Tag: Female writer

THE GREAT FIRE by Shirley Hazzard

I nearly gave up on this book multiple times. I found the style kind of hard to read, and the dialogue fake-y. And then at some point I sort of clicked into it, and it started to fly by. I worry that the older you get, the less wiling you are to enter into things on their terms, rather than your own. Anyway, I managed it on this one.

The main interest of this story was the setting, which was post WWII Japan/China/Australia. It drips with loss and longing. This is not to say the plot was not interesting: barring some side points about polio and Hiroshima, the main story is about a 16 year old girl and a 32 year old war man who fall madly in love. The girl’s parents, totally understandably, think this is not a good plan, and move her to New Zealand. He eventually follows her there and the novel ends with them having sex.

I did wonder why the girl’s parents were painted as such villains, and some Googling reveals that this story is pretty close to Hazzard’s own life. She too fell in love with a much older man right after the second World War, and was also removed from him. However, in her real life, they eventually broke up by letter, and never actually hooked up. This novel was written some forty years later, after she had gone to visit this guy on his Welsh farm. I guess there is a lot of comfort in fixing history, even if only in the imagination.

SMALL THINGS LIKE THIS by Claire Keegan

I read this 110 page novel in almost a single sitting. It has featured on a lot of BOOK OF THE YEAR lists, and I can see why. It’s remarkably densely packed, creating a whole world of snowy working-class Ireland. I read it on Christmas Eve, and luckily it was also set on Christmas, which added to the charm. However the story is not very Christmas-y. It’s about guilt and what you should sacrifice for people you’ve never met. Okay, maybe it is kind of Christmas-y.

It tells about a man who while making a delivery of coal to a Convent gets some sense of what is actually happening to woman in it’s Magdalen laundry. This deserves a googling, if you’ve never heard of these institutions. Essentially they began as places for sex workers to be ‘saved.’ They were saved by working for free fifteen hours a day as laundry workers. This worked so well (for the church’s bottom line) that soon all sorts of women were interned, including orphans, the flirtatious (?), and in general any woman who it was convenient to get rid of.

This poor coal delivery guy is then faced with a very specific moral problem, as it is made very clear to him how little he can do to help, and what the consequences will be for him if he tries. It’s gripping, I recommend it.

EAT PRAY LOVE by Elizabeth Gilbert

I don’t know why this bestseller has such a terrible reputation. I quite enjoyed it. It is a memoir of a woman whose marriage, and then affair that ended that marriage, both explode spectacularly. She decides to heal herself by going on a year long holiday. What is really impressive about this is she sells a book proposal about this and so funds it upfront.

It is maybe a little obvious that this book was written off the back of a book proposal, and not one for a very sophisticated audience. She plans to travel to three countries: Italy, to explore pleasure: India, to explore religion; and Indonesia to explore balance (?). I’m amazed in 2006 someone could with a straight-face describe whole countries as representing things, but here we are, and it was a bestseller. Let us just be grateful she did not get around to Africa.

I was very interested by her time in the Indian ashram, and her sincere attempts to meditate for hours every day. I try for ten minutes and that is tough enough. I liked this as an explanation of silent retreats:

The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendance emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I’m a failure . . . I’m lonely . . . I’m a failure . . I’m lonely . . ) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.

Now I just need to find a way to fund my holidays with book proposals.

EILEEN by Otessa Moshfegh

It is often a mistake to read a second book by an author you enjoy, because you start to be able to see their tricks. Such is the case with EILEEN. I enjoyed it, and I especially enjoyed her deeply unpleasant female narrator, but I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t just read MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION, which has the same ingredients but done better.

But who cares, I guess. As long as something is still fun. Most of this book is about the many ways the main character is unhappy, and how much she makes it worse for herself. Eventually, she makes a friend at work. This sounds like a positive development but in fact it ends in murder.

One thing I did not especially like was the inclusion of child abuse. Not that this can never be written about, of course it can, but in this case it seemed to me a little too much of a plot device – as if it was included just to ramp up the tension – which I did not think was needed, or earned. Eileen was capable of murder without anywhere near that much motivation.

MY PHANTOMS by Gwendoline Riley

This one is COMPLETELY SEARING and I can’t recommend it strongly enough. Steel yourself though. I read that the author is surprised people continually assume the book is autobiographical, and I can tell you right now it is because it is so specific and accurate one can only think it comes from someone’s real life.

It is about a woman’s relationship with her mother. She only sees her once a year, so the book is mostly a series of conversations, and it is the dialogue that is so achingly perfect. Here the mother is, welcoming a man she hopes to date:

“And would you like a drink?” my mother said, as Dave handed her his coat and smiled at us. “Or a … radish, or … You want it, we got it,” she said, in her Italian restaurant owner voice. “We gotta the radishes, we gotta the nuts!” she said.

The mother is horrifyingly closely observed, the kind of observation of someone else most people never do, and if they do it is only of close family members. Try this:

My mother loved rules. She loved rules and codes and fixed expectations. I want to say – as a dog loves an airborne sick. Here was unleashed purpose. Freedom, of a sort. Here too was the comfort of the crowd, and of joining in. Of not feeling alone and in the wrong.

I see that I somehow can’t describe this book. But take it from me: it’s chilling

FLUDD by Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel is a magical writer. I mean, try this:

There were draughts, it was true, which followed each worshipper like a bad reputation, which dabbed at their ankles and climbed into their clothes, as cats do with people who do not like them

Bam! Two amazing ideas in a row, and about draughts. Then try this one, about the view of Catholics towards Protestants in a small town:

The Protestants were damned, of course, by reason of this culpable ignorance. They would roast in hell. A span of seventy years, to ride bicycles in the steep streets, to get married, to eat bread and dripping: then bronchitis, pneumonia, a broken hip: then the minister calls, and the florist does a wreath: then devils will tear their flesh with pincers.

What an accurate summary of a life. And then this:

But then again, taking the long view, and barring flood, fire, brain damage, the usual run of back luck, people do get what they want in life. The frightening thing is that life is fair; but what we need, as someone has already observed, is not justice but mercy

And yet, in a an abrupt left turn, let me say that I did not really like this book. It was about a new curate coming to a parish church who turns out to be the devil. The plot really fell apart, and the book sort of petered out. But the beginning was so strong it was worth it. “What we need is not justice but mercy” GAR!

I’M GLAD MY MOM DIED by Jeanette McCurdy

Here is a memoir that makes you think that being a child star is really as bad as it looks. McCurdy’s mother is a super aggressive stage mother who pushes her daughter into acting and is phenomenally, creepily controlling. Example: she gives her breast AND VAGINAL exams in the shower until she is sixteen.

She gains some independence from her mother but has a drinking problem and both anorexia and bulimia. The anorexia she regards as the more sophisticated and desirable disease, but the bulimia eventually wins out. The most horrifying part is when she starts vomiting in a airplane toilet and a couple of teeth come out.

Every page of this book reads as being earned. McCurdy has clearly gone the incredibly hard miles in therapy. The voice is stark, direct, and simple, in a way you only achieve when you have cut out everything that’s not true. It’s also hilarious. I have nothing but admiration.

THE HOUSE BY THE DVINA by Eugenie Fraser

I found this book yellowing in the bookcase of my childhood home. I would say I have read every book we own, so I was surprised to find this one, and in a spirit of completeness decided to read it.

It is a memoir written by a woman with a Russian father and a Scottish mother. She was born and grew up in Russia, and was only eventually forced to leave as a teenager by the economic collapse of the Russian revolution.

It’s an interesting account of the earliest days of globalization, and what it is to be a child of hybrid culture. It’s also a romantic picture of traditional Russian life. Most interesting though of course, is the collapse. They descend very quickly into hunger and tragedy. I was particularly struck by when the narrator, as a child of the bourgeoisie, goes to beg a peasant woman for milk. The woman tells her about how she used to have to rush home during her short breaks at their mill to breastfeed her baby, and never managed to feed him for long enough. She asks why she should give her any milk. A tough question indeed.

MY FIRST THIRTY YEARS by Gertrude Beasley

Get ready for how this memoir begins:

Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the prenatal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied, and brought into association with people whom I should never have chosen.

If first paragraph not enough, let’s go to the second one:

Sometimes I wish that, as I lay in the womb, a pink soft embryo, I had somehow thought, breathed or moved and wrought destruction to the woman who bore me, and her eight miserable children who preceded me, and the four round-faced mediocrities who came after me, and her husband, a monstrously cruel, Christ-like, and handsome man with an animal’s appetite for begetting children.

BOOM. This lady born very poor in Texas in 1892, and only wrote this one book, a memoir of her life up to age 30. It is a story of titanic will power, courage and rage. It’s also possibly the only book in English I can think of, other than LARKRISE TO CANDLEFORD, written by a poor woman born in the nineteenth century.

It;s is an account of what Gertrude calls her family’s “horryifying and disgusting domestic relations,” where her mother sleeps with a shovel to fight her father off, so she can stop having children. Gertrude is raped by all three of her elder brothers, who also have sex with the cows. Her mother comments: “I was just scared nearly to death before that old cow’s calf come . . ” .

She is the only one of her 12 siblings to make it through high school, and she goes on to University in Chicago. As she put it: “I was getting jollier and jollier and going to the devil as fast as I could go.” The books ends with her contracted as a journalist to go to Japan. It’s an uplifting story about triumph against unimaginable odds. However, on reading the Introduction, I found out she didn’t in fact triumph. The book is banned – apparently you can’t just say exactly how things actually are – and a few years later she is put in an insane asylum, at a time when that was a common thing to do to troublesome women. It does not seem at all likely she was insane. Just belligerent, and with good reason. She dies there thirty years later.

That’s it ladies: these are giants on whose shoulders we stand. I’m so glad she got out this one short book on her life, and on her astonishing achievements, before the patriarchy closed her down.