Children are meant to evolve beyond their parents. Each fresh generation is supposed to have it somewhat better than their living ancestors did when they were younger. Perhaps this is why it feels so normal for most teens to despise their parents. Those feelings are part of the growing pains needed to surpass the oldsters. The negativity that young people feel toward their elders is a way of stepping on the gas pedal and blazing past the past into the future of their dreams. Alanis Morissette had, by all accounts, a happy childhood with supportive parents, even if any household trying to navigate stardom on behalf of one of its kids is going to have its share of obvious challenges and insidious pitfalls. It would be easy to assume a song like “Perfect” is a parody of parental psychology and that Alanis hated her guardians just as much as the rest of us hated ours.
Article continues after advertisement
A deeper reading must acknowledge that there are no actual parents in the song and that what we have instead is a very fine rhetorical example of the many perspectives that produce a paternalistic attitude. The song could also be understood as criticizing Alanis’s own ambitious standards for herself, examining her internal drive for perfectionism as something easily conflated with traditional paternalism.
There’s a mean little workhorse inside of Alanis that is constantly reminding her to win, to keep smiling, to try harder—as if by her perfection Alanis protects her own pride and ensures her redemption for whatever she screwed up before. And the nerve of that song’s speaker, suggesting that all this pressure being applied is “for your own damn good.” The result is that “Perfect” asks to what extent we are aware of what should constitute our own good. When we act paternalistically toward ourselves in the way that the song evokes, when we parent ourselves from a competitive place that assumes one very hard-charging and narrow pathway to success, as so many of us have done, it’s an act of self-hatred.
Using stream of consciousness as a creative tool, she was able to articulate the arguments of her inner saboteur and thereby give a voice to something she sensed as a bad part of herself.
Dick Schwartz’s research on Internal Family Systems (IFS) argues that the self is made up of many parts, and these parts ought to be in conversation with each other so that all parts can be validated as gifts that manage or protect a person in different, wise ways. He teaches self-compassion as the road to empathy for others. If we stop viewing our lives as one monolithic narrative, then we can begin to stop imposing such flat representations upon our view of others, too. This psychological mindset shift can assist in trauma recovery, addiction therapy, and depression treatment. Alanis sought out Schwartz as she was going through her second bout of postpartum depression while simultaneously running herself ragged, as usual, on the hamster wheel of work addiction.
In her foreword to Schwartz’s 2021 book, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model, Alanis identifies a number of her own parts: angry, mother, artist, financially responsible, financially irresponsible, free spirit, murderous rage, shame, terrors, depression, aches, yearnings, humiliations, grief, generous, intelligent, leadership, gifted, sensitive, empathic. She wrote that the result of using IFS to integrate all these parts within her higher self was that she could “begin to feel the agendalessness” of what Schwartz calls the eight C’s: creativity, courage, curiosity, connection, compassion, clarity, calm, and confidence. These are the things that rise up and come through when you are just being the way you are.
By contrast, the speaker in “Perfect” has no access to any feeling of agendalessness. The songwriter counters the heavy agenda of her inner totalitarian by performatively meditating on the flow of time in consideration of the good. While the song’s speaker never lives in the moment, instead firing off demands about the future to remedy the past, the songwriter herself constructed that list of demands in under twenty minutes, in more or less a single take, for a stream-of-consciousness exercise with a flow that had an intensely spiritual momentum. She registered a new zone.
According to Karen Fournier, an associate professor of music at the University of Michigan and author of The Words and Music of Alanis Morissette, Alanis and songwriting partner Glen Ballard were working on a different piece of music when suddenly their collaboration turned toward this, and they just ran with it. In a blink, it was finalized into what we hear on the album. Imagine what kind of poems might have come out of young Alanis if she knew then what elder Alanis later learned from Schwartz, if young Alanis believed that she truly had no bad parts. Using stream of consciousness as a creative tool, she was able to articulate the arguments of her inner saboteur and thereby give a voice to something she sensed as a bad part of herself.
Stream-of-consciousness writing is a tried-and-true feminist tactic practiced with regularity by such esteemed authors as Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and Sylvia Plath. The practice of writing itself becomes more automatic, less judgmental of the honest feelings that appear on the page. The revelation of their otherwise suppressed, hidden, inner lives is part of what makes the style appealing to feminist writers looking to undermine the patriarchal pressure to be well-behaved women. The style merges a sense of third-person narration with first-person interior monologues or external dialogues, for a free but indirect speech that affords more capable agency than that of a single perspective. “Perfect” offers the voice of a parent for those who want to hear that, and the inner voice of Alanis for those who want to hear that. When she sings it now, elder Alanis must feel proud and redeemed, like she’s more successfully parenting herself and meeting the needs of this particularly ambitious facet of her inner teenager.
Jamie Grumet’s 2019 book, Modern Attachment Parenting: The Comprehensive Guide to Raising a Secure Child, attempts to ensure that children grow up with their needs completely met. In her foreword for the book, Alanis self-identifies in her signature as a writer, artist, and activist. She writes that she finds Grumet’s work exciting because it openly engages the things that come with the archetypal role of mother: pressure, beauty, overwhelm, maternal fire, the heavy burden of perfectionism, tenderness, and activism. The whole basis of attachment parenting is that children leaving the nest will feel more grounded and ready to do so if they have experienced tons of closeness and secure connection to their caretakers in their formative early years.
This explains a lot about why Gen Xers are so fucked up. Our parents were neither attuned to nor responsive to us. We could cook our own dinner at age seven and had a set of house keys at age nine. No wonder Gen Xers are the demographic backbone supporting this style of parenting, although Alanis cites a long lineage of psychologists who have been studying and developing theories of attachment parenting in different cultures around the world for many years. She has properly studied them. When Alanis writes a foreword, it’s in support of generalized movement toward an idea more than an endorsement of a particular author. In this foreword, as in her others, Alanis surmises that individuals working to heal themselves are a cornerstone of the recipe for world peace, if not the whole megillah.
The theme of perfection and its two threads of parenting and spirituality were carried through “Perfect” into 2012, where they blossomed into the Havoc and Bright Lights album. The “Guardian” single utilizes the same style of indirect free speech, wherein either a parent is speaking to a child or the speaker is dialoguing with parts of her inner self. This contrasts with the unguarded and exposed feeling of “Spiral,” which makes plain that the challenges symptomatic of “Perfect” are at best in remission without a cure. The most the singer can do is walk away from perfectionism toward the generosity and healing of “Empathy.” Again, these are all songs that may be addressed to the self, but also to parents or siblings or lovers or friends, and also to the gods or whatever higher energy is out there. This is meant as all-purpose medicine. Alanis offers the main idea, then her fans can lob it at whatever target they each feel it can best assist.
Most of these songs focus on giving everything one can give, until “Receive” hits in the second-to-last-spot on the album, arguing in favor of setting good boundaries for self-care. Learning to receive, to stop overextending for others and instead pausing to fill up one’s own cup, is not easy. Gen Xers are a textbook example here. The stereotype goes that after having raised themselves as best they could, they’re no longer able to accept any help or support because they simply don’t trust anyone to stick around.
Or maybe that’s just me—taking care of myself, resenting others for not taking care of me, then bitterly banking on being alone until my prophesy becomes self-fulfilling and I am genuinely isolated. Fortunately, just as Alanis found her husband Souleye, I found my wife Dapper Mindy. As Alanis sings on “’Til You,” it feels like we dodged a lot of bullets until we found our person. This is the person that invites us to show our whole self, including the so-called bad parts. Or as she sings on “Empathy,” the one by whom we truly feel seen.
Alanis offers the main idea, then her fans can lob it at whatever target they each feel it can best assist.
The first verse of “Empathy” still admits the prospect that we can never entirely be seen. Alanis sings about holding back some of her parts, including some secret songs, which it is easy to assume she means both literally and figuratively. From Jagged Little Pill onward, even casual fans have been aware of her penchant for hidden tracks, for the surplus bubbling over of the many more things she always feels can be said. It can be a struggle to hit the brakes once feelings get flowing, to draw boundaries effectively when using stream of consciousness as a mode of writing. One of the things I personally find enigmatic about the Havoc and Bright Lights album is the web of eight bonuses attached to it. That’s twenty songs altogether, and at one point before the album came out she had thirty-one tracks to pick from—enough to make a shortish double album quite lengthy. Those eight tracks that were not part of the first commercial release were launched from a few different platforms.
Two were on the deluxe edition of the album, which is a standard upselling ploy. One track that featured her husband was only available on iTunes. Another featuring her husband was bundled with two other bonus tracks into a package only available at Target. Amazon also got one exclusive track, and the eighth was released in Japan. Imagine the sort of hilariously, nefariously data-rich music industry calculation models that produced this marketing strategy. On the one hand, it seems typical of the business. On the other hand, we might worry that execs wanted to spread out the bodies, bury the most spiritually direct recordings like “Guru” and “Magical Child” in a couple of different places, shushing them for fear that they were bankrolling a woo-woo mystic and not wanting to draw attention to ideas both lyrical and sonic that they expected to be commercially less popular.
The woo-woo is evident all the way back to Alanis’s first forays into book endorsement. She wrote a foreword to a 2009 yoga book, Transformative Yoga: Five Keys to Unlocking Inner Bliss, by her twin brother, Wade Imre Morissette, but the first foreword she wrote was in 2001, for Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God for Teens. The manner of writing here feels close to the version of Alanis we get in promotional copy related to her music, all lower-case lettering with paragraphs so short as to often be com-posed of a single sentence. The tone in each of her other forewords is also quite intimate, but this is the only one of them that makes no overtures toward the scholarly. She simply writes about how, alongside the millions of other people who helped land Walsch’s first book in the Conversations with God series on the bestseller list for one hundred and thirty-five weeks, she was on a quest for spiritual fulfillment, and somebody handed her the book precisely when she was most open to relying upon it.
Alanis and Walsch both grew up Catholic and ended up with an East-West à la carte menu of Zenlike transcendentalism that falls under the heading of New Age spirituality. In some sense, both consider themselves to be modern-day spiritual messengers. Walsch has published about thirty books, and yet of all the titles he could’ve chosen, Alanis was asked to blurb the one for teens. At the time of the book’s publication, she was twenty-seven years old with two albums under her belt. In the foreword, she recalls leaving her religion behind at age twelve and describes how she felt herself resisting the way of life being offered to her by school and figures of authority. She heard messages “of choicelessness, of patriarchy, of there being one singular goal in life toward which our whole lives were to be focused if we wanted to be successful.” These are the nightmarishly normative traps evoked by the lyrics to “Perfect.” As they say in horror films, the call was coming from inside the house.
__________________________________
Excerpted from Why Alanis Morissette Matters by Megan Volpert. Copyright © 2025. Published with permission from the University of Texas Press.
