You Could Have Been a Roosevelt

This song seems to be about two things: the falsehood of limitless potential in young girls (especially upper middle-class American girls) are led to believe in before they hit adulthood, and the fact that most "progressives", whether they want to admit it or not, typically end up collapsing back into the comforts of social and fiscal conservatism because conservatism recognizes the fact that the world is flawed and that utopia is an impossible concept. A lot of upper-class girls in college had high ideals and big dreams, especially when the feminist movement was at its peak, but adulthood isn't clean-cut like that. The album's overall theme of mental illness and the struggle of existing fits into this, not only how the pressure of fitting into the status quo often breaks people who simply can't live up to these expectations, but also how nobody is truly unique or special like we're led to believe in our youths. Most of us start out a "Roosevelt" with "dresses pressed" and "faces as fresh as daffodils", but we're really Kennedys: peaking in our youth, then marred by trauma, hardened by death and age and loss. This is even truer if applied to the wives of FDR and JFK versus the Presidents themselves. The album's relation to the memoir "Girl, Interrupted" - about a girl with Borderline Personality Disorder - also connects well with this song. The song actually reflects a lot of the tenets of a cluster B disorder including identity diffusion, grandiose delusions of things like intelligence and importance in the world, trouble fitting in with social norms, more tolerance for chaos than conformity, black-and-white thinking, a strong ego and a childlike mentality leading to dissatisfaction in regards to the flaws and imperfections that come with adulthood, often linked to some sort of early trauma, such as abuse or neglect. Borderline also leads many who suffer with the condition to self-sabotage relations with others, devaluing and discarding anyone who criticizes them, having intense but short-lived and often inappropriate relationships with others, an inability to secure gainful long-term employment, and co-dependency on other people even if the relationship is toxic. The author of "Girl, Interrupted" had a father who was an advisor to JFK (Carl Kaysen), and Susanna herself lived through the JFK Assassination, so she was well-versed in the Kennedy history. Kaysen has often come across as inanely self-pitying, pretentious and contrary in any memoir she writes about herself, as critics note, but this is part of her disorder and she doesn't try to hide or mask the reality of this. Susanna is notable entirely for her memoirs - she lives a somewhat private life and her sole form of employment post-publication seems to be her books - but "Girl, Interrupted" reveals a rebel, a moody teen trapped in an adult age and body who wants to be more than what she is, and who feels that the conventions of New England's postwar society are drowning her. She "could have been a Roosevelt". Instead she spends her formative years of adolescence in a mental hospital, has an inappropriate affair with an older married man, embarrasses her family, knows she wants to write for a living but doesn't take the conventional route of an Ivy League university common for her social class, and she's mostly known for something generally considered upsetting and unpleasant, even if it did help destigmatize a mental illness. Aimee Mann's incredible ability to write a song in the 2020s that actually sounds vintage to the 1960s era, with no digital giveaways or loud bass or limited instrumental variance, really sets it up well. I could see some listeners interpreting the song these days and in our current political climate as illustrating the inevitable division between liberals and conservatives, or being about a social misfit, but Susanna Kaysen wasn't really any of this. She was well-liked by peers and came from an upstanding family, she eventually longs to go back into the world in spite of what problems it has rather than rebel against it or try to bend it to her own whims and values, and she concedes that the approach that modern mental healthcare takes is often limiting and restricts the ability for patients to actually get better, develop introspection or recognize when they themselves are the one causing the problem. I guess it could be said that this song effectively and poetically reflects how painful all of this is, and how most of us start out in adolescence "sailing" in without realizing how easy it is to crash and burn, especially if we fail to acknowledge the other vessels around us. Youth is fleeting, and we all often want to have lives we wished could happen based upon what can simply never be, wanting others to see potential in us that we've lost on our own.

[Edit: typo]