To me this seems to be a story of addiction. The "three" people that are "Jeff" include 1) the actual Jeff, a shy introvert with way too much on his plate, 2) an intoxicated Jeff that is outgoing and highly functional, 3) a Jeff that is unrecognizably intoxicated (Michelle).
The part where I have a hard time reconciling the story is towards the end;
> I tell her it’s likely not that and then call Michelle. It isn’t difficult to track her down — she has a robust web presence. She says that she is no longer working with Jeff and has no idea where he is.
I'm thinking that the author calls "Michelle" (aka: super intoxicated Jeff) who is hitting "jackpots" all over the news who basically tells the author off completely, indicating that he is never coming back / losing his battle with addiction. Or perhaps "Michelle" has moved on because "Jeff" has moved on to harder substances in harsher circumstances.
I agree. This is definitely about addiction and its bedfellow codependence.
I read the writing style as bizzaro, perhaps to soften difficult topics and to add intrigue. So to that end Michelle isn't actually puppeting Jeff. She's just a controlling girlfriend.
I believe Michelle represents amphetamines, which something like a quarter of university students take[1]. The upbeat and outgoing attitude shift and confidence. The drive and ambition to found your own company. The total rejection by conservative parents who don’t understand how positively life-changing it can be. This story has hit so eerily close to home.
The fact that the sister doesn’t like Michelle, but she likes her brother when Michelle is inside him. It feels like a little betrayal to learn that the person you like to talk to might only act that way when they’re using amphetamines. To me it makes no difference if the person has altered the dopamine and serotonin levels in their brain with diet and exercise or if they did it with a pill. If they’re a happy, successful and well adjusted human then why would it matter?
Honest question--is Michelle a real person the author is recounting events about or is this some kind of literary device? Maybe my brain isn't working today but I gave up halfway through this without getting it.
> Honest question–is Michelle a real person the author is recounting events about or is this some kind of literary device? Maybe my brain isn’t working today but I gave up halfway through this without getting it.
Its explicitly fiction, so “real” is…perhaps not the right word. I think the story is intended to be read literally as fiction; its a fictional world where “puppeteers” that can somehow temporarily exist within you and direct your actions, and also pop out of you and leave you on your own are a real kind of personal service you can hire, and where also VR headset that let you relive past experiences are real things you can get (by the end of the story, at least.)
On the other hand, I think the puppeteer element intentionally can serve as allegory for one or more things in the real world; both gender transition and mental health care via professionals and drugs seem like they could fit, more or less. I don’t know if one thing in particular was intended, though.
If it were a gender transition story, it reads more like a previous generation where therapists were more inclined to tell people to try to bury themselves in living the life of a person they’re not. And it plays out predictably in that case, in that the person not becoming who they truly are appear to be better than before, until it all comes falling apart.
But I don’t think that’s the intent of the story — I think the author did intend for this to be taken literally as a fictional tale, and it’s quite good.
A ridiculous presumption, you ARE always. If anything its how you want to be seen by others. Which is fine, we all seek attention, or certain treatment.
Strange you came to say this unprovoked to a stranger on the internet, but I’m going to rely on the body of medical evidence, psychological evaluations, quality of life improvements, etc. over your insistence to the contrary.
I read it as the story of someone whose brother (Jeff) has multiple personality disorder, where Jeff's personality split to build a Michelle personality that was capable of standing up to and meeting not only his parents' expectations, but his sister's (the narrator's), as she also approves of who Jeff is as his Michelle personality. The bit about Michelle being a puppeteer is how Jeff self-reconciles having a separate personality "in control"; the bit about rich children being able to afford puppeteers is how Jeff reconciles how effortlessly the rich children at Stanford seem to be able to achieve success. The bits about Michelle stepping outside, about being contactable directly after Jeff disappears, are literary devices.
Jeff disappears from his parents', sister's, and wife's life, because none of them accept Jeff + Michelle as an integrated person, someone whose anxiety and depression is unacceptable to them (unacceptable to any of them) but neither is his attempt to pull himself together and become happy and well-adjusted (acceptable to his wife, unacceptable to his parents, acceptable to his sister but only on the condition that he make amends with his parents). Danny is Jeff's true biological son, and when the narrator thinks that she sees Jeff "pulling Danny's strings," what the narrator is really claiming to understand in the end is that she isn't capable of trusting that anyone can be genuinely happy in-and-of themselves, that the projection of happiness must be a front, intended to meet roles and expectations, and not from a genuine inner source.
The story is a tragedy, but not about Jeff. It's a tragedy about the unrealistic expectations often fostered in immigrant families (including the narrator's failure to land a rich husband or build a life outside her parents' conflict management issues and control), and how these expectations can wreck family life.
It reminds me of Greg Egan’s sci-fi short stories. I read it as such, i.e. what could happen if there were really puppeteers as described. No hidden metaphor.
The reasonable interpretation at first is that Michelle is trans Jeff, post-transition.
But then it goes off the rails. We quickly learn Michelle is somebody entirely other, whom we learn practically nothing about despite that she authored an extremely likeable Jeff. We learn that the other, peevish, Jeff is just Jeff from before college, before he was scripted up. We also learn practically nothing about him. The only character we learn anything about is fake Jeff, and then only a variety of impressions of him.
It has elements of a good story, but omits the good parts.
The best allegories are the ones that go completely off the rails, and only make the author's original point if you squint. (Even better if they're still good allegories, but for things their authors didn't know about.)
I imagine the author giggling manically at seeing different people fully convinced of and vehemently agruing about their contradicting interpretation of what the story is an allegory for.
For most of the story I was assuming Michelle was an allegory for drugs (particularly with the reference to Jane's Addiction).
But by the end I was getting a distinctly "inter-generational trauma" read.
Michelle is the coping strategy personality that doesn't always work, and when Jeff's sister (the narrator) becomes part of the problem - and when 'Michelle' has to become a parent himself - Jeff's last option is to disappear completely.
This is science fiction. Good science fiction uses alternate reality to explore the human condition: "Given how human beings' experience, and how they behave in our current world, how would they behave differently if this new technology / capability were available? What are the philisophical / moral / social ramifications of that?"
So, there are immigrant Asian parents. Such parents often have high expectations for their kids. These kids feel the pressure to meet them, but often can't (or feel they can't), leaving a problem to be solved. Also, parents often try to live vicariously through their children.
In the Real World, people might turn to drugs: Alcohol to numb the pain, amphetamines to increase performance, etc; they also put their kids in expensive schools and coach them in everything they wish they'd been taught growing up. In the story world presented here, some people turn to "puppeteers": One particular second generation child first relies on a puppeteer to be a "success", and then becomes one himself to live out a "success" through his child.
The fact that people do have this problem, but don't have the solution, and turn to other solutions, is why so many of the "allegory" attempts here are close but ultimately fail: Yes, drugs are a different way people sometimes deal with these problems; no, drugs are not the same as puppeteering, which is why it's not a 1-1 match.
Jeff does shrooms and listens to Jane’s addiction. Jeff’s parents put him in a psychological vice to make their American tale worthwhile. They’re unhappy people and the only solution given to Jeff to end their collective unhappiness and fighting is Stamford. Jeff makes it, but Stamford and startups won’t work with depressed Jeff, shrooms and Jane’s addiction so he adapts and creates “Michelle”, the face of a successful happy well-adjusted person Jeff couldn’t really be. It works too well, he succeeds, grows closer to his family, but Jeff is still Jeff. When his father is sick, he can’t manage to put on the happy well-composed face. He gets angry that who people think he is isn’t who he is, so he reveals Michelle, which is revealing that teenaged unhappy Jeff is still inside, and he never wanted to be Michelle but his parents forced his hand. It gets worse, he gets a family but again it’s a relationship based on Michelle and not the Jeff of Jane’s addiction and shrooms. He knows that he can’t keep up the hiding, but he’s damaged, so he just leaves.
This reads like a torture scene in an Iain M. Banks Culture novel, where people are plugged into godawful simulations that last a lifetime. Please, just make it stop...
Since we're all chiming in here, I thought the story was about coping with pressures and life, and uses the puppeteer as a stand-in for multiple, nebulous "whats" or "whos".
I think most of us can relate to somebody in our life who leaves either for school, or work, or for some reason is out of our lives for an extended period. I think it's also reasonably common when those same people come back and are changed, for lack of a better phrase. It may be that you, the reader, are that person who came back changed.
For whatever reason, the person is now different in a positive, or at least socially-acceptable, way; however, the other shoe is bound to drop. In this case, it was Michelle and the concept in their world of Puppets and Puppeteers.
But really, you can insert anything you want into Michelle's spot. Drugs, relationships, and religion are often the most common factors in these stories. Just as common is loss of one of those three (parent passes, kicked the meth habit, etc). It can also be something like an aggressive alternative medicine group with strong pressure to conform to the in-group. It could also be something more openly malicious, such as getting into a racial superiority group, a cult, or a conspiracy theory group.
In the end, it is something, or someone, or some group, that allows the changed person to be themselves, or express some other part or their personality. It may even be that this is a change the person wanted, such as being less violent or having more patience.
It also brings up an interesting question, in this framing. How are the outcomes different between using mind altering drugs, joining a cult, and letting a manipulative person guide ones actions? One could argue intent, where manipulation is putting the person in a place to go back to the manipulator, but one could argue the same about drugs, or the alt-medicine group, or any of the other types of things listed above.
When it's all said and done, I thought it was about how people outside of the changed person react to learning about the source of the change. Sometimes it's a positive reaction, but sometimes all anyone wants is the status quo.
Since there's obviously different interpretations, and most of the fun of the story is sharing them, I read parts of it as a plurality and fronting story.
The social pressure to not talk about plurality, and the pushback folks get when sharing their identity with people close to them[family] resemble the interactions the main character has with others. Questions of "who are they really?" and "who am I talking with right now?" present themselves in the story and I'd imagine in systems that don't have the best supportive environment.
Interesting read, but did not understand the author's message or what was going on. Was it about addiction, MPD, trans discovery? Unclear, to me at least. Poor writing I think, unless the ambiguity was the intent.
Great writing leaves gaps for the reader to fill with elements and interpretations from their own life. This comment thread makes it clear it worked -- amphetamine users see it as a story about amphetamines. People who care about gender thought it was a gender story. People with social anxiety see it as a story about masking.
I watch and read too much sci-fi so interpreted it more literally, thinking about how the puppeteer thing could actually work.
> This comment thread makes it clear it worked -- amphetamine users see it as a story about amphetamines. People who care about gender thought it was a gender story. People with social anxiety see it as a story about masking.
You're making a lot of assumptions there. Just because people make a guess doesn't mean that guess is based on their own life.
And reaching as far as you need to find an interpretation is also something that happens with bad writing all the time.
I have a sibling who moved away and comes back from time to time and I miss them. So this resonates for me. Plus the whole dysfunctional asian family with culturally assimilated kids dynamic.
The part where I have a hard time reconciling the story is towards the end;
> I tell her it’s likely not that and then call Michelle. It isn’t difficult to track her down — she has a robust web presence. She says that she is no longer working with Jeff and has no idea where he is.
I'm thinking that the author calls "Michelle" (aka: super intoxicated Jeff) who is hitting "jackpots" all over the news who basically tells the author off completely, indicating that he is never coming back / losing his battle with addiction. Or perhaps "Michelle" has moved on because "Jeff" has moved on to harder substances in harsher circumstances.