Sympathy for Monsieur B by Kayla Min Andrews

The truth is that I have always been impatient with real life, with its tedium, and its pettiness, its flossing and flushing, its what’s-for-dinner, and how-you-doing [. . .] It is why I was not so good at marriage, and better at having short affairs. You got the passion and the yearning, the magic and the mystery, the heightened emotion, and the febrile love-making, without garbage, dishes, or casual flatulence. Perfection and transcendence, in so far as these things are achievable, (and, of course, they are, by their very natures, not), is what I craved. The sublime, in all its swirling, cloud-lit, overwrought, mountain-top, Gothic ruination, with all its silliness and pretension, its awesomeness and sentimentality—I wanted more of that, please. And, never mind its ridiculous, adolescent jerk-off tendencies, I never really outgrew it. 

–Mom, aka Katherine Min, from her essay “On Being a Sprinter”

Mom loved pork sausage, ice cream, high-fat foods that my health-obsessed dad—a former tennis star—looked upon with a pained-saint face. (“Think about your arteries,” he’d say). Every time Mom and I went grocery shopping, we stopped at McDonald’s for milkshakes and French fries, with the tacit understanding not to mention it to my dad, throwing our trash in the bin in the garage, low-key hiding it, not because he would be angry but because his sad disapproval with martyr undertones was unpleasant to behold.

Mom would take me out to lunch at our small town’s one deli and we wouldn’t mention it to my dad, coming home heavy with salami grease, buoyant with root beer bubbles. Meanwhile Dad would eat leftover beans he made for lunch, to save both money and his arteries.

Mom would take me clothes shopping and say “fuck it” and buy the two of us fun and beautiful outfits that I suspected we couldn’t afford. Mom would say “Don’t you worry about that” in a warning tone on the few occasions when I asked if an item was too expensive.

I mostly felt like this was all fine: My dad enjoyed his frugality and health-nut-ness; Mom and I enjoyed our indulgences; everybody won. Except when I got older, Mom confided in me about credit card debt. I thought the concept of debt sounded scary—wasn’t that how people lost their cars and homes?—but I didn’t really know anything; Mom didn’t share specifics. I should’ve been more vigilant, I thought, should’ve said no to more outfits. I did my best to repress my feelings of guilt and fear. (Not to brag, but I’m pretty good at repressing feelings). I kept going with Mom to restaurants and clothing stores. It just felt heavier, more complicated, than before.

In my adulthood, I have always had a gut reaction to credit card debt the way some people might feel about, say, ebola. Horrifying, intolerable, to be avoided at all costs. This feeling came from my early experiences with Mom, yes, but also, I suspect . . . from Madame Bovary.

Mom and I used to read novels out loud together, on evenings and weekends, from when I was little until I left for college. We read Madame Bovary (in English) when I was fourteen or so.

As I remember it: Madame Bovary is married to a man whose biggest vice is being kinda boring. Monsieur Bovary works as a doctor. She stays home, as one did in the 1800s. She has a baby girl named Berthe. She’s irritable, finds the baby annoying, finds her duties taking care of the home annoying. She’s bored. An unctuous moneylender talks her into buying luxurious clothes and fancy curtains and other home decorations on credit. This eases her boredom somewhat. She enters into a passionate affair with an aristocratic fuck-boy, which also helps ease her boredom. Eventually, her debt moves past the point of no return. The moneylender informs her that unless she comes up with an impossibly large sum of money in a few days, Monsieur Bovary’s home and business will be repossessed—or something. The family is ruined. She really doesn’t want to tell her husband this. She asks the aristocratic fuck-boy for the money; he declines. [Spoiler alert!:] She kills herself.

I could hear the tenderness, the reverence, in Mom’s voice as she read aloud. We’d stop here and there to discuss. As I remember it, Mom’s authentic gut reaction to the novel was along the lines of: Hell yeah! Fuck the patriarchy, fuck living the small-town housewife life that everyone expects you to live. Go ahead and buy those fancy curtains! Sleep with that sleazy aristocrat! Get it, girl! Who cares if you look ridiculous, if the moneylender and the aristocrat and the townspeople make dismissive comments about your stupidity behind your back. Who the fuck cares? Life is dreary; get your kicks while you can! She saw in Madame Bovary a kindred spirit.

As for me, at age 14 or so, my authentic gut reaction was three-fold:

1. I’m surprised Mom feels the way she does. I want to learn from her reaction. It seems like she’s saying we must not sneer at people for being impractical, or unsatisfied with the status quo, or unwilling/unable to play by the rules, people who do extreme, ridiculous, unwise things motivated by an unruly yearning for more. (More of what? It doesn’t matter, just more.) It seems like she’s saying we should respect words like ‘transcendence’ and ‘longing,’ respect impulsivity and throwing caution to the wind. Ok, interesting; message received. I agree that let’s not sneer at Madame B the way some of the townspeople in the novel do.
2. But also . . . I’m supposed to connect with someone who’s brought down by curtains? I want to see myself in Madame B—as Mom clearly does—I want to believe I’ll become like her, like both of them, when I grow up, but . . . curtains? Isn’t yearning for fancy curtains simply materialism? What’s so lofty about that? And it hurts my budding feminism the way the moneylender and the aristocrat and the townspeople laugh at Madame B for being stupid. How horrible not to be seen as smart! She makes it too easy for them. If she had acted more intelligently, she could’ve commanded their respect, or at least avoided their derision. (Like me in our small New Hampshire town, in high school, assiduously demanding my classmates’ and teachers’ respect by getting impeccably good grades and carrying myself with impeccable aloof dignity. 14-year-old me felt it was very, very important to be respected.) And what’s so great about Madame B’s grumpiness and brutal disregard for her husband and child? Why couldn’t she have just, I don’t know, spent less money and found a more sustainable way of living?
3. Uh oh. Why is my authentic reaction so different from Mom’s?

Mom divorced my dad when I was in college, when she was a couple years into writing her novel The Fetishist. Mom was single for a while, bouncing around having bad experiences on dating apps. Then she met my stepdad and they lived happily ever after, as it were, until her death from cancer ten years later.

I recognize both Madame Bovary and Mom in the character of Emi from her novel, The Fetishist. Emi is a Japanese American classical violinist. She plunges into an affair with a sexy, emotionally unavailable fellow musician. The sex is transcendent. Emi divorces her husband of many years (who, like Monsieur Bovary, is a minor character in the background of his wife’s story), so she and her lover can be together. When the lover subsequently rejects her, Emi is so heartbroken she descends into alcoholism and, despite her daughter’s efforts to care for her, ends up killing herself.

When I read the scenes of Emi wasting away in her nightgown before her suicide, with her mug of Bailey’s, wailing about how she is no longer beautiful, as her daughter strokes her back and murmurs to her, I can’t help imagining that Mom was imagining an alternate ending to her own story—the worst-case-scenario of impulsivity and a divorce in middle-age.

Despite what some might call Emi’s abject pathetic-ness (actually, because of it), we feel the author’s tender connection to her character. Similar to Flaubert, who is rumored to have said “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Emi, c’est Mom. (Though of course it’s not a one-to-one, and Emi isn’t the character from The Fetishist who Mom most resembles.) Both Mom and Emi possess that itchy incurable dissatisfaction with being cautious, the impulse to pitch oneself headlong into the pursuit of pleasure and transcendence, come what may.

Except Mom didn’t have a tragic suicidal ending. She had a different tragic ending.

In the hospice center at the end of her life, she said she wished she had more money to leave me, but she was proud to have gotten out of consumer debt before she died, and to have a 401k to split among her loved ones. “Don’t save your share for retirement!” she said. “Spend it on something fun!” She was completely serious and a little indignant, probably sensing that my frugal ass would not obey.

She hugged her polite, studious teenage nephews. She whispered her deathbed wisdom/advice/command into their ears: “Party more.”

It’s spring of 2025, and I’m in the Philippines visiting a dear writer-friend who I met in my MFA program. I bought the flights before I found out I was being laid off from the teaching job that I’ve had for 12 years. When I found out about the layoff, I panicked, checked if the ticket was non-refundable (it was), tried to crunch numbers, chastised myself for being irresponsible. My fear was disproportionate; I have enough savings to cover it. My fear was about losing more than money—it was about losing self-control, perhaps, or safety. I soothed myself by saying: Everything will be cheap once I get there.

My friend and I spend a few days on a small island a couple of hours south of Manila. We write in a cute little coffee shop across from our hotel each morning, then explore the island by motorbike each afternoon, zooming past lush tropical foliage and befuddled cows and dogs with proudly dangling nipples.

“I started a new essay!” I tell her excitedly over matcha lattes at the end of a writing session. “It turns out I have a lot of thoughts about Madame Bovary!”

There’s a silence, then we both burst out laughing at my earnestness, at how unintentionally pretentious I just sounded. “I have a lot of thoughts about Madame Bovary!” one of us trumpets to the other at random moments throughout the rest of our stay, our giggles dissipating in the salty humid air.

Mom confided in me about a lot of things, starting when I was a child. It’s hard to remember when she first disclosed this or that, what age I was. I don’t remember when she first told me she struggled with suicidal thoughts. I remember rows of prescription pill bottles lining her bedside table, the same one where our stack of books awaited us, picked out lovingly by her, the primordial TBR list.

I remember her telling me frankly and unselfconsciously about her depression and anxiety, about taking/needing high levels of mental-health medication, and about the niggling, tingling little thought that sometimes glittered and pestered in her mind—the knowledge that she could end her life by taking more than the prescribed amount of these pills.

I don’t remember feeling upset with her for having suicidal thoughts, or for sharing this fact with me. (Do you trust me when I say this? Should I trust myself?) What I remember is feeling special, chosen, touched that she trusted me with a sensitive secret. I felt respected.

I don’t remember consciously fearing Mom would leave us via suicide—though I must have. When I think of my deep fear of overspending, I suspect that in my mind, credit card debt became sneakily tangled up with losing my impulsive, extravagant, not-so-practical Mom. Madame Bovary wove a string of equivalences in my mind: pursuing pleasure = becoming broke and getting laughed at = death. The fact that Mom was so sympathetic to Madame B was another strand in the tangle. Mom took pride in being similar to Flaubert’s protagonist, in not being satisfied, in not accepting drudgery or living at a cautious pace. Of course I must’ve feared losing her to her row of pill bottles, even if I suppressed this fear. 

As an adult, I have always been extremely frugal. I struggle to be less frugal. Sometimes I put off grocery shopping; I eat canned tuna or eggs or ramen for just one more day, just one more, because less-frequent grocery shopping means a lower monthly expenditure. Sometimes I go to great lengths to walk, bike, or take inconvenient public transit when my (used, 250k miles, twenty-year-old) car is in the shop, to avoid spending money on Lyfts. I regularly wear clothes and make-up that I’ve owned for ten or even twenty years.

So far I’ve always been a low-earner—the only jobs I’ve had for sizable lengths of time are waitress and ESL teacher. But still. I am more frugal than I need to be. The idea of spending too much, of one day finding myself destitute, of having to admit my destitution to others, of one day having someone smart with money like Madame B’s moneylender make a derisive comment about my stupidity, fills me with panicky shame and oceanic fear. A shadowy corner of my mind still associates overspending with humiliation and death.

In the café in the Philippines, as I turn Flaubert’s story over and over in my mind, I think I am writing an essay about Madame B. I think about how much sympathy Mom had for her. Then something clicks in my mind. If you consider the story from another point of view: Monsieur Bovary marries a young woman, treats her kindly, trusts her with the household finances, works to provide for her, and returns from work one day to learn she has ruined him financially and offed herself, leaving him impoverished and alone with their kid.

We feel sympathy for this guy, right?

Except Flaubert doesn’t seem to. The novel’s lens stays zoomed in on the enormity of Madame B’s emotional experience. Monsieur B skulks around in soft focus in the background, hardly more than an extra. We don’t hate him; he isn’t interesting enough to hate. He is simply, devastatingly, unimportant to the author. And to most readers. It’s taken over two decades since first reading the novel for me to even consider, and only because I’m writing this essay (“I have a lot of thoughts about Madame Bovary!”) that maybe one ought to, I don’t know, have some sympathy for the guy. When Mom and I were reading aloud, I don’t remember her sparing any thoughts for him.

Therein lies a dark side to Mom’s reaction to Madame Bovary, which I absorbed at 14: We don’t care about the suffering of Monsieur B or Berthe (the unfortunate daughter, whom Madame B finds so tiresome for having normal baby needs). They are civilians. They are boring. Madame B is Interesting. We care about the lofty suffering of the Interesting. We don’t care about boring civilians. Their suffering doesn’t really matter.

As I observed and learned from Mom’s reaction to Madame Bovary, I developed a fear of one day proving to be a boring civilian myself.

Mom divorced my dad when I was 22. As I observed the slow-burn leading to the divorce, in my late high school through college years, as Mom confided in me about it, it was impossible not to notice that Mom saw my dad as a civilian. Like Monsieur B, he was patient and kind. He let her spend their communal money even when it resulted in credit card debt, with little more than a disapproving tut-tut. (Not a perfect analogy, for many reasons. One is that Mom worked full-time, whereas Madame B did not.) Like Monsieur B, my dad’s suffering didn’t seem to matter much.

“Maybe there are two kinds of people in this world,” Mom said once, in a dreamy thinking-aloud tone, “the really interesting ones and the others, who are just lucky to get to be around them.”

She said this when I was a teenager, when her marriage to my dad was at a particularly rocky moment. (The general picture was always the same: She was dissatisfied; he urged her to stay. She disrespected him; he still urged her to stay.) I knew she was talking about herself as one of the really interesting ones and my dad as one of the “just lucky to be around them” ones. I felt a full body disgust and a hot pressure-building sensation that I couldn’t name back then, couldn’t recognize, as anger. That’s gross, I thought but didn’t say, opting instead for a sullen nod. I wasn’t sure why I thought it was gross. That’s part of why I didn’t try to voice it. Instead, I suppressed it and filed the moment away in my mental filing cabinet, in the bulging folder marked “To Brood Over in Silence.”

So many moments in my life when I’m angry and can’t even name it and am actively suppressing it because I’m scared to hear what the anger might want to tell me. Because I’m worried someone I love will see the anger as a sign that I’m boring and conventional, I’m not one of “the really interesting ones.” I worry the anger means I’m tiresome and predictable—snot-nosed baby Berthe howling for milk. I worry if I admit I am suffering, I will learn that my suffering doesn’t matter. I worry I’ll lose Mom’s trust, her respect, our closeness—my most prized, most beloved treasures.

I explain to my friend over juicy glistening tocino with rice and egg that in my Madame Bovary essay, I am exploring a binary in my mind: between the Really Interesting Ones (a special group I count myself among but am scared of being cast out of) and Boring Civilians.

“I know this binary is immature. It’s juvenile to think of the world this way,” I tell my friend. “And therefore the essay is better if I can end by saying, ‘I don’t think that way anymore. I’ve evolved past it. I love myself now.’” I shovel a bite of sweet pork into my mouth, flushing from more than just the weak A/C of the coffeeshop.

“Have you?” my friend asks. “Or, I mean, do you?”

I use chewing as an excuse not to answer.

I still don’t have enough sympathy for Monsieur B. It took me over two decades to even consider that maybe I should. I know intellectually I should feel bad for him, but I don’t feel it in my dark pulsing hot-blooded heart. Or rather, I don’t let myself feel it.

Maybe I’m still a confused fourteen-year-old, scared that if I feel sympathy for him, then the “cool kids,” the Interesting Ones, my mom, will write me off as being similar to him. There’s an element of schoolyard cruelty in this: Children often opt not to show sympathy for an ‘uncool’ kid for fear of being seen as less cool by association.

I don’t want to still be a fourteen-year-old. Maybe one day, when I love myself more, I’ll be less afraid of being similar to Monsieur B. I’ll be able to muster more hot-blooded sympathy for him.

Perhaps it goes without saying?—I am afraid of resembling my dad. I like to notice the ways we are different, and I tremble with cringing shame at the ways we are similar. Like my dad, I often make a pot of beans because it’s a cheap and healthy meal. Like my dad, I favor old used cars and can go years without buying myself clothes. Unlike my dad, I indulge in frequent casual splurges when in the company of others. (Frugality is a dish best served solo; frugality in front of witnesses, frugality that affects others, is called stinginess). When I’m with friends, I eat out if they suggest it, I insist on buying them a drink if they’ll let me. I act unconcerned about money, breezy, knowing I’ll take it out on myself later with my cans of tuna. And I tell myself, proudly, that I’m not that similar to my dad, I’m definitely so much less frugal than my dad.

Surely, he, like me, was pushed toward caution in counterbalance to Mom’s excesses. Perhaps he, like me, was moved by subconscious fear that she would go too far into debt and kill herself. But I don’t like to write about how he and I are similar. I tend to keep him in soft focus in the background, a minor character. I’m reluctant to adjust the lens, to sharpen his image. It’s a lifelong habit, seeking to align myself with Mom and not with him.

On some level, Madame B’s story terrifies me. I’m supposed to relate but instead I recoil. Maybe I’m scared of pleasure. Maybe I’m afraid of my desire for more. (More of what? Anything really. More sex and restaurants and killer outfits and insouciant spending and a life of luxury and artmaking.) Afraid if I embrace my desires too much, I’ll drown.

Does this fear make me less of an artist? It’s true I’ve lived a small life so far, in some ways. Like sticking with full-time ESL teaching for over a decade, despite not loving it, despite wishing I had more time to write. Fear held me back from quitting. Fear of financial instability, leading to death, yadda yadda . . . by now you know the tune.

Before leaving for the Philippines, I decided I won’t look for another full-time job after my upcoming layoff. Instead, I will patch together months of house-sitting and visiting friends and family so I can live cheaply and focus on writing for a while. I’m excited, full of yearning. I’m also, of course, scared. But I’m trying to re-wire some things in my brain. I want to teach myself that I can take measured risks, financial and otherwise, and not die.

My friend and I are having matcha lattes for the last time, at the lovely but weakly-air-conditioned coffee shop on the small island. Tomorrow we’ll pack up our salt- and sand-crusted possessions and make the motorbike/ferry/airplane/car trek to her family’s home in Manila.

“I tried ending the essay with, like, I can be both extravagant and frugal, both artistic and practical. I can be both my mom and my dad, Madame B and Monsieur B,” I say, my voice an auditory eye roll. “But I don’t know, it feels too tidy and uplifting.”

“Right,” my friend says, in a slow thinking-aloud voice. “And also, it’s not like you’re equally both things, right?”

Something deep and primal in me clenches. I start babbling, holding forth on other essays I’ve read with overly tidy endings. I change the subject, essentially, not letting her finish her thought.

I’m nervous that what she means is: “You’re more like Monsieur B than Madame B.” I don’t want to hear her say it, because it’ll hurt me.

It takes an hour or so before I consider that maybe she meant the opposite? Even here in the fun and safety of conversation with a close friend, on a literal tropical island vacation I’ve been un-frugal enough to treat myself to, I’m scared of being called out as Monsieur B. The dynamic feels familiar. I love that Mom never said or did anything to suggest I was boring; in fact she vehemently denied it, and scolded me for even thinking it, on the few occasions I told her I worried about this. Her reaction soothed me. And yet, I always felt on some level like I was pulling off a con. Like I could be found out at any moment—a dramatic irrevocable reveal: “Wait, you’re not one of us interesting ones,” Mom and Flaubert sizing me up, disappointment in their discerning eyes. “You’re a Monsieur B.” You’re someone who can remain in soft focus in the background and be abandoned without a second thought. You’re someone whose suffering doesn’t matter.

I’m not fully there yet, but maybe I’m slowly circling closer to having sympathy for Monsieur B. For my dad. For myself.