Tag: Female writer

IT ENDS WITH US by Colleen Hoover

I bought this book because it has a billion hashtags on TikTok. People like to be dismissive of it, because it is romance, and it is wildly popular with young women, and to be fair because main characters have names such as ‘Ryle Kincaid’ and ‘Atlas Corrigan.’

It tells the story of a woman who falls in love with a neurosurgeon (LOL). It slowly emerges he struggles to control his temper and is violent. What is interesting is that he is presented very sympathetically, so you understand how hard it could be to leave.

What I found interesting is the story of the author, Hoover, who was living in a trailer when she started to self-publish her romances which then by word-of-mouth go on to be on the NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER? I mean SRSLY anything can happen.

THE SECRET RIVER by Kate Grenville

From the first paragraph of this book I knew I was in safe hands. There is no nicer feeling than opening a book and knowing you can give up your own thoughts immediately. It’s like you give yourself over.

This was a story of a man who grew up very poor in seventeenth century London, was transported to Australia as a convict, and the battles – moral and otherwise – he fought in trying to build a new life there. One forgets how rough people had it in Europe, and how recently. At one point his wife and he discuss quite pragmatically how she can start prostituting herself. It gives me hope for the developing world. It also helps you understand in some ways the context of the terrible things these Europeans did to the Aboriginal people. This conflict with the local people is really a stomach-churningly horrible part of this book.

I am surprised there are not more books like this. This meeting of two worlds in fantastically interesting. I’m surprised I haven’t seen much of it. I can’t for example think of a single example in African lit. You wouldn’t think at this late stage there would be any white space left, but here it is, I guess.

FOR THY GREAT PAIN HAVE MERCY ON MY LITTLE PAIN by Victoria Mackenzie

Here is a novel where the backstory is better than the story. It weaves together the stories of two real women from the 14th century. One is an anchoress, Julian of Norwich. She lost her siblings and father to the plague, and then her husband and child. She decided to become an anchoress, which involves you going into a room in the church, and then them BRICKING YOU INSIDE. There is a window to the outside world, through which she gets food and can see people who come to ask her advice, but that’s it. CAN YOU IMAGINE YOUR ISSUES.

The other woman, Margery Kempe is arguably even stranger. She is the wife of a wealthy businesswoman. She has the number of children you have when you don’t have bodily autonomy, and she is suddenly overwhelmed with weeping at Christ’s suffering. She cries a lot, she preaches a lot, all the while being threatened with being burned alive for the revolutionary idea that she can have a personal relationship with Christ (ie., the basis for all contemporary Christianity). She ends up travelling the world doing all sorts.

What makes the book dull is that we have to hear a lot about their religious visions, which is as boring as hearing about people’s dreams. Actually probably more boring, because at least dreams can be new (an octopus ate my pasta) whereas Christian religious visions are not (man gives out fish, etc).

What I did find interesting was how we come to know about these women. For example, the housewife Margery Kempe is the first person to write an autobiography in English – a pretty major deal. And her wild and improbable story would have been totally lost to us, were it not for a houseguest, who in 1934 was searching in a closet for a pingpong ball, and dislodged a pile of papers which turns out to be the only surviving manuscript! It’s just wild to think how many lives are completely lost to us. Thank god we now have social media so every minute of important lives are minutely documented!

THE TWO KINDS OF DECAY by Sarah Manguso

A fine memoir about a rare illness. The author has an autoimmune disease which begins by paralyzing your feet and slowly moves up your body, killing you if it gets to your diaphragm (so you can’t breath). As treatment she has all the blood in her body replaced every other day (!!!). This goes on at various periods for years, until she goes to a new doctor who prescribes her massive doses of steroids. This stops the problem but gives her profound depression.

It’s a pretty horrifying story, especially as it begins pretty randomly, with a head cold, in her early 20s, and then dominates the next ten years of her life. What I particularly enjoyed was the fact that she avoided giving it a clean ‘narrative’ – she writes it to us sort of in bits, as she remembers it, which I found very affecting. It was less factually true but seemed closer somehow to how real experience is.

REALLY GOOD, ACTUALLY by Monica Heisey

This is a comic novel about a short marriage and a long painful divorce. The writer has previously written for TV shows (Schitt’s Creek) and magazines. You can kind of tell: this novel is absolutely packed with jokes and cleverness. It’s like reading an entire novel of one liners. I can only imagine the immense effort this must have taken. Here for example is her taking up buying self help books:

I would open one and put a flower on top of it, then take a picture and imagine changing everything about my personality and core friendship group to allow myself to post that image online.

Or at one of many efforts to have hobbies or interests – at a gaming arcade:

. . . I watched a group of twentysomething girls cheering while one of their friends whacked a pinball machine. They were having a level of fun I’d never seen outside of a commercial for a chain restaurant.

I have read three novels recently about women and breakups and I am delighted once again to have not grown up in the developed world. I’m not saying I feel amazing about my body, but I just can’t get over how much women from developed countries seem to worry about how they look. Truly I wonder if it is patriarchy at work – how much mental real estate is being used on Spanx rather than on seizing the means of production.

I’M SORRY YOU FEEL THAT WAY by Rebecca Wait

Speaking as a middle class person who lives in London I think I have had about as much as I can handle of novels by middle class people who live in London. I know this is not fair, but this book annoyed me. London has 10 million people in it, more than some countries (less than mid-sized Chinese cites), all of whom are I am sure very interesting and worthy of novels and etc. In any case, to this book.

It tells the story of a couple of generations of a family, each from their own perspective. This isa promising idea, and some of the he-said she-said of this I enjoyed. One sister in particular is uncertain of herself and yet helpful to everyone, without getting much appreciation. The framing was that we were supposed to feel for her, but I just wanted to smack her. I don’t know if this makes me a bad person, but honestly here’s how I feel: it’s not everyone else’s problem if you choose to be a doormat. That’s on you.

TRESPASSES by Louise Kennedy

I had for some reason failed to finish four books before this one. I was starting to wonder if there was something wrong with me.  Then I went through this one at speed, how I like to read, like an experienced runner. So I guess it was the books, not me.

This book was a straightforward love story, complicated by the lovers being on either side of the religious divide in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. I have yet to understand all the strong feelings in Ireland, and especially what it has to do with religion, but certainly I got that there was a lot of trauma. Perhaps unsympathetically, or just because I am an immigrant, I just kept thinking: why don’t you just leave? Sometimes geography really is the answer

I note that this book is the first from a woman who spent the last thirty years as a chef. I love that, people who reinvent themselves so dramatically. 

ACTS OF DESPERATION by Megan Nolan

I read this book in a single day. It is the story of a relationship that begins badly and ends worse.   This young Irish woman feels lost in her life and is drinking too much. What makes her feel whole and special is “love,” and she duly falls in love, or maybe something worse than that, with a guy called Ciaran. 

She gets pretty crazy, though to be fair he does ask for it. After they have been sleeping together for like 6 months he give her a gift and and a piece of paper on which he writes that she is beautiful and he loves her. Then he just does not contact her for a week (!), and when after multiple missed calls she threatens to come over, he tells her it is over. That’s it! No explanation. I challenge anyone to not lose their mind over that. In any case they do end up getting back together because she basically eliminates all aspects of her self and becomes a receptacle for what she imagines he wants.  This is a glib sort of summary, and she struggles over how to explain what she is doing:

I hate to write (her explanations), to put my facts in the hands of people who will sneer and feel annoyed by their tawdry debasement.

I can’t lie, she is debasing herself. I felt for her. It is pretty bad.  She goes home to the countryside:

When I go home to Waterford to try to even out and reconnect with myself and my past, people seem to be dying all the time all around me, and I argue with my parents about my reluctance to engage with them. I don’t want to hear about the illnesses and tragedies, and am amazed by their ability to keep attending funeral after funeral.

Somehow this wakes her up. Eventually she starts cheating on him a lot, asking creepy men to be rough with her. When Ciaran finds out he is pretty rough with her too.   She runs away to Greece where she – not totally believably – finds some ability to be on her own. Mostly, this last part made me angry about Brexit. These old people and their conservative enablers have made it impossible for me to go to Athens to sort out my man issues! 

O CALEDONIA by Elspeth Barker

Here is a book in which someone is very, very angry about their Scottish childhood.  It opens with the tombstone of a teenage girl that reads:

Chewing gum, chewing gum sent me to my grave

My mother told me not to, but I disobeyed

This gives you a taster of the extremely bizarre world of this book.  From page one, you get the feeling you are in the hands of someone who knows what they want to say, and is going to go ahead and say it.  And indeed the introduction tells me that this was the author’s first and only book, written in her fifties, and when it arrived at her agent:

It needed no editing.  It was simply there in all its dark and glittering glory. 

It’s a story of a girl growing up, and is almost painful to read, reminding you how incredibly difficult it is to grow up.  Some of it is just a bit LOL, as when her breasts start to arrive, and her mother tells her that “a bosom is a beautiful and natural thing.” Her parents then “went away on a spring holiday, leaving Janet a small book to read.  It was an account of more of the beautiful and natural things which lay in store for her. Janet was appalled.”

But much of it is just much harder and sadder.  Her mother does not much like her, she is not very popular at school, and the amount of non-consensual groping that apparently went on in the first half of the twentieth century is honestly astounding. She is later badly affected by Hiroshima (you can see she is not the most ordinary little girl):

She could no longer have faith in God or man.  She transferred any religious impulse which might yet linger within her to the Greek gods who did not even pretend to care especially for humanity or to value its efforts and aspirations, being far too busy with their own competing plots, feuds and passions. 

I found this interesting.  Indeed, life being so unfair and random, you can see where the idea of the Greek gods does kind of make more sense than the Christian god.  It is interesting Western culture has gone for the latter. 

DRIVE YOUR PLOUGH OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD by Olga Tokarczuk

This book has been much admired. I can say it was okay. The most effective part is the narrative voice, which is of an eccentric old lady who loves animals, astrology, and the Czech Republic, and is given to charmingly erratic capitalization. Try this:

The path in front of Oddball’s house is so very neatly gravelled that it looks like a special kind of gravel, a collection of identical pebbles, hand-picked in a rocky underground factory run by hobgoblins. Every fold of the clean curtains hanging in the windows is exactly the same width; he must use a special device for that. And the flowers in his garden are neat and tidy, standing straight and slender, as if they’d been to the gym.

There are a series of murders of hunting men, in the area, and in a very predictable turn of events it is SPOLIER ALERT BUT SURELY YOU FIGURED IT OUT it is the old lady.