WASHINGTON — Jessica Teich’s second book, “The Future Tense of Joy,” may be new, but the story that unravels on its pages is not. It’s about freeing oneself from the perception of perfection.
Teich writes the book as a shared autobiography. It profiles her past and the past of a woman she never met, named “Lacey” in the book.
“I was sleepless one night and I stumbled downstairs and I happened upon an obituary of this woman; and as I read, I became sort of captivated by her,” Teich said about Lacey.
Similar to Teich, the 27-year-old woman was a Rhodes scholar living in California. She was talented and loved by family and friends, yet something haunted her to the point of suicide.
“There was something about her story that just beckoned to me,” Teich said.
“I think, like a lot of women, we felt the pressure to be perfect and also to be invisible, to not ask for too much, to give everything and want very little.”
Looking back on her past, Teich said she now realizes that “perfection is not a goal for anyone to aspire to.”
It was Teich’s own quest to live free from flaws that caused her to keep her painful past a secret. At the age of 16, she was sexually abused and beaten by a 30-year-old man at her ballet company. The abuse went on for about a year, but Teich was convinced she could “figure it out” on her own.
“I didn’t want to disappoint my teachers, I didn’t want to trouble my parents. I kept thinking it would stop or I would find a way out of it,” she said.
On the outside, Teich was living up to society’s high standards. She graduated summa cum laude from Yale and received an advanced postgraduate research degree from Oxford.
Inside, her experience with abuse warped the way she viewed the world. She thought danger lurked everywhere — an outlook that became especially exacerbated while raising two daughters.
“That was sort of the moment that broke open this back story for me,” Teich said. “I realized it was time for me to really look at what happened to me when I was [my daughter’s] age.”
In fact, it was when she was up at night worrying about her daughter that Teich stumbled on Lacey’s obituary and started obsessing. She hired a private detective — “Which sounds very odd for a suburban housewife,” she said — and talked to Lacey’s survivors, including her husband and sister.
Those conversations form the core of the book.
“She seemed to the outside world to have everything. She had so many friends, she had been so successful, she was much loved by her new husband,” Teich said.
“The fact that no one knew that she was in trouble and that she was afraid to tell anyone for fear that she would disappoint, I think that resonated very deeply with me.”
Teich said no matter your past experiences — whether it’s abuse, depression or something else entirely — keeping silent is never a good idea.
“I think the whole engagement with other people is critical,” Teich said.
Just as Lacey’s story helped to unlock her own struggles with the past, Teich said she hopes others find comfort in her book.
“I think this is the moment for people to come forward and say, ‘We’re not going to be stigmatized by shame. We’re not going to be silenced. We’re going to tell people that we’re being mistreated, and we’re going to insist that society do something about that,’” she said.
“There is real freedom from fear and real joy, and I wish that for you, wherever you are.”
Watch Jessica Teich speak at Politics & Prose:
