Tag: Female writer

RANDOM FAMILY by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

I cannot now recall how I decided that what I needed to read was 400 pages of reportage of a family in 1980s Bronx, but I am glad I did.  This was really banging, and unlike anything I have ever read. 

The author embedded herself with a single family and tells about their day to day lives over the course of about a decade.  I don’t think I’ve ever read a piece of non-fiction before that totally avoided commentary or context.  It just plunges you right into the day-to-day of these peoples’ lives, and tries to very deeply understand the inter-personal dynamics that are driving the decisions they make. And by deeply, I mean DEEPLY.  It’s clear she has interviewed people about stuff like how they first started having sex, and who was cheating on who and why, and so on.   It’s interesting to read about any family’s interpersonal dynamics in this degree of objective detail, but this one is particularly so, because there is almost nothing else going on.  Almost no one has a job, and many are in jail.  All the family’s girls are pregnant at 14.  14!  And then go on to have at least one more child before they are 18.  They are caught in a very, very difficult spiral, and they handle it with extraordinary courage and good spirits.  What I found particularly astonishing was how open they were to helping each other.  One woman (Jessica) has 5 children before she is 21, and then goes to jail at 23.  All of her children are absorbed by her family, rather than being put into care, despite the fact that her family really has no space or money for more.  I was also astonished how appalling the prison system was.  Apparently a single 15 minute call cost $4!  And this for people who are often trying to make $10 do for two weeks of groceries.

One side point is I read this over the course of a delayed flight – MUC-LHR – and I note I read continuously for 4.5hrs.  This makes me happy: clearly the phone has not totally eradicated my attention span. 

THE EVENING OF THE HOLIDAY by Shirley Hazzard

I really hated this book. Why did I finish it? I guess it was only 149pages. And I have been feeling guilty about how many books I have given up on this year. But god I should have given up on this one. It was some kind of love story where a married (but separated) Italian man has an affair with an English woman on holiday. They part because they cannot face the difficulties of his not being able to divorce. I mean I guess that’s why they part? I don’t know, because most of the novel was descriptions. Descriptions of landscape (bad) but also descriptions of unimportant moments (e.g., woman gets briefly lost in church). I fear this was supposed to be poetic but I just found it DUMB.

THE LAST SAMURAI by Helen DeWitt

This is a famous book I had never heard of. First off, this is not the (I have never seen it, but probably) problematic film with Tom Cruise. It is about as far from Hollywood as you can get. The author is a total rebuke to all of us weak people, having half-written an astonishing ~50 other novels before finally completing this one. During that time she worked as doughnut salesperson, dictionary text tagger, copytaker, fundraiser, night secretary etc.

The book was a huge hit, being a crazy, baggy, comic story about a single mother with high ideals. She got pregnant on a one night stand, and refuses to tell the father because she does not admire his writing. She manages the heating bills by spending their days riding the Circle line.

I found it funny and clever, but I gave up about 300 pages in. We got to a part where the child was trying to find his father and it became kind of like a series of short stories about the various potential fathers, and it just felt like it wasn’t going anywhere. I felt bad, because I just love this author’s guts. She went on to write other strange books, and struggle to find a publisher, eventually only publishing one twenty years later. What a life!

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!