Greta Johnson
Professor Scott Olsen
Inquiry Written Communications 100
8 October 2021
The Nature of Relationships and Demanding Careers in Lynsey Addario’s
It’s What I Do
The memoir It’s What I Do by Lynsey Addario focuses on the nature of navigating relationships and demanding jobs through the lens of gender. Addario’s career as a conflict photojournalist influences the types of relationships she has, the kind of men she attracts in romantic relationships, and how she values herself within those relationships. Her gender compounds these issues in her relationships, both because of the way others treat Lynsey and because of the way Lynsey views herself and what she can contribute to a relationship.
The memoir begins with a recollection of a moment during the Libyan revolution, in which Addario is reporting on the war between ruler Qaddafi and Libyan rebels. She and her companions, a driver and other journalists, travel towards the center of the Libyan city Ajdabiya, against the advice of many others, including their driver, who is local to the area. Photojournalist veterans of other conflicts back off, claiming “the pictures weren’t worth the risk” (Addario 10). The reason others warn Addario’s crew about continuing to enter Ajdabiya is because Qaddafi’s troops were moving into the city, creating a violent warzone. Lynsey and her crew push on regardless. During this scene, Lynsey does not describe herself as fearless. She mentions multiple times that she was terrified, writing “My fear was debilitating, like a physical handicap” (Addario 11). She states many times that she feels in her gut that the group should leave, but mentions one reason she doesn’t speak up about it is because she “didn’t want to be the cowardly photographer or the terrified girl who prevented the men from doing their work” (Addario 10).
Early on in the memoir, Addario introduces two crucial topics for the rest of the piece: her dedication to her work and how gender influences her life and her career. She goes on to describe how her crew gets kidnapped by Qaddafi’s troops, and how she is groped and tied up. She worries that her gender will get her raped in addition to being killed, and the recollection ends with her asking herself questions, “Will I see my parents again? Will I see Paul again? How could I do this to them?” (Addario 15). These questions hint at another important theme in Addario’s memoir: the condition of relationships sustained through demanding and dangerous jobs. The dangerous aspect of Lynsey’s work has an impact not only on her, but upon those whom she has relationships with. This is the first time in her memoir that Addario mentions her relationships to other people and how she affects them when she puts herself in danger.
Part One of the memoir details Addario’s early life and her first relationships. Her mother and father split up when she was a child, creating an interesting dynamic for her formative years. The divorce was prompted by her father, who had came out as gay and partnered with a man. He left the family to be with a man, and Lynsey’s mother “filled in the gaps” (Addario 30). Lynsey describes her mother as “infinitely resilient” (30), raising her children on her own as her mother had raised her and her siblings. This early description of Addario’s mother and grandmother foreshadow her own resilience and determination in the face of hardship. Additionally, Lynsey does not write as if she is bitter about her father’s decision to leave the family; she almost writes as if she admires him for his bravery. “I accepted that my father had found the happiness he’d longed for. I even found solace in the idea that my dad left my mother for a man rather than a woman” (Addario, 30). It was an early example of honesty: truth to oneself and truth to the world. Honesty becomes a pillar of Addario’s career and purpose in life as she follows major world events, hoping to shed light on the truth in hard situations.
Addario’s line of work impacts her romantic relationships many times throughout her memoir. The first time that Addario’s line of work affects romantic relationships in It’s What I Do is when she works on a project that explored a statement made by Mayor Giuliani, mayor of New York in 1999, about transgender prostitutes being “society’s throwaways” (Addario 43). Addario is assigned by the Associated Press to photograph these women. She decides that in order to get an honest depiction of the women, Addario must first gain their trust. She spends every weekend with the women she befriended for five months, and begins to see things she hadn’t noticed before about their lives. Concurrently, Addario meets a musician from a band and agrees to go out on a date with him. The date goes well until the women that Addario had been photographing spot her, and loudly cheer her on. The musician expresses his distaste for Addario’s connection to these women, asking, “What did you say you did for a living again?’ ‘I’m a photographer.’ ‘And these are your friends?’ ‘Yes, I guess.’ The kiss ended there” (Addario 49). Lynsey’s first romantic prospect in months is scared off when he is exposed to the nature of her work, which involves putting herself in situations to be able to capture moments that most people wouldn’t regularly see. Addario’s work, even though she wasn’t travelling abroad or putting herself in direct danger yet, begins causing romantic issues very early on in the memoir.
Addario travels to India during her formative years as a photojournalist to practice her craft, and while she is there, one of her peers recommends that she visit Afghanistan to report on the women under Taliban control. In Afghanistan, she picks up on the cultural differences between Western countries and Muslim countries, learning a lot about the role of women in the Afghan society. This project becomes a crucial part of her life as world events unfold in the following years.
A central romantic relationship featured in It’s What I Do is one between Lynsey and a man she meets in Mexico City named Uxval. She meets him on a mountain biking tour, Uxval being one of the guides. Addario describes him as “a young Mexican man with a thick mess of brown hair… He spoke Spanish, English, Italian, and just enough of every other language to be able to charm women around the world… Like most mama’s boys, he was strategically in touch with his feminine side” (Addario 79). When the two meet, Uxval is engaged to be married to another woman, but asks to come see Addario at her shared apartment a few days after meeting. When she agrees, he arrives and kisses her in the doorway, claiming, “‘I just had to do that before I did anything else’” (Addario 80). He then leaves to break off his engagement with the other woman to be with Addario. Lynsey mentions that she is wary of being involved with a man who apparently cares so little about his commitment to others, however she admits that she was “attracted to his decisiveness” (Addario 80). Lynsey goes on to detail a story told by her grandmother, Nina, about her and her grandfather’s relationship. She states that although he was a good provider and a good man, he wasn’t spontaneous or interesting to her. The man Addario’s grandmother had dated prior to her grandfather, named Sal, had been “funny and spontaneous… He made me laugh, and he would grab me and kiss me all the time” (Addario 80). She did not end up marrying Sal, stating that although he was a hard worker, he had no money and no future. Addario’s grandmother chose a safer, more boring option, and although she claims she regrets nothing, she describes a moment in which Sal kisses her fifty years after they dated. “He grabs me and kisses me like I haven’t been kissed since those golden days when he would walk me home from work down the main boulevard” (Addario 82). She explains how the passion of that kiss was something she hadn’t felt for a long time, and how a kiss like that held its own value to her. “I had forgotten the passion of a kiss like that. When a man grabs you and kisses you like he means it. It felt good” (Addario 83). As a conflict journalist, Lynsey craves passion, excitement, and intensity. For this reason, she is attracted to Uxval when he breaks off an engagement purely because of a passionate gut feeling. Lynsey writes, “There was a lightness and spontaneity and romance to my relationship with Uxval, something I’d never felt before… I loved him painfully and did anything to please him” (Addario 83). The passion and adrenaline rush of dating such an intense and decisive person mirrors the excitement that Addario chases in her career, drawing her closer to Uxval. It also exemplifies the type of passion that Lynsey’s grandmother spoke of: a kind of love that one would regret not taking a chance on. However, Addario’s career stresses her relationship with Uxval, as it does in every relationship she mentions. “Photography drew me away from Uxval like a lover, and this was a simmering source of tension between us” (Addario 83). When the attack on the World Trade Center occurred on September 11, 2001, Addario knew she would be called to the war that would inevitably break out between the United States and the Taliban because of her expertise with not only New York City, but her experience in Afghanistan under Taliban control a few years before. She leaves Uxval in Mexico City and ventures out to report on the fallout of the attack on the World Trade Center.
Addario’s pursuit of the War on Terror storyline stresses her relationship with Uxval, as she is needed in the Middle East for long periods of time. In Quetta, Pakistan, another journalist overhears Addario speaking on the phone to Uxval. “Gilles Peress, who had covered Iran and Bosnia, among many other conflicts, looked at me, expressionless, and said, ‘Was that your boyfriend?’ Yes. ‘Do you love him a lot?’ Yes. ‘He will cheat on you one day.’ And he walked away” (Addario 101). Gilles is a veteran of conflict journalism and therefore knows a lot about the people and relationships that endured in that line of work. Addario states that she didn’t believe him then, but has since learned what Gilles had meant: “that in this profession relationships ended in either infidelity or estrangement. A dual life was unsustainable” (Addario 102). In Addario’s mind, to have a relationship and work as a photojournalist was to live a dual life.
Lynsey states that coming home to Uxval during the War on Terror makes her feel as if she should put on an act to pretend like the world isn’t at war and as if she doesn’t have to be there to document it. She states feeling like she “had to step up and be a real girlfriend — an exciting, attentive, normal girlfriend — to make up for the weeks away” (Addario 107). An outlook on relationships in this manner separates work and love life so sharply that one world cannot be carried over into another. This poses a huge challenge to Lynsey, as she states many times throughout the memoir that her work is a part of who she is. “My work would always come before everything else, because that was the nature of the work: When news broke, I had to go, I wanted to go” (Addario 107).
The double life that Addario tried to live with Uxval fell apart quickly while she was documenting the conflict in Pakistan. On a visit to Uxval in Mexico City, Addario finds that he has been cheating on her with a woman named Cecilia and breaks up with him. When she finds out from a mutual friend that Cecilia is a secretary, Addario spirals further into the feeling of self-doubt and failure, as she “could never compete with a secretary who clocked nine to five Monday through Friday, who had all her weekends free” (Addario 110). This event proved to Lynsey that her internal voice was correct: that women who were readily available and not committed to a dangerous line of work would always win out over her in matters of love.
Many women experience feelings of self-doubt and insecurity around careers and purpose, as society puts a specific emphasis on the need for women to diminish themselves and their accomplishments in order to be palatable to men. It is often that a woman is expected to put her career on hold or delay exploring her passions in favor of finding a marriage and looking after a family. When a woman decides to deviate from this path, she will often feel especially pressured to return to the societal norm for women. Lynsey experiences this pressure while she attempts to date and nurture relationships while maintaining a demanding and challenging career. This societal pressure is oftentimes so imposing that it creates a negative perception of oneself in women, which pressures them to settle for less than ideal relationships and involvements because they believe they are not capable or worthy of one that fulfills them. Lynsey’s negative perception of herself allows her failing relationship with Uxval to continue. A few months after ending her relationship with him, she forgives Uxval for cheating, and invites him to live with her in Istanbul as she covers the War on Terror in the Middle East. She writes, “I had one foot out the door, but I was lonely and I loved him, he was persistent” (Addario 115). Her career isolated her from the feeling of normal life, and therefore she was willing to accept less than she deserved from a relationship in order to try to avoid the feeling of loneliness. Not long after he moves in with her, Lynsey starts realizing that Uxval is cheating on her again, using her long periods of absence to see other women. However, she doesn’t respond angrily. Instead, she writes as if she is resigned to this treatment, as if it is her punishment for having a demanding job that draws her away from him frequently. Addario writes, “I accepted my relationship with Uxval for what it was… Though I knew he was dating other women while I was off for months at a time, I accepted his philandering as one of the compromises of the work and lifestyle I had chosen” (138). Lynsey had decided that, as a woman with a busy schedule and passion for work that extended beyond the desire for a relationship, she must accept the love she thought she was worthy of with Uxval. This insinserce relationship with Uxval continues until Addario meets another journalist in Baghdad, Matthew, and discovers that they have feelings for each other. When Uxval comes to visit her, she says that she feels nothing for him or the gesture that should have been romantic. The relationship that Addario had used for comfort and security and an escape from her job had finally been degraded of all meaning for her. She gave him all of the cash she had with her and told him to move back to Mexico City. “And with this petty alimony he disappeared. It was the first time in years I felt free” (Addario 148). Lynsey describes the end of this relationship as “freeing” because it allows her to live a more honest truth about what her life is about and what matters to her.
Lynsey begins to focus on cultivating relationships with people who understand her career and what the job is worth doing, like Matthew. Lynsey and Matthew shared a tentative relationship fueled by the passion and intensity of war. They endure being kidnapped together, helping one another survive the traumatic incident. However, after they are freed, Matthew returns home to Atlanta and marries his first love. Addario reflects on this fling, saying that “the reality was that I could offer little to a man other than passionate affairs and a few days a month between assignments” (166). This comment reflects her internal belief that she is not worthy of a committed relationship because of her work life, specifically because she is a woman. This belief is continually proved to be correct throughout the memoir, affirmed by men who cannot commit to Lynsey because of her schedule or the effect of her career upon the relationship. Relationships within her profession are different than ones with people outside of the journalist world, as they are fueled by an external passion and intensity of war. Lynsey goes on to say that her love with Matthew “would have never flourished anywhere but in Iraq” (Addario 167), and that it needed the passion of war to survive.
Years later, Lynsey finally meets a man she could envision marrying. While living in Istanbul, Lynsey meets a man named Paul, the chief of the Turkish section of an international news company. Addario marvels at the fact that, for once in her adult life, she is finally dating a man she can see herself marrying. This change came down to the fact that Paul is also driven by his career, managing deadlines and hours that extended far beyond the typical nine to five life that most people strive to have. He had also worked as a foreign correspondent in dangerous places, and understood the toll journeys like that take on a person. When Addario is tasked with a dangerous mission, Paul simply says to her, “‘I love you. I am here. Do your work, and come back when you finish. I will be here waiting for you’” (Addario 203). After years of failed romances and flings, Addario finally found someone who understood her relationship with her work. Paul didn’t ask her to be someone she wasn’t when she was home with him, like Uxval did. He didn’t make her feel guilty about her time away, and didn’t use that time to be with other women. He recognized that loving Lynsey meant loving the aspects of her life that took her overseas for long periods of time and led her to risk her life for the betterment of the world.
Still, after years of being a woman in a demanding field, Addario harbors the belief that she is not fit to be married because of her long absences. When Paul proposes to her, she says, “‘Are you sure you want to marry me? I am never home… You don’t have to marry me, you know’” (Addario 249). The intersection of having a demanding job and being a woman had created a belief that a man would never want to marry a work-driven woman that had been ingrained in Lynsey’s mind so deeply that she is shocked when the man she loves asks her to marry him. He insists that he does, in fact, want to marry her, regardless of when she can be home, and they set their wedding date.
Addario’s demanding and high risk job affects her platonic relationships as well as her romantic ones. When Addario is kidnapped in Libya with three of her counterparts, she experiences how the high stress environment of her work forges powerful platonic relationships that are different than ones held outside of war zones and other traumatic places. Lynsey details how she and her companions ended up captured in Libya. They push onwards toward danger in Ajdabiya, despite the warnings of others they encounter and the advice of their driver, Mohammed. They are stopped at a military checkpoint and are captured from their car. Mohammed is killed in the altercation, and the four journalists rationalize the loss of his life with the value of their work while being detained. While being held captive, one member of the group, Steve, periodically asks the group, “Everybody here?” to which everyone responds “yes” in turn. When they are released, Addario comments about this connection, “We would be bound for life by this experience. As I hugged Paul, I heard in my mind Steve’s voice, Everybody here? Yes. Yes. Yes” (Addario 302).
The memoir It’s What I Do by Lynsey Addario details the nature of relationships forged in and out of high risk and demanding jobs. Addario describes how she impacts those who care about her by placing herself in harm’s way, and how her long absences affect romantic connections. These extreme scenarios are exacerbated by the fact that she is a woman, affecting the type of relationships she finds and what she believes she is worthy of. Lynsey discovers, to her surprise, that she is worthy of love in romantic relationships regardless of her profession when she meets a man who sees her as a whole person with obligations and passions that extend beyond the relationship. Lynsey leaves readers with a message for women everywhere: having a meaningful, intense occupation and being loved are not mutually exclusive.
Works Cited
Addario, Lynsey. It’s What I Do. Penguin, 2015.