Female writer Archives -

HAPPENS EVERY DAY by Isabel Gillies

Here’s a memoir by some poor woman who moves to Ohio for her husband’s work and three months later gets dumped by him for a much younger colleague. It reminds me of the Belle Burden’s STRANGERS, another memoir about how very possible it is to know almost nothing about your own husband.

Most interesting thing about this book is how extraordinarily old fashioned the writer is. The divorce happens in 2005, but it reads like its 1955. It is just wild. Try this:

“Because I was on the cover of Seventeen magazine when I was fourteen and I am an actress, I depend on the fact that, objectively, I am good-looking. Tall, blond hair . . But I can tend to depend too much on the idea that I am pretty and sometimes, I don’t try very hard.”

She spends a really astonishing amount of time on home decor, and really cares a great deal about her husband’s height. And again:

“It seems clear to me now that although Josiah loved us and wanted dearly to have a ncie family, there was something in him that just did not want to let him do it.”

‘Nice family’?!? What is that?!? Who says that kind of thing?

I’ve got to report she also comes from money. She seems to think it is pretty normal that she spends her summers in Maine, with the ‘other women’ all of whom apparently don’t have jobs. She grew up in an apartment overlooking Central Park. She acts like moving to Ohio is an insane trek into the wilderness.

I don’t know why I sound like I’m slamming her so much. I enjoyed the honesty of this book. It was refreshing. And it was encouraging to see how she recovered. One wonders how she did not see the red flag that he left his first wife while she was pregnant. He left her with two toddlers; maybe with this third wife he’ll make it till the next kids are in elementary school.

MY BRILLIANT CAREER by Miles Franklin

Here is a book written by a teenage girl in rural Australia in 1899. Considered an Australian classic, I was well into it at first. Try the beginning:

“MY DEAR FELLOW AUSTRALIANS – Just a few lines to tell you that this story is all about myself – for no other purpose do I write it. I make no apologies for being egotistical. In this particular I attempt an improvement on other autobiographies.”

And shortly after that:

“You can dive into this story head first as it were. Do not fear encountering such trash as descriptions of beautiful sunsets and whisperings of wind. We (999 out of every 1000) can see nought in sunsets save as signs and tokens whether we may expect rain on the morrow . . “

The brilliant career is something of a joke. She wants to be a famous writer, but her family is poor and rural and she ends up having to work as a housemaid. The sequel is called MY CAREER GOES BUNG, which I thought sounded amazing. I won’t get to it though, because I confess I kind of quit this one part way through. It kind of read like an over excited teenager, which is I guess what she was, but for some reason I just didn’t have the tolerance. Feel a bit bad about it, because what a teenage girl she was!

WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE by Jenny Mustard

I’ve really got to stop impulse purchasing GenZ novels. I cannot now exactly recall what this one was about, as I finished it right before I went on holiday. I have a vague idea it was basically : girl finds first year of university hard, bends over backwards to get boy to like her, is embarrassed by her actual friends, etc, I mean I guess as I write it’s a universal story? It was set in Sweden (or Norway?) so everyone was disgustingly well fed and well adjusted about sex. So maybe not all that universal

THE DRY by Jane Harper

I found this in the NY Times list of the best thrillers of the last century. I was in a bit of a reading drought, so I thought I’d give it a go. I don’t usually read thrillers but I clearly needed a page turner. And it was pretty good. The pages turned as we investigated a murder-suicide that turned out to be a murder-murder.

I am still not so into thrillers. I did enjoy the setting, being a small Australian town during a drought. This being the warmest summer in the UK since 1976, it felt appropriate.

WILD GAME by Adrienne Brodeur

Words fail me on this one. The publishers have gone with a kind of cheesy womens-fiction cover, which is really to undersell how wild and weird this memoir is. It opens with the author as 14 year old being woken up by her mother in the middle of the night. Her mother excitedly tells her “Ben Souther kissed me!” She wants her to share in her happiness. You may wonder who is Ben Souther, to which I will tell you: Ben Souther is her HUSBAND”S BEST FRIEND. What?!

Now it’s slightly less bad than it first appears because the husband is the 14 year old’s stepfather, not biological father. However, he’s been in her life since she was 8, and they have a good relationship. The mother still expects her daughter to not only be happy for her but to actively help cover the affair up. So for example she always invites her mother and Ben to go for a walk after dinner, so they can go to the guest house and ‘talk.’

This messed-up situation goes on for TEN YEARS. Her brother does not know, so she also has to lie to him. She is incredibly lonely and increasingly crazy with the buden. Eventually the stepfather dies and the mother gets to marry Ben. Now she has what she wants, she sort of cuts her daughter out. It’s hard to describe how awful this is. And yet the book is not bitter. Towards the end, she says something along the lines of ‘my mother loved me as much as she was able to love anyone.’ This sounds bleak, but you come to understand how actually it is kind of an acceptance and a way to peace.

EXIT LANE by Erika Veurink

I seem to be reading more genre fiction these days. Does this mean brainrot? I fear so.

In any case, this one’s a romcom. Interestingly, it’s from a startup with >$4m in investment, that’s basically a publishing imprint with associated income streams (e.g., buy the wine mentioned in the book). I can only be amazed that anyone would look at their investment dollars and think: I know, lets go make money in literature.

The founders of this imprint apparently cold call writers who have never written romatic fiction, or in some cases any fiction at all, and ask them to write for them. (This author, Erika Veurink, is I guess a brand consultant?) Seems an odd approach, and something of a slap in the face for aspiring writers, but there you go.

It compares itself on the cover to NORMAL PEOPLE and YOU, AGAIN. This is very hopeful. It’s not close to their league. However I read it in a single day, while half-dozing in the sun on the Common, eating ice cream, so no complaints here. If this is brainrot, rot away.

CASSANDRA AT THE WEDDING by Dorothy Baker

This book comes draped with reviews calling it a modern American classic. I wasn’t feeling it. It tells about a woman who goes to her twin sister’s wedding, and once there tries to commit suicide, because she is so unhappy about being left alone.

I don’t know what to tell you, I just found it kind of – meh. I think I am just tired of books about people being so tortured all the time. Stop drinking so much and go to therapy for god’s sake.

SKIN CONTACT by Elisa Faison

Here is a book about a woman who pushes her husband to open their marriage. It had some funny bits, like: “Her face was smooth and shiny in the right places, like she hadn’t put on any face makeup or like she knew the best makeup to buy.” But mostly I wasn’t so much into it. This is partly because I am not sure I can relate to all the negotiating about sex, but more because I couldn’t relate to the whole world. The main character is in her early thirties, and there is a lot about how she misses her life with her friends in college. Back then, she says, they were “around each other’s apartments all the time, and it never felt like a special occasion or anything. We wouldn’t wash our hair before getting together.” I mean who are these people in their thirties who only go to their friend’s houses on special occasions? And feel they have to wash their hair first?! Sounds exceedingly lonely.

Also strange was how worried she is about getting older. One thing driving her desire to open her marriage is how she is depressed by no longer being the focus of male interest, now she is so old, which is – wait for it – 32. Honestly I can only conclude that some womens’ appearance really meant a lot to them in their early life. I am much older than her and this has never worried me once. Maybe I was just really ugly in my twenties?

POOL HOUSE by Mary HK Choi

In this book a woman is unhealthily obsessed with her mother. Her mother meanwhile is unhealthily obsessed with her career in Hollywood. There is also a surrogate son character who is just generally unhealthy. I found this to be a quick-moving interesting read, but I can feel myself already forgetting it. I think it’s because everyone in it is so unendingly miserable. At some point towards the end there is like a rising arc, where you start to think we might get some kind of evolution or at least insight but then LOL no, how can you be so naïve, there is no escape! Everyone is just as unhealthy as they were before

I just found this dumb. We eyeroll romances because everyone is so beautiful and happy, which is kind of silly. This I found a bit silly too, just in the opposite direction, towards ugliness and despair.

THE SECRET DIARIES OF MISS ANNE LISTER – I KNOW MY OWN HEART ed by Helena Whitbread

Now here are the diaries of a 18th century lesbian. I don’t know what I thought was going on back then, but DAMN. Charmingly, they were discovered by a PhD student who was looking for a subject in her home town of Halifax, so she would not need to travel too much. She was reading the letters of Anne Lister, and then (as she put it) the librarian changed the next decade of her life with seven words: “Did you know she had a diary?”

The diary, which in total runs to five million words, was half in a code that Lister invented. The family had the key to the code, but had suppressed it these two hundred years, because what that coded stuff was about was super gay. It is charming, and it is also sad.

The charming part is how she keeps falling in love with everyone. Here she is when a woman responds to her complimenting her bonnet:

“She seemed pleased, saying she thought I did not notice such things as these. I said no, not in general. Some people might have sacks about their heads & I not know, but there were some whose ribands I could count over the last seven years.”

She is also constantly swearing off love. Just like people centuries later, she keeps being “determined to devote myself soley to study,” and then not three days later falling in love again. The sad part is that she is actually in a long distance committed relationship with a woman called Mariana. It’s long distance, because at the time of the diaries, Mariana has gotten married (for the money) but this does not stop the women from considering themselves a couple. To give you a sense of all what goes on, let me just say Mariana gives Anne an STD (called ‘the whites’) which Anne then gives to her hookup Isabella (who btw is a bottle-of-wine-a-day drinker). There’s a lot of ‘treating’ herself by injecting herself with pepper.

One also learns a lot about the eighteenth century, not least how horrible the food is. Try this sample: “My aunt’s bowels being far from well, & myself very bilious, we had minced veal (white) & a light batter pudding with a lump of preserved apricot on top”

Probably what I most liked about the book is the intimacy. She really tells you her truth. As she puts it: “What a comfort is this journal. I tell myself to myself & throw the burden on my book & feel relieved”

There are lots of moments when you feel her touching you across time. Like this one: “They are clearing my room that I am sitting alone in the drawing-room . . . I feel rather low. I must turn my mind into another train of thought.”

She had ambition to be a writer, but unfortunately died of a fever while on holiday in Russia at 50. Strange to think she has achieved a certain kind of fame anyway. I’ll try and stop now, because this woman’s life was very interesting. I recommend you wikipedia her, I haven’t even got into her first love who was a mixed race girl who ended up in an insane asylum, or the scraping her teeth with a pen knife for a half hour at at time, or the non-binaryness, or the electrifying machine experimentation –