs” on top of which the Irish immigrants whose bodies were broken to build the Canal are buried without marker (since Irish immigrants were not among the gentried land owners at the time). Knowing her ethnic Irish heritage is not as significant, she writes, as knowing she was “reared on the bones of exploited labor” and then parented by an exploited laborer, as well. 

Part II, “Brooklyn Heights and Coventry Road,” is especially devastating. Jolie describes an attempted assault on her young teenage self by her mother’s boyfriend, with whom they were living and proceeded to live with for “weeks, maybe months after the incident.” The complicated struggles for economic independence and physical independence reverberate throughout Jolie’s story.

Writer Marion Roach Smith’s definition of memoir bears mentioning in reading Rust Belt Femme considering its brevity--the book is just under 200 pages. Smith writes, “Memoir is not about you; it’s not about it. It’s about what you did with it.” By this metric, Rust Belt Femme succeeds in telling the reader who the author is and all the places that informed the person she wants to be. 

Throughout her teenage escapades, we revisit the places where Jolie cut her concert-going teeth, such as the Grog Shop and the Odeon. Still, a good share of chapters read more like brief collage essays. There isn’t much action, in the conventional sense. One chapter is an homage to the author’s grandmother and her sense of Old Hollywood style. Another is chiefly about applying lip gloss and grieving the author’s first breakup with a boyfriend. We ultimately understand these meditations as the author’s first inklings of her sense of “femme.” The latter half of Femme attempts an impressionistic form of memoir rather than an exhaustive story from birth to the present. Some of the renderings can cause some discomfort for the reader who was hoping to understand how the author’s ideologies solidified. Still, the self-portrayals are honest and offer a glimpse of the content Jolie may return to in the future. 

The ending timbers down rather swiftly to the conclusion that Jolie truly cherishes Cleveland as her heart’s home, a place of origin whose destination still seems to be crystalizing for the femme academic. “I breathe easier when I am in Ohio,” she writes. Maybe it’s due to the smoke stacks that are mere vestiges of their former volcanic fury. Or perhaps it’s because she’s conditioned to the grit of this city, in the state where license plates once proclaimed Ohio as the heart of it all.