On Gentrification of Self: An Ode to Jeremy Strong
Some see an ambitious control freak. I see the American Dream.
Over the years, I’ve read Sandra Cisneros’s American classic The House on Mango Street countless times, always finding something new. In the poetic novel, young Esperanza has dreams of a life bigger and better than those she observes in her poor, run-down Chicago neighborhood. When I first encountered this book, as a teenager, I connected with her yearnings. I felt desperate to escape the perceived limitations of my life in Brooklyn.
In my 20s, I wondered: What happened to Esperanza after she’d left? I felt that if I knew, perhaps she could be my lodestar; having left Brooklyn myself and completed my elite college education, I felt unsure of the path forward. In my 30s, I would ponder Esperanza and weep, knowing firsthand how much courage, tenacity, and sheer will she would require to keep forging ahead in her new life beyond Mango Street. I knew how much loneliness she would encounter on her quest for a feeling that can only be described as “something more,” a journey that would pull her further from familiar people and terrain, toward a goal that she could only sense.
Obviously, what had changed was not the book but my own lived experience, and my relationship with the beguiling notion of “the American dream.” As a young kid, I was fueled by the very conceit alone. But once my own quest for that most desired of things in America—success—was under way, it became clear that it would not be achieved with pluck and dedication alone. It would require sacrifices and adaptations of self that I’m not sure anything or anyone can prepare you for.
Like many of you, I’m sure, I was moved and riveted by Andrea Elliott’s 2013 series on Dasani Coates in The New York Times, and its recent follow-up piece, excerpted from Elliott’s book Invisible Child. For the unfamiliar, Dasani is a bright, precocious young Black woman who grew up living in and out of homeless shelters with her family, around my own former neighborhood of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. After being profiled by The New York Times as a child, she was given the opportunity to attend a boarding school in Pennsylvania designed to help pull talented young kids like her out of poverty. Dasani, a bit sad to leave her family behind, is initially eager to take the opportunity. She is given a semi-private room, a closet full of new clothes, and the chance—with pluck and determination—to attend a four-year college, tuition-free. This is where, in America, the movie is meant to end.
What happens in reality, though, is more complicated, and I suspect frustrating to many readers. With an outstanding amount of self-awareness, Dasani realizes that to excel in this new environment, she will need to become two different people. One “white,” for school; the other herself, for home. Soon, this revelation becomes even more painful: If she’s at school more than she’s at home, what happens to the Brooklyn version of herself? What happens to her relationship with home and her family? Eventually, she leaves the school, deciding that the losses inflicted by chasing the dream outweigh the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. One particularly frustrated reader commented that Dasani “threw away opportunity with both hands.”
In America, we excel at mythmaking, and there are few heroes more celebrated in our culture than those who venture on the quest to go “from rags to riches” and succeed. We love to hear about humble beginnings (the humbler, the better), and we fetishize the trappings of earned success. We like to round these heroes out and make them larger than life. Warm their personalities up and paint their stories with a flattering, hazy lens. But the truth is that gentrification of self, like all forms of gentrification, is a painful process, one that only the strong can survive and surely won’t come out of unscathed.
When we celebrate our rags-to-riches heroes, what people don’t like to see or talk about are the scars and calluses that these heroes earn along the way. We don’t like to talk about the bits and pieces of self that will need to be shed or hidden or transformed in sacrifice to the larger goal of “success.” Put another way: Everyone encourages the hero to take the journey, but no one warns them that the trip is going to hurt. People would prefer to not even hear about it—“You’re a success now. What’s to complain about?”
And what did, or does, success mean in most people’s eyes? A fulfilling career. Family. Wealth. A house with a yard and a fence. Maybe multiple homes. Recognition. Clothes so nice you might see them in a magazine. A nice car.
Believe it or not, I found myself thinking about all of this when I read the now infamous Jeremy Strong profile that ran recently in The New Yorker. Somehow, what should have been a simple profile of the star of a hit TV show became the greatest pop-culture Rorschach test of 2021. I came to the piece as a stranger to Strong as a person, but a fan of his work. (I am, admittedly, not a particularly rabid fan of Succession. This confession will likely get me more hate mail than anything else I’ve written in this newsletter.) I finished the profile with, at first, a sense of admiration, kinship, and understanding of this eclectic artist—and later, with more than a bit of confusion as to what all the controversy was about.
As far as I could tell, what I had read was an artistic variation on the tried-and-true American-hero tale: a rags-to-riches, underdog-makes-good story. Young Jeremy Strong is born and raised in a blue-collar family in a working-poor suburb of Boston. In an effort to get him a better education, his family moves to an affluent area with better schools, where Jeremy attempts to fit in—as any survivor among us would do—by adapting his speech and dress. Here he is bitten by the acting bug and, with near-prodigious ambition, begins writing letters to people working in film and theater, seeking internships and opportunities while concurrently getting himself a scholarship to study at the even more affluent Yale University. There, young Jeremy Strong joins the theater club and somehow makes one of his life’s dreams come true through sheer persistence and will: He convinces Al Pacino to visit campus, where he wines and dines him using Yale University funds. This pattern has continued throughout his career: Jeremy Strong sets lofty, ambitious goals for himself in order to achieve the ultimate dream of being a world-class actor. Despite numerous setbacks, time and again, he achieves his goals.
It was exactly the kind of story that our culture would normally celebrate. Except that it was so clearly not written nor received with that intent. The writer—a Yale Man himself—includes the tidbit that this scholarship student “nearly bankrupted” the drama club of one of the country’s wealthiest educational institutions. Strong’s colleagues from Succession—one a member of a near-“royal” family of American actors—mock his work ethic and intensity. An intensity so strong that the piece cites Strong’s request to be hit with real teargas during the filming of protest scenes for The Trial of the Chicago 7. On the internet, the clamoring masses latched onto details about Strong’s penchant for designer clothes and seemingly pretentious quirk of endlessly offering up obscure literary quotations. Why? Was he not merely attempting to collect the trappings of success well-earned? I wondered why this particular rags-to-riches hero was being so skewered.
The conclusion I reached—and I’m so intrigued to hear other takes—was this: We like these kinds of success stories, but we don’t like the seams to show. We want to see Beyoncé win Grammys, not starve herself to prepare for a performance. We want to enshrine Steve Jobs’ genius, not linger on his emotional deficiencies. We want to believe that every little girl like Dasani has a shot at greatness, and not dwell on the fact that only some have a certain makeup that enables them to turn away from their family, their past, and a version of themselves, and never look back.
What is clear in the profile is that Jeremy Strong is exacting and obsessive and unforgiving, to himself and sometimes to others. He has decided notions of what is good and bad and what is high art and what is not, and, above all, what is excellence. And he is unwilling to compromise. In short, he has every trait that is required to withstand the journey from have-nots to haves. He has undergone the full journey of self-gentrification and survived. We are just seeing some of the scars.