Female writer Archives -

A STOLEN LIFE by Jaycee Dugard

Here is a stomach-churning memoir about a girl who was abducted at 11 and spent 17 years in captivity. The man who abducted her raped her and she had two children, the first at f4. Appallingly she had them both without a hospital. This man who abducted her had a wife, who did not abuse her but absolutely participated in the imprisonment, which is one of the more gobsmacking parts of the story. So much did her kidnapper think of Jaycee as an object that sometimes he would leave her tied up in his revolting ways (for videos) for long periods simply because he forgot he needed to go pick the wife up at work.

We will be zero percent surprised to learn that this guy already had a record, for kidnapping and sexual assault, and had been let out of prison early for good behaviour. His probation officer apparently did not query what these female children who were not related to him were doing at his house. The way this poor woman was eventually saved therefore was – get this – a CAMPUS SECURITY GUARD, who saw the children briefly in passing was enough concerned that they were ‘dead-eyed’ that what she called ‘mom mode’ kicked in and she went to the police. Then they found poor Jaycee living in a shack in the backyard where she’d been for almost twenty years. In police interview she said she was too frightened to say her own name, but she could write it down – can imagine the surprise of the police?!

As ever in these kinds of stories, what you are left with is the incredible resilience of human beings. Jaycee is moving forward with her life, valuing the time she has, and working on letting go of the past. She’s having fun, learning to drive, enjoying going to the shops on her own. What a hero.

RIVER OF THE GODS by Candice Millard

Okay this one is really interesting. It just shows you that some people are miles ahead of their time. It’s about the identification of the source of the Nile, a topic of great interest in the west since Roman times, during which it a commonplace to call anything challenging ‘as difficult as to find the source of the Nile’. Several legions died trying. The mystery was eventually solved by John Speke. However, the hero of the tale is one Richard Burton.

This remarkable man, while British on paper was brought up all over Europe. (Big props to Burton as a schoolboy, who observed: ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire, but then it never rises either’). He grew up to be incredible at languages, speaking 25 well, and many dialetics. He had a system in which he could acquire a new language in two months, and never seemed to understand why others found it hard (!) He was the first Western person to go on the Haaj, managing to disguise himself as a Muslim (incredibly impressive, also very problematic).

He got the commission to try and find the Nile, though the voyage was underfunded, and at the last minute added Speke. So rough was Africa on European biology that people kept dying between agreeing to join and actually going. Speke managed to stay alive. Totally different to Burton, he was an aristocrat who spoke one language (English), and that not well. His main interest in going into the interior was, get this, hunting, so he could have specimens for the private museum he planned for his estate. It’s beyond satire. To give a flavour of the man, he was offered at one point the chance to dress as an Arab to make one section of the journey safer, but declined because he thought the Arabs were just trying to demean him by making him dress like them. Burton outright LOL-ed at the idea that Arabs would think themselves inferior to the English.

The two men and their army of porters endured many terrible things, starvation, fevers (a LOT of them), attack (in Burton’s case a spear through the mouth), etc. To give Speke his due, he was tough as hell. Once he was cover in beetles and tried to get one out of his ear with a knife, which ended up leaving him deaf. Here is Burton describing one incident, saying that he had set out to do or die, and: ‘I had done my best, and now nothing appeared to remain for me but to die as well.’

At the end of the expedition they were able to more or less figure that the source was in one of three lakes they had found (i.e., been led to by locals). One of these lakes only Speke had been to, Burton being too unwell. Speke became convinced this was the source. Getting back to England before Burton, he controlled the narrative, and the posh people in the Royal Geographic decided this posh man was clearly a better choice to lead the second Expedition than Burton. He was obviously heartbroken. Speke went back, established it was the lake he had seen, and then renamed it from Nyanza to Lake Victoria:

“Burton had found the renaming of the Nyanza not just presumptuous but preposterous: ‘My views . . . About retaining native nomenclature have ever been fixed, and of the strongest. Nothing can be so absurd as to impose English names on any part, but especially upon places in the remote interior parts of Africa’”

How contemporary is this man?!? Side bar, here he is on the Indians: Writing that Indians would soon decide that ‘the English are not brave, nor clever, no generous, not civilized, nor anything but surpassing rogues.’
You can see where he was not popular with the upper classes. Burton went on to variety of minor civil service roles while Speke had a fatal hunting accident that sounds a lot like a suicide. He had told Burton years before that “being tired of life he had come to be killed in Africa.”

Burton went on to translate the Kama Sutra (!), which made him a rich man. I loved this: “I have struggled for forty-seven years, distinguishing myself honourably in every way I possibly could. I never had a compliment nor a thank you nor a single farthing. I translate a doubtful book in my old age, and immeditaely make sixteen thousand guineas. Now that I know the tastes of England, we need never be without money.”

While Speke has the honour of identifying the source, Burton is the one about home multiple biographies are written; poor Speke has one monograph from over a hundred years ago. So I guess there’s justice in that somewhere.

I’LL BE GONE IN THE DARK by Michelle McNamara

This book is about a journalist’s fixation with a particular serial killer, the Golden State Killer. A very prolific offender, he committed 13 murders and more than 50 rapes over about 15 years. Curiously, despite this, he was not especially famous. This journalist, Michelle McNamara, spent a large amount of time with people she met on internet message boards, and with the police, researching the case and trying to solve it, and this is her account of her fixation. In the end, he was not caught by any of this work, but by genealogical DNA. She was important not because she solved it but because she drove interest in it, even giving him the name the Golden State Killer.

Two things struck me about this book, the first being how awful it is that in fact serial murders are completely capable of stopping. This one did. Their crimes are not compulsions, but choices. This makes it much worse. In this case, as the offender was a police officer, they think he stopped when he became aware how powerful DNA was.

The second thing was that the book was not finished by McNamara. She died part way through, in her sleep, from an undiagnosed heart condition mixed with prescription medication. It was sad to see the second author trying to find a way to end the book from her scribbled notes. It reminds you you do not know the day or the hour. In any case, the Golden State Killer was caught a few months later.

BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA by Dorothy Allison

This novel is about a girl born to a 14 year old waitress. The waitress has a big family, who help her with child care, so it is a lot about that family. It is kind of an uplifting story of small town life, until the waitress marries a man who starts sexually abusing the child. The child eventually tells an aunt, so the mother removes them from the man; but then he ‘promises’ not to do it again, so they go back. The mother tries to make sure they are never alone together. Great solution! Then he rapes her really brutally, and the mother walks in on it. The child goes to hospital, but her mother DECIDES TO MOVE TO CALIFORNIA WITH THE MAN (!?!).

This just seems so awful as to not really be believable, but I’m sorry to tell you that apparently this is a lightly fictionalized version of the author’s life. To be fair, her mother never actually left her, but she did make them all live together even once she was aware of the ongoing abuse. He even gave her an STD, which left her permanently infertile. Sounds like a gruelling read, and it sort of was, but it also wasn’t, because I guess of the courage of the author, who has rebuilt her life with amazing courage. I learn from the Introduction that the book has been banned from schools on many occasions. I know that people who make sure bans like to claim they are protecting children, but I think we all know who this actually protects.

There was an interestng line to a character recently bereaved: Now you look like a Boatwright. Now you got the look. You’re as old as you’re ever gonna get, girl. This is the way you’ll look until you die.

WIGS ON THE GREEN by Nancy Mitford

I love Mitford’s THE PURSUIT OF LOVE. According to my blog I’ve read it an embarrassing 7 times. I was thus delighted to come across this book, her third and a very obscure one, quite accidentally. (By accidental, I mean in the Waterstones in John Lewis, when I was looking for a laundry hamper. Why is there a Waterstones in John Lewis? Why is it by the laundry hampers?)

I don’t like any of her other books, but hope springs eternal I guess. Hope was misplaced. It’s dated and awkward. Of interest though is that she was worried about being sued by her sister, the famous fascist Unity Mitford, as it is in part a satire of Unity’s strange, jokey right-wing sensibility as the ‘greatest heiress in England’ (she was 6 ft 1).

As a child, apparently, Unity shared a room with her other sister, Jessica, a committed communist. They divided the room in half with chalk, one side with pictures of Lenin and the other with swastikas. In later life, Unity travelled to Germany where she got a lot less jokey. Apparently she actually dated Hitler, or was at least used by Hitler to make Eva Braun jealous. She later shot herself when war was declared, which I for one am not at all sorry about.

What does inspire me about this book, in a strange way, is how bad it is. The style is close to THE PURSUIT OF LOVE but also very far away. It’s inspiring to see how someone can work through from this very uneven early work to that classic.

DINNER WITH VAMPIRES by Bethany Joy Lenz

The sub-title of this book is ‘LIFE ON A CULT TV SHOW WHILE ALSO IN AN ACTUAL CULT,’ which pretty much sums it up. If you watched ONE TREE HILL in the early 2000s, you will know this lady. Her story of how she got sucked into the cult is very compelling, because she really talks you through how gradual it is. I guess the point is, no one wakes up and decides ‘today I’ll join a cult.’ It really teaches you to be on your guard. I think the primary point they pushed was for her to not listen to herself, and her own judgement, but rather to god/the cult leader/her doubts. Once you have conceded that your opinion is unimportant, you are basically 90% of the way there. This poor woman had her life really wrecked. She talks about how she decided to be public – not just in the book, but in daily life – about being in a cult, and about how embarrassed she is that hers was not even one of the big, weird cults. She’s ashamed to have to say there was no KoolAid or judgement day. It was just a small, Bible-based group. But it did the business anyway. And it’s still out there in Idaho, ruining people’s lives.

TOM LAKE by Ann Pratchett

I wanted to like this book because Pratchett is a good writer and it’s about productions of OUR TOWN, a play I love. I got about 200 pages in but I just had to quit. The story is set on a cherry farm, and involves this woman telling her three grown daughters the story of her early life, in which she considered being an actress and dated someone who went on to be a movie star. I don’t like books where we have to believe someone is telling someone else a book length anecdote, but okay, I was willing to get past it (see HEART OF DARKNESS and etc). I even enjoyed the flashback parts where she was young and dumb. But the current-day parts were so gruellingly annoying I just couldn’t. It was a really creepy, the nuclear-family-is-all-there-is, the mother-wants-to-eat-her-young, kind of vibe. At one point, the woman is saying how she allows her eldest daughter to have her phone on at the dinner table in case she has to go deal with an emergency, as she is a veterinarian. However, she proudly tells us: “My husband and I turn off our phones because everyone we want to talk to is here.”

VOM! That was when I put it down. My blog tells me I had an equally violent reaction to Pratchett’s BEL CANTO. I’m not sure if there is something wrong with me or with Pratchett.

WILD by Cheryl Strayed

For some reason I thought this was going to be kind of cheesy – maybe because it was made into a movie that was marketed as ‘inspiring’? – but in fact I did find it kind of inspiring.

It tells the true story of a woman in her 20s whose life has spiralled since her mother’s death, with divorce, heroin usage, and etc. She therefore decides to walk thousands of miles along the Pacific Crest Trail, which goes up the West Coast of the US, from Mexico to Canada. She is ill prepared; she does not try out her pack before she begins, and once there finds out she cannot even lift it off the floor. She gets stronger as she goes along, losing 6 of her 10 toenails to the trail. She comes across coyotes, elks, and bears multiple times. She is threatened with sexual assault, but only the once, which is I think surprisingly good going for 3 months on your own, even if it is in the wilderness.

I was especially struck by how distant the 1990s felt. She does not have a phone, which seemed to me incredibly and impossibly lonely. I don’t know this surprises me so much: I was an adult before I had a phone myself, and I don’t remember being lonely without it.

I guess there is some deep evolutionary drive behind the long walk, because so many human societies have sanctioned it with the idea of a pilgrimage. It was interesting to read this very personal, spontaneous version of this idea, and to see how, toenails aside, it helped this lady get a handle on her life.

INTERMEZZO by Sally Rooney

I am a mega-fan of Rooney’s first book, CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS, which is one of the handful of books I have ever read twice in a row. I have been less of a fan of her other books, and especially of the last one BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU? Much of what I enjoyed about the first one was the comic and contemporary spirit, and as we went along I felt we were getting more and more miserable. This one is a return to form. It tells the story a pair of brothers and their various romantic entanglements, and is exceedingly more-ish. I enjoyed it a lot, especially the journey of one character who has to slowly give up his implicit assumption that he is and can be ‘normal,’ which I found to be quite liberating.

My only issue with it was tbh a bit of a political one. In all Rooney’s books there is a strong perspective that anyone who works in any area of commerce is obviously some kind of sad, dead-eyed zombie in slave to our capitalist masters. Apparently the only acceptable professions are like lawyer, journalist, arts administrator. You can work as e.g., a barista, but only if you feel utterly polluted by it. I just find this bizarrely decadent. As if any of these delightful professions would exist without this economic model. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

THE MARS ROOM by Rachel Kushner

This is a very more-ish story about a woman serving a life sentence in an American jail. It was very absorbing, and very deeply researched. Here, for example, is the recipe for prison alcohol “. . . juice boxes poured into a plastic bag and mixed with ketchup packets, as sugar. A sock stuffed with bread, the yeast, was placed in the bag for several days of fermentation.” Good to know.

Somehow how though it left me curiously unmoved. Maybe because I have recently read some really toe-curlingly magnificent memoirs from actual prisoners – e.g., SOLITARY by Albert Woodfox, which tells of his forty years in solitary confinement in Louisiana. It somehow made it hard for me to take this fictional version seriously, which is strange, because I usually find fiction much more compelling than fact.