But I was raised Hindu by Indian immigrants in Georgia, where I was born and lived for more than two decades. Because in this fantasy, everyone is Christian, everyone watches football, and everyone is white. In the Southern Lifestyle, people wear pearls to football games and pearls to church. There is a vision of the South, a mythology, that has been fashioned through years of luncheons and dinner parties and cotillion classes into a character itself: The Southern Lifestyle, present everywhere from weddings to dive bars (Mason jars are a throughline), carefully crafted over the decades and passed down through generations.
But I was Southern, too, wasn’t I? Why had I never heard of it? Carrie A/Flickr/ Creative Commons 2.0 It seemed as though there was a code of conduct that women subscribed to in the South, one that so many people had already been initiated into. I learned a lot that last semester of high school, not just monograms but also about things like Greek life, which had a strange, cultish allure to it, with all of its “football dresses” and candlelight ceremonies and lifelong commitment - even our senior year AP Economics teacher talked up her sorority and offered to write letters of rec to girls who wanted to join it.
Monogram culture has haunted me since the spring semester of my senior year in a suburban Atlanta high school, when I, a person with no middle name, received the following graduation gifts from my peers: note cards, notebooks, and even a set of towels with my full first name on them, when everyone else had their initials monogrammed on theirs a tote bag with my two sad-looking initials on it when everyone else’s were embroidered with intricate three-letter designs and, while my classmates all received tumblers emblazoned with their monograms, mine - to add insult to injury - was blank.Īnd that’s just what I can remember. But they don’t understand: They didn’t grow up in the South.
“For the monograms!” I say, when they give me strange looks. All my friends are having babies, and the only advice I ever have for them is to make sure they give their children a middle name.
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