Tag: Female writer

I HOPE THIS FINDS YOU WELL by Natalie Sue

This book has a fun premise, asking what would happen if you suddenly got access to all your colleagues mails and slacks. WHAT POWER!

This basic idea could have gone in a lot of different directions. I thought it might be an unhinged story about revenge, which probably says a lot about me. But actually it was much sweeter. It was about a girl who is self-absorbed, and getting a chance to see how other people really feel helps her focus outside herself for the first time in many years.

It’s interesting because her self-absorption is sort of sympathetic, in that what she is really absorbed in is guilt about the death of a friend. But even so, what you get is that self absorption is self absorption, and whatever its cause, it makes you unhappy.

I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN by Jacqueline Harpman

This book begins with a girl trapped in a cage with 39 women. The woman are not allowed to express feelings or to touch each other. It is unclear why they are there. They have vague memories of some kind of calamity (fire, screaming, running) but seem to have been drugged, as they cannot remember much of their lives before. It’s all very strange – they don’t even seem to be on a standard cycle – for example, food comes at odd hours for no reason, and the lights never change. Then one day SPOLIER ALERT an alarm goes off just as they are about to be fed, so the guards run away with the keys in the door, and so they are able to escape.

They emerge into an empty plain, and go searching. They SPOILER ALERT find multiple other bunkers, all with cages with 40 people in them, always gender segregated, always dead. AND GUYS THAT’S IT. They never learn any more about why they are there and what it all means. The other women all die as they are much older than the child; and then she spends many years alone.

It is just wild: imagine living your whole life not knowing why things are the way they are. Why are you there? Where even are you? What does it all mean? When she knows she is dying, she sets herself up sitting bold and unafraid. I was like, wow, imagine dealing with a life that is such a mystery. Then I thought, I guess I know someone else who has to do that, which is all of us.

The Introduction seemed to think this book was a lot about gender, but I did not get that at all. For me it was more about meaninglessness, which is pretty gender neutral. It was a very short book, but I find I keep thinking about it. It’s somehow flicked a switch in how I think about my own life, and the courage it takes to live it.

WE HEXED THE MOON by Mollyhall Seeley

Here is a book the author describes as being about: “four best friends who fuck around with The Moon and then very quickly Find Out about The Moon.” As you can maybe tell, it is a triumph of voice, and specifically GenZ voice.

The friends do a spell that pulls the moon from the sky.. The moon then comes to their house and wants answers. This plot, while wild, is really neither here not there. What matters is the vibe. Let me not talk about it, let me just quote extensively from the first page:

“Twitter is crumbling, fittingly, into a timeline of what is no longer called Tweets, now called Xs. Twitter is dead & so is nature, probably. Jen’s never having kids. That’s what Jen’s college application was about, framed through a lens of climate grief, ‘the sense of loss that arises from experiencing or learning about environmental destruction or climate change.’ Jen’s college counselor thought grief was a very powerful world. She said Why say grief and not sadness & Jen said Sadness is local, grief is cosmic. Global heating. Universal heating, maybe, who knows. So Jen’s not having kids but she is going to Yale.”

I’ve never read a book quite like it. I can’t say I know what it was ‘about’ – my female friendship? I didn’t care about the characters or anything like that, but I don’t think that was the point.

VIOLET CLAY by Gail Goodwin

I don’t know why this wonderful book is not more famous. I loved it. It tells about a woman trying to be an artist, and covers the terrible fear and dread of that activity better than anything I’ve ever read. Apparently there is a name for the coming-of-age novel of an artist, and it is kunstelrroman, and this is considered by some to be the first female one. (How do we feel about that this only happens in 1978?)

The book is written from the perspective of her early 30s, and covers her confidence as she graduates college (she won a college prize!), to the hard road of the next ten years, during which she has to do commercial illustration, and does less and less of her actual art. She has a LOT of casual sex (is this what the 70s was like? Does not seem hygenic), and suffers very much over how she is intentionally wasting her time and distracting herself from the fact that she is failing – not just in the world’s eyes, but in her own. She is interested in the dates of birth of famous artists, so she can calculate their age at the time of their first big success, and give herself hope that it is not too late for her.

Try this: “New York from across the river resumed the manageable proportions of a maquette, a harmless little table model on which I could project my dreams. It had looked like this when I rode the Carey bus into its center nin years ago from Newark. I still felt the old twinge when I looked at it now. I still wanted to leave my mark on it, even though it had left so many marks on me.”

Substitute London for New York, and I hear you Gail Goodwin, god I hear you. I see this author is still alive and was last published in 2020, so I am for sure going to read more.

MOKEY GRIP by Helen Garner

Here is an book about the author’s experience being a young mother in 1970s Australia. She lived a kind of sincerely hippy lifestyle that I am not sure exists anymore. It’s all communal living, unsupervised children and relaxed attitudes to hard drugs. Also no one seems to have a job. It made me wonder wtf I am doing, really.

What I found particularly unusual and interesting in this book was the immediacy of the writing. She does not worry with backstory or context, you are just plunged right into the day to day. And its a very detailed day-to-day, she goes to the toilet a lot, something that almost never happens in books.

Like try this bit from near the beginning:

“Oh, I was happy then. At night our back yard smelt like the country.

It was early summer.

And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change. It wasn’t as if I didn’t already have somebody to love. There was Martin, teetering as many were that summer on the dizzy edge of smack . . . “

GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL LIFE by Emily Henry

I don’t really read genre fiction, except for Emily Henry. She writes clever, fun rom-coms. I was excited for this new one to come out. But it wasn’t really for me. It is about two authors striving to be given the chance to write a celebrity’s memoir, and the main story is intercut with a summary of memoir’s plot. This means half the book is a summary of another, less good book? So I was underwhelmed, though the other half of the book was fun, standard, Emily Henry.

ADELAIDE by Genevieve Wheeler

In this book we see what happens when you date someone who’s not that into you.

Adelaide is madly in love with her boyfriend Rory. He thinks she is okay. She puts in an incredible amount of time and effort for him, and he enjoys it. To be fair, he does not lie to her. When she tells him she loves him, he explicitly tells her he doesn’t love her back. And yet somehow she just cannot let him go. I get it. It’s sad. She’s drinking too much, working too hard, and not eating enough, and SPOILER ALERT it all goes pretty badly wrong.

One thing I really enjoyed was that this book was set very precisely in recent years in London. The main character and I have been to the same plays, same exhibits, same restaurants. That was kind of eerie and I enjoyed it.

KINGFISHER by Rozie Kelly

I typically avoid books described on the back cover as ‘lyrical,’ and this one sailed dangerously close to that dreaded adjective. I can’t say it was a bad book; it’s just not my kind of book.

It tells the story of a gay man who finds himself falling in love a woman. This part was interesting, actually, about how unexpected desire is and what it means for your life and identity. But then it just got kind of sad, and well, lyrical. A great book for someone, just not for me.

FOURTH WING by Rebecca Yarros

Here is a multi-million copy bestseller.  It’s about school for dragon riders, kind of GAME OF THRONES meets HARRY POTTER, with some added TWILIGHT, and you can see where that got the publisher’s immediate greenlight, because let’s give the people what they want.  I read a charming article with the author, Rebecca Yarros and learnt she is a military wife (and mother of six!) who’d written twenty or so contemporary romances that sold only middlingly well, before she hit on this mashup of high fantasy and romance, which has made her famous.  Her mind is blown.  

So I love the author, but I’m afraid this is not really my kind of book. I just can’t get passed how dumb it is.  I think this is more a me-issue than the book’s issue though, and is all down to my being rigid and joyless.   A better person would not be immensely bothered by the fact that the love interest’s name is ‘Xaden’!  I mean: Xaden?!?.   In any case, I did read the whole thing – it’s very more-ish, with lots of plot and twists and turns and will-they won’t-they – which I really admired.  And I’m delighted for this lady’s success.

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.