Tag: Female writer

LADDER OF THE YEARS by Anne Tyler

Here is a book about a woman who walks away from her husband and her three children. She has been feeling unloved and unneeded, and on impulse leaves and starts a new life elsewhere. Boringly, she ends up going back to them. I wanted the worm to turn, but it kind of just took a detour.

What I did find interesting was that the woman is only in her early 40s. I had heard before that in the past you were considered largely useless at that age as a woman (having done all that was required of you, i.e., reproduce) but this was a particularly sad and stark example of the problem. She really seems to feel her life is over. Today, most people of that age I know are just gagging for their kids to grow up enough so they can begin getting really crazy.

THE MERCHANT OF PRATO by Iris Origo

Here is a book to make you feel like indeed all your problems are insignificant and death its on its way. It’s non-fiction, based on the 140,000 letters, 500 ledgers, 300 deeds of partnership, and various other paperwork left behind by a 14th century Italian merchant named Francesco Di Marco Datini. This is apparently one of the largest records left behind by any medieval person, and it is truly astounding. His business ventures, his house, his food, his clothes, his private conversations with his wife, his worries, his medical problems, his religious crises. It’s all in there. I don’t know what I thought medieval people were doing with their time, maybe like religious mania and starvation, but apparently they were living full and rich lives that are now completely lost.

Let me give you a flavour. He is a super anxious guy, and here he is to his wife:

Remember to go to bed betimes and rise early and let not the door be opened until you have got up. And look well to everything; let them not go a-gadding. You know what Bartolomea is; she will say she goes one place, and then goes elsewhere. Ghirigora, too, has little sense . .

And here is someone else writing to him when he is getting really carried away with renovating his house, something that even today in Tuscany is called ‘rubble disease”:

Other wise and virtuous citizens do some building, but all except you in moderation! One man has a bailiff, another a friend or a paid overseer. But you are so greedy, you will allow no single groat to be misused, nor a single brick to laid lengthways, when it would look better upright – as if your little house where to be the dwelling place of your immortal soul!

I acquired some interesting historical info too. I was surprised to find that Italians had slaves at this time, actively acquired to replace people who died in the Black Death. Then at another point some town is ‘sacked by a company of free lances,’ from which I guess we get the word freelance? Also, how amazing is that it was standard to write on the first page of all your business ledgers: “In the name of god and of profit”

But I think this history stuff I will quickly forget. What I will remember is the density of his life, the huge anxieties and sufferings and drama, him and I suppose millions of other medieval people, and millions since, all forgotten.

THE IDIOT by Elif Batuman

In this book, a girl at university gets all het up about the philosophy of language, about whether words have meaning, and if so if we can ever understand them.  Of course it all boils down to some guy.   

She meets this guy in Russian class, and he begins to write her terribly clever emails. She replies with terribly clever emails.  It is all very intellectual but also very boring, just like it always is to be up close with someone’s crush. 

The things kept accumulating – the stars, the atoms, the pigs, and the cereal.  It was decreasingly possible to imagine explaining it all to anyone.  Whoever it was would jump out of a window from boredom.  And yet here I was, watching the accumulation in real time, and not only was I not bored, but it was all I could think about.

Eventually it emerges that he for real has a girlfriend, but somehow all this suffering carries on, and this is when she starts to have problems with the structure of reality and what it all means.  The solution is offered to her on a plate, by the crush.  Here he is, talking to her:

“My friend Imre said I was behaving really badly towards you.  He said I was – what was it, it was a funny expression.  Leading you on.  He said I was leading you on.” 

It felt like being hit again, this time in the stomach. 

.. . .”I tried to explain to Imre that it’s not like that, but was really dismissive.  He said I was starting to sound banal, and like a real asshole.”

Like seriously what is up with this girl?  Words do have meaning, and here he is explaining everything pretty clear.  No need to worry about the structure of the universe, this guy just an asshole.

Sidebar, the epigraph of this book is Proust on adolescence.  I’ll just end by quoting it at length because it is so fantastic:

But the characteristic feature of the ridiculous age I was going through – awkward but by no means infertile – is that we do not consult our intelligence and that the most trivial attributes of other people seem to us to form an inseparable part of their personality.  In a world thronged with monsters and gods, we know little peace of mind.  There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul.  Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them.  In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything. 

GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell

GONE WITH THE WIND is a book both profoundly woke and un-woke.  The un-woke part is very famous.  The main characters are slave owners and slave apologists, and it is fascinating to see how they construct a world in which they can still live with themselves. It’s wild to see people living their daily lives while committing atrocities.  The woke part I rarely see discussed, but for me it’s pretty woke: and that’s the character of Scarlett O’Hara. I can’t think of a book previous to this that has a female character who clearly and explicitly manipulates being female to her advantage.  I also can’t think of an earlier female character who makes her own money and is proud of it.

Also interesting, and I think something you rarely see written about, is the really horribly mean act of keeping someone dangling.  Ashley Wilkes does it to Scarlett O’Hara, and it’s really sad. I think this happens a lot: you enjoy someone else having a crush on you, because you like the attention, so instead of doing the kind thing (making it clear they have no hope, so they can get over you), you keep it going, enjoying the validation, and making them go slowly crazy.  Meanwhile you act all innocent like they are the pathetic one.

MRS PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT by Elizabeth Taylor

Here is a scarring little book about what is required to survive old age.  It tells the story of an elderly widow, Mrs Palfrey, who moves into a residential hotel.  Some other old people live there also, and I got the impression that some fifty years ago, moving into such a hotel was quite common for older people who did not yet need nursing care.  This is my second book by this author, Elizabeth Taylor, and I am amazed she is not more famous.  She is wonderful at capturing the battles of daily life, and the struggle of keeping yourself in hand.  Here is an older lady while they wait for dinner:

“Well, another Sunday nearly gone,” Mrs Post said quickly, to cover a little fart.  She had presence of mind.

Hanging over the whole book is the loneliness of old age.  I guess it makes sense: the older you get, the more likely you are to outlive the people you love.  I have never seen described in quite so much detail what this is like.  Then there is also of course what is waiting for you: after the hotel, the old age home, if you are lucky, and if not, then death. Here is Mrs Palfrey, answering when someone asks her if she thinks she is an optimistic person:

“Oh I think so.”  She did not explain to him how deeply pessimistic one must be in the first place, to need the sort of optimism she now had at her command.

I’m sorry this is kind of a downer, but there you go. It is at the same time a fairly funny book.  I’m not sure when I’ll recover.

Just as a sidebar, if you’ve ever read the dreadful IN A FREE STATE by VS Naipaul, you should know that  it beat out MRS PALFREY to win the Booker Prize.  This just tells you everything you need to know.  Allow me to remind you of the time when VS Naipaul said he was better than any female writer, even Jane Austen.  Apparently, the 75% male Booker panel of 1971 agreed.  VOM.

LUSTER by Raven Leilani

This started off pretty well, being a story of a young black woman who gets involved with an older white man who is in an open marriage. Here she is, making out with him:

For a moment, I’m sure I’m going to cry, which is not unusual, because I cry often and everywhere, and most especially because of this one Olive Garden commercial.  I excuse myself and run to the bathroom, where I look in the mirror and reassure myself that there are bigger things than the moment I am in.  Gerrymandering.  Genealogy conglomerates selling my cheek swabs to the state. 

She loses her job and then in a not at all believable turn of events is invited by the wife to live with them. We then get into that beloved territory of recent novels, which is the aimless narrator. She hangs about not really looking for a job, doing weird aimless things like taking photographs of their stuff. I gave up with about twenty pages left to go. The book like the narrator where both going nowhere.

DEVOTION by Madeline Stevens

DEVOTION is okay for a beach read, which is lucky, because I read it on a beach. It tells the story of a nanny who becomes obsessed with her employer. It is another of what seems to be an entire new genre on income inequality. Eventually it all blows up when the employer is extremely intoxicated, and her husband and the nanny force her into a threesome. I got the impression we were supposed to think this was some kind of crescendo of obsession, but mostly I just thought it was rape. Like, check it out, you don’t get to have sex with someone who is too drunk to consent, no matter how obssessed you are or how rich they are.

TRAVEL LIGHT, MOVE FAST by Alexandra Fuller

I guess we’ve all got a lot to say about our parents, but this lady REALLY has a lot to say.  This is the third book of hers I’ve read, and it’s the third to mostly be about her parents.  Rather than them being a character in her story, I am starting to get the impression that she is a character in theirs.  They loom most exceedingly large over her life.

Her parents lived variously across southern Africa, but in her childhood largely in Zimbabwe.  There is much that is comic about them.  Her father reels at the revelation that a laptop might be expected to die after the first decade, regarding planned obsolescence as a scam (which indeed it probably is). 

And there they are on South African politics, an opinion I have heard before in Zim:

The Afrikaaners took it to far, the blacks are bolshie and you can’t blame them.  I find it very creepy, all of it.  Just look at that Oscar Pistorious.

And her mother after the war that gave birth to Zimbabwe:

I mean she was all of us, all of us Rhodesians; hurt, sore, surprised losers.  She’d vowed to fight to the death; and even if everyone else had now forgotten that vow, she’d meant it.  . . . She wept bitterly in private; drank bravely in public.  “Your mother has difficulty cutting her losses,” Dad had explained. 

It’s a book framed around the unexpected death of her father while on holiday in Budapest, but it’s very much a celebration of his life. I don’t know what all this author is working through, but I’m enjoying being a part of it

IN A SUMMER SEASON by Elizabeth Taylor

Here is a story of a suburbia.  A middle-aged woman marries a much younger man after her first husband dies, and . . . Never mind the plot, because as the introduction tells us, the author is ‘bored by narrative. ‘

Usually this kind of thing is RED FLAG for me, but Taylor is such a fine writer she makes it work.  Try this, of the teenage son coming home late:

Tom walked up the drive, treading silently on the grass verge, let himself in quietly and crept upstairs.  The house was night-quiet.  They were all as fast asleep as innkeepers of an afternoon.  They dreamt their innocent, middle-aged dreams and rested their aging bones

And try this, on his mother’s thoughts when this same son rolls his eyes at her:

They condescend, Kat thought.  They behave like people who are trying hard not to be snobbish.. . They are appalled for us that we are middle aged.

Or this, on a son’s reaction to having to talk about his mother:

His fists seemed to be tightened in readiness, lest anyone should find her as absurd as he did . . .

It’s wonderful, sharply observed writing.  Particularly heartbreaking is our occasional insights into the mind of the family cook, who is really quite despairing on her life, but somehow carries on cooking.  Taylor uses the word ‘courageous’ about how she faces some potatoes in a way that made me want to tear up.

I got up in Wikipedia to try and figure out why a writer of this quality is not more famous.  I found no straightforward answer, but I think it is probably down to her being perceived as too mumsy.  She lived an almost incredibly bourgeouis life in the London suburbs, and I guess being the wife and mother of bankers is not as interesting as being an actual banker.  (Side bar, I am sure this was half the problem for Hilary Clinton too.  Fundamentally, people don’t want their mothers to succeed).  In any case, it is interesting to see about her process (thanks to the Atlantic for the information):

She said “I dislike much travel or change of environment and prefer the days … to come round almost the same, week after week.”. . . That steady rhythm allowed for her regular and admirable output—although she began to publish only when she was 34, wrote “slowly and without enjoyment, and think it all out when I am doing the ironing,” and regularly put her work aside to attend to her children and household (!), she produced 12 novels, four story collections, and one children’s book in 30 years

SOMETIMES I TRIP ON HOW HAPPY WE COULD BE by Nichole Perkins

Despite the fantastic title, I did not enjoy this. I had high hopes too, because Nichole Perkins podcast THIRST AID KIT is brilliant. It examines what makes dreamboat men dreamboats. The one on Joshua Jackson (always Pacey from DAWSON’S CREEK) is revelatory. It’s rare and liberating to hear women discussing sexiness. Depressingly, their conclusion is often that x person is sexy because ‘they are a good guy’ or ‘would be a good dad.’ I would like to deny it but I kind of see it, and Pacey is a case in point. LADIES WE NEED TO BE COOLER.

This is a series of essays about Perkins’ life, mixed up with her observations on pop culture. Perhaps they just suffer by comparison to the wonderful essays I just finished by Samantha Irby, but I was kind of amazed by how boring Perkins manages to make her own life. Most people’s lives are interesting, if only because I am nosy. This really was dull. The only interesting point I can recall off the top of my head was that she had this guy where their only relationshp was him giving her head, which routinely would go on for over three hours. Perhaps I am an innocent, but . . wow, that’s a lot.

Anyway, all this detail aside (he used to pull up at her crotch, seated in a chair, as at a table), the reason it all comes off as rather bland is I suspect because she is not actually sharing anything truly vulnerable, or anything she has really struggled with. Not that anyone has to share any such thing, of course, but if you are going to write a memoir it’s kind of what you are signing up for.