Jane O'reilly

The Women’s Review of Books Vol. XX, No. 10-11 July 2003 74035 $4.00

I In This Issue

Fiction, Poetry, and Memoir for Summer Reading:

I Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas are observed from the unique perspective of their Vietnamese cook in The Book of Salt, Monique Truong’s first novel, p. 23.

I The works of Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabokov, and F. Scott Fitzgerald may never have been as relevant as they are to a group of women readers in revolutionary Tehran, recounts Azar CONTRIBUTORS TO THE AGING SECTION: Top row, left to right: Gayle Greene, Gayle Pemberton, Alix Kates Shulman Nafisi in her memoir, (photos by Ann Rosalind Jones, Ariel Jones, Daniel Milner) 2nd row, left to right: Marilyn Hacker, Suzanne Ruta, Alicia Ostriker Reading Lolita in Tehran, (photos by Iva Hacker-Delany, Nancy Dahl, J. P. Ostriker) 3rd row, left to right: Kerryn Higgs, Vivian Gornick, Lesley Hazleton p. 24. (photos by Lisa Gross, Esther Hyneman, Olivier D’hose) Bottom row, left to right: Florence Howe, Veronica Chambers, Jane O'Reilly (Chambers photo by Anna Williams) I Ellen Ullman’s novel The Bug examines the experience of women in the male-dominated world of high technol- Special issue: Women aging ogy, p. 26. In The Quality of Life Report (reviewed on page 25 by Amanda Nash), comic novelist Meghan Daum asks, “Is 37 the new 26?” Or, as I’ve heard friends of mine, somewhat older than Daum, hopefully put it, “Is 60 the new 50?” Several of the authors in our special issue on Women Aging question the entire concept of age, at least as it has been constructed in the contemporary US. Alix Kates Shulman, now 70, says she’s never I and more... felt older than she did at 34, “a disillusioned wife with a wandering husband, no savings, no prospects, no future.” Then, she encountered the women’s movement. 07> Which, as Florence Howe points out, is really not so old itself—35 years or so, depending on how you’re counting. The bonds formed as women now in their 50s, 60s, and 70s shared (and struggled over) experiences, ideas, values, and political work sustained many of them for decades. The importance of female friends and especially of

0374470 74035 mentors seems only to increase with age, as reflected here in writings by Howe, Gayle Pemberton, and Veronica Chambers. PRINTED IN THE USA continued on page three The Women’s Review Contents of Books Wellesley College Center for Research on Women a SPECIAL ISSUE:WOMEN AGING a Wellesley, MA 02481 (781) 283-2087/ (888) 283-8044 3 Alix Kates Shulman a THOUGHTS AT 70: A woman with a past? Or one with a future? What is old www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview anyway? Volume XX, No. 10-11 July 2003 4 Vivian Gornick a THE HOUSE OF ELDER ARTISTS: The challenge of making a daydream into reality FOUNDING EDITOR: Linda Gardiner 5 Gayle Greene a CATCHING ZZZS: Women lie awake and wonder: Why is most sleep research conducted EDITOR IN CHIEF: Amy Hoffman on men? [email protected] PRODUCTION EDITOR: Amanda Nash 7 Suzanne Ruta a SCRABBLE WITH MY MOTHER: What the words really spell CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Martha Nichols, Jan Zita Grover 9 Kerryn Higgs a A TALE OF TWO ACCIDENTS: Injury at 20 is not the same as injury at 55 POETRY AND CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: Robin Becker 10 Alicia Ostriker a PRAYING FOR THE END OF ANGER: “A woman is her mother,” poet Anne Sexton ADVERTISING MANAGER: Anita D. McClellan once wrote. But is that fate inevitable? [email protected] OFFICE MANAGER: Nancy Wechsler 11 Veronica Chambers a FRIENDS FOR LIFE: How female friendship evolves from youthful crushes to the EDITORIAL BOARD: Margaret Andersen I Robin Becker I Claudia M. Christie I deeper relationships of years Marsha Darling I Anne Fausto-Sterling I Carol Gilligan I Sandra Harding I Nancy 12 Marilyn Hacker a THE POET AT 80: A tribute to the aging poet Marie Ponsot is full of the imagery of Hartsock I Carolyn Heilbrun I Evelyn Fox vigor and growth Keller I Jean Baker Miller I Ruth Perry I Peggy Phelan I Helene Vivienne Wenzel a ARYGROWSUP 12 Lesley Hazleton M : The Virgin in her later years EDITORIAL POLICY: The Women’s Review of Books is feminist but not Florence Howe a MY “OLD LADIES”: As writers age, they find ways to continue their work 14 restricted to any one conception of feminism; all writing that is neither sexist, racist, homo- 17 Jane O’Reilly a RUNNING OUT OF TIME: Reaching the age of acceptance and pendulous earlobes phobic, nor otherwise discriminatory is welcome. We seek to represent the widest possi- 18 Carolyn G. Heilbrun a TAKING A U-TURN: The aging woman as explorer of new territory ble range of feminist perspectives both in the books reviewed and in the content of the 19 Gayle Pemberton a NO REGRETS: Which ambitions and possessions are important, and which are not, reviews. We believe that no one of us can speak for feminism, or women, as such; all of was a lesson learned in an unlikely setting—Hollywood our thinking and writing takes place in a specific political, social, ethnic, and sexual con- 21 Eileen Boris a CARING FOR THE CARETAKERS: Feminist Ethics and Home Health Care text, and a responsible review periodical should reflect and further that diversity. The by Jennifer A. Parks Women’s Review takes no editorial stance; all the views expressed in it represent the opinion of I REVIEWS I the individual authors. 22 Susan Millar Williams I Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home by Janisse Ray ADVERTISING POLICY: The Women’s Review accepts both display and Jan Clausen I The Book of Salt by Monique Truong classified advertising. The Women’s Review will 23 not accept advertising which is clearly inappropriate to the goals of a feminist publica- 24 Nan Levinson I Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi tion: As we are unable to investigate the accuracy of claims made by our advertisers, publi- 25 Amanda Nash I The Quality of Life Report by Meghan Daum; The Porno Girl and Other Stories cation of an advertisement does not represent endorsement by The Women’s Review. by Merin Wexler Advertising inquiries: call 781-283-2560, amc- [email protected] 26 Martha Nichols I The Bug by Ellen Ullman Diana Postlethwaite I The Photograph by Penelope Lively The Women’s Review of Books (ISSN #0738- 27 1433) is published monthly except August by The Women’s Review, Inc., 828 Washington 28 Nancy B. Reich I Clara: A Novel by Janice Galloway Street, Wellesley, MA 02481. Annual subscriptions are $27.00 for individuals and $47.00 for 29 Marie Shear I The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O’Hair by Bryan F. 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As an autonomous publication it has its own editorial board and board of directors, 34 Martha Gies I All Night Movie by Alicia Borinsky who set policy with regard to its editorial, financial and organizational character. 35 Pamela Petro I A Visit to Don Otavio: A Traveller’s Tale from Mexico by Sybille Bedford; The Women’s Review is distributed by Total Circulation, New York City, NY; Ingram, Pleasures and Landscapes: A Traveler’s Tales from Europe by Sybille Bedford; A Legacy: A Nashville, TN; and Armadillo Trading, Culver Novel by Sybille Bedford; Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education by Sybille Bedford City, CA. All other distribution is handled directly by The Women’s Review. Sarita Sarvate I The Mango Season by Amulya Malladi The contents of 36 The Women’s Review of Books are copy- 36 Adrian Oktenberg I Calendars by Annie Finch; Flux, Poems by Cynthia Hogue; Little River, New right ©2003. All and Selected Poems by Linda McCarriston; Against Love Poetry, Poems by Eavan Boland rights reserved; reprint by permis- 38 Letters sion only. 38 Contributors 39 The Bookshelf

This special issue is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

2 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 Special issue: Women aging (introduction continued from page one)

My father, now 80, seems to talk more and more often of the influence on him of his own father, who died 30 years ago. Similarly, writers like Suzanne Ruta and Vivian Gornick often think of their mothers, living or dead. Says Alicia Ostriker, “Many times I have said to myself, ‘Well, that’s the last poem I am going to write about my mother.’ It hasn’t happened yet.” (Curiously, in this admittedly arbitrary collection, none is obsessed in the same way with a relationship with a daughter. The primal influence is mother, I suppose, whereas we meet our daughters later in life.) Debunking assumptions about aging, though, does not enable anyone to escape its physical, psychological, and spiritual challenges. These are “part of the adventure of old age,” gamely comments Carolyn Heilbrun, at 77 probably the oldest contributor to this issue, “like frostbite for explorers in the arctic.” Recovery from injury or illness can be slow and incomplete, as Kerryn Higgs recounts. Insomnia, says Gayle Greene, can sap strength and energy. Thinking about living to 95, Jane O’Reilly realizes, “I truly, no kidding, might not.” Nor “earn a living in Provence, or get a pilot’s license... or figure out how to work my cell phone.” Life necessarily continues to be full of changes—in ambitions, interests, and priorities, among other things. Many of the writers in Women Aging have experienced not the end of learning or activity but rather shifts in their focus and timeline. Adjusting is not easy. But then, says Gayle Pemberton, quoting movie star Bette Davis, “Old age ain’t no place for sissies.” —Amy Hoffman Editor in Chief

touched me. In an instant I switched “young”—if young means, as cliché from a woman with a past (“old”) to one would have it, carefree. with a future (“young”). Not that I’m immune to the weight of It’s possible that everything could just mere chronology. I admit I’ve often con- Thoughts at 70 as suddenly change again. A critical fall, a sidered “old” those of my friends who by Alix Kates Shulman devastating death, dementia, the bomb, are older than I by a decade or more, no or an economic crash could conceivably matter how like-minded or free-spirited. age me as rapidly as the women’s move- But now I laugh at myself to remember A woman with a past? Or one with a future? ment made me young. But hair has been that when I was 40 and met my closest known to whiten overnight at 20; disas- friend, then 53, I marveled that a woman What is old, anyway? ter can strike at any age; and some disas- of her age and generation could feel ters feel like opportunities. It’s not age exactly as I did about so many things. a that could flatten me but despair. (She also knew a lot I didn’t.) When she turned 65 (then 70, 80, now 83), my cele- s 70 old? I used to think so, but now (OWL)? Never have I felt older or more till, some sobering changes I’ve bratory wonder remained—as constant I’m not sure. Age is so confusing. irrelevant than before feminism’s second experienced lately do derive from as the difference between our ages. Even I Despairingly I described myself at wave, when 30 was considered over the S my age—not least, my steady now, with her bones and memory getting 25 as “a quarter-century old,” while the hill (for women) and the last safe age to awareness that my end is in sight. Other, thin, her savvy continues to amaze me. In gravity of turning 50 compelled me to begin a family, and your life was sup- derivative changes have an opposite contrast, I’m less aware of my age differ- reinvigorate my life, then write a book posed to be fulfilled by having babies. effect, less sobering than elating. At 70, ence with my younger friends (except for about it. Except chronologically, “old,” Still a 1950s middle-class midwestern many pressures I used to suffer are one, whose deference drives it home). To whether in the negative sense of obso- girl, though living in New York, I retired falling away. No more (anyway, far less) me we’re all just, well, friends—though lescent or the positive sense of experi- from fulltime work to become a mother. driving ambition, relentlessly prospective they may secretly feel otherwise. enced, is an ever-moving target. By the time my youngest started school I thinking, unrealistic expectations, utopi- One’s age sense is inextricable from Emma Goldman died at 70 and was a disillusioned wife with a wandering an delusions—those anxieties of youth the shared culture and experience of one’s claimed to have had her most fulfilling husband, no savings, no prospects, no and middle age that keep people strained generation, time, and place. Veterans of love affair at 65. When I was in my 30s future. A has-been at 34! and guilty. At 50, to ease those concerns movements or wars, of shared traumas or writing a biography of her, I thought Then women’s liberation hit New and free myself from others’ judgments, triumphs, often feel an ineffable, exclusive that 70 was not too young to die and 65 York and quickly restored my youthful I took myself off to an island where, liv- affinity. It’s the rare imagination that can was rather old to have great sex. Now I ardor. Suddenly, I had a compelling pur- ing in complete solitude, I could do permanently switch generations. Last think neither. At 70, with my health still pose and important work. Far from whatever I liked instead of what was night, seeing two movies from the 1940s good, partner holding up, work in being a has-been, I knew life had not, expected of me. At 70, knowing what I on cable TV, I was unexpectedly remind- progress, political action urgent, 70 does- and would not pass me by. Fired by know, such anxieties seem so pointless ed of how long I’ve been around, how n’t feel particularly old to me. But it movement passion, in quick succession I that I am able to enjoy some of the free- much I’ve lived. The matchless movie depends on who’s asking. defied my husband, began organizing doms I discovered on that island smack stars of my childhood—Hedy Lamarr, A new friend, a poet not yet 50, with women’s groups, gave my first speech, in the middle of New York City. On Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford, Greta whom I’ve been drinking mango margar- wrote my first essay and before long my impulse, last weekend I spent an entire Garbo, Mae West—who once defined for itas in an East Village bar, greets my first novel. Though that early movement day strolling through the zoo without a me beauty, glamor, and style, can’t have announcement of my age with stunned euphoria couldn’t last, I never again felt hint of guilt. This extra measure of free- the same meaning for later generations. In disbelief, surprised to learn that she has as impotent or “old” as I had before it dom makes me feel, paradoxically, the backroom of my consciousness they been trading secrets with a 70-year-old. It’s remain the ideal. Subsequent stars have Alix Kates Shulman, center, in black. obvious that to her 70 is ancient. I could © Linda Trichter Metcalf never seemed the real thing; I never pored be her mother. over their pictures in magazines. Instead, “Am I old?” I ask another friend, in I grew up. After I had children I got so her 60s. She directs her surprise at my caught up in movement politics and very question. “You’re not old in any bad motherhood that I was way too busy to sense,” she says indignantly. She adds go to the movies. When, after missing that if I think I am I’ve been bamboo- two decades’ worth of films, I finally zled, because our ideas about age are gazed up at the screen again, I didn’t rec- socially constructed. ognize the stars. Who were those new- I know she’s right. Otherwise the comers and upstarts? Accomplished respect and stature we sometimes accord actors they might be—but not stars, as my to age would graph consistently, and not, cohort conceived them. as now, slope up for some cultures, pro- I left high school in 1950. My music fessions, people, slope down for others, is pre-rock. My defining war was World and look like a dizzying roller coaster for War II. My battle for justice began with still others. civil rights. My children have reached Compared to the heavy burden of age midlife. My parents are dead. My part- I felt in my early 30s—panicked over my ner naps in the afternoon. Suddenly see- impending loss of youth—70 feels posi- ing the old stars vamp across the light tively young. Remember the 1960s slo- years back into my life, I realize with a gan, “Don’t trust anyone over 30”? certain pleasure and even pride that, Remember the 30-year-old admission given the human lifespan, 70 may age to Older Women’s Liberation indeed be getting old. I

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 3 lost definition—she no longer looked Everyone knew that the key element like herself. She looked like a generic was to raise the lowest common old woman. denominator of a senior residence The House of Elder Artists One day when I was visiting I from the simple fact of age to one that brought along a friend, a person who would honor the needs of mind and by Vivian Gornick also talks to everyone she meets in the spirit. The more we thought about it, street. Unexpectedly, my friend’s pres- the more we realized how vital was this ence was enlivening. In no time at all, thing we were trying to do. You spend The challenge of making a she and my mother were deep in con- a lifetime struggling to become a con- daydream into reality versation—real conversation, not the scious human being. You develop a self ritual exchange that elicits a ritual through work, love, politics, talent, a response. The change in my mother informed opinion—a self that you was immediate and astonishing. Within think of as your real self—and then, an hour she was not only looking long before you’re dead, with years of he project is called THEA— © Esther Hyneman younger and more alive, but—and this sentient life ahead of you, your lifelong The House of Elder Artists— was really startling—like herself. effort to “become” is of no conse- T and it is the creation of a It wasn’t hard to figure out what was quence. The only thing that matters is group of New York artists and happening: The conversation was your age and your bank account. activists who have been working for allowing my mother to remember that Anything we came up with would have some years to build a not-for-profit she had a mind, and, in the act of occu- to be an improvement on that. senior residence in Manhattan for pying it, she was returning to her old The first suggestion (mine) was a women and men in the arts. At THEA, self. What was remarkable to me was retirement residence for feminists. rather than “retire,” the residents will how strongly she wanted to be herself That, in a roomful of feminists, was live out the last part of their lives very again. I saw that at the age of 92, my instantly shot down. much as they have lived out the previ- mother was hungry to stay alive in the “Too broad.” ous ones: in the company of like-spir- only way that counts. Between then and “Too narrow.” ited people, and in productive interac- the end of her life, given half a chance “Too inclusive.” tion with the city whose cultural life to be “herself ” she invariably took it. “Too restrictive.” their presence enriches. Watching my mother in the last “What, no men?” The plan is to put up a building of a years of her life, I began to think about The second suggestion was a retire- hundred apartments (to be rented on a my own old age. My situation, I ment residence for women who’d been sliding scale of affordability) plus a set thought, was not so unlike hers. I, too, active in public causes. That quickly of common living and dining rooms. was alone. I, too, was financially mar- went the way of the first. There will also be meeting and exhibi- ginal, had a living relationship to the “Activists? What does that mean? tion spaces where the residents will city, and many acquaintances but not They’ll think we’re communists.” give lectures and readings, mount many intimates. I realized that when I “What, no men?” gallery shows and film series, conduct Vivian Gornick thought about growing too old to take The third was for women in the arts. seminars and master classes—all open care of myself, the worst part of it “What, no men?” to the public. That way, everyone ben- ularly to many people in the street. Yet, often seemed to be that I, like my (It was interesting, that it was always efits: the city by having continued oddly enough, she had no companion mother, might end my days confined to the lesbians among us, not the hetero- access to valuable experience and tal- with whom to run around. Warm, a place where congenial company was sexuals, who said, “What, no men?”) ent, the residents by keeping working intelligent, confrontational, possessed not a given and, worse yet, I might be Then one night, the filmmaker in minds alive. To insure that this ambi- of great vigor and rude good health, deprived of New York City. Fear of the group, said, “Why are we calling tious dream becomes a reality, THEA my mother was always on the go. She loneliness and isolation, I saw, was my this a retirement home? Who’s retir- has formed a partnership with the attended every free movie, concert, great anxiety about the years ahead. ing? And from what? From our work? Women’s Housing and Economic and lecture series in the city. Lincoln From the city? Almost everyone in this Development Corporation (WHEDCO), Center was her hangout. In compulsive began to fantasize. Wouldn’t it be room expects to go on working till she a prize winning, not-for-profit devel- need of social contact, she met people wonderful—this was my first day- drops. And if the time should come oper that shares THEA’s social vision easily wherever she went. Not a day I dream—to end up in a residence in when we can’t go out into the city, why and lends THEA its expertise in finance passed without an adventure in the Manhattan full of smart, lively women then, let’s make a place where we bring and construction. street. New York and my mother were whose lives bore some rough resem- the city to us.” When THEA is built, New York will made for each other. blance to my own; a place where the Every face in the room lit up. On have a unique residence and cultural At 90 she began to lose her balance. chance for companionate exchange the spot, we decided that we would facility and a fresh model for how to Within two years she could no longer would be better than even, so that I become a senior residence for women rescue old age from the spiritual walk alone in the street. She was the might be “myself ”—even if only for and men in the arts in Manhattan—and impoverishment to which it is so often same in every regard, except that now an hour or two a day at dinner? Then I make every word in that description consigned. she was unable to travel freely about stopped daydreaming and thought, count. We would build a place smack in It all began with my mother who, the city, providing herself with the Why need this be a fantasy? Why not a the middle of the city, equipped with when she died five years ago at the age stimulus she craved. That, however, reality? I went through my phone book lecture and performance and exhibition of 94, was still living alone in the was some except. More or less house- and invited almost every woman I’d spaces where the residents would go on apartment she had occupied for 30 bound, she changed rapidly. Her chil- known over the past 20 years to come doing and presenting their work—and years in a middle-income housing dren and neighbors visited regularly, and talk about what was on my mind. we’d invite in the neighborhood! complex in Manhattan. She knew but somehow we could not give her Thirty of them showed up. This is as far as we have gotten. We everyone in her union-subsidized what she needed. She grew steadily The differences among us—in tem- have an excellent relationship with our building, had good neighbors and ele- more listless and withdrawn. She began perament, interests, and finances— partner, WHEDCO. We have raised some vator acquaintances, and said hello reg- to drift. For the first time in her life she were great, and the responses ranged money, met a challenge grant, put on a from “What will it cost me?” to “Will highly successful benefit performance there be medical care?” to “Who’s in in New York last September; and now SIGNIFYING PAIN “This wise and compassionate book will provide charge of Wednesday night movies?” we have a year’s worth of programs Constructing and Healing inspiration and guidance not only for teachers But every woman in the room that taking place all over the city, just to and students of writing, but also for individuals the Self through Writing night agreed that isolation of the spir- show what dynamite THEA is going to struggling to find relief from mental anguish or it was the thing she most feared about be once it gets built. The only snag is Judith Harris to repair a damaged self.” — Mark Bracher old age. A residence formed with this the cost of Manhattan real estate. Our “Signifying Pain will play an important role in the concern in mind was altogether to be difficulty in finding a property that we growing literature on psychoanalysis in education desired. can afford has been monumental. But and in the college classroom, as it both shows and For the next two years, people came we’re determined not to be pushed out tells what a psychoanalytically informed sensibility and went at these meetings. Many of of the city that we have spent our lives can bring to understanding poetry. To be able to the original group remained, some in. So we work, and we wait. And when signify pain is a human triumph; to write about brought their friends, and a few we get discouraged we remember that, the signifying is, too.” — Elisabeth Young-Bruehl showed up because they’d heard about from the very first, people on all sides the meetings and were drawn to the have said, “This is a great idea,” and Available online at www.sunypress.edu idea of the project. In time, the core “You’ll never be able pull it off.” We or call 1-800-666-2211 or write to: group boiled down to 15: most of us believe so strongly in the truth of the STATE UNIVERSITY artists, one scientist, and a couple of first that we have got to overcome the of lawyers. The question we constantly defeatism of the second. NEW YORK PRESS mulled over was, How do we find the Anyone with information or sugges- c/o CUP Services organizing principle that addresses the tions that might help THEA achieve its 304 pages • $27.95 pb PO Box 6525 • Ithaca, NY 14851 question of growing old among like- goal is welcome to call or write THEA, ISBN 0-7914-5684-6 e-mail: [email protected] spirited people? What, actually, do we Suite 16-F, 175 West 12th Street, New mean by like-spirited? York, NY 10011; 212-924-0658. I

4 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 Catching Zzzs Alice James Books by Gayle Greene Celebrating 30 Years of PoetryPoetry Women lie awake and wonder: Why is most sleep research conducted on men? a R A I M E N T

nsomnia affects twice as many © Ann Rosalind Jones Nothing subtle in women as men. Yet 75 percent of it. The pink I sleep research (according to a 2003 oleander pushing report for the National Institutes of up, each cup a Health) has been conducted on men. The flushed petal standard textbook for sleep studies, mocking the skin Principles and Practices of Sleep Medicine, edit- on my neck. Red belladonna. ed by Meir Kryger, Thomas Roth, and Parade of violets like rows William Dement, has no chapter on of girls being led women and sleep. In this 1,300-page in only their bonnets tome, there are only six index references to a mirror. to “gender” and two to “menopause,” I want to be stripped and even though it’s at menopause that scrubbed down the way women’s sleep problems begin in earnest. one would scrub Studies of women’s sleep across the a dog. Then I want to reproductive cycle have been few and be the dog: faithful, far between, and not much is known plain. Will I wear about how sleep is affected by menstru- thin with vast ation, PMS, pregnancy, postpartum, summer? I imagine birth control pills, or menopause. “Is the disappearance of this because the researchers are mainly leaves, of my palms male?” I asked a speaker at the when they press American Professional Sleep Societies Gayle Greene against the parts of meetings this June in Chicago, a five- MARY SZYBIST my body that day, 4,500-attendee conference of attention that’s way out of proportion blush. Faithful and researchers and healthcare profession- to its incidence. Between 1994 and Granted plain and red als. “Oh, I have a lot to say about 1999, there were almost twice as many belladonna. that…” she replied, rolling her eyes. publications about apnea as there were Winner of the 2002 —from Granted It’s a familiar story, a story encoun- about insomnia, though insomnia is at Beatrice Hawley Award tered again and again in relation to least ten times more common than women’s health: a problem that affects apnea. This disproportion is, to be fair, more women than men but is being probably less because of gender bias researched primarily by men, on men; a than it is because apnea is easier to problem that’s not well researched and study and easier to treat. “Everyone not well understood. And because it’s so wants to work on apnea,” one little understood—and because it affects researcher told me; “you can get results THE ADONIS FISH women more than men—it is readily with apnea. Unlike insomnia.” attributed to depression, psychoneuro- Men’s sleep, like women’s, gets worse There is peace between us sis, or some form of psychopathology. with age, which is why elderly people, when we’re sleeping. Blame the sufferer, stigmatize the suffer- though only 15 percent of the popula- Even the wavelets er, then medicate the sufferer. And the tion, account for 45 percent of sleeping beating my face medications are (in my experience) at pill prescriptions. But in men, the signif- are soothing my brain. best temporarily effective and only mild- icant complaints don’t begin until around Odd how the giant bird ly impairing, and at worst, dangerous. age 65, whereas with women, they start becomes dear friend Sleep loss has not until recently been at menopause. A 1987 survey of 100 in Hades, as do taken seriously, but research is showing women attending a menopause clinic arrow, discus, boar, that it is serious indeed. It wreaks havoc found that 77 percent complained of dying so young, dying beautiful, on the endocrine system, the system insomnia. Another survey found that as does father become lover that regulates metabolism, weight, mus- complaints of insomnia doubled in his drink, or lover, cle mass, skeletal mass, and physical well between premenopausal and meno- father, in his likeness, being. It raises levels of blood glucose, pausal women. Hot flashes are the most as do I, divided between which can lead to weight gain. It raises obvious reason; weight gain is a further mothers, natural and captor, levels of the stress hormone cortisol, problem, in that it may bring on apnea. sea and land, the “fight or flight” hormone that But the explanation most experts give— slip from womb to wooden enables us to mobilize energy but is and the majority opinion I sensed at the chest without a cry— harmful in excess, when it wrecks sleep sleep meeting I just attended in woe to Adonis, me, me, and leads to bone loss. Chronic sleep Chicago—is the “altered mood of sleeping in the spirit loss hastens the onset of age-related ail- midlife women,” the “psychic distress” with my mother named for ments such as osteoporosis, hyperten- of women as they age, as children move myrrh, or with my lovers sion, cardiovascular problems, and away, parents die, marriages come apart. in her likeness on a bed memory loss, and it increases their I doubt that midlife stresses and of butter lettuce, LARISSA severity. It puts us at greater risk for strains are the whole story of what hap- thumping out a symphony infectious disease, diabetes, obesity, and pens to women’s sleep at menopause. of lips and tails that dulls me, SZPORLUK cancer. “Sleep,” says William Dement, There are plenty of middle-aged me, Adonis, without enemies pioneer sleep researcher and long-time women who feel fine about their lives, of men, only women director of the Stanford Sleep Research except that they can’t sleep—and it may enemies who love me. The Wind, Center, “is the most important predic- be that it’s the disrupted sleep of —from The Wind, tor of how long you will live, perhaps menopause that accounts for women’s Master Cherry, the Wind Master Cherry, more important than smoking, exercise, worsened mood, and not the other way the Wind or high blood pressure.” around. Though psychosocial explana- Men have sleep disorders, too, of tions may be part of the story, course, though their problems tend menopause is a biological as well as a more to apnea, or obstruction of psychosocial event, a time when ORDER ONLINE: www.alicejamesbooks.org breathing, than insomnia. Apnea hap- women’s bodies are adjusting to plum- pens to be the problem that is getting meting levels of estrogen and proges- OR CALL: (207) 778-7071 most research: In fact it’s receiving terone. I think that midlife insomnia— an affiliate of The University of Maine at Farmington

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 5 and other insomnia as well—gets attrib- owever, something else is answer by pouring out the stress hor- there awake, not necessarily upset or anx- uted to mood because so little is under- emerging that’s not so easily mones adrenaline and cortisol. These ious, not even thinking—just awake. stood about how hormones and hor- H explained: Women report step up the heart rate and convert stored The elevated body temperature that’s a monal fluctuations affect sleep. poorer sleep, but according to so-called carbohydrates into glucose. Cortisol also part of hyperarousal may itself be hor- objective measures, they sleep better signals when the process has gone on monally based. Normally, temperature peaking from my own experience, than men. Margaret Moline, of the long enough, exerting a checks-and-bal- drops off with sleep onset, reaching a I’d say that sleep has a great deal Sleep-Wake Disorders Center, New ances effect that turns off its secretion. nadir sometime around the midpoint of S to do with hormones, not just at York Presbyterian Hospital, Cornell, Researchers are finding that there sleep, then rising again. But it turns out menopause but throughout the whole describes a considerable “disparity may be something intrinsically different that women with PMS have higher body of a woman’s life—though I could between frequent subjective reports of about the female stress system, that early temperatures throughout the night, and never get a physician to take this seri- sleep difficulties in… [women with hormonal influences—the different hor- that even without hot flashes, post- ously. I’d try to explain that just before PMS] and objective findings predomi- monal milieus females and males are menopausal women have temperature my period, I’d get insomnia that a pill nantly derived from laboratory set- exposed to in utero because of the X or fluctuations more extreme than men’s, wouldn’t touch—wired, jittery, amazing tings.” (Laboratory studies are based on Y chromosomes—affect brain develop- more volatile changes from highs to lows energy, mood swings. Then when my the polysomnogram, or PSG, which ment in ways that give women and men throughout the night. And so it goes: You period came, I’d fall into a deep, blissful includes the electroencephalogram, or different vulnerabilities. According to wake up hot, throw off the bedclothes, sleep—for about a night. When I was EEG, a record of brain waves, and a Ellen Leibenluft of the National then get cold and squirrel around pregnant, I slept wonderfully, though I record of muscle tensions.) This dis- Institute of Mental Health, estrogen reassembling the bedclothes (insomniacs had no reason to be sleeping at all—I crepancy between subjective report and “primes the body’s stress response,” aren’t the best of bed partners.) had not intended to be pregnant, was in objective findings exists in relation to increasing the secretion of cortisol and While it’s true that mind and body are no position to carry the pregnancy menopausal sleep complaints, as well: promoting a stress response “that is not in some sense inseparable, and it’s not through to term. It was extraordinary “Women report more sleep difficulties only more pronounced but also longer- easy to sort out the psychological from that during this anguished period, I was than men but women often exhibit bet- lasting in women than in men.” Women the physiological, it’s the tendency of sleeping better than I have before or ter PSG sleep patterns, especially with have also been found to have longer last- researchers, physicians, and psychothera- since. Since then I’ve never quite aging,” says Joan Shaver, Department of ing cortisol responses during the phases pists to assume that insomnia is primari- believed that my insomnia has all that Physiological Nursing, University of of the menstrual cycle when estrogen ly, or etiologically, a psychological prob- much to do with my state of mind. Illinois, Chicago. Studies of women’s and progesterone levels are high. lem that I find problematic: After all, Yet every one of the half-dozen or so PSGs—the few that have been done— there’s a body here, too. Troubled sleep physicians and psychotherapists I’ve indicate that is men whose sleep process- esides these hormonal influences, can, of course, be caused by troubled been to in the last few decades has es age more quickly and whose sleep there are situations that allow nei- minds and troubled lives, and insomnia focused on the psychological as an displays more age-related changes, and B ther fight nor flight, over which may be a result of depression, anxiety, or explanation for my insomnia, and pre- that women retain more and better the individual has no control. It’s known psychoneurosis—though who’s to say scribed antidepressants. Early morning sleep even past menopause. that early life stress and prolonged expo- what is cause here, and what’s effect? awakening? “That’s depression.” Light When subjective accounts diverge so sure to stressors can hyperactivate the Does the psychopathology cause the sleep, fragmented sleep? “You worry widely from objective measures, you body’s stress responses: If a stressful sit- insomnia, or does the insomnia cause the too much.” “You have too much job have to wonder about the technology. uation goes on too long, the mechanism psychopathology? Chronic sleep loss can stress.” “You have maladaptive attitudes In fact, the EEG is a very crude meas- may get thrown off kilter, stuck in the unhinge anyone. and practices.” No doctor I’ve seen ever urement of an enormously complex “on” position, resulting in long-term and In the past few decades, the women’s showed the slightest interest in the fact phenomenon, of processes involving possibly permanent hyperactivity of the health movement has succeeded in gain- that I have no thyroid, or in the cocktail multiple areas of the brain and an elab- system and impairment of the feedback ing research and attention for problems of hormones I ingest daily (thyroid, orate dance of neurotransmitters. Sleep loop that shuts the cortisol secretion off. that were once seen as shameful secrets, estrogen, progesterone), though the is a phenomenon that is barely under- This affects responses to subsequent such as breast cancer and endometrio- endocrine system is so deeply involved stood: How we sleep, even why we stressors, making the individual more sis. Yet insomnia remains neglected. It’s in sleep that every hormone influences sleep, are questions that are still unan- reactive. Studies of women (and men) a miserable affliction, insomnia. It’s it or is influenced by it—not only estro- swered. Most researchers acknowledge who’ve experienced childhood sexual confusing, too: There are no outward gen, progesterone, and thyroid, but cor- that the EEG doesn’t measure every- abuse show this kind of persistently and visible signs; it’s more likely to incur tisol, growth hormone, prolactin, and thing there is to measure about sleep, hyperresponsive stress response system irritation than compassion. Besides, it’s melatonin. No doctor ever bothered to and that there is a great deal that is not and increased vulnerability to depression. been so stigmatized that to identify our- inquire about my cortisol levels, though known. Yet most researchers assert with Since women are generally less selves as insomniac is to brand our- it’s an obvious question, and there’s a confidence that insomnia “most often empowered than men, they’re more like- selves neurotic. This may be why, simple saliva test to find out. There are reflects psychological disturbances.” ly to find themselves in situations where though there are highly visible and suc- so many questions that might be asked It may be that women are socialized to neither fight nor flight is possible. Add to cessful support networks for apnea, to tease out physiological components talk about health problems more than this the priming of the stress system by restless leg syndrome, and narcolepsy, of a sleep problem that the failure to do men do, to complain when something’s female hormones, and you can under- there are none for insomnia. so seems perverse. wrong, and this is why we have more sub- stand why several conditions linked to When literary characters like Macbeth Medical science has a long history of jective sense of disturbance even when stress—depression, autoimmune dis- and his Lady have trouble sleeping, it’s invoking psychological explanations to laboratory measurements do not indicate eases, and anxiety disorders such as panic because they’ve done something really account for problems that are not well that we’re sleeping all that badly. But it disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, bad. But I think physicians, psychothera- understood. People were once told their may also be that women respond more and generalized anxiety disorder—are pists, and researchers have their own ways ulcers were due to stress and neuroses; sensitively to sleep loss than men do. In more common in women. Insomnia may of moralizing insomnia, suggesting that then someone found a bacterium. fact, people respond very differently to be one of these stress-related disorders, it’s something we bring on ourselves Mothers got blamed for everything sleep loss—“by an order of magnitude,” not in the sense that insomniacs lie because we have bad habits and bad atti- from their children’s autism to their according to David Dinges, chief of the awake at night worrying about things, but tudes, that it’s something we ought to be schizophrenia; then new techniques of Division of Sleep and Chronobiology, in the sense that we’re neurochemically pre- capable of dealing with simply by chang- imaging the brain came along and University of Pennsylvania School of disposed to an exaggerated stress ing our practices, our point of view; and showed that these conditions have neu- Medicine. Dinges has not looked at these response: We have different physiological if we can’t, we probably don’t need that robiological bases. The symptoms of differences in terms of gender, but I did responses to stress. Sleep loss itself then much sleep anyhow. And in our heart of mitral valve prolapse, a form of heart find one study that suggested that elderly becomes a further stressor, raising corti- hearts we probably agree, or partly agree murmur that affects mainly women— women responded to sleep deprivation sol and blood glucose levels and perpet- (I know it’s in me, this voice)—if I were racing heart, shortness of breath, and with greater “mood disturbance” than uating the vicious cycle. Women respond only more sane or more normal, I’d sleep panic attacks—were dismissed as neu- men. Women have other susceptibilities to it, as to other stressors, more extreme- the sleep of the just; the best pillow’s a clean con- rotic when physicians had only their that men don’t have: We’re more sensitive ly than men do because their stress sys- science; there’s no rest for the wicked, as the say- stethoscopes to go by; then a new tech- to light deprivation, which makes us more tem has been hyperactivated. ings go. When blame is encoded in myth, nology came along that took pictures of vulnerable to Seasonal Affective Insomniacs often have a condition proverb, and medical lore, it’s hard not to the heart and detected a valve defect. Disorder; and our sleep is more easily dis- researchers call hyperarousal: higher body internalize it. I think such assumptions Migraines, PMS, hot flashes, obsessive turbed by noise, which is said to be relat- temperatures, faster heart rate and meta- have left us so alienated from our own compulsive disorder, and a whole host ed to the female role of tending the bolic rate. Most of the studies I’ve read experience that we’re not even aware that of disorders now known to have neuro- young. We respond differently to drugs; account for this condition in psychologi- it’s our sleep that’s the problem. biological bases were similarly written we may even have different pain thresh- cal terms, attributing it to anxiety, depres- Women’s health advocacy groups off as psychopathology. olds. Most importantly, we respond dif- sion, worry, tension, rumination, “mal- became strong when women had the During the past decade, women ferently to stress. adaptive attitudes and practices.” In view conviction to say, I live in this body, I researchers have begun to focus on Stress is a tricky concept. The word of what’s known about the stress system, know this is wrong, what I’m living women’s sleep. The sense that’s emerg- usually refers to being upset, as in hyperarousal seems as likely to be a stress with, what I’m being told. It’s time that ing from their work is that sleep is not “stressed out” or “distressed.” But stress response that’s been primed by one’s women who are suffering from insom- normally affected by the menstrual can also refer to the body’s stress system, hormones and life experiences as it is to nia stand behind our own experience cycle, but that some subsets of women, the mechanisms required not just for be caused by the worry and anxiety usu- and demand more and better research such as women with PMS, have sleep emergency but for exertion of any sort, ally invoked to explain it: It’s as likely to for this debilitating condition. I complaints, and not just in the days whether it’s reading an article or moving be physiological as psychological. It’s a con- prior to menstruation, but throughout about. The hypothalamus, deep in the dition that may exist independent of our I welcome any responses and stories. the cycle. brain, alerts the adrenal glands, which thoughts or external stressors: We lie [email protected]

6 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 over—habit, custom, generation, char- A 12-hour work day, but she always had acter—and my interviews fall flat. amazing stamina, and her students “What was your mother like?” loved her. No one was surprised when Scrabble with my mother “Overworked and short tempered.” she, and they, recent immigrants from “Tell me about your father.” Hungary, Colombia, and Morocco, by Suzanne Ruta “He died when I was 12, I was his were chosen by Alastair Cooke to rep- favorite.” resent the making of new Americans in It’s like torturing a clam. She occa- a bicentennial special for public televi- What the words really spell sionally volunteers the odd complaint. sion in 1976. My mother’s diction, a Living under someone else’s roof always excellent, became even crisper brings strains. She starts off in high when she taught English as a second dudgeon “Did you ever notice how so language, and so it remains, with the love it when my mother beats me at © Nancy Dahl and so does such and such…” but slightest trace, in moments of great agi- Scrabble, because it proves that at quickly loses steam. tation, of her deep Midwestern origins. I 89, she’s just as sharp as ever. I hate “We won’t talk about it, I’d rather When provoked, she may say “chy-uld” it when my mother beats me at Scrabble play Scrabble.” for child, and “gonna” for “going to” because she plays a crabbed, competi- runs in the family, but as I take great tive game, making three or four words y mother is a strong-willed care not to provoke her, as a rule Ohio with each move, filling every available woman: my will is mush remains dormant in her diphthongs. square, boxing us in to a single corner M compared to hers. I’ve always Our routine is always the same. I of the board so I’m the one who has to been a dawdler (her word, from way walk in the door and, impatient for sacrifice, stringing out my one-point let- back, when I was slow getting dressed gratitude, at once unpack my gift of ters any old way, to open up the game. for kindergarten at the public school books she may have read but won’t Then she really takes unfair advantage. three blocks from our Bronx apart- mind rereading and passing on to She was holding onto the Q, I should ment) and a dreamer, both lazy and friends. She has a strong predilection have known, and she lands it on a triple- ambitious, a losing combination. My for terse, dyspeptic English women letter score. She’s a very canny player, mother is just the opposite: she’s mod- novelists: Pat Barker, Anita Brookner, she knows all those horrid little words est and energetic. For 15 years she was Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen. like quin and jo and ai that are to be the information clerk at the research Virginia Woolf is too speculative, found in the Scrabble dictionary but arm of the New York Public Library at Zadie Smith too exuberant. I bring her nowhere else in life—in real life, that is. Suzanne Ruta Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. You treats as well—chocolate bars, Unless Scrabble is real life. Or the walked in the main door, between the Mallomars, which are her favorite inevitable stand-in for real life, for the Before each visit to her sister’s lions, and crossed the marble floor of cookie, but I only buy them when conversations we never had and at this house, where she lives now in a refur- the vast, high-ceilinged lobby, and there they’re to be found on special. The reg- rate, never will, about the long gone bished top-floor apartment (the mad- she sat, behind a high desk, dispensing ular price is up to $4.29 a box, a scan- past, her early aspirations, early disap- woman in the attic, we sometimes tease information, advice, and wisdom, five dal, she says. She keeps track. pointments (a child of the Depression her), I prepare my list of questions for days a week from nine to five. Then she Within five minutes of my arrival, years) difficulties with my father, joys my mother. What was your mother like, added a second job. Two nights a week, never more, sometimes less, she has and regrets. The kinds of questions tell me about your father, where did he she left the library, grabbed a quick bite lunch ready on the kitchen counter. they ask you for your 40th reunion do his rabbinical studies, why weren’t at a nearby coffee shop and caught the “I made you a Waldorf salad, I from college. My mother’s 60th reunion you nicer to me when I was 15 and mis- bus uptown to the public high school at know how you love Waldorf salad,” a (Hunter College, class of 1935) came erable (I’m 63 now.) But once I’m with 68th and 2nd, where from six to nine misconception of hers I could never and went. No one asked, she didn’t tell. her, some mysterious force takes p.m. she taught English to foreigners. bring myself to correct. Maybe by now,

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 7 after all these years, I do love, or at ed, focused game, with her head down afford to. Her husband had a great job, least like, Waldorf salad, because of over her letters and the board, ruminat- with the Board of Education, so D Voices of Our Own: what it seems to mean to her—chiefly, ing over both at the same time. She could stay home and flick little tiles a delicacy they used to serve at would probably have been an excellent around a board, as if it were mahjong, Mothers, Daughters, and Schraffts when that ladylike restaurant chess player if she had ever cared to try although she mocked women who Elders of the Tenderloin chain still existed. It closed in the mid that game. played mahjong (and since I copied her Tell Their Stories ’60s in New York. “Apples, walnuts, The list of things she didn’t care to opinions, so did I). She even let me celery, grapes in a mayonnaise sauce” try is long. Ask her if she’s ever been to cheat—she let me spell out French by Nancy Deutsch with also reminds us of the Fawlty Towers Venice or Hawaii, and she’ll tell you, “I words and Latin words, and she did the photographs by Kathrin Miller episode where Basil goes berserk and don’t travel,” as if travel were a vice, same, when she could think of any. She evicts all the hotel guests in one fell like smoking. She never learned to was proud of our polyglot version of “Lose yourself in the words swoop. With the Waldorf salad I have drive nor consulted a psychiatrist or a the game, and we agreed that the man- and images of Voices of Our a toasted cheese sandwich, which my divorce lawyer. Divorce was in the air ufacturer ought to incorporate our Own, and you’ll never again mother fries in a pan with a little but- for a few months in 1961 but my rules into a new variant of Scrabble to walk through any struggling ter. I would rather skip the butter and father’s second heart attack scotched be called Omelette, which D pointed neighborhood without seeing have my sandwich grilled under the any notion of even a trial separation. out was just fancy French for scram- the richness and hearing the broiler, but I don’t question her meth- We extract the tiles from a small bled eggs. ods—in her kitchen she’s the boss. Sometimes we got to talking and dreams.” drawstring bag of soft fabric her Mind you, by acquiescing in her menu, younger sister—her usual Scrabble became so engrossed in our conversa- -Gloria Steinem her style of cooking, I’m not humoring companion and competitor—sewed tion we forgot to finish the game, as her—although who’s going to start a for her. I always give the bag a good when I told her that my parents were Immigrant and low-income women fight over a teaspoon of melted but- shake before we start, like shuffling the not on speaking terms that week, and and girls from San Francisco’s ter?—I’m just doing things the way deck before a game of cards—we both she analyzed my father’s character for poorest neighborhood share the they’ve always been done. Now is not hate card games: we find them boring me, using terms like “inferiority com- spirit of survival and the power of the time for major changes or and pointless. To begin, we each extract plex” and “overcompensation,” and hope through journal writing, oral upheavals—if there ever was such a a single tile. The alphabet determines congratulated me on being smart history, poetry, color artwork and time. But if there was, I missed it, who goes first. Lately I’ve been on a enough to comprehend the meaning of stunning photography. through oversight or absence or indif- winning streak, impossible to explain, these words that were too long for the ference or lack of pluck. and wind up going first, time after time, Scrabble board, but indispensable in After lunch she cleans up. My offers an advantage I would gladly cede to my accounting for adult behavior. of help are routinely and roundly mother but If I were to compare them to small rejected. The amazing thing is that I A. she doesn’t need it; and animals, D would be a cat, a silky, well- keep on making them. Why don’t I just B. if she did, it would be tactless of groomed Siamese perhaps, or a Persian give up, after all these years? Whence me to call attention to her failing pow- with long fur, stretched on a satin cush- this stubbornness? Of course, I feel ers, assuming they were failing, which ion. My mother, who got down on her ashamed to have her on her feet at the they’re not, by offering to bend the hands and knees with a damp cloth kitchen sink while I’m sitting on the rules in her favor. every morning to wipe the floors down- living room couch reading the op-ed So, we let chance decide. stairs and up (I thank God in retrospect page of the New York Times, but I have that the total floor space, including liv- learned to live with my shame by now. crabble by itself is an ugly word; ing, dining, and three bedrooms, in our It’s short lived in any event, because it suggests a furtive, desperate attached brick house was about 800 my mother is a quick worker. She does- S search for the necessities of life, feet), then bathed and ran to merge into n’t dawdle at the sink, and the minute as in hardscrabble farming, and it con- the subway to Manhattan, would be a she’s through with her chores we turn tains, quite close to the surface, barely mole. D was a domestic animal. My to Scrabble. hidden, the word rabble. I wonder at the mother lived in wilds of her own mak- “Through this book women We have an old, deluxe edition, with harsh associations that cling to the ing. Or maybe of my father’s making. At and children speak to us with one of those metal and plastic boards name for such a gentle, undemanding any rate, she was running, anxious, pred- their hope, creativity and spir- that revolves on a sort of lazy Susan, pastime. What were the game’s inven- ator and hunted, foraging, scrambling, it, giving us all hope for a bet- but we always forget to give it a whirl. tors thinking, back in the 1950s? It was scrabbling to make ends meet after my ter world.” There’s no need, because we huddle the middle of the Eisenhower era. I father lost his real job as a newspaper -Dolores Huerta, close together, at one corner of the din- was a child, or “chy-uld,” of 12 or 13. columnist and his fake job as a low-level co-founder, ing room table, sharing practically the In those days I never played Scrabble staffer for the Senate subcommittee that United Farm Workers same vantage point. My mother keeps with my mother. She was at work when took over where Joe McCarthy left off score with those little metal pegs that I I got home from school, and in the in 1954. What did my mother make of “Reading this book, you will find difficult to manage. I keep forget- evenings she was too tired and too busy my father’s friends on the committee? find sisters. In hard times, ting whether I’ve moved my pegs or with the kitchen chores she shared only She shrugs. “He had to make a liv- not, and rather than risk losing points grudgingly with me. their voices give inspiration ing.” through an oversight, I prefer to keep I learned about Scrabble, this new When I finally invented my own and hope.” score with paper and pencil as we go phenomenon, from my mother’s friend answer to that particular question and -Maxine Hong Kingston, along. This has an added advantage in D, who lived one street over, whose published it in book form, she was not author of that I can always tell her score from the own daughters had no interest in the offended, only amused. “I’m grist to The Woman Warrior position of her pegs, while she doesn’t game. Some days I went to D’s house your mill,” she said. “As long as they know my score until the game is over. straight from school and stayed there pay you properly, it’s all right with me.” Nancy Deutsch is a San Francisco Of course if she asked halfway playing till it was dark, and my mother She knows I have to make a living too. writer currently directing poetry through, I would tell her my score, but was due home from work. D played a and intergenerational programs she never asks. She plays a concentrat- lazy, relaxed game. Like me, she could y mother strategizes, plots in Bay Area public schools and three moves ahead. She plays low-income housing. She is also Ma smart, defensive game. the author of the training manual Women Who Could…and Did: While she concentrates on blocking my access to the triple-word-score spaces, I Voices of Our Own: Helping Lives of 26 Exemplary Artists and Scientists ponder the similarity of Scrabble Mothers, Daughters and Elders By Karma Kitaj, Ph.D. boards and Ouija boards, and wonder if Tell Their Stories, which is only my mother and I are trying to tell each available at From My Window other something with the words we lay "How did they do it, these women who dreamed Books. Photographer Katrin out. Messages from inner space. Why Miller’s work has appeared in and dared before the second wave of the women's does the word atone crop up so often, Newsweek, Time, Parenting, The movement? Their fascinating stories move us for example? A measly five pointer. Utne Reader and The LA Times. toward answers. Most important, this book does And what about the word vin (rhymes not offer a simplistic answer, but a much richer with win) defined, in the Scrabble dic- From My Window Books and more varied mosaic. It should help many of tionary as white wine. My mother doesn’t San Francisco, CA today's women, young and older." know from wine—she claims she hates ISBN: 0-9715320-0-1; 8” x 10”; the letter V and just wants to get rid of $24.95 Trade Paper Jean Baker Miller, MD, Director of the Training it. I take a more interpretive approach. www.frommywindowbooks.com Institute, Stone Center, Wellesley College Vin, the dictionary notwithstanding, could be a kind of kabbalistic short- Available at local bookstores, 303 pages …… $16.95 paperback ISBN 0-9715957-2-0 hand for vindictive. My mother is full of amazon.com, and from the publisher unaired grudges. She puts them aside Distributed by Baker and Taylor; Huckle Hill Press, Chestnut Hill, MA 617-7731-6170 and gets on with her life. That method Bookpeople, www.bponline.com. www.hucklehillpress.com clearly works for her. Vin is also short- hand for invincible. I

8 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 birthday party, the next skidding into a became constant. My doctor told me to head-on collision. That transition dream- walk less often and shorter distances. As like, a moment when the back wheel if I had only a certain quota of steps left, A tale of two accidents caught the soft dirt on the road margin and I’d be wise to ration them. The Iron and the car was on its own trajectory, out Woman sat down. by Kerryn Higgs of my control. Again, no memory of the There’s a lookout on the northern spur impact—very little memory at all. I recall of Firestone Mountain on the escarp- Injury at 20 is not the same as injury at 55 telling an ambulance officer I had to be ment, where you can look east into the back at work on Monday and how he Forbes Valley and west into the Hastings, a smiled. I was still sitting in the driver’s a rocky spot with windswept gum trees seat, in deep shock, unaware of my bro- and a sense of being in the sky. To get n ordinary morning in Syracuse, © Lisa Gross ken legs as they cut me out of the car. there, you ascend through the rainforest, New York. The kettle was on. I Nor did I feel any pain until, eight no track, blazing the trees to mark your A decided to whip down the base- hours later, I got to the Gippsland Base path. Last year, when Harriet came with ment stairs to start the washing machine. Hospital in Sale, where I was born, and friends from California, I was determined Stairs with a rail, but a rail set back in a they took the splint off my broken to take them there. Having plied myself recess. A brick wall at the bottom, so you femur. My language, in 1968, absolutely with anti-inflammatory drugs for days, I have to make a sharp turn into the laun- scandalous for a girl; so bad apparently made what I knew would be my last trip dry. The laundry bag was lying on the top that the doctor lectured my mother about to the northern ridge. stair, so I kicked it down – or that was my it. After that, apart from a dream—a lurid A luminous winter day for the eight intention. I don’t know where the bag nuclear catastrophe at Port Melbourne mile hike, boiling the billy on the summit ended up, but me, I was airborne, head- and a narrow escape through the dock- in the sun, lazing on the warm rocks. A first, grappling at empty space. lands—I knew nothing for a week. Then certain frisson on the way back when we I can’t say I remember the impact; I woke up feeling pretty good, with a grin lost the next blaze for a while. Despite next thing, I was lying on my back on the and an appetite. the unnerving sensation of bone grinding concrete in the narrow gap between the Surfacing to five months in hospital, I on bone and days of hobbling recovery, I bottom stair and the wall, and yelling for nonetheless felt lucky. Few people, I was was recklessly grateful for the pretext to my partner, Harriet. Harriet is one of Kerryn Higgs told, had ever survived a severe embolism use up a great number of paces, to be up those people who is always in the middle of the bone’s fatty tissue—an occasional there with friends among the windswept of something and tends to say: Wait insurance, that is. My Australian travel effect of a bad fracture, where the marrow gums, to gaze down again at the forested there. One moment. But I screamed, and policy covered me, but the costs could leaks into the bloodstream—and no one folds of the mountainsides and the tiny she came straightaway. have wrecked an uninsured person’s had in Australia. It was touch and go, but paddocks, far below on the river. From her point of view, it looked bad, life—the situation of millions of people I made medical history. Thanks partly to Like many middle-aged people—and my forehead covered in blood, no sign I in the US. Doing without treatment after my mother’s anxious watch and insistent despite the glaring evidence of wrinkles was about to get up. As the shock began such an accident would hardly have been interrogation of the doctors, and partly to and aches—I had not until now been to wear off, the pain in my left arm grew. an option—by the time I was moved, the the unpredictable behavior of the fat, compelled to make the transition from My mouth was dry. I agreed she should pain of the dislocation was almost which bypassed my brain. Young then, identifying myself as “young.” My recent call 911. unbearable. and determined to resume a full life, my injuries cut across this fiction. Though An army of tall men arrived, first the It took an hour or two before it was helplessness did not much trouble me—I relatively mild, at least by comparison firefighters for some reason, then the finally ruled safe to give me painkillers. In was confident it would be ephemeral. with broken legs and coma, the context is ambulance paramedics. Surreal, towering the meantime, when we were left alone, sharply different. at the top of the stairs, giants stepping Harriet and I, fresh from months of was the kind of person who ran At 20, being helpless was a passing over me. A barrage of questions about antiwar rallies, wryly chanted: What do everywhere and, though this habit phase, borne amazingly lightly. This time, whether I’d lost consciousness, then they we want? Morphine. When do we want I was interrupted briefly by the car I got a foretaste of being old and irreme- eased me onto a rigid stretcher and fitted it? Now. accident, I was running again a year later diably dependent—in the first week I a neck brace, even though I said my back Harriet stayed the whole day in the and went on running for another 20 couldn’t face stairs without an escort. Six and neck felt fine. No painkillers, they emergency room, while I was wheeled in years. As the running subsided, I walked weeks later, my head is still dizzy, my left insisted, and no water, until I was x-rayed and out of x-ray, inspected by an excellent in rugged country. For years, my greatest arm swollen and stiff. The road back feels and had seen the doctor. orthopedic resident called Elvis, and final- pleasure was to drive up into the moun- endless. Optimal recovery no longer Later, it was evident I had hit the wall ly knocked out while they wrestled the dis- tains of the Great Escarpment of eastern promises a return to perfection. with my arms and head, left arm first, located bone back into its socket, manipu- Australia, with whatever friend I could At 20, being a miracle survivor rein- then forehead several times like a drum- lated the shattered wrist into a straight line, persuade, take map and compass and a forced my youthful sense of immortality, roll, then right arm. I hadn’t the slightest and encased my left arm in plaster. They billy for tea—and tramp out into the made me invincible. And tempered every bruise on my lower body. The x-rays sent Harriet out for this procedure, which trackless bush, through gorges and turbu- tendency to feel unhappy about the dam- showed a dislocated left elbow and shat- must have been rather gruesome for any- lent upstream rivers, across swathes of age to my legs. Now, though I’ve focused tered wrist. My other wrist felt a bit sore, one who was not unconscious—the nurse dense groundcover where I had to cut my on the considerable luck involved in not but so much less so that it was it another fled the cubicle near the end, looked wanly way, aiming for pinnacles and waterfalls. I breaking my neck—or even my right two weeks before we found out it was at Harriet while parting the curtain, and called them Iron Woman expeditions. arm—it’s been hard to counter the sink- fractured too. I had no glaring symptoms fainted at her feet. Though recovery felt complete, my ing feeling, the regret, about damaging a of concussion at the hospital, but when I It was 35 years since my body’s other broken legs had set hidden traps for the body already past its best. lay down that night, and whenever I watershed moment. I was 20 then. It was future. With age came the return of the Last weekend at Niagara Falls, exhila- turned over, the room spun. equally sudden. A cool April morning on injury. Damp weather began to attack my rated by the causeway walk over the rapids, If one is going to fall headfirst down a a country highway through the forests of knees. I could predict rain. Then, around but exhausted by lunchtime, I tried to flight of stairs, the US in the 21st centu- East Gippsland in southern Australia. my 50th birthday, quite suddenly, the reassure Harriet. Won’t be long, I said, till ry is an ideal venue—as long as you have One minute heading for my sister’s eighth arthritis set in—the intermittent twinges I’m back to the full 82 percent. I

Advance praise for poet Kathleene West’s novel, The Summer of the Sub-Comandante

“West is a daughter of war, wife of war, sister of war and, finally, witness to war and to love beyond borders that speaks the secret language of the spell that will bring all the world’s beloved warriors home.” Bill Ransom, author of The Pandora Series The Summer of the Sub-Comandante moves the reader physically and emotionally from Viet Nam to Latin American to Northern Europe with an uneasy home base in the United States. West’s enactment of the most difficult, even dangerous, situations shimmer with poetic language and inimitable humor. “Story, West insists, is survival; and the best of what we hand down as inheritance.” Kathleen Norris in The American Book Review “[Kathleene West’s] voice is a woman who ironically, and sometimes sardonically, examines life’s scars, treasures and its magic.” Bronwyn G. Pughe in CutBank

www.nmsu.edu/~english/faculty/west.htm Kathleene West teaches in the M.F.A. Program at New Mexico State University and is the poetry editor of Puerto del Sol. The author of eight volumes of poetry, West’s first full-length work of fiction is The Summer of the Sub-Comandante. 232 pp.; $15.95PA / ISBN: 0-9711391-3-X / Hurricane, an imprint of InteliBooks / www.intelibooks.com

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 9 Praying for the end of anger by Alicia Ostriker

“A woman is her mother,” poet Anne Sexton once wrote. But is that fate inevitable? a

Hunger III

I They fired my father because he was a Commie, It was still the Depression when I was born, It was 1913 and there was no money. She remembers how she tied my arms and legs to the highchair She was born a runt who vomited everything, So that I wouldnt flail and she could get the spoon in So much poverty, such thin milk, Though she and my father were hungry. The doctor told her mother to let her go in the dark She told that one to my school counselor, And have another child when there was money for food Boasting, and my counselor told me But her mother persisted, insisted, To separate from my mother, For months feeding and feeding That she was crazy. The skin on bones until she lived and grew, I wanted to be the best mother in the world, But still remembers hunger, even now She says in a voice like hoarded string. Shaking her soft white hair, That was what I wanted, but I failed. She remembers hunger and vomiting, Here I freeze as always, and swallow my own spit. Remembers seeing her mother approach with the bottle, I failed, but I did my best. Her furious need to suck and be filled And at the same time the grip of despair. And the force of will. As a girl she was a wild one, a vilde chaia, She says into the little microphone II I hold for her as the cassette whirs on. She beat up a boy on her block who cheated at cards, She remembers also the dresses her mother sewed her, She refused to be tidy, she ran away from home. Woolen, tucked, pleated, exceptional, In dead European styles that made her ashamed We stand to go to the dining room, where because When she went to school, which insulted her mother, The meal is free she will stuff herself as if She were still that infant, she’ll eat her own ice cream But anyway, her mother never loved her And mine, she’ll tell her neighbor that I After that hard beginning. Fix your hair, Am her sun and moon and stars, My grandma was still scolding in the wheelchair And before I leave she will hug me Whenever my poor mother visited As if we were lovers.

The Workmen’s Circle Home for the Aged. IV Fix your hair, she would say, grimacing, And reach to fix it, and my mom got rashes, And I too had my dreams of improvement and perfection. My mom got asthma before each visit. I too hungered to give abundant life to my children.

hat is it about mothers and Ostriker P. © J. The mellowing I prayed for did take place. Very slowly. Not completely. But daughters? For years, enough so that by the time she died, on her 89th birthday, in the middle of my W decades even, I prayed that 64th year, love was flowing between us. No longer was I grinding my teeth, I would arrive at a place where I did- clenching my fists, swallowing my spit. I had been taping her life story off and n’t gnash my teeth and clench my fists on for years. This is how I learned the story of her birth, the story of the dress- whenever I spoke to her. I prayed that es, and much else. In one of our last conversations before she died, she asked me the anger I wore as armor would dis- who I would choose to be my mother, if I could. In tears, I said that I would solve and that the liquid core of love choose her. I felt inside would work its way to the “Hunger” began as a two-generational poem. The first two sections sat in my surface. I wanted to feel love flowing computer for two or three years, feeling unfinished. The closure was too abrupt, between us. the tone too distant. Something else was needed, but what? This spring, along- Anger about what? Does it mat- Alicia Ostriker side working on poems about a long marriage and the birth and approaching ter? Some women complain that adolescence of my granddaughter, I wrote the third section. What I wanted, their mothers reject them, criticize them, are cold to them. Some complain that here, was to capture the way the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship their mothers smother them, demand too much, need too much. Adrienne Rich, transmit themselves to the next generation. I wanted to get at the force of it, the in Of Woman Born, writes of the mother-daughter relationship that we are angry pain, the deep attachment, the simultaneous love and horror, the simultaneous at our mothers not because they are so much stronger than we, but because we failure and success of it, all knotted inextricably together. Hunger is a leitmotif do not want to be trapped by their weakness. We see them as women with in a literal sense, because both my grandparents’ and my parents’ generation metaphorically bound feet, hobbling through life, and fear they will bind our experienced literal poverty, literal hunger. Metaphorically the poem is about the feet, our lives, as theirs were bound. Reading Rich, I realized that my own rejec- hunger to survive, and even more, it is about the never-to-be-satisfied hunger tion of my mother was not personal but generic: My entire culture and society for love, and ultimately about a hunger we seldom speak of: the hunger not mandated this rejection, and it was wrong and unjust, just one more facet of the merely to get love from the world but to give love to it. In the words of an old brainwashing we all experience in a male-dominated culture. But then, Anne Marge Piercy poem, we want “to be of use”—as feminists, as mothers (literal or Sexton writes in the poem “Housewife,” “A woman is her mother. That’s the figurative), as human beings. The brief final section of the poem spilled over main thing.” When we fear growing old, isn’t it partly that we fear becoming our from what preceded it, as my life and my children’s lives spilled over from the mothers? lives of our ancestors. That terrible and beautiful need, to give abundance to our I have written about my mother all my life. Sometimes I disguise her in a poem young when we lacked it for ourselves—the poem now closes with the poignant as a witch. Sometimes as a bag lady. I guess that means I am afraid of becoming awareness that we can never know how much we have succeeded and how much these things. Sometimes I write about her as a destitute Aphrodite. Or about how we have failed. her talents were wasted, and how I am racked by survivor guilt. I began using my What does this have to do with aging? The poem includes two obvious mini- maiden name as a middle name on my books, in the middle of my life, as a trib- portraits of aging women who despite physical weakness continue to carry their ute to the fact that I would never have become a poet if my mother had not her- younger selves, with all their ferocious hungers intact, inside them. It is also, I self written poetry and read Tennyson and Browning to me when I was a child. believe, a portrait of myself as another aging woman, hoping by these words to Nor would I hold the positions I do about social justice if it were not for her honor the past from which I have my existence. Perhaps as we age we grow to implacable idealism. Many times I have said to myself, “Well, that’s the last poem accept the limitations of our human condition. Perhaps we remain hungry. The I am going to write about my mother.” It hasn’t happened yet. poem is not sure, and I am not sure either. I

10 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 manual for breaking up with a friend, the way that therapists, religious leaders, wise women, and elders guide us through the Friends for life dissolution of romantic relationships and marriage. Without this guidance, at least by Veronica Chambers in my own life, friendships break up in fits of pent-up fury and frustration. How female friendship evolves from Every time it happens, it involves tears, therapy, an at-home film festival of sappy youthful crushes to the deeper chick flicks, and an elementary school girl’s conviction that if I were prettier, relationships of years more popular, and less of a “super freak” my friend would not have let me go. For a a long time, I saw this as my resistance to change. I have walked into parties mut- ince I am a writer, my earliest © Anna Williams tering under my breath, “No new friends. memories of friendship are memo- I don’t want any new friends.” But I think S ries of books. Certainly, growing that’s only part of the picture. up as a black girl in the 1970’s and early I am older now and I value my friends 1980’s, the books that changed my life as witnesses to the girl I once was and to were powerful meditations on women the young woman I’ll never be again. As and friendship: The Color Purple, The my life becomes more settled, I want to Women of Brewster Place, Sula. These books look into another woman’s eyes and see taught me that women create women in the girl who danced on top of bars, drove every sense that matters. We give birth to a convertible through the desert in each other in the literal sense, but also in Mexico, and unabashedly wore blue eye the spiritual sense. We are role models shadow on her chocolate brown skin. As and mirrors: We encourage each other I reach a certain level of success, I want and cut each other down. I have never friends who know how hard I worked to met a woman who says she modeled her- get here and who can stop me mid-sen- self on a man’s opinions, thoughts, tence when my humility veers into self- instructions—though I’m sure such deprecation or, as it often does, self- women exist. degradation. Literature taught me that a woman can I look around my house at the gifts my save another woman’s life and that con- Veronica Chambers friends have given me: treasured books versely, a woman can kill another woman that represent shared passions, recipes without laying a finger on her. These lit- about myself. I tried to be appreciative: scrawled in familiar handwriting, erary renderings bore out my own expe- Thank God for the thank-you-note gene. Depression-era glassware. I do not want rience. I am seven, I am nine, I am eleven But I was not always savvy enough, open the objects I own to outlast the friend- and there is a girl—always one girl who is enough, to reach out to the hands that ships they sprang from. Which is why the ringleader, although she may have reached out to me. I used to regret that. during a recent break-up with a friend, I minions. But there is a girl who rules my Then, recently, I had an experience decided No. This person cannot divorce world. Sometimes she has red hair and an that made me feel more generous toward me. Maybe we won’t pal around twice a impossible smattering of freckles that the girl I once was. A girl whom I mentor week, maybe we shouldn’t e-mail every make her seem more like someone I’ve was visiting my home office. She walked day, but I don’t want to drive the long way seen on television than a girl walking over to my bookshelf and picked up a around her house. I don’t want to clench down an ordinary Brooklyn street. copy of Sarah Phillips, by Andrea Lee. my teeth when a mutual acquaintance Sometimes she is taller than anyone in “Have you read this book?” she asked. “I mentions her name. I want to know her our grade. Sometimes she is as dark as read it last summer, and it’s my favorite and to keep getting to know her, even if Cicely Tyson; sometimes she has the cin- book in the world.” I reminded her that I it’s only from the polite distance of a namon-toned skin of Nelson Mandela. had actually given her Sarah Phillips, semi-annual cup of tea. So I called her, She is always beautiful, she is always pow- because it had been one of my own and I begged: “We are two yolks poured erful, and even now, if I close my eyes favorite books. The look on her face into a bowl,” I said. “Please don’t make and think of her, I can feel her breath on showed a hundred emotions: kinship, me unbeat this egg.” my neck as she whispers a secret or a embarrassment, happiness, fear, confu- All my life, I have had girlfriends with command in my ear. sion, and acceptance. I knew then that whom I imagined becoming old ladies When I was younger, I valued the my mentors, most of whom are still together: two 80-year-old women at the women in my life to the detriment of my friends to this day, had seen the same lay- community pool, swimming like fish in romantic relationships with men. It was ers of expression on my own young face. brightly colored suits. My girlfriends and as if the friend in the word boyfriend was as They had not judged me as I judged I talk about what it will be like to have 50 silent as the e at the end of certain words myself. Perhaps they knew that the kind- or 60 years of friendship under our belts. in French. I can remember nights when ness they had bestowed on me would Some friends I picture having elegant teas my mind was wild with confusion, and I eventually make its way to other young with; others are the more the types you felt disconnected from the man sitting women. “Oh yeah, that’s right,” my meet for cocktails at noon. When I was across the dinner table from me. My eyes young friend said, and we continued younger, I thought it would be easy to shifting to the clock above his head, I sewing the quilt of words and experience have such old-time friendships. Now, I wondered what excuse I could make up that have brought girls and women know that it takes the lungs of an opera to run to the store, meaning to the pay- together for centuries. singer to hold the notes of companion- phone, to call a sister-friend and speak ship for so long. The most memorable until our words brought me to a place of don’t like to let a friendship go, but line in fiction, to me, is the last line of peace. To fall in love with my husband I sometimes I find that when the Toni Morrison’s Sula: “Girl, girl, girl. We needed to build a foundation of intimacy I friendship has turned down a road were girls together.” I read that line for I had never before attempted with a man. too painful to continue on, life does the the first time when I was 17 years old. I When I felt the impulse to call a girl- amputation against my wish. I am not the had no idea that to be an older woman, to friend, I called him instead and I tried, first person to say it, but that does not point to a friend such as Sula, is a mighty however awkward it felt, to speak freely. mean it’s not worth saying: There is no high note to hit. I know it now. I He has become my friend in the deepest sense of the word and I consider this a badge of maturity. Finally, I trust a man to be my friend in a way that I had trust- MOVING? ed only women before. Don’t miss an issue! As a young woman from a difficult family background, I often sought men- Please give us six to eight weeks’ notice of your change of address. We need tors: I was hungry for attention, needy for guidance. I was lucky. Many amazing your OLD address (on your mailing label, if possible) as well as your NEW women responded. I did not know then one. Send the information to: Address Change, The Women’s Review of that mentorship was not about signing Books, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481, or phone toll-free 888-283- powerful women up to a project called 8044/ fax 781-283-3645/ email [email protected]. Me. I was selfish. I spent long lunch hours and meetings going on and on

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 11 The poet at 80 Mary grows up by Marilyn Hacker by Lesley Hazleton

A tribute to the aging poet Marie The Virgin in her later years Ponsot is full of the imagery a cons never age. Especially not the agreed upon if peculiar date of 4 BC— of vigor and growth Virgin Mary. In the cultural imagina- Christ born four years Before Christ—or a I tion, she is always in her 20s—a at the simpler and popularly accepted Renaissance artist’s ethereal dream, noth- stroke of midnight between 1 BC and 1

© Iva Hacker-Delany ing at all like the dark-skinned, hard-mus- BC, or at the more likely date of 6 BC, one his poem was writ- cled Middle Eastern peasant adolescent fact remains: Maryam was 13. ten for the poet she really was. She remains “ageless,” as Even today, in much of the world, T Marie Ponsot on her they say, as though this were a compli- girls are married off at puberty. And 80th birthday. Since then, ment, even an honor. In fact it is the Maryam lived 17 centuries before what she has published Springing, opposite. She is all image and no reali- historian Philippe Aries called “the a volume of new and select- ty—a kind of virtual Mary. Deprived of invention of childhood” in the West. ed poems, and enlivened the vitality, intelligence, and feeling, she is a Children were seen simply as small intellects and imaginations being so self-effacing that all she can say adults. Their ages were figured not by of several more groups of at the Annunciation is “Let it be done numbers, but by what they could do: “the students at Barnard College, unto me”—a phrase some biblical schol- age of chasing stray sheep” or “plant the Cooper Union, ars interpret as a queenly “Let it be,” but gathering” or “plowing.” Columbia University’s that can as easily be read as a cowed “Yes, Marriage came early. It had to. When School of the Arts, and the sir,” or even as a sulky “Whatever.” life is short, you need to grab at every Poetry Center of the 92nd The events of the gospels are opportunity to reproduce it. And life Street Y in New York—at immensely physical—conception, birth, 2,000 years ago was very short. all of which she continues feeding, healing, excruciating death—and True, there is the biblical reckoning of to teach. She is, in my opin- Marilyn Hacker yet Mary seems to sleepwalk through a long life, still echoed in the Jewish ion, one of the major poets them, so vague a presence that she does- birthday toast “to a hundred and twenty.” of her generation. Though her first short the attic regularly n’t even appear at the crucifixion until the But nobody does live to a hundred and book, True Minds, was published in 1956, and the kitchen on odd nights. last gospel, John, and then only as “his twenty, not today and not in biblical when she was 34, the major body of her ………… mother,” without even the courtesy of times either. Long before records of work has appeared in the last 20 years, I think I’ve got whatever I need her own name. births and deaths were kept, 120 was an and most of the poems she wishes to in the overhead compartment. The most revered woman in the world idealized lifespan, providing an image of make public have been written since she surely deserves better than this. The least the patriarch or matriarch looking on in was in her 50s. She has been considering Though Ponsot’s work has not yet one can do is honor her by gracing her satisfaction at four or five generations of and speculating on the possible richness been extensively discussed in the context with reality. Who was she, then? This was offspring, the visible proof of having and creative fertility of age since her early of second wave feminism, even by femi- the deceptively simple question that been fruitful and multiplied. work, fitting for a poet who honors both nist critics, or made part of the feminist impelled me to write Mary: A Flesh-and- To grasp just how idealized this bibli- experiment and the multiple traditions literary “canon,” its assumptions, and, Blood Biography, which will be published cal number is, you don’t have to go back that inform American poetry; who hon- even more, the questions it poses, place it next spring. 2,000 years. You need only look at almost ors also the multiple possibilities of in that line (though never to the exclusion I began by giving her back her real any peasant population today—in women’s lives. Her ongoing life remains of other investigations). Marie Ponsot is name: Maryam in Aramaic, the language Afghanistan, in Somalia, in all those part of a work-in-progress: the octoge- at once a poet eminently of her time, she spoke. That helped me to ground her countries that many westerners barely narian poet, asymptotic to her own matu- whose work bridges the assimilation of in a time and a place, in Palestine 2,000 register as existing, until some form of rity, considers “What Would You Like to and resistance to modernism in contem- years ago. After four years of intensive military intervention suddenly brings Be When You Grow Up?” porary Anglophone poetry. Her work is research, a portrait emerged of a woman them into the brief and fickle spotlight of comprehensible as part of the ongoing who was far more than we have yet world attention. The reason for the garden is enterprise of poetry as she understands acknowledged her as being: a strong and The numbers are chilling. Data from this rooming house, this tidy it, not limited to national borders or even courageous woman who did not merely 1980 show one stillborn per five live body’s heart, this minded body to the English language, but an irreplace- assent to her role in history, but actively births. One in ten of those born die dur- able part of what defines the human chose it and lived it to the fullest. ing the first year of life. A third are dead where I now rent only mind and the human community. The further I explored the multiple by age five. Fewer than half of those facets of her life—peasant villager, wise born make it to puberty. And even for the woman and healer, activist, mother, survivors, life expectancy in many parts of For the 6th of April teacher, and yes, virgin, though in a sense Asia and Africa is under 50 years. for Marie Ponsot we have long forgotten—the more rele- Not that the western world is that far vant and admirable a figure she became. I removed from such lifespans. Go back a Eden is which needs food on the table, was struck by how political, social, and mere couple of centuries to 18th-century pots and tubs on the terrace. an orderly neighborhood cultural issues seemed to echo across London, and records show well over half Tenacious seeds root, wind-strewn, time, creating new perspectives. The of those born dying by age 16. Only ten to bloom around the ficus. and wages question of Maryam’s age, for instance, percent made it beyond age 45—the same Light and shade worked through you. You filled pages challenges contemporary assumptions number as in ancient Rome. In 19th-cen- from this and every decade nonetheless: fables, lines, rhymes, tury Massachusetts, more than a third of cross and dapple the notebook hints from all your languages: regnancy at 13 sounds scandalous- all women died by age 20. It wasn’t until you hold open on your lap. ly early to the modern ear. It the 20th century, with the germ theory of how to live P brings to mind stories of inner- disease, and especially with the introduc- Eighty? Well, well on bread and wine, forgive city girls who have sex in desperation for tion of penicillin and vaccination, that forty, too, and twenty: still old enemies and lovers love and attention, then treat their new- lifespans began to increase to those we no one’s fool, a canny heart, so that full days pass in peace. borns as though they were living toys— now take for granted in the West. spirit joyously at school. barely out of adolescence, children bear- In the ancient Middle East, as many as Is it luck ing children. half of all children died before age five. Precocious no one gets her old life back? It can’t be, says the western mind. Not Infant mortality was so high that child, you run ahead of us What you regret you redress Mary. Except for the collective mind of Aristotle noted in his Historia Animalium aging enfants terribles of if you can; use; don’t forget. the Vatican, which retains a less senti- that newborns were not named until a a later generation mental and, ironically, more realistic view week after birth because many wouldn’t Your daughter, of human physiology. The official live that long. Slim mother one more city gardener, Roman Catholic celebration of Mary’s Childbirth was almost as dangerous of a brood of boys, you were tends your best cuttings in pots 2,000th birthday was in l987, 13 years for the mothers. Miscarriage was com- (seemed) all honed will, clear mind, in pale sun a half-block west. before that of her son. mon, usually due to malnutrition or dislike Never mind for now that the Vatican ease. Of those who carried an infant to a boy, hermit, young sybil Your desk looks reckoning is off, since calendars have term, about one out of three died in out on your trees (past the books). become more precise through the inter- childbirth from uterine hemorrhage or while the day- Thick thumbs of amaryllis vening centuries. Whether you reckon the infection, often with their first delivery. to-day life of the body work their way up and spring comes. year of Jesus’ birth at the academically Five or six live births would be high for

12 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 © Olivier D'hose shortened lifespans still further. Political such luxury. Together with the short lifes- she would simply accept such cruelty upheavals sent foreign armies roaming pan, the high risk of maternal and infant with another silent “Let it be.” and killing at will, making no distinction death in childbirth made early marriage No. Given what we know of the time, between military and civilian targets, and pregnancy essential to survival of and of women’s role in early Christian life, while internecine conflicts spiraled out of both families and peoples. it makes more sense to see her in a far hand as they still do two millennia later A 13-year-old girl was considered a more active role. The gospel writers refer (think of Hutus and Tutsis, Serbs and woman. Menstruation had begun. She to “the many women who came up with Bosnians, Irish Catholics and Protestants, was fertile, and fertility meant maturity. him to Jerusalem,” and these women Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, to What we now celebrate only as ritual— would almost certainly have gathered name just a few). At such times, death the passing into adulthood marked by around Maryam to form a new kind of rates surge beyond predictability with, rites such as Confirmation or Bat community. In an early form of liberation depending on the place and the century, Mitzvah—was fact 2,000 years ago. A 13 theology, they would have combined firing squads, “disappeared” people, mas- year old would be a mother. A woman of activism with contemplation, offering sacre by machete, torched villages, mass 40 would be a great-grandmother. By 50, shelter and healing to those in need, in the crucifixions, marketplace bombs, if the survival odds worked in her favor spirit of justice and the path of wisdom. unmarked common graves. and left at least one surviving child in each Imagine, then, the idealism it took to generation, she would be a great-great- ise is not a word much used any conceive of someone living to three grandmother. She would be truly ancient. longer. One can be smart, one score and ten, let alone to a hundred and W can be intelligent, one may Lesley Hazleton twenty. Imagine the power of the biblical o paraphrase the end of Albert even be a genius. But wise? That has an command to be fruitful and multiply Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus— unreal feel to it, simultaneously too grand any one mother, and since so many chil- when being fruitful and multiplying was T “We have to imagine Sisyphus and too vague for practical people. dren died in infancy or early childhood, so rife with risk, the odds so loaded happy”—we have to imagine Mary old. Yet in Maryam’s time, there was noth- the effective birthrate was lower than it is against success. Who needs such a com- And that means reconstructing her life ing vague about wisdom. Quite the con- today in the industrialized world. mand, after all, except those for whom it after the crucifixion, when she disappears trary. A great deal of the Jewish theology The other famed biblical lifespan, is in doubt? completely from the gospel record. of her day was built around the divine three score years and ten, was the pre- When life is short, there is no such Are we really to believe, as various female figure known as the Lady Wisdom. serve of the fraction of one percent who thing as “youth.” There were no teenagers apocryphal and legendary versions have She had a distinct voice. She spoke direct- were wealthy and sheltered, and even 2,000 years ago, as there are none in many it, that she retreated to Ephesus to live ly, in quotation marks, in several books then of very few of them. The second- parts of the world today. To be 13 when out her days in the care of John, or was written by Judean gnostics living in Egypt century philosopher-emperor Marcus the average lifespan is so short is equiva- sheltered in Jerusalem by Peter, or went from the third century BC on. Aurelius, raised by his grandfather after lent to being a young adult in modern back to the Galilee to live out her days Her name, Hochma, was the abstract his parents died when he was young, saw western society. Westerners are shocked at in quiet anonymity? In fact, are we real- form of hachama, wise woman. Her earliest nine of his 12 children die in infancy or 13 year olds toting Kalashnikovs and ly to believe that such a woman would known appearance is in the third-century childhood, and that was with the best shoulder missiles in African and Middle retreat at all? BC Book of Proverbs, where she descends hygiene, nutrition, and medical attention Eastern warfare, but that is because we This is the woman who was the source from the divine world to guide and save available in Rome. take for granted the idea of childhood, of her son’s powers of wisdom and heal- humanity. She was there when God creat- And such figures applied only to “nor- and of the teen years as a kind of older ing, the woman who taught him about ed the world, she says, before anything else mal” times, when death was caused by childhood, a slow adaptation to adult- justice and freedom. She had just been existed. She proclaims her greatness, gives disease, or by the kind of gross accident hood. We forget that to be a teenager is a through the worst any mother can dire warnings of the dangers of ignoring familiar to farmers worldwide, or by luxury afforded only those with good know—the excruciating death of her her, and demands and expects loyalty. As infection—even a cut or a rotten tooth nutrition and healthcare. For nearly the child. Face etched deep by hard work and the manifestation of God’s presence in could kill you. Death by human violence whole world 2,000 years ago, there was no harder experience, it is inconceivable that the world, this is her due.

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 13 In the apocryphal Book of Wisdom, “the invisible, virginal, perfect spirit.” She written in the first century BC, Hochma impregnates herself, and so is “the encompasses all the sciences of her time: Mother of everything, for she existed physics, alchemy, astrology, biology, psy- before them all, the mother-father.” She My “old ladies” chology, herbalism, and medicine. The is the origin of all things; without her, the book praises her in a list of 21 attrib- world would not exist. by Florence Howe utes—three times the magical number Inevitably, gnostics hungering for seven—that make her everything a divine knowledge identified Sophia with woman and a goddess could be: the first great biblical figure who hun- As writers age, they find ways “Intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, sub- gered for knowledge: the mother of all to continue their work tle, active, incisive, unsullied, lucid, invul- humans, Eve. Where Adam was content nerable, benevolent, sharp, irresistible, to exist in ignorance, Eve dared to reach a beneficent, loving to man, steadfast, for more. She picked and ate the fruit of dependable, unperturbed, almighty, all- the Tree of Knowledge of Good and t is early May, and I am seated in a surveying, penetrating, all-intelligent, Evil. The gnostics saw this as reaching large room filled with over 700 pure and most subtle spirits.” for knowledge of the divine. They I women and a few men, almost all At times, her language reflects the believed it was an act of courage and over the age of 60, with a few heading grandeur of contemporary hymns to Isis; spiritual integrity, not of disobedience. towards 100. It is the annual Alumni at others it seems very close to the sen- Eve was Wisdom in action, to the extent Association luncheon celebrating the suality of the Song of Songs. In the that in the gospel On the Origin of the 133rd birthday of Hunter College, and apocryphal second-century-BC Book of World, she becomes Sophia’s daughter, Helene Goldfarb, with whom I attend- Ecclesiaticus—often called the Wisdom sent by her mother to teach Adam, who ed Hunter in the late 1940s, is presid- of Ben Sirach to distinguish it from the has no soul, so that he might attain one. ing. I am seated beside an old friend, better-known Ecclesiastes—she says she But Sophia’s main child in the gnostic William Zeisel, here to honor scholar is like the finest vines, the sweetest blos- gospels is Jesus, the teacher and media- Marjorie Lightman, who is being soms, the most beautiful roses, the tallest tor of Wisdom. He is her son, her lover, inducted into Hunter’s Hall of Fame. and most graceful trees: and even, in the Sophia of Jesus Christ, We are talking about aging. “What Sophia herself. “The earliest Palestinian does the word ‘old’ mean these days?” I have exhaled a perfume like cin- theological remembrances and interpre- he asks. namon and acacia, I have breathed tations of Jesus’ life and death under- “I know what it doesn’t mean,” I say Florence Howe out a scent like choice myrrh... stand him as Sophia’s messenger and smartly. “It doesn’t mean Mariam Approach me, you who desire me, later as Sophia,” says theologian Chamberlain,” and I turn to her seated young one in the group, the one who and take your fill of my fruits, for Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza in her on the other side of me. “Remember, has to keep learning?” memories of me are sweeter than book In Memory of Her. “The earliest Mariam, when I came back from seeing I can think of several reasons, but the honey, inheriting me is sweeter Christian theology is sophialogy.” aged relatives and greeted you at dinner one most important is the Feminist than the honeycomb. They who A world without Wisdom, without by saying, ‘I am so glad, Mariam, that Press. Shortly after I helped found the eat me will hunger for more, they Hochma, must have been unimaginable. you’re not old.’ You save my life and my Feminist Press in 1970, I began to collect who drink me will thirst for more... She was literally a proverbial presence, disposition. You cheer me up.” Mariam women I now call “my old ladies.” Many constantly invoked. And now that her is 85. She has retired twice, but she goes were authors of the fiction the Feminist And so they did. Two centuries later, favored child, Jesus, was dead, his spiritu- to her office every day, even when oth- Press was bringing back into print. They Christian gnostics would expand the ear- al and earthly mothers would unite to ers are put off by inclement weather. included Tillie Olsen, Meridel LeSueur, lier Jewish writings and elevate the Lady transform grief into wisdom, disaster She has projects and agendas for me Elizabeth Janeway, Josephine Johnson, Wisdom still further. Calling her by her into renewal. For if ever there was a flesh- and for others. She sits on a half-dozen Wakako Yamauchi, Dorothy West, Greek name, Sophia, they explicitly and-blood manifestation of Wisdom, it nonprofit boards, travels abroad to Louise Meriwether, Grace Paley, Edith revered her as the great virgin mother. In was the white-haired Maryam: the moth- meetings, writes essays and research Konecky, and Sarah E. Wright. Others The Apocryphon of John, she becomes er, the healer, the wise woman. I papers for publication, and attends were editors or scholars. movies, theatre, and dance with friends. Her mind is far sharper than mine and uring the fall of 1979, I met Now, from Gloria Feldt, those of others far younger than both Alice Cook when we were of us. She is a resource for anyone who D both Mellon fellows at President of Planned Parenthood® needs information or advice. Her judg- Wellesley College. We occupied adja- ment is superior. cent offices in Wellesley’s Center for Federation of America Bill is not to be put off from his ques- Research on Women and apartments in tion. “Is aging getting old?” he asks. And the same building across from the cam- then, before I can respond, he adds, pus. Each morning when I entered my “Maybe we now have to think about office between half-past eight and nine ‘old’ as an extension of middle age that o’clock, I could hear Alice’s typewriter passes through the 40s and 50s and on clicking away in her office next door. In “A personal story into the 60s and 70s.” I suddenly early November, Alice offered two dis- connects people, remember the title of a book by Rebecca cussion sessions on questions of trade Latimer: You’re Not Old Until You’re union organization, federal policies, it allows us to Ninety…Best to Be Prepared, However. and the law as an instrument of social understand each Bill and I have to stop talking change—all with reference to women. other, it is always because from the dais the roll call of I admired the way her mind cut to the enlightening. The classes begins: One person stands to center of issues. She had traveled to stories in this book represent the class of 1927; three the more than a dozen countries in Europe touched me. class of 1928; and ten the class of and Asia, studying the status of work- The message is 1933—all in their 90s. I’ve met several ing mothers in trade unions. After that our freedom of these tiny women at other Hunter these sessions, I invited Alice to dinner. to make choices functions over the years. Then several I had a burning question I wanted to determines the hundred from the Golden Anniversary ask her. quality of our life.” class of 1953, stand and we all cheer At first we talked about local mat- them. Joan Gellinoff Masket comes to ters, gossiping about who would — Best-selling author Isabel Allende the podium to talk about those days become the next director of the Center, when a subway ride to Hunter cost a and about what other Mellon fellows nickel, when college registration each were working on. After dinner, as we term cost eight dollars, including books. drank second cups of coffee, I asked She represents my generation, who are Alice whether she would answer a per- This rich tapestry of personal stories about love, sex, and families in their mid-70s. Like many in her audi- sonal question. I was in awe of this tiny, will inspire you to see how you can indeed change the world — ence, she is chic, articulate, energetic, spunky woman. one heartfelt story at a time. Behind Every Choice Is a Story funny, and smart. Joan notes that the “Perhaps,” she said. affirms the fundamental human right to control our bodies, our two original leaders of the class of “I’m 50,” I said, “and you are 75. destinies, and our dreams. 1953 are no longer alive. So the ones in How is your life different from the way this room are the lucky ones, the it was when you were 50?” available online and in bookstores everywhere healthy survivors. “That’s easy,” she said. “I can’t work or call (800) 826-8911 to order. On the way home from the Hunter after dinner any more.” reunion, I said to myself, “You are one “But when do you get up in the Read excerpts and reviews, order the book, and even tell your story www.BehindEveryChoice.com of those ‘old ladies’ now. Why can’t you morning?” I didn’t mention that I could at: University of get used to that idea? Why do you con- never get to the office before her, even North Texas Press tinue to feel like the kid sister, the when I turned up at half-past eight.

14 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 “Around five,” she said. I edited her manuscript and planned from you which as you know I have vast Tillie could not talk about her mother “What do you do at that hour?” My to call her after the first of the year, for respect for. I want amplitude for the without tears. voice must have expressed my amaze- there were many queries we would have calendar.” Mainly, my job consisted of In March of 2003, shortly after her ment. to work on together. But Alice had a urging her to select and omit, since the 91st birthday and my 74th, I sit with “I used to run two miles, but my stroke around Christmas and died in volume had to be a reasonable size. Tillie in her room and we talk about the doctor won’t let me do that any more, February 1997. I had a special interest in Mother to Daughter/ Daughter to Mother: A world, the wars still crippling the planet and so I swim two miles, then walk a her memoir, not only because of its dis- Daybook and Reader, illuminates the vast but not her spirit. Thirty years ago Tillie mile or so before breakfast.” cussion of international working class breadth and scholarship of Tillie taught me to care for my body, to swim, My own response was swift: “If I got women’s history, before and after World Olsen’s reading. One hundred and to walk, to do what she still calls up at five tomorrow morning, I could- War II, but also because I had persuad- twenty writers, from the world over, “stretchies.” Once, her limber body n’t work after dinner either.” ed Alice to write about how it felt to age claim the theme of women’s responsi- shamed my stiff one. Now, ignoring a Before we parted at Christmas, I physically and what it meant to be a sin- bility for life on the planet. painful back ailment, she walks a few urged her to write a memoir. She gle woman aging. After describing in Characteristically, Tillie extends the def- blocks with me around her Berkeley laughed and said she had many books brief, stoic language a litany of bodily inition of mothering to include grand- neighborhood, pointing out the 100- to write before she could think of degeneration—knee surgery, falling, mothers, sisters, teachers, mammies, year-old trees and the beautiful spring doing such self-indulgent work. vertigo, Bell’s palsy, stomach ulcers, and mothers-in-law. gardens. Some days we talk about books Alice Cook’s vital physical and intel- deteriorating vision—her pain emerges Tillie used her editorial space in the and even quarrel about writers, as in the lectual energies continued to serve her in one clogged sentence: “Calling for volume to apologize for the omissions old days. She tells me I am privileged to for almost 20 years longer. Each year help is a matter in itself that I am still and to urge readers to check out the full be working with African women, and after that, as I wrote to thank her for learning to do and to accept.” When she works of each author. Buried among she admires Women Writing Africa: The her annual contribution to the Feminist wrote about her circle of “Wise Old the selections for December is Tillie’s Southern Region, which she’s reading. Half Press, I asked Alice about her memoir. Women,” who called themselves essay about her own mother, “Dream- the feisty woman I’ve known for 33 Late in the 1980s, I had a swift reply— WOWS, in Ithaca, New York, neither of Vision.” In her customary terse poetic years, and half the frail new Tillie who is she was in the middle of chapter four. us expected that one WOW, Fran style, Tillie describes her non-religious hanging in there, she says, “Maybe I can When I offered to be a reader or a Herman, would help me prepare Alice’s mother’s deathbed vision of elegantly take one of those trips with you.” blurb writer for her publisher, she book for publication. robed “wise men” who come to talk wrote that she had none and would be with her but who then turn into “the ometime in the mid-1980s, when honored to become my author. She n 1983, I began to talk with Tillie old country women of her childhood, I was still writing notes to Alice also added that she’d learned to use a Olsen about an anthology I wanted their feet wrapped round and round S Cook, several women computer so that she could place her I her to produce for the Feminist with rags for lack of boots.” The vision approached the Feminist Press booth at footnotes at the bottoms of the pages. Press’s 15th birthday in 1985. I was 54 includes the singing of the women and a conference and asked whether they We worked together on A Lifetime of and Tillie was 7l. When we walked a baby they cradle: “My mother, might speak to me about an urgent mat- Labor for more than five years, during together, she was far more vigorous through cracked lips, singing too—a ter. They were prepared to picket the which time Alice rewrote some chap- than I, dashing up flights of stairs two lullaby.” And then her mother woke: booth, they said, but they thought it ters four times, often interrupted by or three at a time in contrast to my stol- polite to warn me first. “But why the the need to finish other books or id lumbering. Together, walking and “Still I feel the baby in my arms, picket?” I was truly puzzled. essays. As she turned in the final draft talking, we settled on mothering as the the human baby,” crying so I “We think you discriminate against of the final chapter, she wrote to me anthology topic. In February 1984, could scarcely make out the older women,” one of them said. “You that I was “not to bother her for some Tillie wrote to me, “Although I vowed words, “the human baby, before never publish about them. All your months, until [she] finished the manu- not to use myself in ‘other’ work this we are misshapen; crucified into novels are about growing up. Aging is a script of another book and the proofs year, I am passionately eager to do the sex, a color, a walk of life, a real issue.” for still another.” She was 93, and it was calendar, but the text and selections will nationality…and the world yet I was surprised, I can admit now, for the summer of 1996. have to be mine—with strong opinions warrings and winter.” though I was then in my mid-50s, I was

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 15 not thinking about aging. I explained male-biased Esquire magazine of the With him and their four children she not going to happen now, is it?” We that the Feminist Press was publishing 1930s. The editors assumed she was lived through and participated in the both laugh, and I add, “Even Cynthia novels about growing up female in male and published her piece. Like me, revolutions that turned Kenya, Uganda, isn’t grandly fat any longer.” order to supplement a college litera- she was Jewish and working class. Like and Tanzania into independent coun- Walking the couple of blocks, I hold ture curriculum filled with male bil- me, she was never sure that she really tries. The Feminist Press has repub- her arm and think again about how dif- dungsroman. Girls needed stories like was a writer. lished two of her early novels, Coming to ferently each of us ages. Grace, seven Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Jo was very independent and would Birth,a bildungsroman about a young years older than I, also continues to Marshall and Daughter of Earth by not take charity, even from the Author’s woman and a young country, and The travel. Five years ago, I had called her in Agnes Smedley. I assured the group Guild, for example, where I had gone to Present Moment, about a group of Vietnam, where she was attending a that, during the next several years, we get her money for a needed eye opera- African women in their 70s and 80s. meeting of writers. We talked on the would be publishing novels and other tion. She was irritated with me, but she Both books remind me again of how phone about the foreword she had writ- books by and about older women. In trusted me enough to offer her treasure much history each woman may hold in ten for the Israeli collection, Apples from 1989 we would republish Sister Gin, the to the Feminist Press, a memoir she had a single long lifetime. the Desert: Selected Stories by Savyon comic Southern lesbian novel by June written in 1969 but had decided to place For the Feminist Press’s 30th Liebrecht. I had a few queries, I said, Arnold that critic Jane Marcus said had in her Boston University archive rather anniversary in 2000, Jean Casella and I and then she said she was really glad I “the very best descriptions of hot than publish. With our advance she were able to draw on the American had called, since she wanted to add flashes in literature.” paid for her eye operation and we pub- books we had published to produce an something to her foreword. She told me Also, I said, we would have Anna lished The Seasons: Death and anthology called Almost Touching the briefly about the meeting she was Teller by Jo Sinclair, a novel that opens Transfiguration in 1993. It is a very rare Skies: Women’s Coming of Age Stories. attending of Vietnamese writers, edi- with a 74-year-old freedom fighter, cross-class lesbian memoir that tells the For our 35th—in 2005—perhaps we tors, and publishers—all men—where called “the General,” on a plane bound story of Jo’s life, and of her love for will be able to produce one that cele- she had to repeat the sentence she had for Detroit and the family she hasn’t Helen, a middle-class, married woman brates the history of the last half of asked a decade before of Israeli writers: seen for 30 years or more. “You’d like with young children, who invites the women’s lives, the mature years, filled “Where are our sisters?” And she dic- her,” I said to the would-be picketers, alcoholic and impoverished Ruth Said with both large and small heroisms. I tated, “But is there no end to the “She doesn’t walk or talk like an old into her home, where she lives for 25 think of Elaine Hedges’ worrying aggressive need to ask that question, woman.” Indeed, the novel reminds me years, writes her novels, and wins prizes. about completing her plans for a wed- ‘Where are the women writers?’” today of Jo Sinclair’s ability to see into Helen is a gardener and for Ruth, the ding party for a young friend two days Yes, I said then and can say now, the future. The youthfully widowed garden becomes her way out of alcohol. before her sudden death. I think of there is no end. And how could there be Anna Teller manages a huge farm and Eventually, as Helen becomes an invalid Kate Simon’s decision not to accept an end? Though many of us are now dairy business, develops an urban chain with a serious heart condition, Ruth chemotherapy, despite the risk that “old ladies,” the women’s movement of bakeries, and then, past 70, leads becomes her nurse and the main gar- she won’t live long enough to finish itself is still young. The Feminist Press, men and women into resistance against dener. The memoir includes Ruth’s the third volume in her series of responsible for the earliest reprints of the Soviet army moving into Hungary. decline after Helen’s death and her bat- memoirs. I think of Perdita Huston, “lost” American women writers, many She is not about to sit around and tle back to sobriety and writing. spending her last months finishing the of whom are now part of the standard “relax,” as her American family expects. monumental Families as They Are: college curriculum, is itself only in its She, I realize, could be me. n the day after the Hunter Conversations from around the World,and youthful 33rd year. Jo Sinclair became one of my “old alumni luncheon, I awake then attending two book parties with If we’re among the lucky ones ladies” shortly after we published The O thinking of the “old ladies” her feeding bag strapped to her back today, we will age like Grace Paley and Changelings, an autobiographical novel who have died: Kate Simon, with or just a few feet away. I think of Alice Cook or my friend Judy Lerner about an unusual friendship between a whom I used to enjoy dinner once or Helene, heading the luncheon com- who in her 80s works as a journalist and black and a Jewish girl, both 12-year- even twice a week during her last six or mittee again, and the old ladies at the a UN activist. What makes this kind of olds, who try to bridge the divide seven years; Bella Abzug, an opera Hunter luncheon saying, “See you aging life possible? Good health, of between their families. The novel also companion, whose memoir I would next year.” course, but after that, Judy Lerner gave me a name for the kind of person have liked to publish. I know I must A few days later I am in a restaurant quotes Bella Abzug’s advice: “Get I am. Like the novel’s protagonist, I too prepare for my next African trip this with Grace Paley, eating soup and a involved. Make a difference.” I used to at 12 had become fiercely antiracist and coming week. And that sets me think- salad. She is to read from her 1950s sto- tell my women students in the ’60s that angry about my family’s attitudes ing about one of my newest “old ries that evening at the Graduate they needed both love and work. towards all who were not Jewish. Am I ladies,” Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, the Center/CUNY, and we are talking Marriage and a family were not enough. still, at 74, a “changeling”? “mother of Kenyan literature,” as she is about her recent visit to Tillie. I am Though their forms may have changed, Jo would never let me come to see known there. She is my age and regards thinking about how small Grace has work and love are essential also to “old he—she was too ill for human compa- me as a maverick, not only because I become, thinner and shorter than I ladies” like me. If we don’t have lovers, ny, she’d say. And she would not talk on continue to work—she, of course, con- remember. I say, “Do you remember we have loving friends. If we no longer the phone—she said she was too deaf. tinues to write—but especially because that night when five of us were have paid work, we work in politics and But she wrote long letters to me and I have the energy to travel long as well crammed into a tiny jail cell in as board and committee members of expected prompt and lengthy replies. as short distances, and to work long Washington? And one of the five was nonprofit organizations whose future She had been born Ruth Said in 1913. hours in meetings. When Marjorie was the poet Cynthia MacDonald? And how we care about. And if we are writers, She took the pseudonym “Jo Sinclair” 20, 55 years ago, she left England for you whispered to me, ‘Why can’t we be the next poem, story, essay, book is when she submitted an article to the Kenya, where she married a Kenyan. grandly fat like Cynthia?’ I guess that’s always on the horizon. I

16 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 My daughter-in-law is 32. When I the most of the time we have—if we tell her I am running out of time, she can figure out what that particular plat- worries that I am announcing that I am itude really means. I know a woman Running out of time giving up the fight. I’m not. I will, who thought it meant moving to six eventually, be like my friend Kay, who states in three years. She didn’t really by Jane O’Reilly is 95 and ready for the slow creep of have time for that many new begin- daily time to end. (She still reads and nings, and neither do I. But then, I feel Reaching the age of acceptance walks and thinks, however, still fight- a bit parsimonious about doing things ing.) I actually won’t be surprised if I for the future in any case. Like Mary and pendulous earlobes live to 95. It’s just that I also realize Kaye, I want to plant a golden elm tree, that I truly, no kidding, might not. And which is said to grow eleven feet in a a even if I do, I probably won’t be able year, not a sugar maple that takes 30 to speak fluent Chinese, or earn a liv- years to look like a real tree. ing in Provence, or get a pilot’s license, My particular sugar maple was the hirty-two years ago I wrote an or even learn to ski properly. I won’t women’s movement and all that it article about managing time. become a real artist, write a novel or meant. George Bush is sweeping away T One expert advised that no two or six, learn to sing, or figure out my life’s work. My friend Mary Kay piece of paper on a desk should ever how to work my cell phone. Blakely says, “I have outlived my opti- be touched more than once. It is per- But, on the other hand, now that I mism, and I miss it.” We thought time haps my complete failure to follow that have written it down, maybe I will. was a continuum, ever progressing for- advice that explains the fact that I own If I have, say, ten years left, I bet I ward. It seems instead to be a cycle, and a barn entirely filled with boxes of can conquer the cell phone, and possi- I doubt I have time for another turn. So unanswered mail. bly the art of watercolor. Except that we are left again with making the most Another expert, the graphic when I think about how little I accom- of the moment. Mary Kay’s sister, who designer Milton Glaser, offered me plished during the last ten years, and is only coming up on 50, pictures us two more clarifying exercises. He how quickly they whizzed past, I won- “volunteering for a kind of senior citi- urged me to design a perfect day five der if I even have time to clean out my zen draft. Whatever civilian outrage is years into the future. He said that Jane O’Reilly closets, much less the barn. Much less in the offing then—NRA guys selling when he assigned that task to his learn Chinese. Time goes fast when guns at flea markets, terrorists bombing design students quite a number of And then again, I might not. Now that you are going downhill. When I think abortion clinics, riot squads beating them showed up the next day deter- I know death is the meaning of life, of the time it took to grow from two college students, school boards ban- mined to leave town, change careers, real if still absurd, I am not sure I to three, and the much longer time it ning books—we’ll march to the nearest or change partners. I imagined living want to waste time thinking about the took to raise a child from two to three, barricades and make them shoot us in Vermont, picking the first peas, jumbled archive of myself. when I think of the hours of my life I instead of our teenagers.” I like her editing the last draft of a book, being I am running out of time. spent napping (my one truly, complete- vision of gray-haired furies. The very visited by my granddaughter, and In fact, the very experience of time ly achieved art form) and bearing idea makes me realize that time spent packing for a trip to Europe. In fact, has changed completely. grudges and trying to control the out- acting together is time tripled. although it took a lot longer than five come of things, I realize I am now liv- Just for the record, I am now 67 years, I have achieved such days. They or example, I was given a glori- ing by an entirely different clock. years old. I looked in the mirror on my seem perfect enough, so it was proba- ous week at Canyon Ranch for Without such parameters as a school birthday and discovered that my ears bly a good idea to have tried to visual- F my birthday. I am in pretty year, Saturday nights, and the monthly had gotten old. They are no longer ize them. good shape—way too fat, but fairly visitor, children seem to grow up shell-like and appealingly pink, but pen- The second exercise was to try to strong and limber. All those hockey overnight, and Christmas comes at dulous and wrinkled, something like decide what I would do if I had only games in school, all those drinks and least four times a year (What! Hermione Gingold’s ears in Gigi (and six months to live. Fully, if uncon- cigarettes abandoned, all that yoga Christmas again?!) Time just runs on, how many years has it been since I real- sciously, confident that no such absurd and walking have paid off. I won’t be on its way out, and I don’t want to ized I had begun to relate to Hermione thing as death would ever happen to taking up kick boxing soon, but I am waste it. instead of Leslie Caron when I watch me, I immediately said that I would better off than some women my age. Rejoice in the moment. My friend, Gigi?) The spots and freckles, the flab take my child out of school and travel Not most, just some. But at the lec- the artist Mary Kaye, says “Yes, living and wobble, the folded eyelids and the around the world. My dearest friend tures and classes on nutrition and in the moment. That’s all we have, real- stubby eyelashes, the creaky knees and astonished me by saying that she aging I had the eerie sense that most ly, lest we be dominated by the now crumbling teeth had, until the moment would lose weight and tidy her apart- of the audience still believed the train loud sound of the falls over which we of the pendulous lobes, been matters ment. I suppose the things that haunt was just leaving the station, with a all must go. It seems just a few years for denial and half-hearted plans for us as left undone are extremely vari- long, long run of track still ahead. I ago that the sound of those falls was renovation and disguise. Old ears were able. Now, I might spend the time have already arrived. Becoming has only a whisper which was heard only my turning point. I have reached the dealing with the boxes in the barn, as given way to being. The watchword is when the wind was right.” Age of Acceptance. a last act of consideration for my sat- maintenance. Forget transformation. We can live every day to the fullest, Just as well. I don’t have time for isfyingly increased number of heirs. This is it. doing things we really enjoy, making anything else. I

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 17 grown weary of the constant defeat by the key to discovering new laws.” But destiny or chance of even the best quali- new laws in science, once discovered and fied women; I had grown weary of the defended, are established. Taking a U-turn readiness of many women, even femi- Also, I find gratifying the models of a nists, to disparage those of our sex who “good” life offered by the scientists— by Carolyn G. Heilbrun flourish. Whether fate or the roller coast- lives encompassing work that powerfully er of politics had impeded the progress matters, in relation to which a private life The aging woman as explorer of new territory of feminism and of female accomplish- is definitely secondary. Romance, spous- ment became extraneous to my thoughts es, children are appreciated but are not, a as I fell, with astonishing relief, into the and never can be, at the center of bounty of male lives and male stories. rewarding achievement or endeavor in have been a feminist for most of my fectly conveying what is these days my I am struck by the way the work of the world of science. adult life, which makes my drift away chief despair: these men forced them into challenges, Do I understand the science I am I from feminism in my middle 70s a if not denials of the prevailing and pow- reading? I grasp it a little better than I did bit strange, even to my eyes. Not that I birds build—but not I build; no, erful religions of their day. They did not before entering upon this venture, but do not work politically for feminism but strain, so much deny God as suggest that the the extent of my comprehension is best now as ever, perhaps more while the Time’s eunuch, and not breed one laws of the universe might be better expounded by Chaim Weizmann, Christian Right rules over us. My femi- work that wakes. understood, not only by disaffirming describing a trans-Atlantic crossing with nist antennae continue to quiver. But Mine, O thou lord of life, send God, but by refusing to see him as an Einstein in 1920: “Einstein explained his recently, the fate of women in fiction or my roots rain. adequate hypothesis for the universal theory to me every day; by the time we nonfiction has failed to compel me as a laws of physics and evolution. To attrib- arrived, I was finally convinced that he reading subject; my writing, reading, and And here is Wordsworth: ute all creation to God was to accept the understood it.” The work of Newton cogitations have turned to other avenues threat, as with Galileo, of having to dis- and Einstein are more available to the of contemplation. When not pondering Another race has been, and other claim one’s discoveries. Faith has been likes of me than either cosmology, about life in general, I read and learn about sci- palms are won. called the evidence of things not seen; the birth of the universe and the death of ence, primarily physics but also evolu- Thanks to the human heart by rather it is, for scientists, the refusal to stars, or string theory, the postulation of tion and the grandeur of Darwin’s life which we live, see. I may learn but little of science; yet, tiny one dimensional invisible filaments and thought. Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, turning to scientists in my 70s, I make called strings uniting quantum mechanics In the wondering part of my life and fears, myself a poet by Thoreau’s definition: with general relativity. The reward in these days, I seek out poetry. But even To me the meanest flower that “The art of life, of a poet’s life, is, not each case is in the striving to understand here, the poetry that I meditate upon is blows can give having anything to do, to do something.” and the glimpses of the scientists at their not the poetry I read for so many years Thoughts that do often lie too (And I rejoice in his vestigial, elegant use work. In addition, I am greatly aided by before my 70s. The women poets, many deep for tears. of commas.) the exposition science journalists provide of whom seemed, in past years, to be The great reward I find in science is precisely for such as I. As to evolution, writing my life, make little demand upon But poetry accosts and assuages me the way in which scientists see a problem that I seem able to grasp more directly me. My esteemed Auden, too, leaves me less often. I have turned to science, and set out to solve and understand or, and with greater ease. only with excerpts for things I need to turned to reading of men, with their fea- at the least, to interpret it. Sometimes say and cannot say other than in his sible destinies, their ready-made support they are right; sometimes their efforts nd what part has God in all this; words. I mostly return instead, odd as I groups of men like themselves, and their are later disproved; perhaps there is no and why do I bother with that find it, to Wordsworth and to Gerard chance profoundly to affect human answer at all. In fields like sociology, psy- Aquestion? My oldest friend, who Manley Hopkins—Hopkins most knowledge and action. I allow the felicity chology, philosophy, and literary criti- believes in God, formulates the problem strangely, since for me one of the chief of their lives to overpower me, even as I cism, however, no lasting answer is ever for me. Why do so many scientists, even comforts of science lies in its abandon- cannot help but notice their dissimilarity to be found. Certainly for the question Stephen Hawking, sooner or later invoke ment of God. Yet here is Hopkins, per- to most female fates. I had, in fact, to which the major part of my life was the name of God? Why did the mathe- devoted—the question of women’s matician John von Neumann turn to attempt to become whole human beings Catholicism at his death? Grappling with able to chose among destinies—there is this question has allowed me to face the no “right” answer to be found. There agnosticism of my life—and to confirm are only cycles and pendulum swings. A it. My friend sends me highly intelligent, math problem from my childhood con- searching articles about the connection Feminist Teacher cerned a frog who, trying to get out of a between science and God. These, figur- well, continually climbed up five feet and ing God as a master mathematician, A Journal of the Practices, Theories and fell back four. The frog did, eventually, convince me that such investigations are make its way out; for women, on the necessary to those who need a place for Scholarship of Feminist Teaching contrary, the fall back seems eternal. In God in modern science, but not for science, any solution, any explanation, those who find the universe, and the must be capable of being repeated. It earth itself, sufficient compensation. must also face and survive Karl Popper’s Wallace Stevens’ Sunday Morning, though test for falsification, which says that you he too died a Catholic, expresses per- cannot prove that a proposition is cor- fectly my final religious conviction, rect unless you have tried to falsify it and which was probably Stevens’ first: “We not succeeded. Richard Feynman, as his live in an old chaos of the sun.” And at biographer James Gleick reports, the poem’s end we have not a single “believed that the inefficiency, the guess- dove’s annunciation to Mary, but casual ing of equations, the juggling of alterna- flocks of pigeons who make “ambigu- tive physical viewpoints were, even now, ous undulations as they sink /

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18 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 Downward to darkness on extended no further work demanding to be done. wings.” I intend no condemnation of Margaret Atwood, at the beginning of those institutionalized religions that do Negotiating with the Dead, quotes not define themselves by their enemies, Marguerite Duras: “Finding yourself in No regrets their own righteousness, or their mis- a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost sionary zeal. Ritual and community, wor- total solitude, and discovering that only by Gayle Pemberton ship and holidays, are essential to many, writing can save you. To be without the but not to me—and the scientists bol- slightest subject for a book”—Duras Which ambitions and possessions are important, and ster me in this. perfectly describes the situation. Do I imagine that others in their 70s, I have always believed that, over 70, which are not, was a lesson learned in an or approaching them, or now beyond one should be as free to choose one’s them, will find any benefit from learning death as one must, earlier, be free to unlikely setting—Hollywood where I find myself? Yes, some will. For choose whether or not to give birth. they may, as I have, come to realize that Well into my 70s I live, as all must live a it does not suffice to hold on to the life at this age, with the inevitability of one has long known as a way to prolong approaching death and the chance of a n August 1984, I rented the second © Ariel Jones it. I have found that a swift deviation devastating, unanticipated assault from bedroom of a small Los Angeles from past interests is surprisingly sweet. some bodily failure. I have, unlike many I condo belonging to Edythe Kemp. One’s politics may not radically change; of the old, consented to life only on the Mrs. Kemp, 88 years old and known affec- one’s commitments usually remain unal- terms of borrowed time. Perhaps, how- tionately as “Kempy”—was somewhat of tered. But if the focus of one’s attention ever, there are, even among those most an LA legend. She told me that she was the shifts sharply, one awakens. There are, I privileged by life, more than we might first African American child born on surmise, three alternative, reasonable guess who, like myself, ruminate daily Coronado Island off San Diego, where her roads to a workable compliance with old upon death and consider each day as father had worked on the lavish hotel there. age: One is to go on doing what one was accepted, so to speak, on loan. One After graduating from Wilberforce College doing, preserving as far as possible those may, of course, choose to hold onto the during World War I, she returned to south- physical aspects and activities that help loan beyond one’s ability to decide on ern California and later worked as a studio to deny aging; another is to contemplate death—one of life’s profounder assistant in Hollywood during the Golden the past, reflect upon it, and, if one is tal- ironies. But there is also a curious com- Age. Kempy said it was a union job, and ented, write about it in the form of pensation for this risk: If each day is a her role was to make sure that the star she memoir; a third is the way I have taken, loan from eternity, one spends it with worked for was ready for the day’s filming. of a u-turn onto something hitherto the joy known to gamblers betting At one time or another, she worked for Ina ignored. This last, I have found, has the everything on a last roll of the dice. Claire, Ann Sothern, Evelyn Keyes, and Gayle Pemberton benefit of stimulating one’s mindfulness, The payoff is intensity. Bette Davis, who called her Kempus. one’s new-found capacity for attention, Meanwhile, I shall probably not My cousin Nat, an LA resident for over clear that he also loathed what he had the faculty most readily lost in old age. attempt to publish a book about the half a century herself, had found Kempy been doing for decades. After our brief And then there is death. “‘In the men of science; I write because, as I with the room to let just a few days after my encounter, I made up my mind to leave middle of my party, here’s death,’ read and cogitate, I must write—but arrival, via that apparently seamless and academia and to try my hand at some- Clarissa Dalloway thought.” At the only for myself. Is that, I ask myself, wireless communication network of mid- thing else before it was too late, before I opening of my book, The Last Gift of because, were I to attempt to publish, I dle-class black Americans of their genera- became a piece of academic driftwood, Time, I wrote that I had always planned would have to fear rejection? Yes, there tion. I had gone to Los Angeles with a filled with regret and having nothing to end my life at 70, the biblical span. is that, but not as much of that as there Hollywood taste in my mouth. I wanted to positive to say to young people about lit- That statement astonished many peo- might be. learn something of the screenwriting game, erature or life. Some would say, with rea- ple, and my explanation—I was often What it comes down to, finally, is but the tough lesson I did learn is that Los son, that my choice of Los Angeles as a asked about this when speaking in pub- that I think life beyond 70—and these Angeles can be a very cruel and fickle place. place to begin my new life was insane, lic—seemed to offer them little enlight- days life can go on for decades beyond But, that’s no news. What was news, and but I think of it merely as hackneyed. enment. My encounter with death at 70 70—is an adventure so far largely good, about my crash and burn was Learning nothing of screenwriting, I did was neither sudden nor dramatic; it was unrecorded, unanticipated, unacknowl- Kempy, who for five eternal months kept see the inside of directors’ and produc- rather a daily struggle willingly to pro- edged. Wordsworth warned if “solitude, my spirits up and delighted me. She was a ers’ offices from behind my temporary ceed and endure. It was not that I had or fear, or pain, or grief / Should be thy new friend, grandmother, sister, and guide. secretary, receptionist, and typist desks, nothing to live for; it was that, at that portion,” well—what in that case shall Several months before my arrival in and in retrospect, I can say with some time, and later, I could not credit the we do? These portions are inevitable, Los Angeles, I’d stopped to chat briefly assurance that lottery tickets are a better unconsidered commitment to go on part of the adventure of old age, like with a colleague at a college where I bet than success in Hollywood. living if my particular journey seemed frostbite for explorers in the arctic. taught. He rarely spoke to me, this weary, Kempy’s condo was mostly red, her to be over. At 70, rather to my surprise, Such dangers are undertaken by the old, cynical man who hadn’t been a good favorite color. The furniture, rugs, and I found I still had promises to keep. as is extreme cold by explorers of the teacher for many years, if ever. In our walls were also variants of red or pink. It Is the end of the journey now near? I poles, in the hope of startling oneself one conversation, he admitted to could startle. She went out now and then fear living with the certainty that there is into vibrancy. I loathing the idea of retirement, yet it was for excursions to her favorite restaurants

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 19 and friends’ homes. But for the most part, case this year. Although I was not drawn she stayed in bed and watched television. I to Hollywood by its sometimes ludicrous would sit with her and watch a show or fictions about love, I have loved love and two in the evening, and we would talk. She been unlucky in it, as most who love love. had been a famous cook. One Sunday As I grow older, I’ve tossed out all sorts of afternoon she scraped together a meal so fantasies about romantic love and faced, divine I can still remember the taste of the in ways I could not have imagined when fifth roasted chicken and the macaroni and younger, the joy of loving friends. Things house On a high hill with wide cheese. Her body was marginally ambula- sometimes even out in the wash. views of earth and sky… tory, testimony to the high-calorie entrees Kempy made a point of befriending lodge and desserts that had created her reputa- younger people. She had pals 50 years her tion. Yet her kitchen was bare, with only a junior, as I was, people 20, 30 years few plates, a couple of pots and stainless younger, and just one or two near her own steel cutlery for two or three. Kempy had age. She told me that it made no sense to A Maine Retreat for Writers given up cooking and when she did, she stick to one’s age cohort and be alone Offering Workshops and Personalized Retreats gave away the tools of her trade. In fact, when they all died. In my 30 years of she had unloaded almost everything she teaching, I’ve found friends among of a ever had. The only things left were the few number of my students—a sophomore pictures and personal mementos of her this year has all the makings of entering life with her husband, long since dead, and the group—and I hope to live long Joan Lee Hunter [email protected] her son, whom she had outlived as well. enough to see the youngest of them well 207-647-3506 www.fifthhouselodge.net Her attachment to what remained into their middle years. I had no children appeared deep, but not overly sentimental. of my own, and I certainly will not be hav- She had only given up driving two years ing any now, but some part of the pleas- before I met her, and no doctors had ure and pain that must come from having warned her of her impending demise. Yet children I have experienced by teaching so for years she had been giving the material many and finding friends among some of goods of her life away. Only three years the most wonderful. before meeting her, I had spent a week of I will never play a good game of tennis, ten-hour days with my sister and best but I’m keeping the racquet—and the golf friend cleaning out my parents’ home, clubs. I will not learn the major cuisines of Now Available from Miriam Grace Monfredo: Children of Cain where nothing, it seemed, had ever been the world, but my pots, pans, knives, and Last volume in the Cain trilogy tossed—including a used Styrofoam cup molds stay where they are so that I can to that I found in the attic one day that continue cooking what I do know. I start- Praise for Miriam Grace Monfredo and her Seneca Falls historical mysteries: prompted a hysterical laugh that took me ed piano lessons two years ago, and I “Well written… historically accurate and telling—really strong” —Sara Paretsky five minutes to contain. Kempy’s solution intend to have a recital in a couple of “Richly satisfying both to the head and to the heart.” —Anne Perry to the sometimes tenuous relationship of years. I am willing to wear patent leather “stuff ” to mortality appeared to me to be maryjanes and an organdy dress, if “The genius of Monfredo is to teach brilliant. It was information worth saving, required. As I write essays—and screen- ‘herstory’ while absorbing the reader and I stored it in my brain. plays—on my computer, I look at photo- in a good old-fashioned mystery.” graphs on the wall from the past and find — Newsday am a third of a century away from in them inspiration and comfort. “Page-turning suspense.” — being as old as Kempy was when I first I went to Los Angeles because it is Publishers Weekly (starred review) I met her, but in looking at the things I possible to control what one ultimately “Successfully blends history and fic- carry with me from one move to another, chooses to regret. Or almost. I wish I tion, feminism, nationalism, medi- I am aware that it is time to begin unload- could forego the regret of having met a cine…most entertaining” — Library ing some of them, along with a few of the couple of people who pulverized my Journal dreams. The horizon simply is not wide heart. But beyond that, because of my “The imaginative research and lucid enough to hold it all at once. I have a clos- sojourn in Los Angeles, in spite of the writing create a fine balance.” — et shelf filled with camera equipment. For failure that it was, I believe I will never be Chicago Tribune years, I was the one at the party with the as bitter or resentful as that university col- “…combines the best of Agatha camera. I was good at portraits and can- league whose dreams were tossed aside at Christie and Walter Mosley…A treas- dids, favoring a 105mm lens so I could get the beginning of some road he had not ure.” —Syracuse Herald American a full face shot without being in my sub- taken for fear, or pride, or laziness. When ject’s face. An old Nikon F that was my I needed the counsel of someone older “Monfredo combines convincing period detail and atmosphere, real events inheritance from my father would capture and more experienced, who could help and people, an efficient, unobtrusive a hip caught in mid-shake on the dance me discover what in my life was worth writing style, and a well-conceived floor or an eyebrow raised across the room saving, throwing away, regretting or not, I and satisfying puzzle plot.” —Ellery at that hip. I have boxes of photographs of found Kempy. Queen’s Mystery Magazine academic colleagues, some of whom have Kempy lived to be 92. We would talk “A marvelous eye to historical detail…a become quite eminent, and some whose on the phone from time to time. And beautiful read. If you have not yet read appearances in the photographs are the through me, she found another good this author, then you are missing out.” only proof that I knew who they were at friend, my own friend and former student —The Merchant of Menace some moment in this life—because I cer- Jim, who loved her as much as I. He had a tainly have no idea of who they are now. job working for one of the major studios There are images of city streets, national and one day, he took her to lunch at the Seneca Falls Inheritance Best First Mystery Novel nominee, 1992 parks, English moors, countless rivers, two MGM commissary—a place she had 0-425-14465-8 $6.99 oceans, many dogs, 40 Christmas trees, known from the early days. He arranged a North Star Conspiracy 2002 “All Alaska Reads…”; 2002-2003 Alaska and quite a few beautiful cakes and pies. I screening of her favorite film, Jezebel, 0-425-14720-7 $6.50 Association of School Librarians’ “Battle of the Books” always thought that I might spend more which starred Bette Davis. Kempy was Blackwater Spirits time studying the art to become a better not a great fan of all of her employers, 0-425-15266-9 $6.50 photographer, but it’s time to put the cam- and she had many stories that she refused Through a Gold Eagle eras for sale on eBay and keep just one, to tell publicly because of her ethics and 0-425-15898-5 $6.50 because I can’t imagine being completely sense of propriety. But she loved Davis, as The Stalking Horse Voice of Youth Advocacy’s Best Adult Mystery for Young Adults, without a camera, whether I use it or not. she called her. Kempy, as Kempus, was 0-425-16695-3 $6.99 1998; “best” review, young adult section, Library Journal I should add to the lot the unused, new probably a good match for the fiery Must the Maiden Die sewing machine, a book on juggling and Hollywood star. My mementos from my 0-425-17610-X $6.99 some balls, two squash racquets, a box of months with Kempy are a few photo- Sisters of Cain Historical mystery career achievement award, Romantic Times watercolors, a calligraphy pen and instruc- graphs of her and the memory of a pho- 0-425-18092-1 $6.99 tions, and all the paraphernalia for refin- tograph of Davis on Kempy’s wall signed, Brothers of Cain Herodotus Award Winner, Best History Mystery novel 2001 ishing wood furniture. Four guitars are too “To Kempus, Love Bette.” I have my own 0-425-18638-5 $6.99 many; there is not enough of me to picture of Davis on my bulletin board. A Children of Cain become an outpost of the Los Angeles seemingly unlikely connoisseur of needle- 0-425-18641-5 CL$22.95 Guitar Quartet. The French novels that I 0-425-19103 PA$ 6.99 (available August 28) point, Davis is sitting in a chair staring at have never been able to read I will never the camera, of course, with a pillow read- be able to read, unless life takes me to ing, “Old Age Ain’t No Place For Sissies.” Reading Group Study Guides available: www.miriamgracemonfredo.com France for a long time. I have decided not Kempy taught me that it is possible to be Available at local bookstores, amazon.com, or from the publisher, Berkley Prime Crime, The to take up Italian. both graceful and not a sissy as one ages. Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc. www.penguinputnam.com Old friends know that every year I get I will be lucky to live long enough to put a bad case of spring fever, and such is the her lessons into practice. I

20 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 as just another device or apparatus, and lines up nicely with our broader they and their families misrecognize the masculinist cultural ideals, since homecare worker as a “cleaning lady.” the acute care model is also ends- Caring for the caretakers Another side of the issue is county welfare oriented, focusing on the produc- departments that persist in treating care- tion of a normal, functioning by Eileen Boris takers who are relatives as non-workers. body that is capable of returning These misunderstandings arise because to productive activity. The “non- No Place Like Home? Feminist Ethics and Home Health paid or unpaid, these workers are women. productive” work involved in chronic care—work which is, by Care by Jennifer A. Parks. Bloomington, IN: Indiana he interdisciplinary literature on our paradigm, futile, since no good care has explained its association is produced in the end—falls upon University Press, 2003, 184 pp., $29.95 hardcover. T with women in terms of occupa- women, since they are still consid- tional segmentation (the sexual division ered largely nonproductive. (p. 25) a of labor); psychodynamics (giving care is like mothering); and social status (men Homecare could encourage independ- don’t want to do it). It has asked how we ent living and self-sufficiency. But these wo years ago, barely settled in visor’s calls in the middle of the night. as a society should organize care—who values are elusive when industry prof- California, I responded to a call She’s balanced her clients’ desire to should care and who should pay for care? itability is the highest priority, and current T from the United Domestic remain at home with the possible harm Should care remain in or move outside of standards actually impede autonomy Workers of America to testify before the that could result from neglectful acts like families? Is it an individual, family, com- because they reward shoddy and rushed Santa Barbara County Board of leaving a stove on. “My clients’ stories munity, state, or national obligation? To care. Applying Foucault, Parks suggests Supervisors. In 2000, the state legislature became my stories,” Parks confesses in this discussion, Parks brings outrage, pas- that “in the daily carrying-out of their had mandated that all counties become, this closely reasoned and refreshingly sion, and vision. An ethic of care is not work, aides are complicit in the very for collective bargaining purposes, the critical re-visioning of homecare. “My enough, she declares. “A system that norms that serve to marginalize and employer of record for In-Home work self was not separable from my takes advantage of women’s free and oppress them.” Their poor working con- Supportive Service (IHSS) workers by scholarly/educated self, as the issues I low-cost caretaking is unjust. A system ditions and lack of training for many 2003. I was to use my position as a uni- witnessed in my work life directly impact- that exploits women’s caretaking at the tasks, like inserting catheters or handling versity professor to argue for the creation ed the focus of my professional work.” cost of their lives is completely dementia, creates burnout, and low pay of a public authority to set standards and Having experienced homecare as an immoral.” Caring about the cared-for leads to various forms of client neglect, provide training for some 1,500 personal arena of reciprocity, Parks focuses on all requires social justice for home aides as like taking on simultaneous multiple attendants and other home aides who the stakeholders: the elderly women who well as for family members. shifts or stealing. Abuse of caretakers assist the county’s low-income, frail elder- predominate among receivers of care as What most impedes just treatment, generates abuse of the cared-for. Living ly and disabled. It wasn’t my explanation well as the women who also predominate she insists, is the development of home- wages and improved training could facili- of how the care we applaud as a labor of among providers. Parks addresses a range care as “a subsidy provided by women to tate better care. love deserves living wages and benefits of ethical issues, including attitudes the state.” Although her book lacks the Last December, Santa Barbara’s public when undertaken as a job that convinced toward the aged that deny their agency, detail that a history of homecare might authority was fully operative, and its the supervisors. I’d like to think that it was problems of physical and emotional iso- offer, Parks gets the trajectory right: The IHSS workers voted to unionize. Parks the testimony of the givers and receivers lation, and overuse of medical technolo- rise of managed care since the 1970s has applauds unionization for bringing justice of care, and their daily struggles for dig- gy. She recognizes the inequalities in the encouraged deinstitutionalization so as to to workers and enhancing the quality of nity, that convinced the elected officials care relationship, not the least of which maximize services and minimize costs. care. Paying family members for caretak- that carework is worthy of compensation. stem from the prevalence of racial “oth- Changes in federal Medicare/Medicaid ing adequately would also help recognize It should not be regarded as unskilled ers” as providers and the diminished reimbursements and standardization of care as valuable work. But Parks goes far- labor that anyone can do because moth- physical and mental capacities of hospital stays and diagnostic assessments ther and imagines a more radical ers, wives, and daughters perform it with- receivers—issues that make both liable to expanded the number of homecare agen- response: restructuring the delivery of out pay, and people of color and immi- exploitation. Parks’ emphasis on reci- cies but also limited services to patients medicine and removing care from the grants take it on for a wage. But probably procity shapes her most sensitive explo- whose needs qualified them for reim- market altogether. Facilitating “the kinds the supervisors figured that because ration: whether to acquiesce to the racist bursement. Doctors became gatekeepers; of human flourishing, function, and homecare is cheaper than institutionaliza- preferences of clients. Instead of assum- patients who could not “meet the ‘skilled capabilities that are an important part of tion, they’d rather cut a deal with the ing that black or Latino caretakers expe- needs’ requirement” had “to struggle on our common public life,” care no longer union than lose out on state funding. rience psychic as well as economic harm their own or with the assistance of would be mired in the private or linked For Jennifer Parks, a politicized femi- from disrespectful treatment, she argues unpaid family caretakers.” Limiting costs with women. Produced through demo- nist ethic of care begins with the needs of that the workers themselves must lead in limited the amount of care, while lack of cratic exchange between providers and minimum-waged caretakers, like those formulating responses to racism. both private insurance and societal sup- receivers, it would turn into a public who spoke that day. Parks is a philoso- Anything else would be presumptuous. port forced women, particularly black good. Though she offers no blueprint for pher who knows what she’s talking about. Caretaking involves not merely minis- women, to leave employment to tend to how to move from our current for-profit Parks supported herself through gradu- tering to bodies, but also engaging the family members. Hidden in the so-called health system that excludes thousands ate school by laboring as a home health whole person. “Reducing the work to private sphere, naturalized as female obli- from necessary care, the coalition of aide. She’s kept a frightened elder compa- physical labor violates the dignity and self- gation, this invisible “free labor,” Parks unions, consumers, and government in ny even after her shift was over, turned respect of both caretaker and care recipi- perceptively observes, “is a social service California suggests a modest beginning: over the bedridden, lifted the immobile, ent, since it is akin to viewing care for that results in savings for the state.” Upgrade the occupation of home aide fought off bites from a demented dependents as caring for ‘things,’” she Parks’ analysis of homecare and gen- through better pay, training, and respect; woman, and suffered groping from an warns, “and it robs homecare aides of der perceptively draws upon the insights and take the concerns of consumers seri- impaired man. She’s lain awake worrying their own intuition that they may be skilled of disability studies. Homecare of the ously. For the present, unions, coopera- about a patient’s condition, anguished caretakers who have a special talent for chronically ill and dying challenges the tives, and paid family members must pro- about whether to accept a gift from a working with others.” Of course, some medical model of control and cure of the vide the building blocks for a new demo- grateful client, and put up with her super- consumers of care regard their attendants body. She explains that acute medical care cratic regime of care. I

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 21 Reviews

In this issue, as we do every July, we concentrate on fiction and poetry for summer reading.

With a flinty scorn for sentimentality, wanting to get back to her memories of O’Connor depicted the obsessions and the junkyard and day-to-day life reclaim- banalities of Bible Belt Georgia. Ray wants ing the farm. to teach people how to live better, in har- One of the most poignant passages is Home, difficult home mony with nature and with themselves. “I not about Ray’s beloved longleaf pine but by Susan Millar Williams do not want to write anything that will about her son Silas. She wants him to be cause hurt or shame,” she declares toward a child of “stars and dirt.” He longs for the end of her story. Alas, great autobiog- movies and video games. About halfway Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home by Janisse Ray. raphy does not get written when the author through the book, it becomes clear that Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2003, is pulling her punches. One of the most Silas wants to leave, to live almost any- disturbing scenes describes how Ray sneaks where else. Ray wants to stay put. In a 308 pp.; $22.00 hardcover. off to join a Martin Luther King Day rally. panic over her son’s unhappiness, all she She accepts a lift from a young black man can think of to say to him is “What’s I riding a Harley-Davidson. The two have a wrong with it here?” The answer he gives heart-to-heart, and at the end of the day is, “Here there is no imagination.” Soon aving escaped the Georgia junk- around mowing, church, and TV dinners, he offers to take her home. Ray refuses. afterward, Silas moves to Vermont to live yard where she grew up, Janisse lives in a dilapidated doublewide next Uncle Percy, she explains, doesn’t “cotton with his father. H Ray returned looking for simplic- door and watches every move she makes. to mixing the races. Uncle Percy watched Wild Card Quilt has a fairy-tale ending ity, connectedness, peace, “wholeness.” The children in the local school taunt every move I made, and if a black man that side-steps many of the searing con- “What do you want to go back down there Silas: “If you step on the black tiles you brought me home on a motorcycle he flicts raised in earlier parts of the book. for?” demanded one of her city friends. love niggers.” He walks over to stand defi- would not have spoken to me for weeks, Ray reunites her father and sister, It’s a good question. Fans of Ray’s first antly on a black tile. maybe not ever again.” For somebody so estranged for 19 years, and finds a way to book, the widely acclaimed Ecology of a At her best, Ray finds a stark poetry in self-conscious about living well, this reconnect with her mother by piecing and Cracker Childhood will recall her bald the ruins of Baxley. Describing what hap- seems like moral cowardice. And yet I’ve quilting a coverlet. Her parents buy back description of her ancestors as redneck, pened between the time she left and the seen it happen with too many people who pieces of the family farm that had been inbred, racist hicks who “lumbered across time she came back to live, she catalogues live cheek-by-jowl with their relatives in sold over the years to make ends meet, the landscape like tortoises.” Ray’s father the stages of deterioration: “The out- the rural South. Rather than risk upsetting and terminate the lease on other pieces, ran a junkyard, was in and out of the state house fell. The smokehouse fell. Three of the old folks, they act like old folks them- now eroded and steeped in the toxic mental hospital, and started his own fun- the pines in the yard blew over in a selves. And so progress never quite gets chemicals used on cotton. For Ray, it is damentalist church in an abandoned ware- storm.... An apple tree fell. The chicken made—it’s one step forward and two the culmination of a long quest for house. Ray was forbidden to swim, dance, coop fell. The sassafras in the field fell. My steps back. “wholeness.” She also meets a kindred watch TV, wear pants, celebrate Christmas grandmother fell.” The plants are as hard spirit with the improbable name of or Halloween, cut her hair, wear jewelry, or as the people: “Tough fists of sand pears ay’s cause is not so much social jus- Raven, and they get married. Ray ulti- even read the newspaper. She learned to dropped from the trees and rotted on the tice but conservation, especially of mately leaves the farm—because of write using stubs of chalk on the sides of ground until my father came in his dilapi- R the few remaining old-growth lon- Raven’s job as a mail carrier in junked cars. Ray claims in Wild Card Quilt dated pickup and gathered washtubs full gleaf pine forests. She pursues her calling Tallahassee, or so she says. I suspect she that her father has mellowed in old age, for the wild hogs penned in his junkyard,” with missionary zeal, much as her father was ready to split, at least for a while. The but even with the miracle of antidepres- she writes. There is a genius in prose like must have commanded his hellfire and book ends with a tableau of the extended sants, his idea of small talk is macabre: this, worthy of praise from Wendell Berry, brimstone ministry. Ray finds fulfillment family replanting their property in lon- “[L]et’s say your mother goes to heaven who gave her first book an enthusiastic in the drama of local politics, in a fight gleaf pine. Ray hopes that she and Raven and you to hell. She’ll be able to look down blurb. But there is also, at least for my against school consolidation and an can someday make a home there. and see you suffering. But she won’t cry. taste, far too much overt moralizing. (At attempt to start a conservation fund. She Wild Card Quilt is clearly a sequel, and She won’t shed a tear of remorse, for times the effect is downright comic, like forms a writers’ group, volunteers at should be read only after an encounter there’ll be no crying in heaven.” Lisa Simpson shouting “Free Tibet!” Silas’s school, barters for goods and serv- with Ray’s amazing first book. It is meant All this makes for a great story, but when she wins a school spelling bee.) ices, and supports the local arts council, to be autobiography with a message: You who would want to live it? Or, even worse, After describing a traditional syrup boil- but her passion is always the forest. can go home again. Moving as her stories to relive it as an adult? These people are ing, Ray can’t resist a final paragraph that Sometimes her emotional involvement are, I’m not convinced that Janisse Ray has straight out of Flannery O’Connor, who lays it on too thick: “Its sweetness keeps with the cause goes a little over the top. found the secret of life, and I’m not going grew up in this same stretch of rural people together. Sweetness. The sweet- She builds an altar where she prays about to rush right out and start trying to save Georgia and returned there to live out her ness of our tongues, of kind words, of saving the forest, and she fasts one day a pine trees. But I’m glad to know there are last years wracked by lupus. It is August praise, of invitations extended and invita- month hoping that will help things along. still people like her living in the South— when Ray moves back home to Baxley, tions accepted, and the sweetness, too, of As in Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, chap- quirky, eccentric, passionate about the and boiling hot. She and her nine-year-old acts of imagination and love. Forgiveness, ters about the forest alternate with chap- land, and not afraid of being labeled hip- son, Silas, take over her grandmother’s tolerance, and the courage to reach out.” ters about her life. I wish I could say that pies. And I will look forward to the next house, seven miles from her daddy’s junk- She adds a similar breathless coda to these sections, clearly so close to Ray’s installment of her autobiography, for yard and uninhabited for almost a decade. almost every chapter, as if readers could heart, were the best part of the book. But Janisse Ray has a gift for language and a Her Uncle Percy, whose life revolves not be trusted to get her point. I often found myself skipping them, story that is worth the telling. I

22 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 Whatever their nationalities, all of © Marion Ettlinger Bình’s lovers are ephemeral, almost ghost- like presences in the novel. This status The cook’s tale seems appropriately symbolic of the many real-life barriers to romance presented by by Jan Clausen Bình’s situation. But it also gets in the way of conveying the texture of Bình’s inner The Book of Salt by Monique Truong. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, life, though Truong compensates with her brilliant flare for using images to suggest 2003, 256 pp., $24.00 hardcover. strong emotion, as when Bình renders his growing passion for Sweet Sunday Man by I describing the flesh of ripe quinces, sim- mered with honey over a low flame until n first person narration, voice is char- rageous if subtle dispossession—his wise they exhibit “an opulent orange...a color acter. The voice may coax or ravish and gentle revenge—is, presumably, The you can taste.” I or prompt our outrage, compel us Book of Salt itself (the novel shares its title with its understated sincerity, seduce us with Stein’s manuscript). He responds to n contrast to his evanescent lovers, with a dance of revelation and conceal- exile, loneliness, and displacement with a Bình’s family, especially his mother ment. It doesn’t matter what happens, or valiant effort to inscribe his own story as if I and putative father, seem meant to who the other characters are. What for an ideal reader, one who might—like take on a more solid presence in the text. Monique Truong counts more than great dialogue or a Bão, his one-time shipmate and fellow Truong employs a spiraling narrative tight narrative arc is the author’s skill at speaker of “southern market banter”—join structure that gracefully revisits key Bình uses Vietnamese words, explaining provoking our desire to remain in the him in building a “safe house” of language. episodes from Bình’s past, revealing a lit- for example that the term lai cái, used for company of the speaking “I.” I thoroughly enjoyed Truong’s portray- tle more each time; eventually, Bình’s flex- men of his type, means “I am mixed with Bình, the cook-protagonist of The al of “my Mesdames” from Bình’s appro- ible voice bends far enough to relate what or am partially a female.” It doesn’t help Book of Salt, has been endowed by first- priately jaundiced though never dismissive happened to his parents long before his that the breezy colloquial English that is time novelist Monique Truong with just point of view. (Full disclosure: I survived, birth. We learn of his Buddhist mother’s supposed to represent Bình’s fluent such an enthralling voice—one that man- class critique intact, 1970s lesbian nation- tribulations after her own mother marries Vietnamese sounds anachronistic, as ages simultaneously to inspire trust and to alism with its canonization of the elite lit- her off to a husband who turns out to be when he refers to “dumbed-down generate the suspense of unreliability. erary clique known as the Paris Circle.) a fanatical Catholic, an alcoholic, and a French” or remarks that “there is no nar- The mixture reeks of uneasy power rela- “Are there no dogs in America?” he acidly brute to his hapless sons. A few poignant rative in sex, in good sex that is.” tions, for the difficulty of being truly inquires after witnessing his employers’ scenes between Bình and his mother are After sitting rapt (mostly) through seen and named is at the heart of Bình’s teary farewell to their obnoxiously pam- among the loveliest in the book, including Truong’s virtuoso performance, I have to story of exile. (His name, which means pered darlings, Pépé and Basket, on the one in which he injures himself chopping admit I came away feeling somewhat less “peace,” turns out to be a pseudonym.) eve of Stein’s triumphant 1934 lecture vegetables in her kitchen: than satisfied. How could it be that a For Bình, a penniless Vietnamese servant tour. No dyke is a goddess to her live-in book so packed with gorgeous descrip- in the Paris of the late 1920’s and early cook, whatever his sexual orientation. My mother is humming at a small tion, probing social observation, and 1930’s, an “asiatique” with limited com- With her cagey use of well-researched piece of pork that will make the provocative ideas—redolent of all the mand of the colonial rulers’ tongue, a biographical detail in the service of an bowl of scallions into a feast. She is kinds of salt (kitchen, sweat, tears, the man in love with male beauty who longs invented narrative, Truong has done humming, and I think that I am sea) that Bình laments and celebrates— to be fully known by another man, each something far more interesting than turn- hearing birds. I look up just to be had come off seeming a trifle bloodless? exposure of self is a fraught negotiation. ing Gertrude and Alice into “round” char- sure, and I thread silver into my fin- Upon reflection, I decided this “They have no true interest in where I acters. She has left them pretty flat, which gertips for the first time....She sits impression stems in part from Truong’s have been or what I have seen,” Bình is appropriate both to their iconic status down and wraps herself around me, heavy reliance on images and repetition: observes about the class of employers he and their cook’s practical need to know pressing my stooped back into her- It is no accident that the novel opens and terms “collectors,” the ones who “crave them, from an intimate distance, as behav- self. With one hand, she holds my closes with descriptions of photographs. the fruits of exile, the bitter juices, and the ioral probabilities. There is something fingers together. With the other, she Even more significantly, The Book of Salt heavy hearts. They yearn for a taste of the both grotesque and moving about the way squeezes the juice of the lime onto lacks fleshed-out people apart from Bình pure, sea-salt sadness of the outcast they reappear, staid yet lusty, gigantic and my fingertips. ‘Fire! Fire!’ I yell. She himself. Even Bình’s character, so flexible whom they have brought into their fixed of feature, presiding over Bình’s blows them out and begins to hum a and even mercurial, is static over the long homes.” This unsparing diagnosis, repre- story like balloons borne along in the tune. My fingertips heal, despite the haul, as he remains suspended between sentative of Truong’s deft approach to fig- Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade: threat of rust on her knife. (p. 72) eventful memory and a present that uring the distorted intimacies of domestic offers him few if any real choices. service as a microcosm of distorted My Mesdames cohabitate in a state Although I welcomed the depth of The narrator’s return to the image of geopolitical relations, almost immediately of grace. They both love feeling in scenes like these, I eventually the “man on the bridge”—who at one gives way to rueful self-awareness: GertrudeStein. Better, they are both grew impatient with the mother’s story. point gives his name as Nguyen Ai Quoc, in love with GertrudeStein. Miss Despite some moments of self-asser- a pseudonym used by the young Ho Chi I forget that there will be days Toklas fusses over her Lovey, and tion—Bình reports or imagines a clan- Minh during his Paris sojourn—is meant when it is I who will have the her Lovey lets her....A kiss freely destine affair that may mean her husband to infuse the novel’s end with emotional craving, the red, raw need to given is a wonder to watch, even if is not actually his father—by the end of dynamism. Bình appears to make at least expose all my neglected, unkempt it is being seen through the slit of a the book she shrivels into a cloyingly ide- a tentative choice to wait for this man or days....When I am abandoned by partially closed door. (p. 71) alized portrait of martyred motherhood. someone like him (though an image of [employers’] sweet-voiced cate- The scene in which Bình intuits her water in the closing paragraph strikes a chism, I forget how long to braise In time-honored fashion, the servant demise while witnessing the death throes sinister note, given that Bình has thought the ribs of beef....I neglect the who resists his employer’s voyeuristic of a Paris pigeon borders on bathos. The of drowning himself): “Your question, pinch of cumin, the sprinkling of interest in his life feels justified in Old Man is even more one-dimensional, just your desire to know my response, lovage, the scent of lime. (p. 20) indulging a reciprocal voyeurism, just as he so bereft of complexity that his hold on keeps me [here]” he repeats. Perhaps he will later feel entitled to subtract “The Bình’s mind, illustrated by a running will find a scholar-prince with a postcolo- After a series of these lapses and subse- Book of Salt” from Stein’s precious man- series of imaginary dialogues, turns out nial consciousness after all, someone who quent dismissals, Bình answers an adver- uscript hoard. More was robbed from him to be harder to understand the more we can honor their scarred past without tisement for a cook at 24 Rue de Fleurus, long ago than he could hope to steal back. learn about him. Truong does succeed in becoming determined by it. Yet as the home of the pair he refers to as “my On Sundays, his one day off, Bình rendering vivid the homeland Bình book closes, such a consummation seems Mesdames,” otherwise known as cooks for and beds an expatriate who fre- remembers, but often more effectively (realistically enough) as distant as it was at “GertrudeStein” and “Miss Toklas.” He quents the Rue de Fleurus salon. This through brief scenes and details (“In the the beginning. senses immediately that these employers lover, a well-heeled, white-appearing half-light of morning, everything looks In the end, Bình’s marvelous voice will be different—and they are. (For one American Southerner, turns out to be in beautiful, I remember thinking, even the reminds me of that documentary film thing, they permit him to consume—in flight from mixed-race origins. “Sweet twin sisters selling mangosteens”), than technique whereby the camera imparts its another room, of course—portions of the Sunday Man” is a definite improvement through the elaborate family saga. own sense of motion to still photographs, same exquisite foods he prepares and on Bình’s first passion, the Saigon Truong explores notions of home and swooping low over the surface, focusing in serves to them.) Yet Stein turns out to be a Governor-General’s chef, a dyed-in-the- exile through Bình’s reflections on lan- on discrete details. This animating effect slightly more sophisticated version of an wool colonialist; but the social gap is guage. Faced with difficult task of using nearly prevents us from noticing the static employer-collector, one who “wants to see wide, and the relationship lacks the inti- English to represent conversations that quality of Bình’s memories and the dearth the stretch marks on my tongue.” The cryp- macy Bình briefly experiences with a are supposed to be taking place in either of complex characters for him to interact tic metaphor, a brilliant example of Vietnamese stranger known as “the man French or Vietnamese, she adroitly con- with. Who needs them, anyway, so long as Truong’s poetic prose, eerily blends images on the bridge.” Having gotten a taste of veys the condescension and racism in we have Miss Toklas looking “pleased but of sex, linguistic homelessness, and the what it would mean to share language employers’ unwillingness to learn how to as always somewhat irritated, an oyster feminized stereotypes of Asian men so and history with an erotic partner, the pronounce “Bình” correctly. She has with sand in its lips, a woman whose prevalent in the West. Stein eventually lonely cook casts his fellow expatriate in more difficulty hinting at the specific con- corset bites into her hips”; so long as Bình writes a manuscript purporting to tell her the fantasy role of his “scholar-prince,” sciousness that his native tongue express- keeps showing us what his tongue can do, cook’s story. Bình’s reply to this act of out- the true companion of mind and body. es, apart from those few occasions when stretch marks and all. I

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 23 grow older—and in part because the replace it. Yet even bloodthirsty revolu- regime has so constricted their experi- tions give way to routines. “I, like others, ences. At times, the fiction they read can went about my business,” she writes. “It Literature as survival seem more real than the lives they lead. was only at night and in my diary that my The women become particularly growing desperation, my nightmares, by Nan Levinson involved with Lolita, taking the book as a poured out uninhibited.” jumping off point for reflections on Nafisi sees Gatsby as a paean to dreams Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books everything from child brides to the self- and optimism. She underplays the fact absorption of fictional villains and actual that it’s a peculiarly American optimism, by Azar Nafisi. New York: Random House, dictators. Nafisi presents Lolita as a cau- but shrewdly points out that ancient tionary tale of a life stolen by someone countries such as Iran dream of past glo- 2003, 347 pp., $23.95 hardcover. else, and her students agree, siding unani- ries, while Americans are nostalgic for mously with Lolita, in part because she is some idealized future. The two visions are I never allowed to tell her own story. They connected by their consequences. tell themselves that they participate in the omen can’t: wear nail polish, © Lili Iravani class so that their lives and stories won’t What we in Iran had in common run up stairs, board a bus by be snatched away from them too. Nafisi with Fitzgerald was this dream W the front door, sit in a cafe with reports that Nabokov said every great that became our obsession and a man not their relative, leave the country novel is a fairy tale and adds approvingly took over our reality, this terrible, without their husbands’ permission, or that fairy tales are essentially defiant beautiful dream, impossible in its appear in public with their heads uncov- because they free us from the limits of actualization, for which any ered. They can, however, marry at nine reality. It is an idea she revisits and hones: amount of violence might be justi- and be stoned for adultery. It is Iran, Fiction offers alternatives and, at best, an fied or forgiven. (p. 144) 1997, 18 years after the Shah was over- “epiphany of truth.” thrown and Azar Nafisi, a Iranian profes- These women are joined in the narra- When a student complains about the sor of English literature living in the tive from time to time by Nafisi’s other novel, Nafisi suggests that they put it on United States, returns home, eager to take students, her husband, children, mother, trial. In a funny scene, students who seem part in the promising rebirth of her coun- and her “magician.” The last of these is a to have watched too much Court TV try. In those 18 years, though, the promise reclusive professor of drama and film, a vehemently attack and defend the book as has turned to betrayal, and at the close of kind of pied piper who became famous if it were a living being. Nafisi plays the her memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, she when he declared Laurel and Hardy defendant—the book itself—and when decides she must leave. worth more than all revolutionary tracts, she takes the stand, she lays out a second Nafisi has taken some time to reach Azar Nafisi and then refused to return to the theme in her reading of literature: that a this decision, thinking more and more of University of Tehran until Racine was good novel, by demanding empathy and “going to a place where everyday life was ized around the novels Lolita and The reinstated in the curriculum. To Nafisi, he respect for others, provides a way of not such a battleground.” She asks herself Great Gatsby and the works of Henry functions as an Explainer of All Things knowing someone else’s humanity. an essential question: “How does the soul James and Jane Austen. In each section, and, at the end, gives her the key to writ- Of course, the humanity of one’s survive?” Her answer, “through love and Nafisi deftly interweaves biography, ideas, ing the book that we now read. “You will opponents is not something ideologues imagination”—and, Nafisi has convinced politics, and literature. She describes not be able to write about [Jane] Austen are eager to acknowledge, let alone me, through stories—lies at the heart of events, comments on them, then com- without writing about us,” he insists. embrace, and the cadres of true believers this smart, sad, exhilarating book. ments on her comments, as if scratching “This is the Austen you read here, in a in her class oppose the book as a celebra- Reading Lolita is densely layered. It is an itch to understand what it was really place where the film censor is nearly tion of Western decadence. (In an ironic divided into four sections loosely organ- like to live in that place and time. At the blind and where they hang people in the coda, Nafisi is told that an influential stu- core of the book is a clandestine class she streets and put a curtain across the sea to dent has placated the Islamic association convenes in 1995, after the administration segregate men and women.” at the university by convincing them that at the University of Allameh Tabatabai in her class they had put America on trial.) has driven her from her teaching post. his is a memoir, and so Nafisi Like book banners everywhere, they read (Earlier, she was dismissed from the comes to us in all her roles; fore- as literally and with as little joy as possible, University of Tehran for refusing to wear T most as a teacher, but also as a fearing ambiguity and taking portrayals of the veil.) Selecting her best and most woman, citizen, wife, mother, daughter, human behavior as advocacy of immoral- committed students—all women, because friend, reader, and writer. She was born ity. They assume, too, that other read- it is too risky for unrelated men and into an intellectual and influential family: ers—it’s always others whom censors women to gather in a private home—she Before the Shah threw him in jail, her worry about—are defenseless victims of declares the theme of the class to be the father was Tehran’s youngest mayor, and dangerous books. Nafisi would agree that relationship between fiction and reality. her mother was among the first women books have power, and she is aware that For nearly two years, seven young elected to parliament. Nafisi studied and many of the books she teaches challenge women come to her house on Thursday lived abroad from age 13 to 30. An early, authority and complacency. But to her mornings to read and discuss the increas- mismatched marriage (“The day I said this is a benefit, not a drawback, which is ingly unobtainable classics of Western lit- yes, I knew I was going to divorce him.”) why she eventually finds it impossible to erature, taking heart from and arguing brought her to the University of keep teaching officially. with the books as if their lives depended Oklahoma during the freewheeling ’60s. At the book’s end, we return to the on it. In Iran, sometimes they did. In less There, she became involved in the secret class, now reading the novels of skillful hands, this could collapse into a Iranian student movement, though half- Jane Austen and discussing love, sex, combination of Oprah’s book club, girl- heartedly, since she fashions herself more courtship, and the lives of women in the victim lit, and Orientalism, but Nafisi is rebel than activist and was unwilling to thaw that follows the long and debilitating after something more ambitious. She sacrifice her long hair and beloved Iran-Iraq war. Nafisi notes that, in con- wants to understand how we use sto- “counterrevolutionary” writers to the trast to the values of the revolution, the ries—literary, anecdotal, political, even revolution’s demands. In the fall of 1977, 19th-century novel focuses on individual delusional—to construct a world and fig- the Shah made his last official visit to the happiness and rights. These are what she ure out how to live within it. “Personal United States and Nafisi married Bijan wishes for her girls, or, as she imagines and political are interdependent but not Naderi, a fellow activist. The marriage the “Dear Jane Society” her students once one and the same thing,” she observes. held, the Shah’s rule did not. jokingly proposed: “We would meet and “The realm of imagination is a bridge When the Shah was deposed, Nafisi dance and eat cream puffs, and we would between them.” and Naderi were caught up in the excite- share the news.” We first meet Nafisi’s students in ment and returned to Iran. Soon after, she The Austen section, though the most descriptions of paired photographs: in began teaching at the University of gossipy and playful, is also suffused with one, only their faces and hands remain Tehran, but from the beginning, she longing and regret for all the pleasures, uncloaked; in the other, they emerge from chafed at the dictates of the increasingly sensual, social, or simple, that her stu- their robes and veils like butterflies from orthodox administration and students. dents have been denied, for all the intel- chrysalises. They are Manna, Yassi, Azin, Her section on Gatsby, which she teaches lectuals who have been tortured or assas- Mitra, Sanaz, Mashid and Nassrin. (Nafisi at the university to the accompaniment of sinated, and for all the places and has renamed and disguised them for pro- loudspeakers outside intoning, “Death to moments in her country that she loves tection.) She calls them “my girls,” but America,” could be subtitled, “What hap- and will leave. Fiction may not solve all they aren’t really girls. They have histories, pens after you win the revolution.” It is of life’s problems, she decides in a final jobs, children, husbands. (Apparently, in perhaps the saddest part of her book. As affirmation, but it can show that the Iran it’s easier to get married than to have Ayatollah Khomeini takes power, and world is rich in ways of being and think- a boyfriend.) But they do seem young, in friends from her student activism days are ing. In “refusing to give up their right to part because Nafisi presents them that executed, she realizes that in their struggle pursue happiness, [her students] had cre- way—the habit of the teacher for whom to end the old tyranny, she and her cohort ated a dent in the Islamic Republic’s students, met in their youth, never really had thought too little about what would stern fantasy world.” I

24 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 is some redemption in Lucinda’s learning Estrada © Sigrid to deal, nominally, with “real” problems. She manages to keep her sense of humor Not exactly “lite” reading throughout (although this is more of a relief to the reader than to her). She by Amanda Nash learns basic, practical survival skills that give her a self-sufficiency she would The Quality of Life Report by Meghan Daum. New York: never have acquired in New York. And in taking on these challenges, she even- Viking, 2003, 309 pp., $24.95 hardcover. tually gains, if not the simplicity she was hoping for, a real depth. The Porno Girl and Other Stories by Merin Wexler. n The Porno Girl, Merin Wexler gives New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003, us a different kind of heroine. The I eleven stories are grouped in sec- 225 pp., $22.95 hardcover. tions titled “Mothers,” “Daughters,” and “Wives,” and, as these headings reflect, I the stories explore the challenges of inti- erhaps you’re in the mood for affect thousands of women macy in women’s relationships. The Meghan Daum some light summer reading, but nationwide. With every press of women in her stories are deeply conflict- P not quite so light as to make you my record button, feelings of ed by the expectations of their roles. enough, her delicate but relentless prose feel like you just spent your last dollar on righteousness released themselves Wexler does not balk at examining the can be devastating. candy bars instead of dinner. Perhaps in me like an Alka-Seltzer tab in seamy sides of their conflicts. She leaps In the title story, a young mother you’ve enjoyed “chick lit” in the past but water. (p. 15) headlong into any and every taboo, becomes obsessed with the Pussy Cat it makes you feel a little guilty and a lit- exposing her characters in their most Palace, a local porno video hall, unable tle dull-witted, maybe even a little old. Almost immediately, however, there vulnerable places. If the provocative to keep from patronizing the establish- What comes after chick lit? Meghan are complications. A married man trans- subjects Wexler addresses are not ment with her infant child in tow. Daum, in her second novel, and Merin planted from Brooklyn, just the sort she Wexler, in her debut collection, offer would have avoided in New York, hits on two possible directions. her, telling her Daum, whose first novel, My Misspent Youth, was an eccentric, disaffected tale “It’s great to have someone of a young single woman’s attempt to [around] who can talk about cul- find love and success, takes another ture, who knows what’s going on "COMPELLING . . . REVEALING . . . alternative route in The Quality of Life in the world, who can think out- AN EXPLORATION AND CELEBRATION Report. Lucinda, a young New York tele- side the box.... You just tell it like vision reporter, has spent most of her it is. That’s how we used to do it OF FEMALE PHYSIOLOGY." career interviewing New Yorkers about back in Brooklyn.” (pp. 54-55) —USA Today thong underwear, takeout sushi, and whether the adoption of Chinese daugh- When she does meet her Sam ters is turning the Upper West Side into Shepard-like boyfriend, Mason, her boss “a playground for men with Asian fetish- at the TV station wants to cast him in the es.” She characterizes her New York per- story idea she has conceived for Lucinda, spective as having consisted of conversa- a follow-up to an interview with the tions about: author of a book called The Good Girl’s Guide to Bad Boys. The TV show hosts A) No one wears gold anymore. It want the segment to address: just went away.... Now it’s silver.... Wedding bands are platinum or 1. Is he much gentler in bed than white gold. When is the last time you would have thought? you saw a gold wedding band? 2. In spite of his overall rough Seriously? But you’re not, like and tumble demeanor, does he friends with that person? have a secret soft spot that really B) More and more women are turns you on (he’s super nice to feeling pressure not to get married his mother, he drinks herbal tea)? until they’re at least twenty-eight. 3. ....Does he ever look in your But at the same time there’s pres- eyes and say, “Honey, I know I sure to marry before you’re thirty- seem a little rough around the four. This leaves a very small win- edges, but nothing would make dow. Six years to find a husband... me happier than settling down Ergo, limited window of opportu- and having a family with you”? nity.... What to call this? The New (p. 101) Spinster? The Spinsterization of America? Lucinda is obligated both to steer C) Yogurt. What happened? It just Mason into this role (to keep her job) went away. and to fend off her bosses’ demands (to D) Is thirty-seven the new twenty- keep Mason). I Knew a Woman six? (p. 4) Mason resolutely refuses to socialize with Lucinda’s new friends, the hippie Four Women Patients and When Lucinda is assigned to research lesbians who run the Prairie City a story on women’s methamphetamine Recovery Center for Women, and the Their Female Caregiver addiction in “the heartland,” she finds recovering women themselves. He refers herself in Prairie City, Iowa. She to the latter as “the ones that are rode Cortney Davis becomes convinced that in Prairie City, hard and put away wet.” The lesbians call she can find a life that is simpler and Mason “creepy” and compare him to the more real, as well as statistically more Unabomber. Lucinda is between a rock advantageous for meeting a mate, specif- and a hard place. "RIVETING . . . A caregiver’s first-person account of the drama of the ically, a Sam Shepard-type of mate. As In short, it quickly becomes clear that female life cycle . . . This panorama of life experience combined with she begins her transition from young the complications of living in the heart- formidable talent make Davis an accomplished writer." urban professional to middle- land are no easier to dispense with than —The San Diego Union-Tribune American—which she manages to do those of living in the big city; in fact each without entirely abandoning her New successive problem is significantly less “This stunning work captures all women, truthfully, thoroughly, brilliantly.” York status by wrangling an arrangement superficial than the ones she had to be the heartland reporter for her New encountered in New York. As she gets —People Magazine York TV show—she says, deeper into her relationship with Mason and becomes more secretive to mask his I felt that I’d finally found my problems, she becomes increasingly A Ballantine Trade Paperback niche. I was a socially conscious alienated and isolated. www.ballantinebooks.com reporter passionately committed Her ultimate victory over her situa- to the true-life health crises that tion is inadequate, unsatisfying. But there

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 25 smiling, and I felt myself shrink. (pp. 22-23) The husbands in her stories are gen- Bugging out erally of the sensitive sort; they try to be understanding about their wives’ neurot- by Martha Nichols ic anxieties but eventually they become alienated and unhappy. They want to The Bug by Ellen Ullman. New York: Doubleday , help but they grow frustrated at the illog- ic of the female mind. When they give 2003, 368 pp., $23.95 hardcover. up and retreat, it’s hard to know which of the pair to feel sorrier for. I

“Have you seen your therapist?” alfway through The Bug, pro- © Elliot Ross I should have seen that com- grammer Ethan Levin is des- ing. I shook my head. H perate to fix an error that

© Nancy Crampton “Why not?” freezes his company’s hot new software. Merin Wexler How could I explain? The company, Telligentsia, is going “Pregnancy is no time for self- down the tubes. Roberta Walton, the It wasn’t the sex I was after (this examination. Like combat.” software tester who first sees the bug, is I know you won’t believe), the His eyes narrowed. His mouth forced to learn programming in order to floodlit vulgarity of naked wet turned down, deflated, and I saw help him. The clock ticks, as the bug— flesh, the prodigious moans, the those droopy little bulges under nicknamed Jester—eludes its pursuers, expulsion of fluid. It was the his eyes, soft like melted wax. I and more and more employees are laid shock, the sheer carnality. I was- saw the sadness in his face. He off. The race to unmask this digital n’t aroused; I was becalmed, as if looked old. (p. 36) trickster keeps the pages of Ellen the actions onscreen confirmed Ullman’s novel turning; at times, it’s as my new understanding of the Another mother, in the wake of her gripping as a thriller. The Bug’s own bug body, its limitations and abun- separation from her husband, grows so lies deep in its human characters. dance, its wrenching amalgam of frustrated with her child that she nearly In the opening scene, Roberta is in pain and joy. And in that faint drowns him. A babysitter has an affair the San Francisco airport, returning tranquility I could begin to feel with her charges’ father, but her real from a lonely vacation. She watches a Ellen Ullman briefly myself, meaning my pre- infatuation is with his wife. A lonely, clerk run the Telligentsia program a baby self, which, since the birth, frustrated teacher becomes obsessed good 25 years after it was created. This seemed to have died. (p. 4) with breaking the spirit of a popular pri- brings to mind Ethan Levin. Back in Harry’s office contains all the trap- vate school girl and is subsequently 1984, Roberta broods, he was “a skinny, pings of a playpen: a water gun, a plastic Another young mother has a neurot- humiliated by having her history of per- apparently confident man of thirty-six scooter, a miniature basketball hoop. ic preoccupation with Nola, her daugh- sonal ad dating revealed in a creative who had been programming for twelve Other programmers include Bradley ter Eliza’s nanny. Pregnant, she writing assignment that the student reads seemingly accomplished years when the Thorne, an “intense, uncommunicative becomes convinced that she is having aloud in class. bug designated UI-1017 first found man” whose eyes “kept sliding…like a her second child for Nola, so that the In “Solomon and His Wives,” a young him.” Subsequent chapters alternate cat wall clock,” and Dana Merankin, nanny won’t leave. “[I]f not for Nola,” wife, who is avoiding pregnancy unbe- between her first-person account and “happily shaggy and overweight like the she says, “the precarious arrangement knownst to her husband, has an affair his perspective, inexorably narrating the guys she hung out with.” Roberta’s fel- that comprised my life could instantly with a 72 year old she teaches in a nurs- events of that year. low tester Mara is “a small, round person collapse.” Yet she is also resentful, ing-home art class. The Bug is clearly meant to be more who had the extremely annoying habit of because it’s clear that Nola is a much than a John Grisham page-turner or going around meeping like a robot.” more fit mother than she is. She felt his fragile weight against Michael Crichton screed against Those Much of this may seem like a cliché her and she fell back into the Clueless Scientists. Ullman’s 1997 Close after the gallons of verbiage spilled on I shuffled home hoping for sofa, his body alongside hers, his to the Machine, a memoir of her own the dot-coms, but in the ’80s these hack- Eliza’s big hello. The lights in the face rustling in her hair. He time as a software engineer in the Bay er stereotypes were still being molded. apartment were on, but the place unhooked his suspenders and Area, is a haunting meditation on what Companies funded by venture capital in was silent. I opened the hall closet pushed up her dress. They made she calls “technophilia and its discon- 1984—the year the Macintosh, with its to hang my coat. Inside a thick love in silence as if even the tents.” The Bug also provides a look mouse and graphical user interface, was curtain of quilted parkas gently most fractured speech would inside the heads of programmers—the introduced—were producing the soft- rustled, as if a wind had passed force them to acknowledge the “incinerating perfectionism” and “cau- ware that we now take for granted. In through. From behind the coats strangeness of their coupling and terizing vigilance of good engi- this fictional case, it’s a networked data- came a voice. the unnaturalness, and they neers”—and it has its illuminating base program. Such a system would “Shhhhhh!” would have to stop.... She came moments. For Ethan, programming is encompass programs within programs, Eliza, invisible. to relish the lightness of his “a process of unpacking thought, try- coded by different people, and would “We’re playing hide-and-seek. bones, the looseness of his skin. ing to clear it of …dormant viruses, always be full of bugs. Hence the need Go away.” Intricately lined, it stretched invisible and unaccounted for within for testers like Roberta, whose job is to I shut the door.... Then came across his frame in places as thin the human notions of ‘I think’ and ‘I deliberately try to crash the system. Nola, surefooted as always and as paper and sallow. (p. 215) know.’” For Roberta, a linguistics PhD Jester starts off as just another bug, taller than I.... without an academic job, this strange one of over a thousand. It freezes the “I saw her in the coat closet.” Wexler has an unusual talent for illu- fraternity is one she joins only because computer and dumps garbage on the Nola looked at me as if I had minating the moment when people rec- she needs the money. screen when a user moves a mouse outspoken to her in Turkoman. She ognize but have to turn away from each Ullman gets the East Bay setting side an open menu. When Roberta the opened the linen closet. other’s vulnerability. It’s a painful right, from the Fremont office building lowly tester first brings the report to “I said, she’s in the coat closet. moment—and her stories can be at the northern border of Silicon Valley Ethan, he barely acknowledges her pres- Near the front door.” intensely discomfiting at times—but her to Ethan’s rented house in working-class ence. He later marks it “Probable user “We’re playing hide-and-seek,” ability to render it is elating. San Leandro. (I grew up next door to error,” thinking “They were idiots, all of she said in her lush West Indian Daum and Wexler have given us San Leandro and worked as an educa- them, incompetent.” trill. “It’s a game.”... books that are both toothsome and tional software developer in the ‘80s, But Jester becomes the bug of all “Right. So if you want to find remarkably perceptive. They’re easy to and can testify to “the wasted feeling of bugs, one that doesn’t always appear in her, she’s in the other closet.” read but not quite so easy to put out of having driven through traffic to arrive the same way, can’t be tracked down, and “Missus, it’s pretend.” she said, your mind. I nowhere.”) The Bug’s work scenes are isn’t easily fixed. Worse yet, it has a habit often caustically funny. At one meeting, of popping up when the company presi- Ethan notes of his boss Harry Minor, a dent demos the program for programming legend: Telligentsia’s venture capitalists or sales- MOVING? people show it to prospective clients like There was something reassur- the US Navy. The number of days the Don’t miss an issue! ing about the dome of Harry’s bug report remains open escalates— belly rising like a giant bagel there’s a running “days open” count at Please give us six to eight weeks’ notice of your change of address. We need under his Mr. Xinu T-Shirt. the beginning of each chapter—and your OLD address (on your mailing label, if possible) as well as your NEW Harry fingered the Xinu logo. Jester becomes Ethan’s personal nemesis. one. Send the information to: Address Change, The Women’s Review of “UNIX—“ His failure to find it parallels his dis- Books, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481, or phone toll-free 888-283- “—spelled backwards,” the integrating relationship with his girl- front-end team replied, groaning. friend Joanna. She leaves him after a trip 8044/ fax 781-283-3645/ email [email protected]. Harry was a man of habits. to India on which she began an affair (p. 36) with their mutual friend Paul.

26 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 Meanwhile, Ethan doggedly debugs his Yet it’s her androgynous appearance— code; starts wearing ear plugs and a tall, head almost shaved, big breasts wacky headband to block out all sound; under a man’s undershirt—that Ethan is and begins to drink heavily, joining his drawn to rather than her womanliness. Looking for Kath father’s “drunken fellowship of disap- Roberta, retrospectively commenting pointed men.” on this arid milieu, could have provided by Diana Postlethwaite a refreshing counterpoint. Looking his is where The Bug runs off the back at that time, she wryly points out, The Photograph by Penelope Lively. New York: Viking, rails. It’s not good when your gut “I might have considered what this T reaction to a character is “Get retreat from the outside world meant 2003, 231 pp., $24.95 hardcover. this man therapy—please!” If the great about me, about programming, about protagonists of literature went to weekly the technical life I was slipping into. But I sessions, there would be no novels, but coding was too compelling. It was all Ethan is so unaware of the humans in about creating a separate, artificial reali- he two central characters of and shapely novel are headed by a his orbit that his fall is pathetic rather ty inside the machine.” The Photograph are a landscape name or pair of names from among a than tragic. Even more problematic, the The question is, why didn’t she reflect T historian and a garden designer, small circle of acquaintance (“Glyn”; other characters viewed through his eyes on it? In the end, Roberta, still reserved quintessentially British occupations “Elaine”; “Elaine and Glyn”). seem equally immature and infuriating. and cynical after many lucrative years of whose concerns mirror author Characters come together, move apart, It’s most unfair with Joanna, who in car- software consulting, seems to have trav- Penelope Lively’s own. When Glyn trade partners and reconnect with pat- rying on so openly with her lover eled nowhere. Her final epiphany is Peters, the landscape historian, looks at terned precision. Like a skillfully appears to treat Ethan with cruel detach- intellectually satisfying but doesn’t pro- a map, he “[sees] not space and shape, trimmed topiary, each carries the rec- ment. Far too late it’s revealed that she vide any real insight into her emotional but an assemblage of time. He sees ognizable outline of a literary type: had good reason for doing so, an autho- stasis. The Bug contains many references centuries juxtaposed, superimposed, Glyn, the Aging, Amiable Wastrel rial manipulation that feels like a cheat. to artificial worlds and simulations, to carving each other up, pushing one Husband; Oliver, the Underestimated, Unsympathetic characters have made life mediated and diluted by technology, another out of the way.” Nebbish-y Sidekick; Polly, the readers squirm in many a novel, but what to Noam Chomsky and even Casaubon’s Lively, too, experiences time in this Judgmental Web-Designing Daughter; keeps us reading is how they got that “The Key to All Mysteries” in way. Here, as she often does in her fic- Elaine, the Overbearing Wife Who way. If people go crazy, we want to know Middlemarch. Any novel is an artificial tion, she reminds us that the well-cul- Heads a Garden-Design Empire (imag- why. If they destroy themselves or each construction, but in this one, emotions tivated landscape of England is a ine Martha Stewart here, as played by other, it should seem like it matters. seem dangerous—messy, unknowable, palimpsest. Dig down at any given Judi Dench). More than anything, the explanations “dormant viruses.” spot, and you’ll unearth layer upon But Lively’s is an organic sort of for- need to be convincing. Yet much of In the final countdown to catching layer of the past. In this novel, as in malism, flourishing on the “rich com- Ethan’s family history seems generic— Jester, Roberta argues that “reading the Glyn’s maps, the past is always pres- post” of astutely observed human the nerdy Jewish kid in anti-intellectual code was a matter of banishing the ent, “carving” and “pushing” charac- behavior and authorial imagination. Fresno, California—and what little is human story from my mind. I had to see ter and plot. The governing principle of The offered doesn’t come until many chap- what it was doing, not what Ethan The presence of the past also Photograph turns out to be not so much ters into The Bug. Like an angry teenager, intended it to do. There was something weighs formatively on Lively’s writing, the intricate narrative dance as it is the he blames everyone else—the other pro- that seemed disloyal in this. Stripping which is layered with literary influ- mysterious, empty space at the book’s grammers and testers (“It would mean, away Ethan’s person, [and]…the satis- ences, above all Jane Austen and center. In the middle of this empty up to this point, your testing hasn’t been factions of one person making contact Virginia Woolf. She admires the space is a vibrant, beautiful woman worth shit”); Paul (“The asshole fucked with another—it felt ruthless to discard Austenian virtues of “accuracy and named Kath—wife, lover, sister, aunt, his girlfriend, in his house, in his bed”); this experience as irrelevant. But so I concision” in writing, saying of her friend; deceased, recollected, obsessed Joanna (“Sorry, sorry, sorry, why didn’t had to do.” own work, “what I am always trying to over. What happened to Kath? And Joanna ever say she was sorry?”). Ethan It may be Ullman’s intention to turn do is to find ways of translating ideas why? This crucial information is with- realizes eventually that he screwed up by the emotional requirements of narrative and observations into a character and held from the reader, not as an Agatha ignoring her, but it’s never clear why he inside out—and to comment obliquely narrative.” And like Woolf, her fiction Christie-style tease, but because the loved Joanna in the first place. on a world that strips us of our human- repeatedly returns to “the ways in people who should have the answers Not surprisingly, the women in this ity—but a novel can’t banish the human which the physical world is composed cannot bear to think about the ques- insular male world are treated as annoy- story. Her take on Silicon Valley is cer- of memory.” tions. As the book progresses, it ing inferiors. Most of them are either tainly unsentimental, but she doesn’t Elaine Hammond, the The becomes clear that it is, in fact, these idiot sales staff in big-shouldered jackets underscore the larger implications of Photograph’s garden designer, absences—what is not felt, not or testers like Roberta whom the pro- what happened there in the 1980s. expressed—that provide real clues to grammers think don’t deserve the title of These days, almost anyone who uses a sees herself as shored up by the mystery. “quality-assurance engineer.” Marsha, computer is colluding in a reality deter- alley and arbor and knot garden, The Photograph begins with Kath’s Paul’s wife, is big and fleshy and prone to mined by Microsoft and AOL Time by pergola and parterre, by vista husband Glyn searching through a gooey hugs; even when she tries to com- Warner. This libertarian environment and axis and drift and focus. She dusty filing cupboard, “a landscape in miserate with Ethan, he feels “a sudden favors ironic detachment over displays is activated by emphasis, harmo- which everything coexists, requiring horror of embracing her.” There’s a proof genuine feeling and calls for social ny, and contrast. She flourishes expert deconstruction.” Looking for a foundly anti-female bias in the Teenage change. The Bug mirrors such an impov- on the rich compost of all that scholarly offprint, he unexpectedly Boy Land of computers, but this novel erished mental landscape, but its charac- she knows... a thousand plants comes upon a photograph of Kath provides little else to leaven it. Ute, the ters are left exactly where corporate cap- that she can conjure up in the holding hands with her sister’s husband, sexy German night administrator in italism wants them—and us: thinking we mind. (p. 144) Nick. The photograph is stored inside charge of backing up files, is the book’s have to devote endless hours to the an envelope marked “DON’T OPEN— most vital character, a bristling amalgam Machine, passively accepting our lot, Like Elaine, Lively is by tempera- DESTROY”; and an accompanying note of punkiness and New Age spirituality. disconnected from one another. I ment a formalist. Chapters of her spare suggests the two were having an affair.

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 27 wise, nor clever, nor well informed.” Glyn’s reaction to his wife’s infidelity is strangely unemotional. He treats Kath’s past as a research topic: “I am Imagination vs. reality not interested in recriminations. My concern is purely forensic... Kath is by Nancy B. Reich now my area of study.” Elaine, filled with “grim purpose,” Clara: A Novel by Janice Galloway. New York: Simon & Schuster, chucks her hapless husband out of the house, leading to some of the novel’s 2002, 425 pp., $25.00 hardcover. most humorous moments as Nick goes into Peter-Pan meltdown without I his steely wife/mother. Like Glyn, Elaine becomes obsessed with deter- n the verso of the title page of © Michael Wolchover © Robin Matthews © Robin mining “what really happened,” yet her novel, Clara, Janice Galloway Penelope Lively expresses surprisingly little love or O writes: “This book is a work of loss. Glyn and Elaine’s memories cre- fiction. Names, characters, places, and n Glyn’s mind, “Kath steps from ate another mystery at the heart of the incidents either are products of the the landing cupboard”; the past book: Why do the two people who author’s imagination or are used fictitious- I becomes the present, and a chain should have been closest to Kath ly. Any resemblance to actual events or of events is set in motion. In the appear to feel the least for her? locales or persons, living or dead, is entire- course of the novel, “many different It is only in the minds of Polly, ly coincidental.” Kaths” will appear to each character. Kath’s admiring young niece, and But the resemblance in this book to “She is fragmented now,” her sister, Oliver, an underling employee, that we names, characters, places, and incidents in Elaine, thinks. “The dead don’t go; glimpse tenderness, affection—and, the life of Clara Wieck Schumann, the they just slip into other people’s not coincidentally, a less superficial and eminent 19th-century pianist and compos- heads.” Though these images offer more sympathetic woman. “Still Kath er and the wife of Robert Schumann, can conflicting information about the is unreachable,” Polly thinks; but she hardly be termed “coincidental.” As a “real” woman, they will reveal a great “glimpses something in Kath’s eyes musicologist and biographer of Clara deal about the other characters, as they that perhaps she never saw before. Schumann, I was amazed at the accuracy remember her. Someone else looks out of them, of Galloway’s novel. She has done her Janice Galloway The novel’s living characters, egotis- someone sad.” homework: She has read most of the tically self-obsessed, share a compul- What was going on, in the final years recent scholarly books (which she of marriage, Clara Schumann never aban- sive bent toward order and control. of her life, behind Kath’s distractingly acknowledges) on Robert and Clara doned her career. She was considered one Kath, the reader discovers as the novel beautiful face and her effacingly accom- Schumann; she has visited Germany to see of Europe’s leading pianists throughout unfolds, was spontaneous and full of modating nature? Ironically, it is in the for herself the places portrayed; she is well her 60-year reign on the concert stage. life—temperamentally antithetical to mind of second-fiddle, fussbudget acquainted with the language; the names Despite Galloway’s disclaimer, readers these driven narcissists. Oliver—a cautious fellow who timidly of family members, friends, and acquain- and reviewers will accept her novel as Glyn remembers her as an unfo- admired Kath from afar—that we first tances are genuine; she describes, with authoritative. But there is a gap between cused dilettante: “Even when Kath did sense grief and glimpse a beauty beyond acumen, musicians such as Felix fiction and scholarly biography that work she did not appear to be doing Kath’s pretty face. “It seems incredible Mendelssohn, Fanny Hensel (Felix’s sis- should not be ignored. The scholarly so,” he recalls, and, “Kath had gaiety to Oliver that Kath will not suddenly ter), Franz Liszt, Joseph Joachim, biography is based on primary sources: and verve, but she was not especially walk into a room. Never again…” And Johannes Brahms, and Richard Wagner, letters to and from family, friends, and yet, through memory, he creates her. who were close friends or colleagues of acquaintances; diaries; family papers like “He sees her arriving thus with a great the Schumanns; and she knows the music certificates of birth, death, marriage, bap- tray of peaches in her arms.” performed and composed by Clara and tism, divorce, and medical information; The psychology of loss—and the her husband. She has added imagination school records; publications by the sub- redemptive power of memory—are and passion to her rendition of the life of ject; and reviews in local and national themes Lively has explored before. A this musician, creating an appealing fiction newspapers and magazines. For a musi- House Unlocked, the book that preceded that will surely lead to renewed interest in cian, biographical source material also The Photograph, traces the history of a Clara Schumann and the role of women in includes music studied, heard, and per- British country house, in Lively’s fami- European musical life in the 19th century. formed, and programs that list not only ly for over a century, sold after an Clara Wieck was born in Leipzig in the music played but the supporting aunt’s death. In writing its history, she 1819 to Marianne Tromlitz Wieck, a for- artists and even the kinds of instruments counters loss with the creative power mer pupil of Friedrich Wieck, Clara’s used. All this is put together in its social, of memory. father. Wieck was a domineering and political, and cultural context. The same elegiac tone permeates despotic man who owned a small music But merely presenting this mass of The Photograph. In the penultimate chap- business and was a master piano teacher, material can lead to a dull recital of facts. ter, entitled “Mary Packard,” we meet one of the city’s leading pedagogues. The scholarly biographer, who invariably the one person who truly loved Kath— After eight years of marriage, Clara’s par- loves, is intrigued by, or admires her sub- “Much more than the autobiography who saw her clearly and saw her whole. ents were divorced. Marianne had borne ject, must always select and speculate of an extraordinary woman, this is the This “wise woman” sitting calmly in five children, worked in her husband’s about the inner world of the subject, story of a century of French history. her “deeply inhabited room” is much music store, taught piano, and performed while citing the sources used to reach any Sand’s Story of My Life is a delight to as I imagine Penelope Lively herself to in Leipzig’s major concert hall as a singer conclusions. read.” –Germaine Brée be: “She is astute, she is generous, she and a pianist. When she left Leipzig, tak- “Sand recounts her own saga with is warm; she is also gifted with the ing her youngest infant son with her, her he novelist also selects, makes great gusto and unflinching honesty, power of detachment.” As Glyn speaks husband retained “possession” of the choices, and speculates—without and without any kind of self-pity. This with Mary Packard, “they bring Kath three other surviving children, two boys T citing sources—but is freer to use splendid translation is a landmark back to life.... They are clear-eyed; they and Clara. He was determined to give her, imagination to penetrate the characters achievement. It manages the feat of do not remember with sentimentality.... the eldest and most talented of his chil- and make them more vivid and more being both scrupulously faithful to the they are... performing a kind of ritual, dren, the best musical education possible. human. This is exactly what Galloway has original as well as highly readable.” they are paying tribute.” She was exceptionally receptive and done. She writes about Clara’s physical –Gita May The briefest of conclusions follows. learned rapidly, making her solo debut at sensibilities—what she smelled, how she “A work which fully does Sand jus- The outcomes for Polly, Nick, and the age of 11. Hailed by audiences and sweated, bled, and wept; her sexual activi- tice.” – Henri Peyre Elaine—wedding and reconciliation— critics as a wunderkind, she proceeded to ties and the pains of childbirth. While a are comedic. But we leave Oliver think- tour with her father throughout Germany, biographer might merely report on the Story of My Life: ing of “lacrimae rerum,” the tears at France, and Austria. The tours brought fact that Clara Schumann played a concert The Autobiography of George Sand the heart of things. Glyn returns to his money and fame to both Clara and her in Norderney one day after a miscarriage, A Group Translation edited by Thelma Jurgrau map of Britain, “layer upon layer, piled father. When the adolescent Clara and Galloway describes it this way: 1168 pages; unabridged and with index up, intersecting, making nonsense of Robert Schumann, a student of her chronology.” He has found a “new father’s and a budding composer, fell in Sitting on inch-thick towelling and $25.95 paper + $4.00 shipping Kath” but, paradoxically, he has experi- love and wanted to marry, Wieck’s objec- a constant slither of blood-clots, (NY residents add 7% sales tax) enced, in the final words of the novel, tions were nasty, deliberate, and public. her face white but composed ISBN 0-7914-0581-8 “a fresh, sharp deprivation.” After a long and bitter legal dispute with enough, she played a concert as State University of New York Press Social comedy, psychological mys- Wieck, Clara married Robert on the eve of soon as it could be set up for some c/o CUP Services, PO Box 6525, tery, and above all, elegy, this poignant her 21st birthday. Although she had eight local hall.... She would have worn Ithaca, NY 14851 and accomplished novel offers the rit- children, at least two miscarriages, and a black in case of staining but had (607) 277-2211; Visa, MasterCard, ual absolution of art, even as it husband who suffered from a severe men- brought none, so maroon served.... American Express acknowledges the painful absoluteness tal illness (probably manic-depression) She played Carnaval, taxing her fin- of grief. I and died of tertiary syphilis after 16 years gers, imagining the merriment of

28 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 dancing. Something with the feel One of her organizations issued a flyer and size of raw goose liver slicked showing the pope as a vampire threat- out of her on the final chords, her ening a terrified Statue of Liberty. Not stomach swilling. Maroon was cer- Separating church and state satisfied to vilify believers, she also shot tainly the sensible choice. Dizzy, her own troops by saying, “Most per- gripping the piano lid for support by Marie Shear sons who think they are Atheists are and finding it, she turned, smiling, ass-holes and nit-wits.” to her applause. (pp. 292-293) The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O’Hair by Bryan F. Le Beau. While O’Hair can fairly be taxed for spewing vitriol, it is unrealistic to over- I admired the strength and insight in New York: New York University Press, 2003, look the sexism of some of her ene- Galloway’s writing and was often caught mies. One noble soul wrote, “Dear up in the story even though I know it so 386 pp., $29.95 hardcover. Heathen Communist Bitch: …You well. But Galloway has a point to make, should have your tongue cut out and and here is where her imagination reigns. I your breast sliced off like slim sliced Clara is presented as a woman and wife of roast beef to make it more painful….” her time. According to Galloway, her love orty years ago this summer, mil- A similarly driven, sometimes Another said, “You probably have no for Robert prevailed over her own ambi- lions of Americans believed that unscrupulous man might have reached children either, let alone a man. Your tions, and she was prepared to sacrifice F the Antichrist had captured the the US Senate or chaired a giant com- hooked, ugly nose, triple chin and fat her talents and career for him. To help United States Supreme Court. It ruled, pany. Le Beau suggests persuasively ‘sloppy’ body are enough to make you make her point, Galloway uses in Murray v. Curlett, that public schools that the lack of outlets for O’Hair’s godless.” The writer who mocked Schumann’s song cycle Frauenliebe und had violated the First Amendment’s intellect and intensity contributed to O’Hair’s nose might have been molli- Leben as a framework for the book. Each ban on the establishment of religion by her fury and self-destructiveness. fied to learn of her anti-Semitism. of the eight chapters is headed with the requiring students to read the Bible and Like most crusaders, O’Hair was no Even her elder son, who became a title of a song from the cycle, which has recite the Lord’s Prayer in class. tea cozy. Her lustiness has its charms. born-again Christian and publicly apol- aroused much controversy in the 20th Horrified critics blamed the decision She said: ogized for having helped remove century. (Indeed, many women simply on a woman with a fierce opposition to prayer from schools, claimed that her will not sing it, despite the beauty of the religion, a yen for publicity, and a If I can’t come through this case “maniacal campaign to remove all ref- music.) Galloway fits Clara into the messy personal life: Madalyn Murray the same offensive, unlovable, erence to God in public schools and Frauenliebe mold of the wife who lives only O’Hair. bull-headed, defiant, aggressive government” stemmed from the osten- for her husband, whose life is over when O’Hair’s role in the case had begun slob that I was when I started it, sible fact that “Madalyn Murray was her husband dies. The novel ends, in fact, when she sued to stop a junior high then I’ll give up now. My own mad at men, and she was mad at God, with Robert Schumann’s death. school in Baltimore from requiring identity is more important to me. who was male.” Galloway writes, for example: daily Christian observances by students They can keep their g—damn Her relationship to feminism was like her 14-year-old son. Because an [sic] prayers in the public mercurial. She called herself “a militant Love was not kisses or children or earlier, related case had been brought schools, in public outhouses, in feminist,” refusing to fawn over men, even what was commonly called by a Pennsylvania family that shunned public H-bomb shelters, and in who preferred ditzy, submissive, younger happiness. It was the protection of publicity, O’Hair inaccurately but easily public whorehouses…. women anyway. In Le Beau’s words: what one loved best of all, at what- claimed sole credit for the ruling and (pp. 113-14) ever cost, and on that score she had began basking, says Bryan Le Beau, in a During the 1950s, if not earli- no doubts. Him. Without him, no reputation as “the most hated woman She said, “I love a good fight,” and “I er….she sought to change the family, no happiness at all and what in America.” (I refer to “O’Hair,” who want money and power and I am going status and condition of women else followed from that? Nothing used various surnames, because a last to get it,” and: in America….And like other worth having. Ergo, what mattered name seems more suitable than Le women reformers of the 1950s, was him. All she had to do was offer Beau’s frequent use of “Madalyn,” and I want a man with thigh muscles she shunned the title and compa- some necessary shelter. (p. 291) because she never married the man to give me a good frolic in the ny of the 1960s feminists while named Murray.) sack…and yet who can go to the fighting for many of the same Galloway depicts Clara as a woman During the cold war era, Le Beau ballet with me and discuss goals. (p. 231) who is first torn between her father and explains, Communism, subversion, and Hegelian dialectic....I want a man her lover; then between her career and her immorality were equated. Atheism was with a capacity for love—to give She applauded Susan B. Anthony husband’s; and between her career and her considered un-American. O’Hair thus it generously and accept it joy- and Margaret Sanger and assailed children. But the depiction of her as a “came to symbolize all that postwar ously. (p.132) churches, especially the Roman woman whose love for her husband led Americans hated and feared.” Being Catholic church, for opposing sex edu- her to sacrifice her career because she felt media savvy, she started reaching a In temperate moments, she could civilly cation, birth control, abortion rights, she had to care for him is simply wrong. nationwide audience with interviews, explain the dangers of state-sponsored and the Equal Rights Amendment. She Clara Schumann was unquestionably magazines, books, and lectures. Her religion or the meaning of atheism: accused Pope John Paul II of “crimes devoted to Robert’s music and his career: radio broadcasts were aired on 150 sta- against humanity” regarding women. She premiered all his piano works; spent tions; 100 cable stations carried her TV An Atheist loves his fellow man Yet she announced, “Compared to precious time arranging and transcribing programs. She established an atheist [sic] instead of god…believes most cud-chewing, small-talking, stupid his music for piano; put up with his irra- center, library, archive, and press. For that a hospital should be built American women…I’m a genius.” So tional remarks about her playing; and faced decades, she filed lawsuit after lawsuit instead of a church…that a much for sisterhood. down the committees who came to release to keep the issue of separation of deed should be done instead of him from his duties. But she kept her own church and state before the public. a prayer said. An Atheist…wants n 1995 O’Hair, her younger son, career going during years of continual As the cold war receded, “she flour- disease conquered, poverty ban- and her granddaughter disappeared. pregnancy and Robert’s mental illness. She ished in the more tolerant environment ished, war eliminated. He wants I Theories flew. Five years later, it organized the first chamber music concerts created by….civil rights leaders, femi- man to understand and love turned out that O’Hair’s former office in Dresden, and composed, taught, and nists, antiwar demonstrators, homosex- man [sic]. He wants an ethical manager, who was a convicted felon, gave triumphant public performances uals, and others.” But by 1995, when way of life.... (p.172) and several confederates had kidnapped throughout Germany’s major cities. she and two family members mysteri- the three victims, extorted $600,000 Galloway presents Robert Schumann ously vanished from their Austin, But she often refused to acknowl- from them, then murdered and disas a man who is always ill, on the verge of Texas, home, Le Beau says, she had edge that people can find strength and membered them. By then one confed- or in the midst of one breakdown after shrunk from “an American original” to comfort in religion without becoming erate had been found murdered— another, an alcoholic who barely manages a caricature. arrogant or sanctimonious and can live minus his clothes, hands, and head. The to run what she refers to as “a musical Born in 1919, O’Hair was too well morally without impinging upon oth- remains of the dismembered three were newspaper,” and who also composes. educated and restive to be a proper ers’ rights. On the contrary, she said: not located until 2001. O’Hair’s elder That Robert Schumann was a warm and wife and mommy of the 1950s and too “[I]f a person is once in the clutches of son buried them in an unmarked grave. caring father, a man with many friends, an female to get a job worthy of her mind the priests, his intellect becomes bar- According to Le Beau, only the son influential critic, an editor who founded and her law degree. “I had wanted so ren…and instead religious maggots knows where the grave is. “My mother and built up a prestigious music journal desperately to fit in,” she wrote. But “I and divine worms wriggle through his was an evil person,” he said. still in existence, a manager who made all could not engage in conversation about brain.” Unfortunately, O’Hair mothered few the business arrangements with publish- which bleach was the whitest for the influential institutions that survived her, ers for his and Clara’s music, and one of wash.” Iconoclastic, ambivalent, out- We find the Bible to be nauseat- perhaps due to the combination of per- the greatest, most innovative composers raged, and gnawed by intermittent self- ing, historically inaccurate, sonal failings, other activists’ jealousies, of his time is overlooked. doubt, she belonged nowhere. replete with the ravings of mad- and sexism. Today, the need for such Did Galloway do this in order to mag- Eventually, her personal life would men. We find God to be sadistic, institutions is urgent, for the tide of nify the image of Clara and her accept- include a divorce; two children born brutal, and a representation of presumptuous pietism rises by the hour. ance of the role of the “good wife”? This out of wedlock by men who denied hatred, vengeance. We find the Each week brings accelerating is where her fiction obscures fact. Clara paternity until she took them to court; Lord’s Prayer to be that mut- demands that right-wing Christianity be will—and should—be long remembered, occasional charges of assault by, and tered by worms groveling for made our national religion, pressed but the reader must not forget that it is, as upon, her; and an attempt to become a meager existence in a traumatic, upon us by “President” Bush (as Galloway clearly tells us, a novel. I Soviet citizen. paranoid world. (p. 85) Michael Moore calls him) wielding fed-

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 29 eral appointments and funds and by Burns’s tone is occasionally uneven, zealots in state and local government however. At times, the writing borders on and the private sector. People who silly, or becomes mired in a bitter rage that believe in the separation of church and Living with autism readers might shy away from, as when state may be smeared as demonic Bridget is talking with a patronizing psy- pagans bent on persecuting faith-based by Heidi Bell chiatrist and thinks, “Oh, brush me off, organizations—“faith-based” having you fucking douche bag. Just admit your replaced “religious and parochial,” even Tilt by Elizabeth Burns. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks Landmark, system sucks and your staff are nitwits.” in mainstream media usage. “Bully pul- The novel is also marred by stereotypes: pit” has a new meaning now. 2003, 275 pp., $22.00 hardcover. the wealthy, disinterested mother, the Le Beau’s conclusions seem clear- effeminate gay male friend who calls every- eyed and judicious, not sexually stereo- I one “hon,” and the handsome, emotionally typical. He offers evidence that O’Hair distant hero with a secret. While Bridget’s could be a dictatorial egomaniac who rom the first page of Elizabeth Understandably, Bridget wrestles with mother eventually rises above type, Pierce perennially alienated potential allies. Burns’ debut novel Tilt, we know conflicting feelings for her daughter, whom never transcends his first appearance, “But,” he says, “during one of the most F that something has gone terribly she imagines “locked inside the world of which is like something out of a romance difficult times in American history, she wrong in protagonist Bridget Fox’s life. vision and sound where everything is dis- novel. Bridget first sees him at an opening pushed the reality of unbelief to the Bridget alludes in her brief opening pas- torted, where she sees specks floating in of one of his sculpture exhibits: fore and made the nation reconsider its sage to the deaths of loved ones and the people’s eyes, where she can hear the toast- assumptions concerning nonbelievers.” “diagnosis” of her young daughter Maeve, er toasting, her own blood flowing, can feel A very tall man smoking a black cig- Le Beau has extensively examined but we don’t know yet why she stands at her toes rubbing against her socks.” At arette was leaning against a wall. His O’Hair’s published writing, radio tran- the meat case in the grocery store “think- times, Bridget exults in the feeling of hav- blond hair was pulled back in a scripts, and personal diaries. But I wish ing my stomach was clenched so tight that ing reached into Maeve’s world, as when ponytail. He was dressed in jeans this volcanic woman had prompted a I would never stand up straight again.” she first takes Maeve swimming: and a jean shirt and a bolo tie. But more vibrant biography. If Nicholson This foreshadowing gives way to a tour of the thing that made me want to Baker can write a spellbinding book Bridget’s past, where we learn of her priv- She pranced on her tiptoes, begin- weep was his nose. It was big and about libraries replacing old newspa- ileged upbringing, her seemingly casual ning to bounce. I placed a hand on crooked and made his eyes so deep pers with microfilm, Double Fold, then a tutoring career, and her failed marriage to either side of her waist and bounced and direct and, well, piercing. (p. 22) complex zealot who met a gruesome Philip, who cheated on her with a neigh- with her, giggling, watching her gig- end should have inspired a page-turn- bor, a Vogue model. Bridget is far from gle, and then laughing, both of us Am I mistaken, or does Pierce resemble er. (Sequentially numbered footnotes perfect herself, we discover, when, con- laughing. And then I pulled her Fabio? and better proofreading would have fronted by Philip, she reluctantly reveals close to me and that’s when I knew Of course, every woman and gay man helped, too.) her own infidelities. she was fine. That was the first time in the gallery is eyeing Pierce, but he offers In the end, O’Hair reminds me of After divorcing Philip, Bridget marries I felt a beam like a glow just radiate his private stash of Scotch only to Bridget. Rose, the protagonist of Arthur Pierce, a sculptor, who takes a position as from her and hit me in the middle. When he accidentally spills some of the Laurents’ superb Broadway musical, an art professor at the University of She was lit from the inside. She had liquor on her chest, Pierce takes off his Gypsy, about a stage mother who has Minnesota, uprooting Bridget and their her own generator. And it was just own shirt—despite the roomful of peo- often, wrongly, been labeled a monster. daughter Maeve from the east coast. Pierce my own good fortune to have her ple—to cover up her sweater, though he In the musical’s last scene, Rose shouts: is moody and unpredictable, but Bridget this close to me, in my life, burning couldn’t possibly have done more than “You wanna know what I did it for?! accepts this limitation as the price of his away my foolishness and igniting dribble on her. Did Burns intend an altru- Because I was born too soon and started too artistic prowess. It is a price she pays more something true.… (p. 144) istic gesture here or macho posturing? late, that’s why!” I and more unwillingly as the pillars of her Bridget fails to comment on Pierce’s support system fall away. Bridget is preg- These moments of communion stand strange behavior, so awed is she by his Copyright © 2003 Marie Shear nant with her second child when her in heartbreaking contrast to moments hairy chest and broad shoulders. Later, cousin and best friend Nessa dies of breast when Bridget becomes overwhelmed by Pierce’s stilted dialogue and histrionics cancer. Not long after, her father dies of Maeve’s need of constant supervision, her stand out in a narrative otherwise marked kidney cancer. Isolated and grief stricken, moaning and knocking herself against the by more lyrical expressions of pain. Bridget is unprepared for her increasing furniture. Then, Bridget screams at Maeve The events that make up Tilt’s plot— difficulties with Pierce, who is finally diag- or shakes her until they both cry. death, diagnoses, mental health crises, hos- nosed as manic depressive. Meanwhile, pitalization—repeat themselves as the plot doctors decide that what they initially y pairing Bridget with Maeve, Burns move toward its climax, making the dramat- labeled “developmental delays” in Maeve forces Bridget to take on responsi- ic arc a curlicue rather than a line and mud- PRESIDENT are actually signs of autism. B bility of a magnitude we suspect she dling the novel’s sense of time. Sometimes It takes all this death and destruction to would never have assumed otherwise. it’s unclear where a certain hospitalization or DUKE make Bridget Fox an interesting character. Novelist Charles Baxter calls this technique outburst lies in relation to the present Initially she is largely indistinguishable “counterpointed characterization,” where- action, which Burns indicates by narrating UNIVERSITY from the blur of casually dissatisfied and by “certain kinds of people are pushed in present tense. In contrast, flashbacks are emotionally immature young women who together, people who bring out a crucial written in past tense; but Burns doesn’t populate contemporary literary fiction. She response to each other. A latent energy rises always present them in chronological order. The Board of Trustees of Duke is young and lovely (a redhead with large to the surface, the desire or secret previous- Bridget’s father dies, for instance, while he is University invites nominations and breasts), intelligent, lazy in both work and ly forced down into psychic obscurity.” still a minor character, a mildly amused expressions of interest for President. relationships, ironic, a sucker for conven- Before Maeve, Bridget seemed incapable of voice we’ve heard once or twice on the tele- The successful candidate is expected tional male beauty, and predictably com- or unwilling to make conscious decisions, phone, and we don’t know him well enough to be a person of high academic forted in times of crisis by chocolate, ciga- instead drifting in and out of cities, job yet to share Bridget’s loss. rettes, alcohol, and extramarital sex. When assignments, relationships. Being responsi- Despite its shortcomings, Tilt is impor- distinction and demonstrated her life becomes a catastrophe, we can’t ble for Maeve—who is almost pure id, an tant for its depiction of the intimate effects leadership qualities. Screening of help but wonder if Bridget has what it extreme magnification of Bridget’s previ- of autism—a disorder whose numbers are candidates will begin on June 30, takes to survive. ous self-absorption—forces Bridget across inexplicably on the rise. Of course, autism 2003 and will continue until an It is her struggle with the ineffable the threshold into adulthood. has been depicted on television, in movies, appointment is made. Inquiries, forces of Maeve’s disorder that reveals As she tells Philip, her ex-husband, and in the occasional novel, but the stories applications and recommendations Bridget’s tenacity and stubborn strength. when he comes to her apartment intending usually revolve around high-functioning She can blame the demise of her first mar- to take care of and, ultimately, seduce her, autistics with a penchant for mathematical may be directed in confidence to: riage on Philip’s and her own failings; she “You can’t rescue me… I have to direct the genius, like Dustin Hoffman’s character in can be righteously angry with Pierce for not way things go. I have to fix them or make Rain Man. In contrast, Burns draws us into Robert K. Steel, Chair using the tools at his disposal to regulate his them go away or take them apart. I can’t let a world that most likely reflects a more disease; she can grieve for Nessa and her things go by; I can’t float ever again.” common experience, a world in which par- Presidential Search Committee father. But responding to the distressing At its best, Burns’s writing is clear, bit- ents of autistic children must coordinate Duke University puzzle that is Maeve is more complicated. ing, and poetic, which seems only appro- care and advocate unceasingly for kids Box 90871 There is no one to blame for what’s hap- priate, since the author has won multiple who are given to violent rages and cannot Durham, NC 27708-0871 pening to Maeve and no one to explain why awards for her poetry. Her run-on prose communicate beyond pointing to the she moans and tears off her clothes and style is especially effective at communi- refrigerator to indicate hunger. What [email protected] licks her father’s sculptures. And while the cating Bridget’s passion and pain. Burns Burns illustrates so well in Tilt is the autism diagnosis eventually justifies Maeve’s also has a good instinct for cutting the relentless cycle of hope and despair, how behavior, it also illuminates the grave reali- harrowing events of the novel with the moth of human consciousness beats ty of her future. Autism is a brain disorder humor. Bridget’s younger daughter, Cleo, itself against the glass of the inevitable, with no known cure, the current therapies asks about her grandfather, for instance, the incurable, the inexplicable, in search of for which are intensive, time consuming, and when Bridget explains that he is in answers. Because she is Maeve’s mother, Duke Is An Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer and only sporadically effective, if effective heaven, Cleo says, “You mean he dived?” Bridget must keep hope alive, even at all. Many low-functioning autistics need “Yes, he dived,” Bridget responds when—especially when—there is little rea- care around the clock all their lives. straight-faced. son to hope. I

30 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 espite my earlier criticism of more woman-centered pleasure impa- Harry Robin’s use of antiquated tient. But I enjoyed those moments DGreek language, I was also occa- when this energy was dispersed with par- Sex among the ancients sionally taken aback by what seemed to me odic or ironic material: in the Arabic tale somewhat anachronistic use of modern or “The Man of Quality,” translator Jim by Peg Aloi culturally inappropriate terminology (like Colville lends his characters suitably “mother-in-law”) within otherwise ancient foolish-sounding macho pronounce- The Virago Book of Erotic Myths and Legends and authentic-sounding translations. Since ments, as with: “Madam, you’ve just this book is clearly meant for English-lan- fucked me. What more do you want?” At edited by Shahrukh Husain. London: Virago, guage readers, I can chalk this up to least one account is a poetic celebration Husain wanting as accessible a translation of self-pleasuring (“The Arousal of 2003, 295 pp., $14.95 paper. as possible, but at times, the euphemisms Innanna”) and some texts go beyond a for genitalia made me want to laugh aloud, corporeal, earthbound definition of I so reminiscent were they of a clumsy eroticism, as in the closing piece, “I paperback romance novel, like this pas- Whirl,” from a conversational and poetic t seems what we once called “erotica” ernized, but otherwise the writing is engag- sage: “Cautiously he guided his bellwether piece by Rumi. has undergone a slow, meandering ing. In Husain’s reworking of “Hera’s through the gates of her pleasure house, Any reader who wonders what has I death beneath the crushing weight of Deceit,” Zeus’ jealous wife contrives to and then began to remove the rest of her become of literary erotica would do well amateur Internet porn and the rising costs wreak revenge on her philandering mate, clothes.” (from “The Vernal Palace”) But I to peruse this collection. In returning to of maintaining an independent press. but also to rekindle his passion for her subsequently realized such terms were the roots of human civilization for her Anthologies abound that specialize in (“She smoothed her ambrosial unguent used ironically, calling attention to an illus- survey of the mythic erotic, Husain has niche forms of erotic fiction: vampires, into her hair, the luminous gold flowing trated sex manual studied by the character recultivated terrain already rediscovered horror, celebrity, and various combina- like streams to her knees…”). A poem by to aid his seduction. by other modern harvesters of ancient tions of sexual proclivity and ethnicity, but Sappho describes the goddess Aphrodite’s There is, perhaps predictably, an lore: historic re-enactment enthusiasts, form is often sacrificed on the bloody altar decision to return the poet’s lover to her: emphasis on heterosexual relationships neo-pagans, folklorists, feminist anthro- of micro-genre. Get a gander at the “Again whom must I persuade back into (apart from the aforementioned Sapphic pologists and archaeologists, poets and “slash” fiction on the Net for a real eye- the harness of your love? Sappho, who poem). The phallocentricity of some of musicians, artists, and, in more than one opening glimpse at contemporary amateur wrongs you?…if not now loving, soon the tales might make readers hoping for sense, lovers of the ancients. I erotica that strains at the seams of a genre she’ll love even against her will.’” attempting to transcend cyberporn. These The collection contains prose and stories are often written by fans of popu- verse from medieval China, ancient lar fantasy-based TV shows (the “slash” Egypt, Canaan, the South Pacific, Wales, refers to the mark that divides the two England and Ireland, North America, people thrown into a parodic and puerile Syria, Iran, Iraq, India, and Turkey. The pairing: to use one ubiquitous example, pagan sensibility informing these legends Buffy the Vampire Slayer has spawned reams is apparent, the imagery infused with ani- of the stuff, with every conceivable com- mistic belief and the sensual rhythms, bination: Buffy/Willow, Anya/Giles, and scents, and colors of nature. In “The the most popular slash coupling, Sacrifice” a fertility and sacrifice ritual is Xander/Spike). One longs (yes, it’s a nos- enacted; it is the story of Mithras, a solar talgia thing) for the type of literary erotica and vegetation god whose mythology is purveyed, for example, by Anaïs Nin. considered an ancient precursor to the Little wonder that some scholars turn Christ myth. Rewritten by Husain, even to ancient mythic texts to recapture what the segments describing nonsexual has fallen by the wayside. The Kama Sutra scenes are erotically charged: “Life con- still enjoys a steadily loyal stream of ceived, life sacrificed: a display of the perusers, but a recent artful film by award- goddess in her infinite magnificence and winning filmmaker Mira Nair (Mississippi munificence, expanding, filling up first Masala) that met with a lukewarm recep- with the life to come, then bursting forth, tion suggests that enthusiasts of erotic spilling her multiple bounties from the material find something hokey and overly world to enjoy and celebrate.”. familiar about the language and imagery of In “The Queen of the Summer antiquity’s most notorious sex manual. Country,” the well-loved story of London-based editor Shahrukh Husain’s Lancelot and Guenevere is mined for an new collection contains excerpts from answer to a historically intriguing ques- tales which seem to have been intended as tion: Did the lovers consummate their sex manuals, too; but in the updated, affair at the Castle of Dolorous Garde? reimagined translations, we get a satisfy- Archeologists have for centuries debated ingly diverse sampling of ancient erotic the existence of authentic “Arthurian” writings with a mythological and often artifacts and locales. Rosalind Miles spiritual component. imbues her description of the tryst with a Spanning centuries and continents, the deeply sensitive, even magical, sense of collection’s stories and poems are divided place: “Outside the window the moon into sections entitled “Awakenings,” shone down on groves of white “Desire,” “Games of Love,” “Tales of hawthorn and roses with silver leaves, Lust and Ribaldry,” and “Love Beyond making their branches sing. The pale fra- Life.” Husain has retooled some of these grance of apple blossom was in the air. texts herself, but has also enlisted the help She kissed his mouth hungrily, and felt of translators, poets and writers such as his hunger rise. She kissed him again, she Ananda Devi, Henry Adams Bellows, was starving for him—oh, my love, my love.” Elizabeth Gray, and other assorted schol- Some pieces are elegantly brief. The ars. Erotic content is found where many of Japanese creation myth “Izanagi and us have been unaccustomed to seeing it: for Izanami” relates the story of a divine pair example, in the Greco-Roman tales, known of lovers whose sexual union begets all for their rich relationship dynamics and of humanity. “The Tobacco Plant” is but nature imagery, but not normally for sexu- a paragraph long, and describes the wide- al language. In “Amaltheia and Chryse,” we spread use of tobacco in Native find a virginal Zeus being schooled in the American ceremony as a result of the dis- arts of love, his demeanor towards covery of the plant growing where a women—usually sexist and abusive— young couple first made love. Songs and strangely tender. It is made all the more ballads are included as well, like the interesting for the first-person narrative: “I Icelandic “Ballad of Skirnir,” a vivid little lay down close to her and brought her face drama whose players inhabit the leg- to face, belly to belly, so that our noses endary Land of the Frost Giants and almost touched. When I smelled her spiced speak to one another in prophecies and breath I brushed her lips with mine. I had curses: “With three-headed giants as never known a kiss!” Harry Robin’s spelling eternal companions/ You’ll never find a of “klitoris” with a “k” seems precious, as husband. May you be gripped with desire, does the arcane use of “phallos” and “kon- wasted with longing,/ May you be like the nos,” when the rest of the language is mod- thistle thrown in a loft and crushed.”

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 31 But this was only the beginning of to questions about whether women their ordeal. The second phase of testing belonged in space at all, and eventually could be conducted only at the NASA even Lovelace withdrew his support. Into the blue facilities, and NASA insisted that it had Cobb moved to Washington to lobby neither the time nor the money to waste the Senate and Congress. She and Janey by Alice Kessler-Harris on testing women it did not need. By the Hart (one of the 12 women, wife of a spring of 1961, the Soviets had launched senator, and a mother of eight children) The Mercury 13: The Untold Story of Thirteen American a man into space, beating the United met with Vice President Lyndon States by a matter of several weeks. Johnson to persuade him to intervene Women and the Dream of Space Flight by Martha Months later, President Kennedy with NASA on their behalf. Johnson not announced his goal to put a man on the only refused to write a letter of support, Ackmann. New York: Random House, 2003, moon before the end of the decade. In but urged NASA to “stop this now.” the view of NASA director James Webb, Finally, a House subcommittee agreed to 227 pp., $24.95 hardcover. his facilities were already overused, and hold hearings to explore the issue of he had no intention of putting women whether NASA was discriminating I into space. against women. Despite Cobb’s and Hart’s eloquent testimony, the hearings t the heart of the American exclusionary nature also “compromised errie Cobb was not easily dissuaded lasted barely two days before they disin- dream is the belief in opportuni- fundamental principles of democracy” from her goal. She sought and got tegrated in mockery. All the testing had A ty. This is a country, so the myth that the program meant to represent. J psychological and psychiatric tests been for naught. goes, in which everyone with gumption, The Mercury 13 documents the post- that paralleled those given to astronauts Although Martha Ackmann has not self discipline, and the capacity for hard Sputnik attempts of a small group of in training. She subjected herself to so perfected the storyteller’s art, this excit- work can make the best of herself. The women to demonstrate that they could many hours of isolated submersion ing story is well worth reading. Cobb story of the Mercury 13 is the heart- function in space as effectively as men. underwater that she outlasted every man emerges as the lead player in the effort: rending tale of a group of women who The author recounts the conviction of who had taken the test before her. And we follow her determined and often discovered the hard way that the Dr. Randolph Lovelace, director of the she demonstrated an awesome invulner- lonely struggle, feel her frustrations as American dream did not apply to them. space-medicine program and the ability to the hallucinations that affected the infrastructure refuses to bend under In the late l950s, when the US first Albuquerque laboratory that tested all most test-takers. Astonishingly, two of the weight of the women’s evident began to take space flight seriously, the potential astronauts, that women might the other 12 women surpassed Cobb’s prowess. We learn less of the other 12 goals were ideological as well as techni- be better candidates for space flight than achievement when it came to their turn “astronettes,” many of whom remain cal. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik men. Lovelace had a hunch that women’s to be tested. shadowy figures identified only by their (the first orbiting satellite) in 1957. lower body weights and their lesser For the third phase, Lovelace helped reputations as pilots or by their difficul- Fearing Soviet control of space would demands for oxygen and food might give Cobb find a Navy testing facility that ties in finding babysitters while arranging threaten national defense, the US quickly them an advantage in situations where duplicated NASA’s equipment. As quick- to be tested. And yet all of them were put together the NASA (the National existing booster rockets could barely lift ly as she could arrange it, Cobb put her- women of extraordinary courage who Aeronautical and Space Administration) heavy spacecraft. No one knew, however, self through a ten-day ordeal designed to remained loyal to the program for years. space program and set out to beat the whether women had the physical and test her reaction to such things as They sacrificed income, jobs, and, in one Russians. President Dwight Eisenhower mental stamina to withstand space travel. “space-high altitudes, high G-loads, case, a marriage to their desire to hoped to reestablish US technological By the fall of 1959, Lovelace had motion sickness, violent seat ejection” become astronauts. Though her story superiority, and he believed that the US found an ideal test subject in Jerrie Cobb, and her ability “to escape from a sub- sometimes gets bogged down in details, lagging behind would reflect poorly on the first of the women who became merged cockpit.” Once again Cobb Ackmann tells us that at least some of American democracy. The race to put known as the Mercury 13. An experi- passed—her scores equaling those of the women understood, as Janey Hart someone in space had begun. enced pilot with several high altitude the navy pilots tested. Gleefully mailing did, that “NASA’s dismissal of the Eager to catch up to the USSR, records to her credit and an ardent advo- her scores to James Webb, she called his women was part of a larger system of Eisenhower encouraged NASA to search cate of space flight, Cobb enthusiastically attention to the Soviets’ announced social bias that restricted women’s for potential astronauts among those who agreed to participate in the medical test- intent to put a woman in space, and opportunity in nearly every aspect of might already be both skilled and emo- ing that was the first phase of the three- asked him to admit her and the other 12 American life.” tionally prepared. The call for candidates tiered astronaut testing program. Secretly, women to training. The core of the story parallels the went only to military jet test pilots with at she flew to Lovelace’s Albuquerque head- But Cobb’s luck had run out. emergence of second wave feminism. least a thousand hours of flight time. In quarters and endured a rigorous ten-day Formally, Webb responded constructively Here were 13 women who wanted 1958, this group excluded women entire- testing program that included hours of by asking her to be a NASA adviser. opportunity above all, 13 women who ly, and contained precious few men of hearing, vision, and physical stamina tests. Informally, he and other government and would have laid their lives on the line to color. The first seven astronauts, the When she passed with flying colors, space officials began to question whether prove that women deserved a chance to Mercury 7, introduced to the public in the Lovelace revealed her identity, and Cobb they had let the women go too far. The become the best they could be. Sadly, spring of l959, were Protestant white was immediately labeled the country’s 12 other women found their space tests they had come to maturity a little too males in their thirties. As Martha “first woman astronaut.” Cobb then par- unaccountably delayed time after time, early. In January 1961, at the peak of their Ackmann tells us in her inspiring chroni- ticipated in selecting 12 other women—all and then canceled altogether. Publicity struggle, John Fitzgerald Kennedy estab- cle of women’s efforts to join this elite pilots with at least 1,000 hours of flying leaks had by now revealed the names of lished a Presidential Commission on the group, the choice “placed expedience time—all of whom promptly undertook all 13 women to an expectant public. Status of Women (PCSW) to investigate ahead of equity.” Perhaps ironically, its the same medical tests and passed. Jealousies among other women pilots led women’s place in American society. By 1963, little more than a year after the humiliating congressional hearing, an Equal Pay Act passed Congress. In the summer of 1964, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act ending job discrimination on the grounds of sex as well as race was signed into law by the same president who as vice president had so cavalierly urged an end to the ambitions of female astronauts. Was the PCSW aware of the women’s struggle? Why didn’t the women in Congress take up their cause? Did the press make the obvious connections between women’s rights and women’s opportunities? What about the women? 1(: These questions remain unanswered. In 1983, 25 years after Cobb tried to break the gender barrier, Sally Ride ( 221 became the first woman in space. In : ·0 l999, Eileen Collins became the first :$// *5((7,1* woman to pilot a spacecraft. It had taken fully 40 years for women to achieve Jerrie &$/(1'$56 &$5'6 Cobb’s dream. Collins, to her credit, knew something of history: She invited '$7(%22.6 the 11 surviving members of the Mercury 13 to attend her launching. -/4(%24/.'5%).+ Jerrie Cobb stood a little apart from the 3%3.5&&).2/!$ %34!#!$! /2 group as they celebrated their part in 4/,,&2%% / 7%-//. 7777%-//.73 making it possible for girls to share in the American dream. I

32 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 graphical retelling of her stormy if loving would’ve been an entirely different relationship with her tempestuous, flam- story! (p. 194) boyant sister Diana. The Diana character, Some anti-Bridgets called Julia, is played by actress Kelly Til Death Do Us Part is produced by Cavanna, whose tantrums and grand ges- Peter Heller, a cutie with his own emo- by Margaret Weigel tures match the late sister’s behaviors. tional knots to untangle. Jennifer is Jennifer begins to identify Kelly with immediately smitten, and though the Coffee and Kung Fu by Karen Brichoux. New York: Diana. At the cathartic moment of the attraction appears mutual, she shuts novel, Jennifer replaces Kelly’s onstage down emotionally in the clinches: New American Library (Penguin/Putnam), counterpart at the last minute. Playing herself, she finally expresses her pent-up And there, as if on cue, was my 2003, 256 pp., $12.95 paper. rage to her sister’s stand-in in a safe envi- sister hovering over me. “You ronment, a fine example of Adlerian cog- think you’re going to enjoy your- We Can Still Be Friends by Kelly Cherry. New York: nitive therapy in action: self? You think I’m enjoying myself? How dare you enjoy your- Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003, 288 pp., Melanie [the Jennifer character]: I self…?” … But I did my best. have lived… my entire life… with Tried to get her out of my mind… $24.00 hardcover. your unhappiness looming over A few minutes later… he came Thoughts While Having Sex by Stephanie Lehmann. me. Like a stunted little scraggly out of the bathroom. And he sat bush growing under the shade of down next to me and put his arm New York: Kensington Books, 2003, a gigantic overgrown tree with around me and leaned towards me huge fat branches that snake like he was going to kiss me again, 244 pp., $14.00 paper. around me like tentacles sucking and my anxiety overtook me and I the life out of me. I wanted your said, of all things, “Maybe you I suffering out of the way, out of should get going.” (pp. 134-135) my life. I wanted you dead! Dead lame it on Bridget. Nothing trig- as casual bonds of friendship and sex are and gone! Because if you had For a novel hyped as a Bridget-style gers a trend like a runaway suc- formed mainly out of convenience. never lived. Just image. My life. I chick lit romp, broad humor, light- B cess, and Bridget Jones, Helen There is one individual, though, who Fielding’s slightly plump, neurotic hints at a more nuanced complexity who charmer, has been transformed from a might be able to engage Nicci: the enig- humble newspaper column character to a matic waiter at the diner around the cor- “Inner Lives soars” —Book magazine lucrative international brand. Someone, ner from Nicci’s workplace: somewhere, is getting rich, and it would be strange indeed if the entertainment For the first time since I came Inner Lives: industry did not scour the globe search- to this city, I feel like I’ve actually ing for the next sweet singleton to talked to someone. I take a deep Voices of African American Women In Prison enchant the masses. For better or for breath and say what I want to say worse, publishers seem to be doing just before I lose my nerve. by Paula C. Johnson that. The risk is that some delightful, “I wish I’d taken that break with a Foreword by Joyce A. Logan and an Afterword by Angela J. Davis non-Bridget nugget of a story will be over- with you.” looked during the general gold rush, or, His eyes widen a fraction, then “Johnson gives [African American women prisoners] visibility and worse, forced to dress up in Jones’ he smiles. (p. 24) clothes. Of the three new releases voice as they relate their lives, their crimes, and their efforts to reviewed here, two are inappropriately The novel tracks the softening of remain connected to families and communities...powerful.” Booklist pegged as foot soldiers in the Bridget Nicci’s emotionally hidebound nature as army, while a third escapes that cruel fate she grows from a testy coworker into a and is allowed to stand on its own young woman who begins to appreciate Inner Lives provides readers the rare opportunity to intimately connect A promotional blurb for newcomer the depth of the lives around her: with African American women prisoners. By presenting the women’s Karen Brichoux’s Coffee and Kung Fu “[Melissa] smiles at me. One of those stories in their own voices, Paula C. Johnson, who also took the black declares “Step aside, Bridget and Jemima! angels around the baby Jesus kind of and white photographs of her interviewees, captures the reality of There’s a new chick lit heroine on the smiles… And I realize she’s not who I block!” That heroine is twentysomething thought she was, not who she pretended those who are in the system, and those who are working to help them. Nicci Bradford, a graphic designer in to be.” Toward the end of the novel, Johnson offers a nuanced and compelling portrait of this fastest- Boston who spends her days getting Nicci, like a dutiful Bridget acolyte, averts growing prison population by blending legal history, ethnography, through the 9 to 5 grind and her evenings a train wreck of a marriage with Mr. sociology, and criminology. The rate of women entering prison has curled up with a pint of quality ice cream Seems-Like-a-Real-Catch-But-is-Totally- watching obscure Kung Fu flicks. Wrong-for-Her and makes a daring play increased nearly 400 percent since 1980, with African American Like Bridget Jones’ Diary, Kung Fu relies for Coffee Boy. Unlike Bridget, however, women constituting the largest percentage of this population. on the first-person voice of a protagonist Nicci’s initial emotional brittleness makes However, despite their extremely disproportional representation in whose relationship with media provides her character difficult to root for. insight into the character’s mindset and This is Brichoux’s first novel, and her correctional institutions, little attention has been paid to African motivations. Bridget’s medium is her voice seems to be still under construc- American women’s experiences within the criminal justice system. diary; Nicci’s is her Kung Fu movies, tion. There are some odd narrative which serve as a handy mirror of her life digressions, such as when the narrator Paula C. Johnson’s striking photographic portraits and her vivid narra- or support a tenet in her belief system. veers away from Nicci and Coffee Boy tives of women inmates are accompanied by equally compelling argu- After her coworker Carol mistakenly sharing their first pot of tea to a discus- believes Nicci has betrayed her, Nicci sion of the origins of the teapot, but ments by Johnson on how to reform our nation’s laws and social poli- muses: there are also clever and heartfelt turns of cies in order to eradicate existing inequalities. Johnson’s thorough and phrase as well. Coffee and Kung Fu is an insightful analysis of the historical and legal background of contem- The Young Master is a movie about easy read, well-suited for long weekends porary criminal law doctrine, sentencing theories, and correctional loyalty. Broken loyalty between a or extended beach breaks. master and student, unselfish loy- policies sets the stage for understanding the current system. alty of one brother to another, he title of Stephanie Lehmann’s and ultimately, the loyalty that Thoughts While Having Sex con- Inner Lives’s author Paula C. Johnson is Professor of Law at Syracuse University comes from forgiveness. The T jures up tales of a saucy wench College of Law and Co-President of the Society of American Law Teachers. theme of loyalty isn’t just in The doing the town, a Bridget meets Barbarella Joyce A. Logan, author of the book’s Foreword and a former inmate in the Texas Young Master, it’s the hinge which meets the Kama Sutra intellectual erotic prison system, is an advocate for prisoner rights and education. swings most Kung Fu movies adventure. The novel itself, however, Angela J. Davis, author of the Afterword, is Professor of Law at the Washington p. 25) contains minimal canoodling at best. In Thoughts, protagonist Jennifer Ward is College of Law at American University and former Director of the District of Bradford’s passion for Kung Fu cinema dealing with memories of a disappointing Columbia Public Defender Service. also marks her as an idiosyncratic, untra- sexual relationship and of her older sister ditional female in a universe where most Diana’s suicide. Both experiences haunt New York University Press of the other women are married (her her and get in the way of any serious fun, Now in cloth: ISBN 0814742548; b&w photographs; 339 pages; 6 x 9; $29.95 friend Carol and Bradford’s sister Beth), and the novel centers around how Available Jan. 2004 in paper: ISBN: 0814742556; slutty (her coworker Melissa, who’s sleep- Jennifer finally comes to terms with these b&w photographs; 426 pages; $22.95 ing with the boss) or breeding (sister memories. www.nyupress.org Beth again). But the iconoclastic place Jennifer’s media counterpart is her Nicci inhabits seems to be a lonely one, play Til Death Do Us Part, an autobio-

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 33 hearted romance and silly costumes whom we might identify, no consistent take a backseat. narrator to inspire trust, no causal chain of events to illuminate, no irreversible e Can Still be Friends by Kelly A postmodern challenge act to move our hearts to pity. These Cherry escapes being pegged refusals are intentional. W as a member of the Bridget by Martha Gies If Aristotle’s rule, unity of action, is club: Its characters are in midlife, with broken, so is Scheherazade’s: “She only real jobs (two professors, one heart sur- All Night Movie by Alicia Borinsky, translated by Cola Franzen survived because she managed to keep geon and one Hollywood producer) and the king wondering what would happen real long-term relationships. Another with the author. Evanston, IL: Hydra Books, Northwestern next,” says E. M. Forster in Aspects of decidedly non-Bridget factor is Cherry’s the Novel. use of multiple perspectives: The brief University Press, 2002, 201 pp., $15.95 paper. “In All Night Movie the discontinuity chapters switch points of view among is absolute,” writes Argentine novelist Ava Martel, her ex-boyfriend Tony, I Luisa Valenzuela in the foreword. The Tony’s new lover Claire Buchanan, and principal objective of this postmodern Claire’s husband Boyd. This reframing of ll Night Movie begins when a (the word lands on the page with its own the story from several perspectives is woman gets out of prison, drum roll) technique is that we readers central to the novel; unlike Kung Fu or A though not like one of those old never, not even for a moment, fall prey Thoughts, Friends is not about an individual James Cagney flicks, where the con is to the vivid, continuous dream (John woman’s struggle for meaning and peace, handed his bundle and the prison gate Gardner’s term) by which traditional fic- but about four individuals’ struggles for clangs shut behind him. This is metafic- tion is said to lull and deceive us with the meaning and peace. Friends also ambition: The author is here in person, fol- “dominant ideologies.” tiously delves headlong into issues of lowing close behind, calling her character All Night Movie is Borinsky’s third race, class, and status. a mean, hot bitch, seeing her off on the novel, following Mean Woman (1989 The title comes from Tony’s parting train, plunging her tongue into her Spanish/1993 English translation) and words to Ava as he dumps her over the mouth as she gives her a farewell kiss. Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer phone. Ava’s illogical response is to Before the first short chapter is over, (1995/1998). Ten years ago, she pub- proposition Boyd in the hope of gaining the protagonist has taken up work in a lished Theoretical Fables: The Pedagogical both sweet revenge and a child. Ava does phone booth as a whore. And now she Dream in Contemporary Latin American indeed succeed in carrying Boyd’s child, has a name: Felipa, given to her by the Fiction, a work of literary scholarship that to the distress of barren Claire and rigid first pimp she meets. Make that two traces the development of Argentine lit- Tony. The ending might be construed as names, because she works with her eyes erature through five Argentine writers, as stereotypically feminist: The women shut, daydreaming the man gives her well as García Márquez from Colombia, bond and the men suffer. But it is diffi- orchids and calls her Matilde. Make that Alicia Borinsky and Donoso and Bombal from Chile. cult to place the overall story on a femi- three names: When she meets the love Borinsky, who grew up in Argentina nist continuum. Ava is a strong, profes- interest, Pascual, she begins answering to and attended literature classes taught by sional women, but she is driven by the the name of Lucía, because that’s his It cannot ruin the suspense to know Borges at the University of Buenos need to have a baby. Is that feminist, or a ideal woman. And when she thinks she how the book ends because the book Aires, tells us that Borges always regard- backhanded slap at feminism? Is Ava’s has poisoned Pascual, she runs home to refuses suspense, just as it refuses other ed Macedonio Fernández (1874-1952) as proposition to Boyn selfish, vengeful, Mother and insists she be called Juana. traditional devices of the realistic novel. the seminal figure behind the inventions enlightened, or all of the above? The Juana asks her mother to explain her As the “to be continued” suggests, of Argentine Modernism. The writers novel is laden with ambiguities, complex- father’s murder, takes a surprise phone Juana, fresh out of prison, will unwind who interest her are those who have, as ities, and surprises. call from Pascual, accuses her mother of Pascual’s shroud, and they will be a cou- she says in the preface to Theoretical Unlike Brichoux’s and Lehmann’s, killing her father, testifies at a mock ple again, he masterful, she diminutive. Fables, dismantled “the illusions of real- Cherry’s is not a first novel, and she court held in the courtyard of the pension The change of reels imperceptible, the ism, naturalism, and historicism”—Jorge writes with a lyrical, assured voice. run by her mother, shoots Pascual when film keeps running. Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Adolfo Bioy Virtually every page features wonderful he comes looking for her, visits him in If Cagney as unrehabilitated tough Casares, and Manuel Puig. exposition, a nugget of wisdom, an the hospital, kills him (finally) by spitting guy is an old template, the girl who does In her chapter on Cortázar, Borinsky unexpected turn of events, or a bitter- on him, and goes to prison. anything to get or keep a man is hardly a identifies the “spirit of denunciation” in sweet comedic moment. The characters In addition to the main story line, new one, either. Juana shrinks every time his 1963 novel, Hopscotch: in We Can Still Be Friends are older and there are several others, including that of she gets back together with Pascual, one more settled than Nicci and Jennifer, but Raquel, the investigator with the red of those one-time-funny-only gags An ethics of the reader is they still grapple with desire, love, work, whip, who picks up Rosa off the streets which, like a first riddle in the mouth of developed throughout its pages, life, and death. One could almost say that (“I don’t need a makeover,” Rosa tells a five-year-old girl, can, with relentless suggesting that there should be a this is where Bridget might end up in 15 Raquel. “That’s only for fags. We women repetition, wear out even her parents’ way of taking the leap that sepa- years or so. I no longer care about such things any- smile. Other insights: men are brutal rates those capable of entering more.”) Other threads concern a 14- (Pascual), cold (Dr. Gutierrez), brutal the new realm from the dilet- year-old stripper who ends up with one and cold (Felipe the pimp) or merely tantes... Dr. Gutierrez at a seaside resort; Rubén, mesmerized by their own erotic fantasies The mistakenly involved reader, who works at the hearts of palm cannery (Rubén). At least the women, with the the female reader, and, by exten- Now on the and masturbates thinking about Malvina, exception of Juana, have the good sense sion, the Argentine mode of read- Women’s Review of his supervisor; the Girls of Eva cult, not to get too involved with them. There ing, are expelled from the seen here and there about the city; food is no love in the novel, and the sex that book...These pages search for a Books website shortages; botulism; a stadium full of stands in for love is (the Cortázar readers different kind of reader, not nec- people who are “frightened skeletons” will have guessed)—sadism. essarily the one envisioned years until, upon getting their picture in the But when she writes about the press, earlier by Cortázar’s much- Subscribe by VISA paper, have all the food in the country Borinsky shows a fine wit. She under- admired Macedonio or Mastercard on diverted to them; and Chantal, a French stands how a rumor metastasizes within Fernández...but another one, with our secure server. journalist who comes over on the days, engulfing the nodes of truth on amplified tasks. Concorde to interview Juana in prison which it first appeared. (Theoretical Fables,p.59) only to be mobbed by people who want Find out the help getting out of Argentina. ll Night Movie is a pastiche of dia- In other words, banished are those The Felipa-Matilde-Lucía-Juana strand logue, newspaper clippings, lists, readers who take delight (dilettare) in lit- answers to some of the novel ends on the last page: A headlines, letters, and diary erature. Frequently Asked entries, rendered in a variety of sizes, Moving on to Puig, Borinsky writes, The messenger had come by pitches, and faces of type, so that even at “we see...how the transmission of .edu/womensreview Questions bicycle from China... a glance we experience the same discon- knowledge becomes engulfed in consid- The boy gets down from his tinuities the “story” delivers. To say the erations of style and gender, opening up bicycle. A circle has formed novel is 204 pages long is misleading: a meditation about the ultimate pes- Search our useful around him. Despite the fact that each of the 70 staccato chapters, many simism with which postmodern dis- index of back issues Chantal tries to elbow her way to of them less than a page, is preceded by courses view the production of mean- where she can look directly at the a full page devoted to the chapter title; in ing.” camera, we can only see the pack- other words, this would be maybe 100 Thus the road from the intellectual Send in a donation age that contains the body of pages if printed conventionally. playfulness of Borges leads through the .wellesley Pascual Domenico Fracci and For such a short book, All Night Movie sexual sadism of Cortázar and the pes- Juana who comes forward, dressed is a slow read. And that’s principally simism of Puig to the parody and Win a free subscrip- as an odalisque, small but unmis- because the author rejects, on principle, nihilism of Borinsky’s own novels. takable, to undo the first knot. all the devices of narrative normally used Which leaves only the question of

www tion—what a deal! (to be continued) to capture and hold a reader’s interest. their ideal reader: It is she who accepts (p. 201) Thus, there are no round characters with the task of searching for whatever

34 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 them as a calamity, and of the Industrial although Mexico City “has four distinct one they were not yet aware”; and a climates, one for the night—which is bit- neighboring clan of greater wealth and ter—and three for every day.” Bedford A traveler’s tales overt Catholicism. perceives that Mexico in the 1940s still Thirty-three years after writing A lacks a middle class of “lay mediators” by Pamela Petro Legacy Bedford published Jigsaw, which and has numerous brushes with the she called a “biographical novel.” It absurd, including one with a cook who A Visit to Don Otavio: A Traveller’s Tale from Mexico picks up the pieces of her life where A believes the Virgin Mary lives in Rome Legacy dropped them. Over its course (“Has she all she wants?” asks the cook, by Sybille Bedford. New York: Counterpoint, 2003 the young girl, now overtly named “What did she wear?) Sybille, ages into her early 20s. The story As in the novels, all is related in (originally issued 1953), 370 pp., $16.00 paper. begins with her holed up with her Bedford’s distinctly worldly voice, one father, who has been abandoned by her cultivated in another time, which a New Pleasures and Landscapes: A Traveler’s Tales from Europe mother and financially ruined by the York Times reviewer noted, is “like war, in a darkly picturesque chateau in Pernod in the morning, one shouldn’t by Sybille Bedford. New York: Counterpoint, 2003 southern Germany. He lives long like [it], but one does, immensely.” Her enough to impart to the not-quite-ten sophistication sometimes irks modern (originally issued 1954), 176 pp., $16.00 paper. year old a lifelong love for fine wine, sensibilities—too aristocratic, too A Legacy: A Novel by Sybille Bedford. New York: then dies of appendicitis. Sybille is com- clever—but in Otavio it is pitch-perfect. manded to Italy to join her mother, of The chief and best subject of Otavio Counterpoint, 2001, 368 pp., $15.00 paper. whose character Bedford says, “My is Otavio himself, a kind-hearted mother and I are a percentage of our- Mexican aristocrat picturesquely going Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education by Sybille Bedford. selves…” [Jigsaw, Author’s Note] to seed along with his hacienda, San Thereafter begins Sybille’s shuttled ado- Pedro, in a backwater near Guadalajara. New York: Counterpoint, 2001, 351 pp., $15.00 paper. lescence: At first she travels within Italy Bedford and her friends become with her mother and her mother’s lover, Otavio’s houseguests, joining his hallu- I Sybille’s “step-father,” the beautiful cinatory ménage of 17 servants, occa- Alessandro, who is not much older than sional family members, and expatriates ravel narratives and novels are is the fulcrum upon which Bedford’s lit- Sybille herself. After Mussolini’s rise she including a German witch, an like identical twins who grew up erary output rotates. She draws upon travels by herself from her mother’s var- Englishman of the “Colonel Mustard” T together but then, tired of being this lived sliding scale as a novelist con- ious habitations in southern France to school, and a Virginian of pre-Civil War confused one for the other, ostenta- sidering character and a travel writer London, where her education takes outlook. Otavio himself floats benignly tiously began to dress differently. observing place, employing truth and place more in theory than fact. and passively along on the scent of cin- Eighteenth-century travelogues were fiction as technical devices in both ven- The character of the mother—a namon and geranium petals. His values, often fictional. For the past half-centu- tures. As a result, Bedford side-steps the beauty, a democrat, a storyteller, care- his insularity, and his mystery form the ry, no one has more willfully kept the moral imperatives that customarily less of emotions and people’s feelings, core of the book and, for Bedford, twins in similar—if not quite the define the genres. In a recent introduc- a morphine addict—is one of the mag- reveal the core of the country as well. same—outfits, and done it with more tion to her first novel, A Legacy—about netic poles of the book. Sanary-sur- The incomprehensible foreigners who intelligence, insight, and good-natured which she says, “[H]ow much is autobi- Mer, the town in Provence where she encroach upon him; his brother who joie de vivre, than Sybille Bedford. ographical?…[Q]uite a lot”—she com- eventually settles, is the other. Sybille tries to make the hacienda profitable; Bedford published A Visit to Don ments, “I began to write this novel as a loves her mother cautiously and Sanary the superstitious servants: All are Otavio (originally titled The Sudden View: sacred duty in a hot Roman August in with all her heart. Typical for Bedford’s echoed and explicated in Bedford’s trav- A Mexican Journey) in 1953. Its subtitle is 1952.” Then she gives us multiple work, characters and place are mutual- els, which bookend the great set piece A Traveller’s Tale from Mexico—hence, images of Rome. This is what she feels ly revealing: on Otavio. That this episode is too bril- one might assume it is a work of we need to know to embark on the liantly jewel-like, too carefully con- reportage. And yet to travel writer novel. Bedford wants us to be aware that The conjunction of the perennial structed to be reportage of lived events Bruce Chatwin, a dubious practitioner place conditions every aspect of her austere beauty of climate and is of no more matter than the preter- of recorded veracity himself, Bedford work, shaping both the child-narrator of nature—scouring mistral, the naturally adult narration of Bedford’s said, “Of course it’s a novel. I wanted to A Legacy and the grown-up writer in unfudinging sun—with the young heroines. make something light and poetic…I Rome. It seeps into the text and between sweetness and sharpness and After Otavio Bedford wrote travel didn’t take a single note when I was in the lines, nourishing, altering, mirroring quickness, the rippling intelli- journalism, but never another “travel Mexico…If you clutter yourself with both characters and author alike. gence, the accommodating toler- narrative.” She didn’t need to. A Visit to notes it all goes away. I did, of course, Despite the many incarnations of ance of the French maniere de Don Otavio freed her as a writer. It is the send postcards to friends, and when I herself in print, Bedford’s biography is, vivre gave one a large sense of only one of her works in which she started writing, I called them in.” as critic Roger Kimball has called it, living rationally, sensuously, appears as herself, yet in which place Bedford’s easygoing rapprochement “shadowy.” He cites an article from the well.... France between the wars mirrors not her own soul, but another’s. between travel memoir and novel, 1980s that states “Sybille Bedford was made one this present of the In her later works, considering aspects between exactitude and invention, born 16 March 1911, daughter of illusion of freedom. (pp. 88-89) of place always means considering her- offers more than an opportunity to Maximillian van Schoenebeck and self as well. She explains herself by list- bemoan categorization and semantics. It Elizabeth Bernard. She married Walter Jigsaw is at the opposite end of ing the places she considers her gives us a rare glimpse into the uses of Bedford in 1935. That is absolutely all Bedford’s sliding scale of truth and fic- homes—a noun that for Bedford is truth and fiction, and the seesawing bal- the personal information she has sup- tion from A Visit to Don Otavio, which always plural: She has a sense of ance between place and identity. plied to the usual biographical sources.” can be labeled a travel book about “almost belonging to—England: attach- Discussing her 1989 novel Jigsaw: An In a 1993 interview, when asked about Mexico chiefly because the characters, ment to language and some institutions; Unsentimental Education, Bedford says, her sexual preference—two of her nar- Otavio in particular, elucidate the place, Italy: romantic first love, visual, sensual; “What I had in mind—or wherever rators, including “Sybille,” fall in love whereas in Bedford’s novels the balance France: for everything else”). For such directives originate—was to build a with women—she said, “Private life is tilts the other way. The language and Bedford, who was a traveler before she novel out of the events and people who private life, which means private.” storytelling devices—lists, rear-and- was virtually anything else, including, had made up, and marked, my early Privacy of such rare scrupulousness near-view shifts between description, one guesses, a child, travel was a natural youth….It had to be a novel in which suggests that the versions of Bedford narrated set pieces, historical asides, and state. Comparison was her intrinsic the events had actually happened and whom we meet in print, from her nov- exposition—are strikingly similar to mode of thought; truth and fiction the happened largely as described…Truth elistic alter egos to the recollected self those of her novels. hand-luggage of her art. For Bedford, here was an artistic, not a moral, in Rome, are all in varying degrees well- travel writing was writing herself. requirement.” crafted constructions. t the close of World War II, with Bedford rarely examines the fact that In Bedford’s 1961 essay “The Quality The young narrator of A Legacy clear goals and a vague itinerary, her narrator-self is always a “her.” She is of Travel,” reprinted in Pleasures and remarks in her introduction that the A Bedford took a train from New on record as disapproving of feminism. Landscapes, Bedford explains, “A part, a story is based on what she heard and York City to Mexico City with her friend It is curious, however, that while travel large part, of travelling is an engage- especially overheard as a child—adult E. “I had a great longing to move, to hear writing is still an overwhelmingly male- ment of the ego v. the world.” She calls conversations made up of “rumours, a new language, to eat a new food, to be dominated field, women are the world’s the world “hydra-headed,” made up of innuendoes, half-truths, vengeful tales as in a country with a long nasty history in natural travellers. The displaced foreign- keys and clerks, tickets, people who well as pastoral set-pieces and fond the past and as little present history as er; the bewildered outsider; the margin- don’t speak your language, the weather.” recalls.” So the raw material, the writer’s possible,” she writes. The book she con- alized presence who doesn’t speak the Then she nails the ego, which, she says, own legacy, is murky stuff to begin with, structed three years later is a masterpiece language; the coddled guest—these are wants to arrive on time. “It wants to be no matter how scrupulously remem- of minute observation and compressed women’s roles at home, in everyday life. provided with entertainment, colour, bered. The plot concerns three families geography set against great narrative Sybille Bedford’s location of home as an quiet, strong coffee, strong drink, in turn-of-the-century Germany: a rich, swaths of history—she is particularly idea in motion between diverse points, a matches it can strike, and change for a insular Jewish family in Berlin; a tribe of good on the ill-fated reign of the place sought after by characters and large paper note.” agrarian aristocrats in the south, loosely European puppet-emperor Maximillian author alike, is as emblematic an image The ego elucidates the world, and Catholic, about whom Bedford writes, and his wife Carlotta. She pithily bundles of 20th-century female experience as vice versa. The encounter between them “The French Revolution was still alive to Mexico into three climactic zones, we are likely to find. I

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 35 Spicing it up Formal but unconstrained by Sarita Sarvate by Adrian Oktenberg

The Mango Season by Amulya Malladi. New York: Ballantine, Calendars by Annie Finch. Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, 2003, 229 pp., $22.95 hardcover. 2003, 70 pp., $14.95 paper. I Flux, Poems by Cynthia Hogue. Kalamazoo, MI: New ndian immigrant literature has American or an English writer had used Issues Press, 2002, 51 pp., $14.00 paper. reached its apex in America today. such language to describe India, she or I Many Indian American writers can- he would have been instantly labeled a Little River, New and Selected Poems by Linda McCarriston. not help wondering how long the craze racist. But from an Indian author, such will last; others wish they had hopped on proclamations are apparently meant as Evanston, IL: TriQuarterly Books, 2002, the bandwagon while the going was good. prescriptions to Western readers for cur- 95 pp., $12.95 paper. Indian American literature today ing India’s evils. includes not only fiction by writers like I remember vividly my own visit to Against Love Poetry, Poems by Eavan Boland. Salman Rushdie, who can be blamed for India after attending graduate school in starting the fad, and V. S. Naipaul, who America. India seemed to me, as always, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2001, belonged to the generation before to be a place full of contradictions. Rushdie and won the Nobel Prize for lit- Friends and family seemed orthodox, 53 pp., $21.00 hardcover. erature in 2001; but also writers like superstitious, and ignorant, yet at the Arundhati Roy, whose first book, The same time infinitely wiser, more com- I God of Small Things, won the Booker passionate, and warmer than Prize for portraying her Indian family Americans. The immigrant experience ormalist verse—I, too, dislike it. I (forests growing under water with an unmistakable Western sensibili- is complex, but Malladi reduces it to a wonder what the utility is in writ- press against the ones we know)— ty. In fact, there are so many Indian writ- set of cardboard characters and hack- F ing, now, in centuries-old French ers being published in the West today— neyed situations. and English forms, when verse was “lib- and they might have gone on Pulitzer winner Jhumpa Lahiri, Amitav In fact, in the hands of Amullya erated” almost a century ago. The sonnet growing Ghosh, Vikram Chandra, Vikram Singh, Malladi, India itself becomes a caricature. is really the only form that has survived and they might now breathe just to name a few—that I am always Never mind that it is a civilization which, well and continues to thrive on a wide above surprised to find yet another novel by an over thousands of years, has absorbed scale. But the villanelle, sestina, pan- everything I speak of sowing Indian American writer on the New such foreign influences as Alexander the toum? The very names sound like (everything I try to love) (p. 3) Fiction shelf of my neighborhood Great, the Moghul rulers of Persia and operetta or dessert! And when forms are bookstore. Iraq, the British empire and its cultural done now, they are so often done badly. This is the first poem in the book, and it The Mango Season by Amulya Malladi vestiges like cricket, the parliamentary There are any number of overpraised sets the tone. Here we will be exposed to regurgitates familiar themes better system, and the English language itself, white men, established poets, whose a poet who has an exquisite ear and eye, explored by her predecessors Chitra which has given Malladi a chance to get verse is all but unreadable—flat, very flat who writes out of an inner necessity to Divakaruni and Bharati Mukherjee. The published in America. India was the orig- (to quote Noël Coward). It is also a mat- connect, who acknowledges the com- issues she addresses include the staples inal melting pot and remains so today. ter of suspicion to me that formal writ- plexity of our world, and whose per- of the Indian immigrant genre, arranged Yet Priya is blind to India’s nuances; to ing so often goes hand in hand with a spective is a little strange, more than a lit- marriages, son preference in Indin socie- her, everything is black or white, good or conservative aesthetic, reactionary poli- tle slant. ty, the use of ultrasound to abort female bad, orthodox or modern, liberated or tics, and people you would not want to Finch’s book is not all effervescence fetuses, and cultural clashes between repressed. spend an evening with. and flora, however. It has meat, too, or East and West. But when I read poetry written in rather, mammals—“Watching the The Mango Season develops these ndians both at home and abroad forms by Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Oregon Whale” is one of her stunning themes through the story of Priya, a view this sort of literature with dis- Hacker—and Annie Finch—I have to poems—and a pagan sensibility taken young woman who returns to her native I taste, a fact apparently little known in concede there is a place for it. I have seriously throughout. I mean, yes, the South India after seven years in the the Western publishing world. Many in only two questions in mind when I read religion of the Goddess, which animates United States. The streets of her adopted the Indian community believe that only poetry: Is it beautiful, and, does it move nearly every poem with a sense of the land, Priya has discovered, are paved with writings that are critical of India see the me? These writers do both. When they “the hard, the intricate dark” and the gold. Her America, it turns out, is a light of day in the West. Unfortunately, a write in forms, it is utterly contemporary. hiddeness of essential things. Finch is a color-blind utopia in which she lives with book like The Mango Season seems to sub- Annie Finch in particular manages to poet of roots, darkness, and water, who her American boyfriend, Nick. Nick is stantiate the Indian community’s charges combine two major trends in contempo- writes as if risen from the underworld to African American, an important detail of racism against Western publishers. rary poetry: what is called “neo-formal- tell what we most need to know. revealed only in the last paragraphs of True artistic merit, not political consider- ist” verse, and “innovative” style. If this “Calendars,” the title poem, is for four the book. His e-mails to Priya during her ations, should govern the decision about sounds like an impossibility, it is. This voices, Demeter, Persephone, Chorus, Indian visit do not hint at his ethnic the publication of any book, but since short lyric will give an idea of what she and Hades. Appropriately, it is both background, which in any case, seems to this particular work lacks the former, I sounds like: ecstatic and terrifying, and it reverber- be of no consequence to Priya’s fairytale have to wonder what factors contributed ates elsewhere in the book, with lines life in America. to its passing muster. Did its publisher Landing Under Water, repeated in new and different contexts. When Priya goes home, she discovers think American readers would be tanta- I See Roots In poem after poem, Finch evokes her family, her mother in particular, to be lized by its unfamiliar cultural details the natural world, its beauty, its fluidi- ignorant, superstitious, and narrow mind- while at the same time reassured by its All the things we hide in water ty, its temporality. But for her the natu- ed. “It had just been three days, but I was assertions of American superiority? hoping we won’t see them go— ral world is not just “nature,” land, already tired of being in India, at home, In fact, among the immigrant authors, and especially tired of my mother,” she the one to portray the interactions says in the first chapter. She goes on to between the East and West with the describe India in terms that would shame greatest sensitivity happens to be Jumpa ized sadly. I would have to sacri- she intends to marry. The book eventually the most bigoted British Raj colonials. Lahiri, who transcends culture to get at fice the granddaughter to keep the winds its way toward a predictable ending. the human condition. Naipaul, too, has lover. (p. 189) To her credit, Malladi’s language is clear The road was bumpy and the auto been able to do this with a monumental and simple, and I am almost tempted to rickshaw moved in mysterious sense of humor laced with pathos. She states this flatly, without a hint of recommend this book for that reason to ways… There were no rules; there Malladi, on the other hand, “tells” remorse. students of creative writing. But there are never had been. You could make a rather than “shows” India. “This was a Malladi uses another cliché that has no great revelations here about the immi- U-turn anywhere…. Crossing a man steeped in ritual,” Priya says of her been overused ever since Laura Esquivel grants’ lives, lived in that space in between red light was not a crime. If a grandfather, published Like Water for Chocolate. She continents, where memories and reflexes policeman caught you without interlaces her story with the ritual of and even one’s intuition can betray one, your driver’s license and registra- Life and tradition lay alongside making mango pickle, just as Divakaruni and where one is confronted by thousands tion papers, twenty to fifty rupees each other and bled into each used descriptions of Indian spices of years of history, not only of the East, would solve your problem. (p.13) other. Thata [the grandfather] did- throughout her first novel, The Mistress of but also of the West. n’t question tradition but accepted Spices, to literally spice up her story with It is sad then that nearly 50 years after For a moment, I hoped that Mallady it just the way he accepted waking exotic flavors. writers like R. K. Narayan first began to was trying to be humorous, but I soon up every morning at six to per- The tale of The Mango Season revolves write about the Indian experience for the realized that she is in earnest. Her form the Gayatri mantram.He around Priya’s simple dilemma: how to tell Western readers, India still remains mired derogatory tone never falters. If an would never come around, I real- her parents about her boyfriend, whom in cultural stereotypes. I

36 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 water, sky, but also ourselves, bodily be. McCarriston is transplanted here, and of homelessness, the abyss of the Inches towards the light. See how and mindfully. lives in Alaska. As a poet, she is a truth- great lie, She falters only in a huge poem called teller, and this is a dangerous thing to be, the gifts of sickness and injury. Past and future and the space “A Wedding on Earth,” an epithalamium especially if you are a feminist. My whiteness between which I think she intends to be the cen- She butts in with a lot of unwelcome is a man in me, and I am likewise The semblance of empire, the ter of the book. To my mind, it’s beauti- news in “Kitchen Terrarium: 1983,” the his stranger... promise of nation, ful and strong in places, but suffers from first poem in her book. It is about the (pp. 19-20) Are vanishing in this mediation trying too hard to embody “wisdom.” loss of her son, “a sixth grade boy / four Between oppression and love’s Still, at her slighter best, Annie Finch is a foot nine, who still gave / turns to the It is really very rare to find all of these remembrance deserving heir to Emily Dickinson, Hart teddies he slept with,” in a custody battle essential elements in a poem of this Crane, and Wallace Stevens. with her ex-husband, the physician kind, and in a tone that gives each a bal- Until resistance is their only Father. At the end of this long poem she anced weight. McCarriston’s name never element. It is ynthia Hogue is a fitting col- addresses her son directly: seems to be included in the established What they embody, bound now league of Finch’s, since both lists of political poets, but she should and always. C share a pagan spirituality, but ...Davey, if we are to sing occupy a high place. She is among our History frowns on them: yet in Hogue’s touchstones are Emily of each other in common terms, very best. its gaze Dickinson, HD, and Marianne Moore, we must But I have misrepresented her book They join their injured hands and and she pushes her innovative moves far- use words long worn sore with so far; it is not without joy. “Little River” make their vows. ther. Her hallmark as a poet is longing, meaning: is a wonderful poem to a friend, and (From “Marriage I. In Which for human connection, for what we there are numerous beautiful poems in Hester Bateman, 18th Century might call wholeness. The dominant the rare soft moments of a hard the book that touch on the natural world, English Silversmith, Takes an theme in Flux, expressed in every element lust, satisfied, in Alaska and in Ireland. In particular, Irish Commission,” pp. 3-4) (animal, mineral, vegetable) is the diffi- held up as love’s highest figure. It there is a series of poems about horses culty of communication. Every ground is is this in the center of the book. They are love- No couple is alone; it exists, is created unstable, every meaning is slippery, and instruction into which you’ve been ly, consistently engaging, and extremely out of, “tension” between their hands every kind of knowledge refracts into taken wise about our lives with animals. They and hearts, and, not just the conventions mystery—yet we seek, search, quest, the alone are worth the price of the book. and customs of marriage, but also the human essence being to try. The underly- to grow, like the moss and lichen And you get politics too. greater historical forces (“empire,” ing sadness of this is palpable. Hogue’s still alive here, that you gathered “nation”) that weigh upon them. touch is gentle, thoughtful, probing, like a and placed in the big glass jar on avan Boland has long been “Resistance” is the key word here, as in good physician’s. the table. acknowledged as an essential Muriel Rukeyser’s “resist, fall, fail, resist.” In a characteristic poem, “The Light The glass is clear. From inside it E political poet, and her recent, The book alternates between such at Our Backs,” the “you” and “we” is must be short book is Against Love Poetry. The “public” poems and more “private” sometimes shifting, sometimes stable; title intrigues. I like these titles, “Against lyrics centering on Boland’s own mar- the conversational tone slides off into invisible, so there would be an Decoration,” Against Forgetting, riage. These are, without exception, truly dream; everything is mutable, sound to Emperor “Against Silence.” But who could be beautiful. Here is “Marriage IX. sight, present to past, clothed to of the Jar and for his son against love poetry, except a curmudg- Thanked Be Fortune”: unclothed, housed to unhoused, speech a place beside him, to which all eon or a scold? Importantly, Boland is into silence; the imagery has a quiet of creation doing something else, as she indicates in Did we live a double life? beauty and strangeness. The emotional one of the early poems in the book: I would have said core of Hogue’s work—it is always had been scaled: no trees taller than we never envied deeply felt—is unlike much “innovative” a man to climb, no creatures We were married in summer, thir- the epic glory of the star-crossed. poetry, which tends to be dominantly but pets and game, a mirror to ty years ago. I have loved you I would have said intellectual in impulse. look at deeply from that moment to this. we learned by heart Like Finch, Hogue is overtly feminist. and walk upon, that he would tell I have loved other things as well. the code marriage makes of Her places are the Southwest and you is water.(p.7)Among them the idea of women’s passion – Iceland, making her comfortable with freedom. Why do I put these duty dailiness routine. updating legends and myths, and she The clear honest bitterness of this, not words side by side? Because I am But after dark when we went to takes evident pleasure in telling stories. only for herself but for her son and the a woman. Because marriage is not bed But when Hogue tells a story, it’s always world, is an amazing achievement in lan- freedom. Therefore, every word under the bitter fire slant. In poems like “The Changeling,” guage. Not since Virginia Woolf has here is written against love poet- of constellations— “Tracks of Sound and Water,” “The “the culture of the sons of educated ry.... It is to mark the contradic- orderly, uninterested, and cold, Sorcerer,” and “The Strange Land,” men” been so sharply indicted. If this is tions of a daily love that I have at least in our case— Hogue enters an ancient, dreamlike hard to take, it is hard in the way truth is written this.... in the bookshelves just above our world full of urgent questioning: hard. Poems like this should be taught in (From “Marriage II. heads, the schools. Against Love Poetry,” p. 5) all through the hours of dark- …There are three tasks left. McCarriston widens her vision ness, The first is to discover the other two.. beyond her own situation again and The book is a series of linked poems, men and women When you know the second, become the again in this book, but with the same then, exploring these contradictions. wept, cursed, kept and broke faith third.... clear-eyed anger. She writes difficult The distinctive thing about Boland’s and killed themselves for love. (From “Tracks of Sound poems about our misogynist culture of perspective, coming as she does from a Then it was dawn again. and Water,” p. 28) violence, about several kinds of male small country, an ancient culture, is that Restored to ourselves, abuse of women, about class, and about her perspective on love, on marriage, is we woke early and lay together Hogue’s poems in Flux, her third race. It is especially difficult to write not merely personal and individual but listening to our child crying, as if book, are challenging intellectually, and about these subjects now, after genera- collective and centuries-long. When she to birdsong, on the visceral level, complex. She is one tions of such subject matter, taken up by looks at a city, she remembers the forest with ice on the windowsills of the most interesting poets I know, not various hands, since the ’60’s. that preceded it. When she examines and the grass eking out settling for one or the other, always McCarriston does it remarkably well, by couplehood, it is not merely her own and the last crooked hour of pushing the language, kneading and avoiding received notions of thought or her husband’s but those who preceded starlight. shaping it like dough. This is a poet hon- applicable language, by finding the right them by generations, and then further (pp. 16-17) est enough to enter the space “between tone, and, above all, by being rigorously, back into legend and myth. When she what you admit / and what you won’t.” painfully honest. thinks about politics, it is always in the Like Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty-one This is the end of “Portals”: In her poem “At the Indian Store,” context of history. This perspective gives Love Poems,” this poem explicitly rejects McCarriston manages a remarkable pro- her book a resonance that goes well the Tristan and Isolde version of love ...But my senses wring gression: to combine humility about her beyond itself. and passion, ending in the tragic poison from unsalvaged night—a swan’s own ignorance in the face of another’s The first poem in the book is not per- cup. Instead it ends with morning light passage history, to take responsibility for the sonal at all but historical: and birdsong , and the child—who is down the wind. It’s that journey I crimes of her ancestors and government, always absent from such tales– crying. want now, to acknowledge her whiteness and what Hester Bateman made a marriage And yet the idea of a woman’s free- into fathomless white. (p. 31) that means, and to align herself with the spoon.... dom is implicit throughout. However sufferer, crushed as she is in her own Here in miniature a man and often Boland looks at the “burdens of a As Hogue grows older, I follow her powerlessness under the oppressor’s heel: woman.... history”(and there are several poems so poetic quests with an increasing sense of They stand side by side on the themed in this book), she rejects the urgency and need. Her reports from the I was the hand of the government handle.... notion that things should necessarily or ancient interior are stimulating, surpris- that gave you, with the word for inevitably remain the same. ing, and richly rewarding reading. gift, Art and marriage: now a made It is Boland’s task always to “wait for blankets of smallpox.... I broke match. language,” always to seek “a different don’t think Linda McCarriston is as the promises.... The silver bends and shines and in truth,” and this is to her readers’ lasting well-known as Eavan Boland, anoth- Yet I am woman and know the its own profit and edification. For her work we I er Irishwoman, but she deserves to hunger Mineral curve an age-old tension can only be grateful. I The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 37 Letters Contributors

To the editor: American? I for one would much prefer PEG ALOI is a freelance writer living ed from Jerusalem for 13 years, and We want to publicly express our grati- to have progressives use American hatred in Boston, and teaches film studies and now lives on a houseboat in Seattle. tude to Linda Gardiner. She created and of the Taliban to highlight abuses of creative writing at Emerson College. sustained over two decades a truly impor- women in our own society. The left Her interests include traditional music, CAROLYN HEILBRUN is the tant institution in Western feminism; very should say “It’s the American way to let alternative medicine, and herbal folk- author, most recently, of When Men few people could have translated such a women and gays have totally equal lore. Her reviews have appeared previ- Were The Only Models We Had: My vision into the consistent production and rights.” Of course, the most successful ously in The New York Review of Science Teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling; and as distribution of a magazine of the highest progressive organizations understand Fiction, Obsidian, Paramour, The Valley Amanda Cross of The Edge of Doom. quality, and no one could have done it this, and have for decades. The American Women’s Voice, The Herb Quarterly and KERRYN HIGGS is the author of All with her unique combination of wit, Civil Liberties Union, one of the most The Herb Companion. That False Instruction, Australia’s first les- intelligence, open mind, and commit- effective progressive institutions in our bian novel. It was reissued by Spinifex ment to feminist ideals. She produced, nation’s history, is in agreement with Ms. HEIDI BELL’s fiction and reviews have appeared in The Seattle Review, Press in 2001. She is also a freelance month after month, a journal that was Kingsolver. The ACLU used the flag long environmental writer. meaningful to subscribers of all kinds, before one started seeing red, white and Salon, and Prairie Schooner, among others. whether activists, academics, readers or blue on car bumpers. But it really is a She works as a freelance writer in FLORENCE HOWE was one of the writers, insisting always on the highest question of the Left’s priorities: Are we Aurora, Illinois. founders of the Feminist Press at the standards both editorially and ethically. to bemoan American ideals as hopeless, EILEEN BORIS, Hull Professor of City University of New York. She is She was a rigorous but kind editor who and engage in anti-American rhetoric Women’s Studies at the University of now publisher/director emerita, and was always a pleasure to work with. which will alienate most Americans, or California, Santa Barbara, is a member emerita professor of English at the We wish her well in whatever she goes are we to cultivate a healthy patriotism, of the California Homecare Research Graduate Center/CUNY. She is co- on to do next and also send our best free of the excesses of the Right, one Working Group. She writes on the director of Women Writing Africa, a wishes to her successor and to the journal that recognizes the progress America has home as a workplace for mothers and project of the Feminist Press funded by we have enjoyed for so long in the hope made over its history, and that continues other laborers. Her latest book is the the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. that it will flourish for many more years. to strive to eliminate the injustice that is co-edited Major Problems in the History of She is writing a memoir that has no Ruth Gundle still present in our society? There is American Workers. publisher. Judith Barrington much more work to be done—the Left Portland, OR should do it, rather than engaging in nar- VERONICA CHAMBERS is the ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS is a pro- cissistic fantasies. author of, most recently, Having It All? fessor in the department of history and To the editor: Alexander Yarbrough Black Women and Success. She has con- the Institute for Research on Women Though it has been a while since Memphis, TN tributed articles to Glamour, O, the Oprah and Gender at Columbia University. Harriet Malinowitz’s review (“Down- Magazine, the New York Times and other She is the author, most recently, of In home dissident”) of Barbara Harriet Malinowitz responds: publications. She is the author of Mama’s Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Kingsolver’s Small Wonder: Essays was In asking “Why should the Right Girl, a critically acclaimed memoir about Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth- published, I still feel compelled to write define what it means to be American?” growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, as Century America. concerning several points that Alexander Yarbrough is merely recapitu- well as several books for children. A NAN LEVINSON’s book, Outspoken: Malinowitz made. I did not fly an lating the flawed logic of Barbara recipient of the Hodder Fellowship at Free Speech Stories, will be published by American flag after the attacks on Kingsolver that I was attempting to cri- Princeton University, her first novel Miss the University of California Press in September 11th, but I think it is tique to begin with. Rather than assert- Black America will be published in spring October. She teaches journalism and Malinowitz, not Kingsolver, who displays ing, as Kingsolver and Yarbrough do, 2004. Please visit her online at writing at Tufts University. a considerable degree of naïveté in deal- that Americanness is intrinsically one www.veronicachambers.com ing with progressive thought and patriot- thing or another, I was simply making the AMANDA NASH is the production ism. It is true, of course, that if an not-very-original case that representation JAN CLAUSEN’s most recent book is editor for The Women’s Review of Books. American flag is displayed alone, one works in more complicated ways. The a memoir, Apples and Oranges: My Journey She has a checkered past in publishing cannot assume that its owner holds pro- meaning of a symbol such as the flag Through Sexual Identity. The recipient of that she prefers to leave to your imagi- gressive rather than chauvinistic views. can’t escape the vagaries of interpreta- a NYFA poetry fellowship for 2003, nation. However, when a lesbian couple fly a tion, and anyone who claims that s/he she is at work on a novel and a book of rainbow flag and an American flag side possesses the magical key to the icon’s poems. MARTHA NICHOLS is a contribut- by side, to say that “their flag and our flag “real” meaning—whether that person is ing editor at the Women’s Review of Books MARTHA GIES began publishing and a former associate editor at the happen to look exactly alike” or to sug- a white supremacist or a card-carrying non-fiction in the mid-seventies and gest that “the casual onlooker usually member of the ACLU—is either deluded Harvard Business Review. A freelance later studied fiction with Raymond writer, she has published in HBR, the can’t tell which intended message is flut- or deliberately using the myth that repre- Carver at summer workshops. Her tering from any particular mast” is luna- sentations can be fixed to advance a par- Chicago Tribune, Youth Today, and Utne short stories and essays appear widely Reader, and has appeared on CNN. cy. The American flag and a rainbow flag ticular social agenda. The notion that in literary quarterlies. She teaches at do not cancel each other out—an you can just wrest the American flag Lewis & Clark’s Northwest Writing ADRIAN OKTENBERG’s first full- America, accepting of gays and lesbians, away from the “bad” people, stake it Iwo Institute and at a summer writing pro- length collection of poetry was The of independent women, of people of Jima-like on some “good” ideology, and gram in Veracruz, Mexico. Bosnia Elegies, which has been taught in color and other minorities is being born, declare the war of signification won can many universities. Her new collection is and the last thing that this better America be helpful when you are trying to manip- VIVIAN GORNICK is currently at Swimming with Dolphins. She is a winner needs is the Left to try to strangle it in its ulate people. But I hope the left aspires work on a book on Elizabeth Cady of the Astraea Award for lesbian poet- cradle by attacking the idea that there can to more than that. Incidentally, as a les- Stanton and feminism and America. ry. Her most recent award is the Mudfish be a decent America. Progressivism has bian, I was particularly mystified by the Poetry Prize, chosen by John Ashbery. worked when it has harnessed the noble fuzzy linkage Yarbrough suggests GAYLE GREENE (Scripps College, Claremont, California) has published The poems appear in the current issue ideals of America, rather than casting between the rainbow flag and of Mudfish, #13. aspersions on the possibility that Kingsolver’s progressive views. Ever several books of feminist criticism and America can be a decent, tolerant society. heard of the Log Cabin Republicans?— theory. Her most recent publication is a JANE O’REILLY is the author of To leave patriotism to the Right is to lesbians and gay conservatives who cele- biography of radiation epidemiologist Click! The Housewife’s Moment of Truth and betray progressive ideals—why should brate “the inclusive and winning message Dr. Alice Stewart, The Woman Who Knew other Feminist Ravings. She lives in the Right define what it means to be an of President George W. Bush”? Too Much. She is at work on a book on Vermont. insomnia. ALICIA OSTRIKER has published MARILYN HACKER is the author ten volumes of poetry, most recently of nine books, including the just-pub- The Volcano Sequence. Her most recent lished Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002. critical book is Dancing at the Devil’s First Cities, a re-issue of her first three Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the books, including the National Book Erotic. She is a professor of English at Award-winning Presentation Piece has also Rutgers University. just been published by Norton. She Says, a translated collection of Vénus GAYLE PEMBERTON is professor Khoury-Ghata’s poems, in a bilingual of English, African American studies edition, was published by Graywolf and American studies at Wesleyan Press this year. She lives in New York University. She is the author of The and Paris, and teaches at the City Hottest Water in Chicago: Notes of a Native College of New York. Daughter, and is completing The Road to Gravure: Black Women and American LESLEY HAZLETON’s books Cinema. She lives in Northampton, MA. include Jerusalem, Jerusalem and Where Mountains Roar. She lived in and report- PAMELA PETRO is a writer based in

38 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 Northampton, MA. She is working on a travel narrative about Romanesque sculpture, pilgrimage, love, and stone The Bookshelf set in southern France. Each month we list the recently published books received during the preceding month or so that we think readers of the Women’s DIANA POSTLETHWAITE is pro- Review will want to know about. This is, however, a very partial selection of the books by and about women published each month. fessor of English at St. Olaf College in Our listing is informational, not evaluative; the only annotation added is a brief indication of the subject matter, where the title is not Northfield, Minnesota, who specializes self-explanatory. All are nonfiction titles published in 2003, unless otherwise noted. in the British novel. She reviews contemporary fiction for a number of Carol J. Adams, The Pornography of Meat. New York: Continuum. “High and Mighty Queens” of Early Modern England. New York: national publications. Jane Adams, When Our Grown Kids Disappoint Us: Letting Go of Their Palgrave Macmillan. Problems, Loving Them Anyway, and Getting on with Our Lives. New Jennifer Lewis-Hall, Life’s a Journey- Not a Sprint: Navigating Life’s NANCY B. REICH received her York: Free Press. Challenges and Finding Your Pathway to Success. Canada: Hay House. PhD from New York University in Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia. New York: María Lugones, Pilgramages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against 1972. She has taught courses on Columbia University Press. Multiple Oppressions. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. women in music history at Thomas H. Appleton, Jr. and Angela Boswell, eds., Searching for Jeanne Marie Lutz, Changing Course: One Woman’s True-Life Adventures Manhattanville College, Bard College, Their Places: Women in the South Across Four Centuries. Columbia, as a Merchant Marine. Far Hills, NJ: New Horizon Press. and Williams College. Her book, Clara MO: University of Missouri Press. Margaret F. MacDonald, Susan Grace Galassi, and Aileen Riberio, Schumann: The Artist and The Woman, has Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and Whistler, Women, and Fashion. New Haven, CT: Yale University been translated into German, Japanese, the Gender Divide. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Press. and Chinese and won many awards. A Paula Bartley, Emmeline Pankhurst. London: Routledge, 2002. Janet. M. Martin, The Presidency and Women: Promise, Performance and revised edition of the book was pub- Janet Catherine Berlo and Patricia Cox Crews, Wild by Design: Two Illusion. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press. lished in 2001. Hundred Years of Innovation and Artistry in American Quilts. Seattle, David B. Mattern and Holly C. Shulman, The Selected Letters of Dolley SUZANNE RUTA is the author of WA: University of Washington Press. Payne Madison. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Stalin in the Bronx and Other Stories, and is Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood, Women and Literary Jean V. Matthews, The Rise of the New Woman: The Women’s Movement writing a novel about a love triangle History: “For There She Was.” Newark, NJ: University of Delaware in America, 1875-1930. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. among three major religions. She is the Press. Helen E. Maurer, Margaret of Anjou: Queenship and Power in Late grandmother of Simran Elsa, born Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith, Middlebrow Moderns: Popular Medieval England. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press. March 2003. American Women Writers of the 1920s. Boston, MA: Northeastern Marijane Meaker, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s. San Francisco, University Press. CA: Cleis Press. (A memoir.) SARITA SARVATE was born and Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco Valentine M. Moghadam, Modernizing Women: Gender and Social raised in India and came to the United to 1965. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Change in the Middle East 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. States to be a graduate student at the Patricia A. Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 1850-1920: Politics, Sylvie Murray, The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in University of California, Berkeley. Her Health, and Art. London, UK: Kent State University Press. Suburban Queens, 1945-1965. Philadelphia, PA: University of commentaries, distributed by the Rita Felski, Literature After Feminism. Chicago: University of Chicago Pennsylvania Press. Pacific News Service of San Francisco, Press. Claudia Nelson, Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care have been published in many national Robin N. Fiore and Hilde Lindemann Nelson, Recognition, in America, 1850-1929. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. newspapers. She is a regular commen- Responsibility, and Rights: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory. New Lesléa Newman. Write from the Heart: Inspiration and Exercises for tator on KQED FM and on National York: Rowman & Littlefield. Women Who Want to Write. USA: Ten Speed Press. Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Her Jane Gallop, Living With His Camera. Durham, NC: Duke University Carrie Ostrea. Family Bound: One Couple’s Journey Through Infertility and cross-cultural columns for the commu- Press. (Meditations on photography and portrayals of family life, Adoption. New York: iUniverse. nity magazine India Currents have based on the author’s own family.) Paul Preston, Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. Boston, MA: earned her much fan mail while being Rebecca Gifford, Cancer Happens: Coming of Age With Cancer. Northeastern University Press, 2002. (Biographies of four at the center of many controversies. Sterling, VA: Capital Books, Inc. women involved in the Spanish Civil War, two as Republicans Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, A Human Being Died That Night: A South and two Francoists.) MARIE SHEAR is a writer and editor African Story of Forgiveness. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Tammy M. Proctor. Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First by trade, a satirist and musical theater (Memoir of serving as a psychologist on the Truth and World War. New York: New York University Press. lover by temperament, and a feminist Reconciliation Commission.) by necessity. Her essay on book review- Alvina E. Quintana, Reading U.S. Latina Writers: Remapping American Susan Goodman, Civil Wars: American Novelists and Manners, 1880- Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ing appears in Freelance Writers’ Guide, 1940. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. published by the National Writers Louise Ballerstedt Raggio, Texas Tornado: The Autobiography of a Ann D. Gordon. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Crusader for Women’s Rights and Family Justice. New York: Union. She is based in Brooklyn, NY. Susan B. Anthony. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kensington. ALIX KATES SHULMAN is the Jessica L. Gregg, Virtually Virgins: Sexual Strategies and Cervical Cancer Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia, author of 11 books, including the pio- in Recife, Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. neering feminist novel Memoirs of an Annibal Guasco, Discourse to Lady Lavinia His Daughter: Concerning the Susan R. Ressler, ed., Women Artists of the American West. Jefferson, Ex-Prom Queen and, most recently, the Manner in Which She Should Conduct Herself When Going to Court as NC: McFarland. memoir A Good Enough Daughter. She Lady-in-Waiting to the Most Serene Infanta, Lady Caterina, Duchess of Janet Lynn Roseman, PhD, The Way of the Woman Writer 2nd ed. has taught writing and literature at New Savoy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. New York: Haworth. York University, Yale, New School Angela Hague, Fiction, Intuition, and Creativity: Studies in Brontë, James, Susan Goldman Rubin, Searching for Anne Frank: Letters from University, and the Universities of Woolf, and Lessing. Washington, DC: Catholic University of Amsterdam to Iowa. New York: Harry N. Abrams. (An exploration Colorado and Hawaii. America Press. of the relationship between Anne Frank and her American Amira Hass, Reporting From Ramallah: An Israeli Journalist in an school penpal.) MARGARET WEIGEL is a Boston- Occupied Land, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Joni Seager, The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World. Hong Kong: based writer, photographer and graph- Jennifer Michael Hecht, The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Penguin. ic designer. She is writing a book about Atheism, and Anthropology in France. New York: Columbia Tanya Shaffer, Somebody’s Heart is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in historical and contemporary outdoor University Press. Africa. New York: Vintage Departures. advertising. Christine Henseler, Contemporary Spanish Women’s Narrative and the Roger Shattuck, The Story of My Life: Helen Keller. New York: W. W. Publishing Industry. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. SUSAN MILLAR WILLIAMS is the Norton. (A new edition of the autobiography including supple- Yvonne Kapp, Time Will Tell: Memoirs. New York: Verso. (Memoir mentary accounts by Anne Sullivan, her teacher, and John Macy.) author of A Devil and a Good Woman, of the writer, aid worker, and political activist.) Too: The Lives of Julia Peterkin, winner of Holly Silva. Guilty Pleasures: Indulgences, Addictions, and Obsessions. Sheila H. Katz, Women and Gender in Early Jewish and Palestinian Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel. the Julia Cherry Spruill Award given by Nationalism. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. the Association of Southern Women Lenore Skomal, The Keeper of the Lime Rock: The Remarkable True Cynthia Kaufman, Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change. Historians for the best book of the Story of Ida Lewis, America’s Most Celebrated Lighthouse Keeper. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Philadelphia, PA: Running Press. year in southern women’s history. She Catherine Kingfisher, ed., Western Welfare in Decline: Globalization and teaches at Trident Technical College Michael R. Stevenson and Jeanine C. Cogan, eds., Everyday Activism: Women’s Poverty. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania A Handbook for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual People and Their Allies. and is at work on a book about the Press, 2002. New York: Routledge. great Charleston, South Carolina, Eva Feder Kittay and Ellen K. Feder, The Subject of Care: Feminist earthquake of 1886. Mihoko Suzuki, Subordiate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Perspectives on Dependency. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Literarry Form in England, 1588-1688. Miami, FL: University of Kathleen L. Komar, Reclaiming Klytemnestra: Revenge or Reconciliation. Miami Press. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Clare L. Taylor, Women, Writing, and Fetishism, 1890-1950: Female Jacob Korg, Winter Love: Ezra Pound and H.D. Madison, WI: Cross-Gendering. New York: Oxford University Press. University of Wisconsin Press. Helen Tookey Anaïs Nin, Fictionality and Femininity: Playing a Thousand Winona LaDuke, The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Roles. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Writings. Stillwater, MN: Voyageur Press, 2002. Kara Walker, Narratives of a Negress. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cynthia Lee, Murder and the Reasonable Man: Passion and Fear in the (Cut paper artist) Criminal Courtroom. New York: New York University Press. Jean Calterone Williams, “A Roof Over My Head”: Homeless Women Toni Lester. Gender Nonconformity, Race, and Sexuality: Charting the and the Shelter Industry. Boulder, CO: University Press of Connections. USA: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Colorado. (Interviews with homeless women—many also caring Caroline Levin, Debra Barrett-Graves, and Jo Eldridge Carney, for children.) The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 10-11 / July 2003 39 as social, economic, and cultural history. Radcliffe Application Office, 34 Concord Candidates should have a completed disser- Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138; 617-496- Classified tation. Reading of applications will begin on 1324; [email protected]; www.rad- November 1, 2003. Please send a letter of cliffe.edu. tory 1789-1877. The search committee application, CV, and placement dossier to Booksellers invites applications in fields including, but British Search Committee, Department of Feminist Editor. Ph.D. Prize-winning not limited to: social and intellectual/cultur- History, Stanford University, Stanford, CA author. Twenty years’ experience editing al history, women and gender, Civil 94305-2024. Stanford is an equal opportuni- every imaginable kind of writing. War/Reconstruction, race, slavery and ty, affirmative action employer. References provided, including many happy emancipation, and borderlands. The com- WRB readers. (510) 524-7913, mittee will begin review of applications on [email protected]. November 1, 2003. Please send a letter of Travel/Rentals application, CV, and placement dossier to U.S. Search Committee, Department of “Women & Dreaming in Australia”. Join History, Stanford University, Stanford, CA the International Women’s Studies Institute Classified Advertising 94305-2024. Stanford is an equal opportuni- on a trip focusing on women and aboriginal ty, affirmative action employer. culture, 12/27/03 to 1/11/04. For more Let The Women’s Review of Books promote your service, sell your product, Publications information, telephone: 650-323-2013; announce a job, education, or travel 20TH CENTURY CHINA. Stanford email: [email protected]; and visit: opportunity, or publicize your conference Solving the Great Pronoun Problem: 14 University seeks an outstanding junior www.iwsi.org. or workshop. Ways to Avoid the Sexist Singular con- scholar for a tenure-track assistant profes- Rates: tains a 14-point guide, discussion, and illus- sorship in modern Chinese history (empha- Carol Christ leads two programs in Greece: $1.15 per word per insertion trative examples. Equal Writes reviews sis post-1911). 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