Breaking Up with Your Best American Girl

This is Formation Jukebox, a column by Lio Min on being in transition and the music that helps them make sense of it all.

The worst breakups are the ones you try to stave off as long as you can. Passionate breakups—between lovers, friends, family—taste like blood, metal, and smoke, a flaming sword cleaving what used to be a shared beating heart, or raw meat going into a garbage disposal. Quiet breakups are trickier: One day you’re walking next to someone, talking about something a friend of a friend wrote or an intriguing snack you saw at the corner market, and you realize you’re the only one talking because your conversation partner has become translucent, their spirit somewhere else and their body slowly but surely retreating to join it.

This is how my breakup with Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl” is going. Mitski fans know that she doesn’t waste a syllable in her writing. These lyrics are particularly tight, clustering denser and denser only to be blown away like dandelion parachutes by a wail of understanding. The only personal pronouns in the song are “you” and “me” and their possessive variants, but every time I’ve listened to “Your Best American Girl” in the past year, I’ve closed my eyes and imagined the entirety of my life until now unspooled within the way Mitski sings girl.

There is more to the song than its titular American identity anxiety or latent heterosexual disappointment, both of which are brilliantly captured in its iconic video treatment. I keep trying to center images of nested spoons and birds silhouetted against the moon; a parent turning a smile on their tall child, each seeing and receiving the other as they are after an odyssey of miscommunication. The song contains a universe of poetry that’s as far removed from gender as anything can be. But in the underbelly of I guess I couldn’t help trying to be the best American girl is “she”/”her”/the version of me who grasped at American girlhood until her hands were numb.

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None of my girl friends in high school, almost all of them the children of East Asian immigrants, were particularly invested in their femmeness. One of our unisex friend group pastimes was going to the Bath and Body Works at a local mall to pop lotion tops and spritz each other with aerosol sugar, giggling even as we collectively choked on aquamarine jasmine twilight silkspun vanilla. But when the Big Dances came around, we all knew which side of the gym to stand on, teetering around on heels we bought on sale at Express and Wet Seal and TJ Maxx. We practiced putting eyeliner on together and took jobs as bubble tea girls while our guy friends ranked our appearances in spreadsheets and scoured Urban Dictionary for descriptions of filthy sex acts they’d unleash at the next video game hangout, inciting squeals of “Ewwwww” from mouths kept soft with lightly sweet lip balm.

“Your Best American Girl” wasn’t made with my childhood in mind, but it reminds me of the empty nostalgia I feel when I revisit my hometown and think about the girl I was, the woman she would try to be. A place filled with beige/green fields and street names like River and Hollow, small businesses whose oral histories were code to those welcomed into the community and those who would always be outsiders. I spent thirteen years in the same school system and watched generations of classmates forget my name or call me by some other Asian girl’s.

In the underbelly of I guess I couldn’t help trying to be the best American girl is “she”/”her”/the version of me who grasped at American girlhood until her hands were numb. 

I think of those girl friends now, almost all of whom live on in my life as strangers, and feel a deep shame. We were so buoyant with affection and tenderness; we were so gifted at twisting small blades in each other’s backs under the petty spell of teenage courtship. I have no trouble meeting up with former guy friends, but I have a much tougher time talking to the girls, who are now women.

It’s not that we would have nothing to talk about but that we would have everything to talk about, like how we had to clamp our teeth on the bit of white suburban girlhood whether we identified with it or not. Rehashing nostalgia with no bittersweetness is just a signifier that you’ve changed in a way that can’t be reversed, even if you wanted to. And for those of us who don’t want to go back to how we were, the rush of remembering this other time and place and body is almost as painful as the moment my dysphoria and its accompanying clarity, growing like fungi—stealthily fertile in decay—under my skin, erupted into the light.

When Mitski sings Don’t wait for me / I can’t come, the reverb on her vocals making her sound like she’s fading into the growing swell of the first chorus, the fantasy of the verses before falls away. My teenage self would’ve written the chorus in permanent marker on her skin, somewhere no one else would see: Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me / But I do, I think I do / And you’re an all-American boy / I guess I couldn’t help trying to be your best American girl. That was and wasn’t my life. So I still hold those lyrics close to my heart, and at a show I would sing along to every word. The melody and the message doesn’t have to be the same thing.

Sometimes you shouldn’t try to overcome a difference. Sometimes who you were is just who you are. But if given the choice to change or not, I will always choose change.

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The bridge in “Your Best American Girl”: You’re the one / You’re all I ever wanted / I think I’ll regret this. It’s a coy, self-fulfilling prophecy that helps align the rest of the song, as the protagonist swoons in and out of one kind of love (romance with the American boy) while cushioning herself with another (appreciation for the mother who raised her right after all).

Since voicing my intention to transition out loud—to my loved ones; to my therapist; to every doctor acting as a gatekeeper, however sympathetic—I’ve been revisiting all of my favorite love-as-a-woman songs and reorienting myself within them. “Your Best American Girl” used to be a portrait, and now I’ve stepped out of the frame by choice and with conviction.

But the outline where a girl used to be is still there, and I haven’t quite figured out what should take her place. With every syringe I plunge into my belly on Tuesday mornings, every step I take away from the homestead of cis womanhood, I think, “I hope I don’t regret this,” laughing to and at myself so I don’t dwell on what I’m walking away from. I’m breaking up with my best American girl, and she’s felt it coming for a while, I think, and is happy for me. I want to tell her that it’ll be okay and hold her hand, but as I reach for it, mine passes through.

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