Woo, Girl, Need To Kick Off Your Shoes
March was one of my favorites - Women’s History Month, which meant that I only read books written by women. Hooray! It ended up being a really diverse selection of books. I read five altogether. Let’s rack ‘em up, shall we?
1.) Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom, by Ilyon Woo is the incredible true story of a couple who escape their captors by the wife pretending to be a male slaver and the husband to be her slave. The escape took place in 1848 and the story is riveting, and terrifying. Ellen Craft is very light skinned, and she disguised herself as an unwell, wealthy, white man, with a broken arm, so she wouldn’t have to sign her name. the plan was so elaborate, and they almost got a caught a few times in their journey. I was seriously stressed out at the beginning of the story. The rest of the book talks about the issues they encountered after their escape. I know some readers thought the middle of the book was a little slow, but I was fascinated the whole book long. Woo talks about the politics leading up to the Civil War, and the racism and sexism the couple experienced in the U.S. and throughout the world. It definitely earned its Pulitzer prize for biography.
2.) I had never read Sylvia Plath before. I’m not sure why. Her life was dramatic enough, so you think I would have been all over it. I decided this was the year to read the Bell Jar. It is a mix of fact and fiction and concerns itself with the time Sylvia Plath’s character (Esther Greenwood in the book) spent in New York City as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine, through a suicide attempt and her subsequent stay in a mental institution, and her healing. The thing that was hard for me to read, was that the character was violently sexually assaulted right before her breakdown. Because of the time period, she didn’t tell anyone, and I’m sure she would have been blamed if she had. Without any way to heal after that, either physically or psychologically, of course a person would be suicidal. I’m not saying she wasn’t clinically depressed throughout her life as well, I just wonder how different her life/death would have been if women had any power back then, and if there had been better treatments for mental illnesses.
3.) Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice, by Cristina Rivera Garza won the Pulitzer Prize for memoir or autobiography. It is the true story of a woman who goes back to Mexico after decades of living in the US to try to understand her sister’s death at the hands of her violent ex-boyfriend in 1990. The author goes through her sister’s journals, and interviews her classmates, friends, and family. Cristina was quite a bit older than her sister, and lived in Texas, while her sister lived in Mexico. So, I’m sure she has plenty of guilt in not knowing how bad her sister’s situation was. She discovers her sister was finally starting to break free from her abusive ex-boyfriend, and have some freedom and joy right before she died. Of course, right when women break away from their abusers is when they’re also in the gravest danger from them. Sadly, the asshole who killed her has never been caught or imprisoned. Let’s hope he hasn’t done the same thing to other women since he murdered Liliana.
4.) I had a lot of mixed thoughts about Libertie, by Kaitlyn Greenridge. It starts out in New York right before the end of slavery. Libertie is a young, dark skinned girl who’s mother is light enough to pass for white. Her mother is also a doctor and a helper on the Underground Railroad. Libertie’s father is dead, so she is raised by her mother. From the title of the book and the name of the main character, it’s obvious that the central theme is about freedom, and all its ins and outs. Is her mom giving her freedom and independence by pushing Libertie so hard into studying medicine as her only option, even if she has no interest in it? Is Libertie grabbing her own freedom by defying her mother and moving to Haiti with her rushed marriage to her husband? I had a lot of issues with the choices people made in this novel, but of course, I am coming from a totally different reality, and based on the times and the situations, they may not have felt like they had any choices at all.
5.) Speaking of questionable choices…The last book I read in March was Miranda July’s All Fours. This is a crazy book that most people have strong opinions about, either for or against. I appreciated the originality of the story line. A semi-famous woman (much like Miranda July) decides to drive across the country from where she lives in Los Angeles to some engagements she has in New York. Her road trip was supposed to be her way to prove to herself that she could be a different person than what her husband labeled her at the beginning of the novel. About twenty minutes away from her home and husband and child, she gets off the freeway and takes up residence in a crappy motel. She pays a designer $20,000 to renovate the motel, and spends the next few weeks creating a different life for herself. Boundaries are pushed, lives are reevaluated, and I was made uncomfortable. It’s not that I had issues with the sex or the kind of gross scenes in it. It was more how embarrassed I was for her, and I was afraid she was going to get caught at some of the weird games she was playing.
In the latter half of the book, she talks about Perimenopause, and her fears about the changes involved in the process, and I was very interested in that. I’m so glad women are being more open about going through “The Change” now. I also felt like the ending of the book was really gratifying. This book is definitely not for the faint of heart, or if you’re offended easily, but I am glad I read it.
Soooo, I felt like my list of “lady” books was well rounded this year. I traveled to different time periods, and to several other countries. I learned so much, and was able to look outside my own little world. In general, I am in awe and appreciative of so many women writers. I hope you all had a happy Women’s History Month too, and let’s continue fighting to not only keep our rights, but to have even more. It’s going to be an uphill battle in this authoritarian nightmare we’re all living in the US right now.