Tender is the Night, but Deadly It Remains - Nina Naval
“I don’t ask you to always love me like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me, there’ll always be the person I am to-night.”
As of the 27th of March 2025, I am 24 years old. There are days I feel I’ve changed completely, and days I feel I haven’t changed at all. I think most of the time, I live in a liminal space where both exist. I am both the 3-year-old wishing on stars out my window, hoping the Big Bad Wolf wouldn’t blow my house down, and also the woman 20 years later who now stains her teeth drinking coffee like it’s water, hoping to make ends meet in New York City.
I have loved and lost and loved again. I have won and lost and come out alive. I have marked my skin, cooked myself dinner, hated my body, and dressed confidently within it. I am constantly subject to change, to contradictions, and I think that may be the most predictable thing about me.
The Pouring Pages
Before I get into more of this, as always, I have to mention my bookstore The Pouring Pages. It would mean the world to me if you could support my dreams and buy your books from our bookshop or, if you prefer audiobooks, our Libro.fm! Like I said, I might now be a slightly 24-year-old hardened from the facts of life, but I am and always will be a dreamer first. If you’re reading this, I think you are too—and. from one dreamer to another, books can help you feel less alone.
Tender is the Night (Unabridged) Audiobook on Libro.fm
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“The wisdom she got from you is all molded up into her persona, into the mask she faces the world with. She doesn’t think; her depths are Irish and romantic and illogical.”
I have not delved much into literary fiction or classics since this year, if I’m being completely honest. I dabbled in my younger years, maybe, but I have always been one for romance books where love conquers all. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy for me to delve so deeply into fantasy now: what greater optimism is there than to think good always pulls through in the end, and great loves move mountains? I used to think this was obvious in my eyes, in the way I spoke and acted. I thought my heart was constantly on my sleeve, clear as day for anyone to see.
My perception of myself has changed, especially in the past few years. Throughout college and even after, people began to tell me I was sharp or even intimidating, which surprised me. I didn’t think I’d changed much. After all, I was a girl who flew across the world on nothing but dreams and my mother’s support, and there I was, still going on the same fuel (however limited the time for the latter). But I think what did me in was the fact I started speaking up and as I did so, people started listening—and with ears came opinions. Reading Diver and Rosemary’s story, I couldn’t help but recognize that same judgment: the way their words, like mine, were often pathologized, dismissed, or reshaped to be more palatable.
Nicole Diver is one of the main characters of Tender is the Night. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia after a traumatic experience involving her father in childhood. After this, she began to have outbursts about the maliciousness of males (which, in this political climate, isn’t exactly much of a stretch). Another character in the novel, Rosemary, confesses her feelings to Dick Diver. Instead of taking her at her word, Dick instantly dismisses her experience and reshapes it to fit a simpler, less 'complicated' narrative. While this book was set in the Jazz Age, it was almost jarring to see the same struggles women experience even a century later. We are still accused of “not knowing” or of “overreacting,” just maybe in a subtler way.
Somewhere between growing up, I learned to speak out, and no longer was I someone with a heart on my sleeve. To everyone else, I was a girl with a sword in her throat.
“How you remember things! You always did—and always the nice things.”
Nostalgia’s a dangerous game. It’s easy to look at past experiences with the knowledge you have now but didn’t then, and either idolize or curse yourself. I’ve spoken about it briefly in our Imposter Syndrome episode, but I sometimes feel the superhuman I was at 18 is no longer to be found, and I never talk about the girl I was at 15. The truth of it all is that both still exist, and I find them in my best and worst moments. Right now, juggling 4SickGirls, my job, and my bookstore—that’s the grit and determination of my 18-year-old self. But when I’d gone through my biggest heartbreak a while ago, that was 15-year-old me, begging to be held.
Dick and Nicole Diver, our two principal characters in the book, are left navigating through the temptation of nostalgia and stagnancy. It’s easy to find a moment; call it “when we were happiest.” People often do two things: one, try to remain in this moment for as long as possible, clutching time with our white knuckles; or, two, try to recreate it over and over. There’s a scene towards the end of the novel where Dick tries aquaplaning and fails, and he tries over and over, through exhaustion because he’d done it before. But he’d been younger then, stronger and sober, so it wouldn’t make sense he’d be able to do it two years after, when, on the third try, he could barely get himself off the board. Meanwhile, Nicole asks him to stop.
This scene encapsulates their entire marriage: Dick had fallen in love with Nicole and could never leave her. Even as he feels himself deteriorating with each of her schizophrenia episodes, he claims he loves her. Through his own harsh words and barely masked indifference, he stays, clinging onto the vision of her that once-was. Nicole, however, feels herself growing the more space is wedged between them both. “Nicole relaxed and felt happy; her thoughts were clear as good bells [...] ‘Why I’m almost complete,’ she thought. ‘I’m practically standing alone, without him.’” When she leaves him, she’s in love with someone else. But when Dick walks away from her, he’s left bouncing from one failure to another, still clinging onto a past long lost.
“She couldn’t guess how he was going to behave next upon the torturously slow unrolling of the carpet, nor what would happen at the end, at the moment of the leap. For what might occur thereafter, she had no anxiety—she suspected that that would be the lifting of a burden, an unblinding of eyes.”
It’s easier said than done to wade through the pain of the now to get to someday, and I don’t want you to think I’ve mastered it: I haven’t. Just last week, I was thinking I was at my happiest blonde, praying for time machines to turn back a clock. Reading Tender is the Night was a reminder that even if I managed to hold onto something—the way Dick tried to hold onto Nicole and Rosemary, for example—it wouldn’t be the same. Even in resisting change, you change. You change in the missing, in the grieving, in the living, and simply the passage of time. You’ll find that whatever you think you long for isn’t it at all, and there would never be a recreation of it. The moment has passed, and all you’re left to do is get through.
One of my biggest pet peeves is that you go through things for a reason. Sometimes, there is no reason. There is no lesson to be learned. There is no getting stronger. Sometimes, things just hurt, and things just happen, and they are simply an experience. There’s no fairness to be found, no character development necessary: it just occurred.
Rosemary had to experience Dick Diver. She had a years’ long situationship/affair with him (RIP Rosemary—you would’ve loved illicit affairs and the entire Tortured Poets album by Taylor Swift). Nicole had to experience Dick Diver. Dick Diver had to experience both these women, even if he wished he’d never fallen in love. It would’ve been an extremely boring book had they not all experienced each other.
Reader, there are some heartbreaks you will never get over. There are some people you will love forever. There are versions of yourself that you will always think are better than you now. That’s okay and it’s a part of life. How amazing is it that we get the ability to yearn so fully that we are driven to literature and art? No other creature on this planet is able to express that blessed, haunting, messy pain quite as eloquently as we are. In those moments, we create art, the same way F. Scott Fitzgerald did.
“But some day, I’m going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.”
If this doesn’t resonate with you, then good for you: but I think there’s been a lot of division amongst people right now, especially in America. It’s understandable, but that doesn’t make it any less painful.
In my measly 24 years, I’ve driven myself up the wall at trying to figure out the why behind it all: why people leave, why I have to leave, why people said this, why I felt I had to say that. I’m certain if I’m lucky to have 24 more, I will be certifiably insane with my brain’s determined analysis of life. That being said, I’ve found so far that it matters little whether I know the why or not—it still happened. That will never change.
I wrote last time that I used to wonder if my mother ever found me worth staying sober for as a child. I write to you now saying I will probably never know what she thought, but that my current hypothesis is that she felt she had little support in a world that challenged her so wholly. If you ask me in the future, I may come up with a different hypothesis, maybe one completely contradictory. Maybe I’ll write that she just hated me that much—who’s to say? But within my ever-changing mind is a common thread: it still happened. I can wish it was different all I want and return to the tenderness of night and ignorance, but it will not remove the danger that laid there all along.
Maybe Dick Diver really loved Rosemary, and that’s why his marriage with Nicole fell apart. Maybe Dick Diver never really loved Nicole at all. It doesn’t matter: their marriage still fell apart. It still happened.
Somewhere inside this writer is the girl that prayed to the skies and winds to move from the Philippines to New York. Somewhere inside this same writer is the teenager that moved mountains to make it happen. Somewhere inside this same writer is the woman who feels a little homesick and craves Jollibee. Maybe that’s why I devour these novels and I still wish on stars—not because it’ll truly give me answers, but because I haven’t yet grown out of hoping.
And I hope I never do.
