Page 57 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

50 Narrating the self
I met somebody who just sort of really changed my life really, it was
amazing. Which is Emily and Ellen’s aunt, which is how I met their dad,
and that literally did set me on another path. But she was . . . there I was
in Spain working on my tan, and wearing my bikinis and thinking oh
Spain, it’s nice, but I’m off to Australia, then I’m going to America, [. . .]
I was kind of, in a way, I was very kind of quite directional in terms of
I wanted to travel, but I was so kind of . . . you know, I wanted to meet
a rich man, to rescue me, you know, it was all that kind of stuff going
on. And then I . . . then one day, Joy breezed in and I always remember
’cos I was sitting with all these ex-pats. And Joy breezed in. And she
lived opposite me in the winter. She’d only come in between college and
university, but she started talking about things that obviously I might
have thought, well, she’s obviously a complete lunatic or it doesn’t mean
anything. But for some reason, it was very strange. For a start, I got on
brilliantly with her and felt really close to her, and . . . but she just had
completely different priorities in life. She’d come from something so
different. And she’d just started to question some of the things that I was
about, and some of the things that I wanted, do you know what I mean?
And she really influenced me. And when I came back from Spain, I actu-
ally decided I think while I was in Spain that I wanted to come home,
do some O and A’s and ...I don’t know if I knew what I wanted to do
at that stage, but I thought I’d like to go home and do something. I’d
like to go to college again. And I definitely see meeting her as a real, real
changing point in my life. Up until then I’d probably met people who
were into quite similar things to me. And probably hadn’t even really
thought that much about direction and values and things like that really.
I mean, it was just a case of, you know, you were a bit like one of those
little wish things that just blows through life.
(Interview 22)

There is little that Sally could have done in this narrative to make the
entrance of Joy more dramatic: ‘I met somebody who just sort of really
changed my life, really, it was amazing!’. Instead of the hoped-for man ‘res-
cuing’ her, this woman ‘breezed in’ to her life and completely transformed
it. In the narrative, Sally relinquished a sense of her own agency to Joy, who
transformed her from ‘one of those little wish things who blows through life’
into someone with ‘direction and values’. This could read like the beginning
of a lesbian coming out narrative, but it is not sexuality or sexual orientation
that marks Joy out. Yet Joy was clearly different – Sally said that she might
have thought that Joy was ‘a complete lunatic’. The clue is in the juxtaposi-
tion of Joy with the ‘ex-pats’. It was Joy’s racial positioning and their friend-
ship that prompted Sally to question her values and certain aspects of her life
and to set a distinction between Joy and her sisters: