Flo State

Rethinking Authenticity, Selfhood, and Creative Nonfiction

People sometimes compare me to Janet from The Good Place: a little too perky, a little too formal, a little too precise. Not a robot, but not quite a girl either. She is something in between, something other. Something uncanny.

I don’t mind this comparison. Despite or perhaps because of her strangeness, Janet is charming and likeable.

Alas, people—including, once, my own grandmother—more frequently invoke another cultural figure: Flo from Progressive.

I don’t like this comparison as much—not because I have particularly strong feelings about Flo, but because other people sure seem to. Plenty of users on Reddit and other forums feel compelled to announce how much they loathe her.

The thing about Flo is that you know immediately that she is fake. This, in fact, is the whole joke of Flo. Everything about her is intentionally heightened artifice: the exaggerated bouffant, the precise red lipstick, the pristine white uniform. According to Stephanie Courtney, the Groundlings-trained actress who has portayed her since 2008, Flo’s hair alone takes an hour to style, her makeup another hour to apply.

But Flo’s most important characteristic, and what seems to bother people most, is not her appearance. It is her perkiness. It makes it seem like she is imitating a human woman, not that she is one.

When people don’t like me, this is usually the reason. They find me fake: my mannered way of speaking, so often mistaken for a midwestern accent, the weird way I continually smile and nod, the way my cheeriness seems designed to hide a lack of intelligence or interiority.

A memory that’s burned into my brain, probably from around the same time Flo first appeared: it was back in grad school, and I had just received my teaching evaluations from the past semester. For the question “What did this teaching assistant do well?” one student answered, “She was bright . . . very bright.” Aw, how nice, I thought, they think I’m smart! Then I scrolled down to the question “What could this teaching assistant improve?” and saw this: “. . . perhaps a little too bright.”

Okay, smartass. I see what you did there.

The logic, I think, goes like this:

1. Whereas no real person could be as perky as Flo,
2. Therefore, Flo must not be a real person,
3. Therefore, anyone who acts like her is not a real person.

They—we—belong to the realm of the uncanny, the not quite real.

This is the dilemma: I try to pretend, but it’s the pretending that gives me away. People can always sense the pretending.

As Joanne Limburg, one of my favorite writers, points out, that obvious artifice, that failure to do femininity “correctly,” destabilizes the whole game, because it threatens to reveal that all of femininity is artifice, that there are only imitations of human women. As she writes in Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism,

“The whole point of the work that goes into the presentation of girlhood and then womanhood is to erase itself, and by doing it incompetently we are drawing attention to it . . . it’s only us failed girls who give the game away—that, to paraphrase Eimear McBride, a girl is a made-up thing.”

Strangely, we accept that reality in writing; we do not expect that the person speaking to us—no matter how personal the narrative—is the writer per se. Rather, following Vivian Gornick in The Situation and the Story, we understand that the “I” of a nonfiction narrative is a persona:

“The writing we call personal narrative is written by people who, in essence, are imagining only themselves: in relation to the subject at hand. . . . Out of the raw material of a writer’s own undisguised being a narrator is fashioned whose existence on the page is integral to the tale being told. This narrator becomes a persona.”

The persona is a constructed thing but not a false one, like so much of life, of identity, seems to be. Yet we insist that the people we meet in real life are somehow unmediated, rather than personae themselves.

I think that here, finally, is the reason that authenticity as a concept has always nagged at me: policing the authentic and inauthentic, the real and the fake, can so easily be weaponized against those of us whose behavior seems to fall on the wrong side of this divide, whose outer expression doesn’t seem to match an “inner self.” Perhaps, as the most chauvinistic versions of Theory of Mind still insist, we don’t have selves at all.