Tag: Female writer

A MOTHER’S RECKONING by Sue Klebold

Not sure how I got into this, but here is a memoir by the mother of one of the shooters at Columbine High School, Dylan Klebold. First thing to note, which really astonished me, was that school shootings were extremely uncommon at the time of Columbine. Imagine how bad it would be to find out that your son is a school shooter, without even having a model of what a ‘school shooter’ is.

This woman’s experience is truly jaw-dropping. Dylan, far from the bullied outcast I always thought he was (trenchcoat mafia etc), had in fact a bunch of friends and had been to the prom a few days before. He was also a perfectionist who was the child they ‘never had to worry about’. I guess I should not be surprised: teenagers lie to their parents. It is just astonishing how people do not know each other, even if they see each other every day.

What struck me particularly was that Dylan was not just a murderer, but also a suicide. When they eventually found his journals and went through them, it turns out he had been thinking of ending his life for at least two years. Even the week before the shooting he had been debating with his father on what dorm room to choose. Apparently this kind of apparent ‘planning’ is common in suicides – something for us to bear in mind when deciding how worried to be about someone. Her main takeaway after a decade of agonising is the simple one, that she wished she had listened more and talked less. Poor lady.

I cannot imagine how she survived this level of shock and bereavement. It puts one’s own problems very much into perspective i.e., they are minor.

PIRANESI by Susanna Clark

This is a strange book and FYI this post will be chock-full of SPOILERS.  It opens with a man living in a mysterious flooded mansion that is full of statues.  It is so large that he has never found the end.  There is only one other person who he sometime sees there, who he calls ‘the Other,’ and who sometimes brings him modern items (e.g., sneakers) but everything else he must forage for himself out of the tides that crash into the halls.   There are also thirteen skeletons, in different parts of the House, and he has developed a strange religion involving caring for the skeletons and worshipping the statues.  It sounds sad but actually he is rather happy, and has a full life engaging with the beauties of the House. 

Eventually he is rescued by a police officer, and we find out that he is a journalist, who (in a past he has now forgotten) was trapped by the Other, an occultist, in this parallel universe.  He goes back to the ‘real world,’ and – this is right at the end of the book – this is where I found it really rather lovely.  You’d think he would be happy to be back in ‘reality,’ but he misses the beauties of the House, and he brings to our reality this same kind of simple delight in the beauty of what he sees.  I think this book, while full of plot, is really a triumph of narrative voice, offering us a different, and frankly better, way of living in the world.  A way of loving the streets and trash cans and commuters like they were marble statues.

DADDY ISSUES by Kate Goldbeck

I really liked this author’s previous book, YOU, AGAIN, which managed the difficult task of novel-as-romcom. This one I didn’t like nearly as much. It’s just wild, and shows you how much of a mystery writing is. Even if you can do it once, it doesn’t mean you can do it again. Or at least not for this particular reader.

A WOMAN IN BERLIN by Anonymous

I am amazed I never heard of this book before, and had to randomly come across it in a secondhand book store. It’s a the real diaries of a woman in Berlin over three months in 1945, as the Russians invaded. AS Byatt called ‘one of the most remarkable war diaries ever kept’ and she is not wrong.

The first few weeks are spent in the basement, as Berlin is pounded with artillery, and they are cut off from water, from electricity and from news. And then the Russians arrive. I’m sorry to say she gets raped multiple times. Here she is waking up one morning:

“I felt rested and refreshed after five hours of deep sleep. A little hungover, but nothing more. I’d made it through another night.”

This was how bad it was; that just being alive was an achievement. She speaks a little Russian so manages to identify the highest-ranking Russian she can, in the hopes this will ringfence her from the others. The guy she finds is not nearly so bad as some. He does not ‘force’ her physically, and he apologizes, as he has not ‘had a woman’ in so long. She is so touched to be spoken to gently that she bursts into tears in his lap.

One thing I found interesting was that the experience of rape was so widespread, that the women all talked to each other very openly about it. She said it helped a lot, that it was a common experience and there was no shame. But get this: when he fiance comes home, she lets him read his diary and he is SO DISGUSTED BY HER RESILIENCE in the face of the sex violence that HE LEAVES HER. I mean: I can’t.

And this despite these sort of heart-breaking sections:

“I don’t want to touch myself, can barely look at my body. I can’t help but think about the little child I was, once upon a time, the little pink and white baby who made her parents so proud, as my mother told me over and over. . . . So much love, so much bother with sunbonnets, bath thermometers and evening prayers – and all for the filth I am now.”

Apparently there was a very bad reaction when it was published, as ‘people’ (men) thought it besmirched the honour of German women. So she insisted it not be published again till after her death, and never with her name. Her name came out eventually, and guess what: she lived till she was ninety, in 2001. She made it.

NOBODY’S GIRL by Virginia Roberts Giuffre

I thought it was sad that I knew so much about Epstein but so little about his survivors. So I decided to read this memoir. I don’t know what I expected. I knew it was going to be bad, but it was really, really bad. This lady’s courage is just incredible.

It starts off terrible, with her being sexually abused by her father. I’m sorry to say she is seven. He then ‘shares’ her with his friend. Based on the similarity in the abuse, she thinks they were comparing notes. She attempts to run away, and is put in some kind of terrible ‘tough love’ type place. She runs away from there by hitch-hiking, and one of the men who picks her up rapes her at gunpoint. She manages to escape when he stops to answer his phone (!) and the very next person who offers her a ride turns out to be a trafficker. She is the only American underage girl he has, all the others are trafficked from Eastern Europe. By the time we get to Epstein, you fully understand how incapable she was of escape.

Epstein is particularly stomach-churning. He helpfully explains to her that he prefers it if girls ‘pretend to enjoy it’. He trafficks her to other men, one of whom leaves her bleeding from the mouth, vagina, and anus. He tells her ‘it’s going to be like that sometimes’. I don’t know why – it’s not so bad as the other stuff – but one detail that particularly stuck with me is that he often had her rubbing his feet for two hours straight during flights.

The book follows how she got away from him, and about how much energy it took for her to come forward. I had not realized the extent to which she really was the figurehead for getting this story out into the world. It had a huge cost on her, forcing her to relive the abuse many times.

It’s hard to read, and what makes it even sadder is that Virginia seems to understand how hard it is for us to read, and often takes breaks, flashing forward to her current happy life with her husband and three kids in Perth. I’m sorry to say that here it also gets worse. The book begins with a note from her co-author. Virginia had written to the co-author, emphasizing how important it was to her that the book be published, no matter what might happen to her. This sounds ominous, because it is. She unfortunately killed herself once she was sure the book was in its final draft. It turns out that her husband was allegedly violent towards her. I can kind of get that, just from reading the book. He does not seem a great guy (‘he said I could only take 3 of my 6 suitcases’ etc).

She sacrificed a lot to get her story out. She’s an amazing woman, and I am glad I got the opportunity to hear her story and learn from her.

HEART THE LOVER by Lily King

I read this in on one long and sleepless night. I really enjoyed it. It tells about a woman’s long relationship with her university boyfriend. Let me give you a taste. Here is the boyfriend, talking about his mother:

“We are not the same species, Yash said once. I am a human being and she is a two-ton albatross. She wants things from me I cannot give.”

At the end, SPOILER ALERT, she spends a few days with him in hospital as he dies of lung cancer. I cried myself silly.

The next day was very strange. I felt like I was living in two realities, my own, and the one in the book. I guess these days it’s rare I read a novel straight through.

FAN SERVICE by Rosie Danan

This was a charming romcom about a woman, Alex, who falls in love with a werewolf. It’s fun and genre-y, and also a pretty clever metaphor for learning to live with things you can’t control. 

Alex was obsessed as a teenager by a TV show about a werewolf, and was the moderator of the show’s main wiki.  I actually found this part of the book deeply reassuring.  I always wonder if I am too online, and this made me realize that really I’m not – other people are way, way, way more online than I am.  I could barely understand some of the references.  Hurray!

BIRD BY BIRD by Anne Lamott

Here is a book about writing that is very famous and I can see why. It is not at all a technical book, but more about the actual emotional experience of sitting down to write.

Mostly what I enjoyed was her chapter SHITTY FIRST DRAFTS, which is about shitty first drafts. She encourages mess:

“Your day’s work might turn out to have been a mess. So what. . . Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. . . . Perfectionism will keep your cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.”

And she encourages risk, telling about how she told her student, who was very hung up on mistakes that “. . . when he was old, or dying, he was almost certainly not going to say, “God! I’m so glad I took so few risks! I’m so glad I kept shooting so low!”

I also liked this part:

“Don’t be afraid of your material of your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.”

I found much of her advice helpful beyond writing. I thought about this suggestion a lot:

“Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbour’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying gently to bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen.”

It was also somewhat hilarious. Please enjoy this:

“Now Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning – sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.”

JOE CINQUE’S CONSOLATION by Helen Garner

Apparently I’m on a real Helen-Garner-true-crime kick. This one is another account of a real trial. It is about a university student who hosts a dinner party to celebrate the fact that she is going to kill herself and her boyfriend. The boyfriend is not aware that this is a farewell party, but – get this – most of the other people there are (?!?). She goes on to kill the boyfriend but, in true cowardly form, not herself.

It is really a jaw-droppingly weird story. The girlfriend seems to be pretty sane-ish, but struggling with self-obsession. The judge believes she has some kind of personality disorder, which I could kind of believe, except for that part where she doesn’t even try killing herself, but stands over her boyfriend while he dies slowly over the whole weekend (heroin, rohypnol). She only get four years. Her best friend 100% knew what she was planning, is 100% sane, and gets off scot free. It’s wild. Only of their friends, a 21 year old, gets even close to calling the police, but is shamed into thinking they are not serious. This was in many ways the most interesting part of the story, how none of these students had the courage to follow their gut.

This was an earlier piece of reportage than THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF, and I did not like it as much. It was, for my taste at least, a little bit over-written and overwrought. It was still interesting though, and I don’t doubt that if she has written more of these I will read them.

GHOSTROOTS by Pemi Aguda

Here is speculative horror fiction from Nigeria.  Unfortunately, it’s short stories, which I always struggle to get into.  However they were skilful stories.  I liked, for example, the description of a woman   “who is stroking her blond wig as if it were a living thing, a pet that needs comfort”

I also really enjoyed the way she evoked contemporary Nigeria, very dense and real.  This I thought was an interesting part, about a girl whose parents will not tell her anything about her grandparents:

“But what do Nigerian parents tell their children about their own parents?  Especially the Pentecostal Christians? Nothing.  If you took a poll of your friends, three out of five would be similarly ignorant of these histories of parents who moved from somewhere to Lagos, left behind religions and curses and distant cousins and grimy pasts”

That first generation who moves to town, who goes from nine kids to two, in any country, is an interesting one.

Nigeria is generally kind of an extreme place, and it makes for a fun setting for speculative fiction. One charter fears she is the reincarnation of her evil grandmother, and she asks her “coworkers if they believe in reincarnation.  Five of them believe. Two of them claim to have corroborative stories.” One of them feels she is a reincarnation – of Beyonce.