We are too old for this shit

Women, freedom, and fiction

It’s now clear that The Supreme Court intends to take away a core component of freedom for all American women. Overturning Roe v. Wade is a clear violation of our Constitutional rights, the 13th and 14th Amendments, specifically.

Margaret Atwood says it better than I ever could, and I don’t mean The Handmaid’s Tale. Read this essay published in The Guardian. TLDR: She points to how forcing a woman to have an unwanted pregnancy is enslavement, a violation of the 13th Amendment. Speaking of Handmaid’s Tale, in what is just a little too on the nose, Amy Coney Barrett apparently thinks we need to beef up the domestic supply of infants for adoption.

Freedom and womanhood is rich terrain, and here’s three books about women grappling with it in one way or another. 

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Who cares what the old lady thinks?

If I were ranking these three books on merely their titles alone, this wins. When I include the pages inside, this novel by Olga Tarczuk still wins. 

It’s about an old woman who lives up in the hills above a small Polish town. Her wry perspective on everything and everyone is a pleasure to read. She’s the half-hearted caretaker for the neighboring summer cottages sprinkled in the woods near hers. Half-hearted in the sense that if she discovers that animals have nested in the rafters, or sees mold growing at the floorboards, she’s inclined to let nature run its course rather than actually take care of it. She’s funny, too, and renames everyone in her life with a moniker more in accordance with their appearance or general vibe, like Oddball or Big Foot. She lives alone, studies astrological charts, loves the natural world, and sees how utterly useless most of the men in her town are. When people mysteriously start dying, her theory of who’s doing it–the animals, who are sick of being hunted–only solidifies her reputation as a nutjob. She doesn’t mind that everyone thinks she’s a crank, and she is wryly aware that as an old woman, her status is essentially nil. It’s interesting what she does with that invisibility.

With moments of magic realism, and the careful exception of certain topical details, the author creates the sense that you’re reading a timeless folk tale. Then you’re thrust into a scene with a Range Rover or cellphone reception, and yanked back into the very real present.

Tarczuk won the Nobel prize in literature, and even though the writing is beautiful I was initially a little confused as to why this author deserved a Nobel. But I can’t stop thinking about the book, about what the author was saying, and about this old seemingly inconsequential woman at the center of the story. It was irrelevant to her that her community thought she was weak, invisible, meaningless. She was operating on a different plane, she was answering to a higher call. She was free.

Vladimir

Not that one 

This is a dry martini of a novel, and nothing to do with Putin. Funny, satirical, and dark, the story catapults along with great twists and surprises as the unnamed main character’s situation becomes increasingly unhinged. She’s not particularly likeable I guess, yet I couldn’t tear my eyes away. 

She’s a mess. To be fair, she’s married to an asshole whose dicking around has put their careers and security at risk, but she creates plenty of problems on her own. The book is a fabulous romp and a compelling look at the #metoo movement from an unexpected angle.

Even when she actively sets out to get what she wants–she’s lusting after a younger prof named Vladimir–she never really allows herself to feel happy. From the outside looking in, she’s a successful dedicated professor and mother, but on the inside she’s vainly consumed with her aging appearance. A station is always playing inside her head, analyzing if she looks fat in what she was wearing, if the lighting makes her wrinkles more pronounced, if she looks older than the other women in the room, if she should eat all the food on her plate. Know anyone like this?

I wish my brain were different, but this station is preset in my head too. I don’t think vanity is in itself a bad thing—in small doses it reflects a degree of self-esteem. But our image-obsessed culture makes it hard to age gracefully. She’s so constrained by her vanity, her insecurity, her overthinking of what people think about her. She’s never free. 

I could be wrong, but I get the impression the generation of our daughters has evolved. I think the majority of these young women aren’t tortured by the pressure to live up to some unrealistic fashion-magazine expectation of beauty, and don’t put an outsized value on their appearance. I hope so.  

Lessons in Chemistry

We’ve come a long way

The main character in Vladimir is the polar opposite of the perfect heroine of Lessons in Chemistry. Elizabeth Zott is a brilliant chemist living in the early 1960’s, when women weren’t supposed to be brilliant chemists. They were expected to delight in being nothing more than homemakers. Men were in charge, and the novel cartoonishly displays the flagrant patriarchal misogyny of the time.

This book is smart and vivacious, but a little superficial. Zott is relegated to hosting a cooking show, and uses the airtime to try to radicalize the housewives watching. My problem is that she’s so self-possessed and capable, she started to feel a little like a sociopath. And of course she’s gorgeous, and never wonders if she looks fat in her lab coat. The story is heightened and stylized, and maybe that’s why I couldn’t find any traction. I was ready to bail to be honest until I saw how popular this book is–so popular Brie Larson is already filming the Netflix series. I decided to see if I was missing something, and stuck it out to the end. You could do worse than read or listen to this book (I listened). It’s fun like “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” or “Gilmore Girls.” If you like those shows, I think you’ll love this book. 

My favorite character in the book, besides the dog, is Harriet the neighbor. She’s a bored older woman in a loveless marriage. She sees that her neighbor needs some help with her baby and knocks on the door, in the process opening herself up to a whole new life of relevance and love. Harriet felt more like a character who realistically reflects a smart woman in the raging sexism of the early 1960’s. She’s been indoctrinated by women’s magazines, never had the courage or maybe even the notion to buck the norm and go to college to start a career. She had no recourse when her husband was abusive. She just had a persistent sense of injustice and dissatisfaction that she shoved to the back of her mind because she had children to love and raise, and no power to change things anyway.

I cheered more for Harriet’s resilience to carve a meaningful albeit quieter path for herself than for the heroine’s heroic deeds to liberate the women of her era. I also cheered more for the author of this book, than the book itself. This is Bonnie Garmus’s first novel and she is 64 years old. She had a career as a copywriter before publishing this novel. This woman is my new role model.

It’s always reassuring to be reminded of how fucking backward and flagrantly misogynistic and chauvinist the country used to be. Less so now that we’re heading backwards, I suppose. Maybe the women who are celebrating Roe v. Wade being overturned should read this book.

Time to claim our power

The opening line of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is “I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night.”  I’m not that old yet, but I aspire to be and all these books were valuable opportunities to ruminate on what kind of woman I want to be as I get older.

Truth is, grown women are having a cultural moment. There’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once” in the movie theater, and gray hair is no longer something you need to mask until you’re a grandma. These cultural markers are a reflection of real power. Women control $20 trillion in spending¹ and drive the world economy, and American women vote at higher rates than men². (Still only 55% of eligible women vote in this country.) How in this time of rising power is our government taking fundamental rights away from us? What are we going to do about it?

1. https://hbr.org/2009/09/the-female-economy)

2. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/03/in-year-of-record-midterm-turnout-women-continued-to-vote-at-higher-rates-than-men/