A Literary Life

Singled Out (Virginia Nicholson)

While many may think me odd for sitting down with a thick tome of social history for a little light reading, I couldn’t stop myself from wanting to read this interesting, well-researched book about Britain’s so-called surplus women, left without men to marry and love after World War I. In fact, I had to interlibrary loan the book, the Pikes Peak Library District being too backward and short-sighted to pick it up. (I don’t mean that, PPLD. Please don’t take away my heroin library card!)

“In 1921, the National Census had published. The figures were devastating … In England and Wales there were 19,803,022 females and only 18,082,220 males — a difference of a million and three-quarters. This was far worse than predicted. Already, since the end of the war, newspapers had been running scare headlines about ‘Our Surplus Girls’. By February 1920 the Manchester Evening News was running a report on Dr Murray Leslie’s alarming analysis of post-war demographics, in ‘Husband Hunting — Tragedy of England’s Million Surplus Women’. The Daily Mail caught the story, with ‘A Million Women Too Many — 1920 Husband Hunt’. But with the publication of the 1921 Census the figure doubled overnight, and the Mail’s proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, felt able to publicly refer to ‘Britain’s problem of two million superfluous women’. The phrase — with all its insinuating baggage — refused to go away.”

Much awaited, the book didn’t disappoint in the least with Nicholson’s mostly anecdotal tales of these “bach girls” (pronounced batch, as in bachelorette), surplus women, spinsters and old maids. Yes, there were a lot of negative titles for these unfortunate ladies, who not only had to experience their brothers, fiances and neighbors being killed in foreign lands, but also had to find a way to go through life without a mate — and often have society blame THEM for not following the traditional route of marriage and babies. There simply weren’t enough men to go around, so what was a girl to do? According to Nicholson, lots!

Surplus women studied at the best universities (where they could complete courses, but not receive degrees). They could get office jobs as clerks and secretaries (where they were paid a pittance compared to men doing the same jobs). They could fall into the guilt trap of taking care of aging, ailing relatives. They could set up house with a sister or a friend and become uncomfortably fond of their pets. They could go lesbian. They could go to the colonies in search of single men. They could live financially and emotionally meager existences. Some did, of course.

However, Singled Out chooses not to focus on what these women missed out on or the negative aspects of their spinsterhood. Instead, we learn about women who became stockbrokers, archaeologists, publishers, authors, diplomats. We meet women who took lovers, traveled the world, adopted children, devoted themselves to politics or public service. In fact, these single women transformed society in one short generation. Unable to ignore such a big population, the patriarchy was forced to relax. Women not only had careers and options and freedom, they were eventually accepted for having them. They got the vote. They got respect. They achieved things that it might have taken women a century to accomplish and changed Britain’s conception of women, setting the stage for the women’s rights movement/feminism of the next generation. According to Nicholson, many came to see being a wife and mother as the real cage, a boring existence they were glad to escape. (And some wives shared their opinion!)

And all because their future husbands were killed before they could ever meet.

Bittersweet and often touching, the stories of these women were fascinating reading, sad yet empowering. Singled Out (like Sin in the Second City or Dorothy Parker’s biography — Gee, am I a bit of a feminist, you think?) is the kind of non-fiction I can read all day, without the pressure of a classroom or a syllabus to MAKE me do it.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection

This Common Secret (Susan Wicklund)

I can guarantee right now that this post will probably drive more traffic and hit more search queries than most other things I write and, in fact, I actually considered not reviewing it. Why? Because this book is the memoir of an abortion doctor. That’s right, a sane, kind, intelligent female doctor who aids other women in ending unwanted pregnancies. Here’s the word again in case the search engines missed it: Abortion. Oooooo. Get a soapbox and a fire extinguisher, because someone is going to get up on the former and someone else is going to violently spray them with the latter. That’s just the nature of the passion the subject sparks.

This calm, measured and thoughtful book, however, is anything but incendiary in my opinion. Granted, my opinion is firmly in the pro-choice camp, so perhaps it’s easy for me to say that. But Susan Wickland’s story could make a more convincing case for safe, legal abortion than doubtful readers out there may expect. After suffering a horrific abortion as a young woman and then becoming a mother, Wickland became a doctor later in life, specializing in women’s health issues. She had to fight for the right to learn the abortion procedure, thinking that it was a necessary thing to know when you dealt with women who, you know, get pregnant and might want to, gee, have a perfectly legal procedure done to stop that pregnancy from progressing.

She had little idea what she was getting into. Because of the high personal risk of the job, very few doctors are willing to step into the shoes of “abortion provider.” They’re stalked, libeled, threatened — as are their families. From 1977 until 2005, these doctors have seen seven murders, 17 attempted murders, 52 bombings, 100 acid attacks, 3 kidnappings and 480 cases of stalking. Needless to say, few have the courage to provide the services anyway and more women than you would ever guess are thankful for them every year. And Wickland? Well, she even had the courage to provide services to the very women protesting outside her door, who would then use privacy protections to be out on the front lines the next day, harassing other women in the same situation.

“Smile: Your mom chose life!” read several billboards around my city, the very conservative town of Colorado Springs. These ads make me very angry, because they assume that every pregnancy is potentially unwanted, that women make arbitrary decisions about such important things. (Should I dye my hair red? Should I have this baby? How insulting to our intelligence. No wonder some think they have the right to make choices FOR us flippant women.) The experiences Wickland describe have nothing to do with women using the procedure as birth control or making offhand choices. These are real women making hard choices, women who would have no where else to turn except dangerous, back-alley, illegal providers. These are the victims of rape, abuse and incest. They are women who don’t want to bring their child into the wrong situation. They are women who know they aren’t ready. Women who don’t need to share their motivations with anyone, really, just as they need not make if or what form of birth control they use, what career choices they make, who they love public. It’s a hard choice no doubt, but one they have the right to make.
Wickland writes: “Abortion is about life: quality of life for infants, children, and adults. Everywhere and in every sense of the word. Life, not death.”

If you don’t believe this, or don’t believe that the above could be true for ANYone in ANY situation, read the book. Perhaps it will change your mind.

Sin in the Second City (Karen Abbott)

I’m a sucker for sin. A relatively (ok, a VERY) vanilla person myself, I love delving into the social and literary history of sex and sin. Not “evil,” mind you, but “sin” — that delicious and glorious word that connotes rebellion, scandal and transgressions against buttoned up morality. I mean, I wrote my thesis on female sexuality in 18th century Britain, for sin’s sake, and I’ve reviewed many of the most controversial books about sexual liberation (Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Lolita, for instance) and even sexual subjugation (Story of O, anyone?) So when I picked up this excellent book of creative non-fiction about two of Chicago’s most infamous madams, I knew I was in for a deliciously sinful treat.

Chicago — the second largest American city at the turn of the 20^th century — full of marvels like horseless carriages, trolleys, skyscrapers and modern medicine. But also overflowing with immigrants, shysters, con men, crooked politicians, bribed policemen and, of course, prostitutes. By the tally of the 1911 Vice Commission, there were no less than 1,020 brothels in Chicago and 5,000 full-time prostitutes, and the Levee (the red-light district) raked in more than $16 million per year, which would amount to $328 million in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars.

Enter Minna and Ada Everleigh and the Everleigh resort. (Yes, yes, the ever-lay club. The pun is intended.) These two madams set out to elevate the profession, which they see as a necessary service to male society, a sex that they not-so-secretly disdain. Their harlots are fed gourmet meals, dressed opulently, cared for by a respectable physician, taught to recite Balzac and made never to drug, rob or otherwise con their clients. The Prince of Prussia drank champagne out of the slipper of a Butterfly, as the Everleigh’s harlots were known, and any visitor to Chicago (who had the money, of course) wanted to see the inside of the sisters’ carpeted, gold-plated, perfumed bordello.

But this was 20^th century America and the moral reform movement was already at hand, the same movement that would pass the Mann Act to prevent white slavery and make alcohol illegal for more than a decade. And so the free spirits of the Levee district and their bacchanalian attitudes clash with the street preachers, the stern lady do-gooders and the fiery spirit of moral uplift. I think we all know who wins.

Even if the reader knows that the brothel doors will one day be closed, Abbott is a masterful story teller. Never dry or dusty, she brings the lives of these ladies off of the page with sensory details, real dialog pulled from first-hand accounts and a burlesque sense of humor that it’s difficult not to share.

“Imagine yourself,” Bell (a Chicago-based preacher and reformer) wrote, “In this awful district with Satan and all his cohorts let loose, seemingly. The cursing of men and the screeching of dope-filled and half drunken women; the banging of electrical pianos; the honking of autos; the throngs of young men going like mad into these houses of horror, where the air is reeking with the fumes of dope and tobacco and millions of germs; where women are in their scanty attire with painted faces and colored and false hair, with their honeyed words and foolish prattling, calling and alluring men into their fearful clutches and then to awful sin and death perhaps!”

Ah yes, just imagine. How sordidly and wretchedly fun to read and imagine.

House of Mondavi (Julia Flynn Siler)

Big-breasted women in peasant blouses, the smell of Chardonnay aging in oak barrels, tipsy men howling songs at the moon, grape skins bunching between the toes: Such are the images I expected to find within the pages of a book about the Mondavis, the most famous wine-making family in Southern California. What did I find? Family feuds played out as lengthy legal dramas, stock option summaries, board room battles, financial reports and… snore zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

File this under “business,” not biography. The later I like and the former I’d rather us as a coaster than subject my fragile, creative head to its numbing influence.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars - Mediocre

Perfect from Now On (John Sellers)

I like John. I like John a lot. I think John and I could be friends and drink beer at a local pub and jam on each other’s iPods. However, I admit I didn’t RABIDLY enjoy John’s book the way I did immediately take to his personality. I liked the book — especially the fact that it turned me on to a lot of new music — but a dozen pages of footnotes dedicated to how he spends the anniversary of Ian Curtis’s death drones in my eyes and makes me sleepy.

In other words, portions of the book are pure fan-to-fan fiction. If you don’t share the same heartfelt passions for particular gods of indie rock, you won’t truly get what the man is laying down, dig? And given indie fans’ (all music fans?) tendency to bash the well-loved indie bands of others as “too trendy” or “knock-offs” to make their own favorites seem more cool, he alienates a few readers, too. (I mean what’s with the animosity, or perhaps just indifference towards Modest Mouse, Johnny boy? Huh?!)

But I’ll give the man props for this: He made me REALLY listen to the music of The Shins. Outside of the ubiquitous Garden State Soundtrack, that is. While Seller’s prose didn’t disappoint me (let’s get that straight), it didn’t wow me either, but lyrics like this from The Shins (Sleeping Lessons, Wincing the Night Away) do:

Eviscerate your fragile frame
And spill it out on the ragged floor
A thousand different versions of yourself

And if the old guard still offend
They got nothing left on which you depend
So enlist every ounce
Of your bright blood
And off with their heads
Jump from The hook

You’re not obliged to swallow anything you despise
See, those unrepenting buzzards want your life

And they got no right
As sure as you have eyes
They got no right

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars - Vacation book club selection

Update: I can’t upload the song here, as per The Boyfriend’s little reminder of legality (party pooper!). Check out the link in the comment below for the YouTube video of Sleeping Lessons.

Leap of Faith (Queen Noor)

An American woman marries the King of Jordan in the Diana-Charles-style romance of the Arab world. She converts to Islam, aims for peace in the Middle East, starts many charitable organizations, throws herself into her adopted country and pops out quite a few children along the way. She sees peace effort after peace effort fall apart, innocent civilians die at war and homelands stolen. In the end, she must witness her husband’s surrender to cancer.

It’s a great biography that gave me a lot of insight about the country of Jordan and their unique role and perspective in the region, and it also fleshed out and humanized the role of women in politics in the Middle East. While I wouldn’t say Queen Noor (Noor meaning light in Arabic) is a hero of mine or any such thing, I would say her life story is a valuable addition to my view of the world and the people who inhabit it. Oh, and she’s really purdy, too, especially for a woman that’s my mother’s age.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Vacation reading

My Hutterite Life (Lisa Marie Stahl)

So we all know the Amish, right? (Even if some of us only know them through their association with Harrison Ford) And some of us know the Mennonites. But I for one had never heard of the Hutterites, who live mostly in the northern US (Montana) and Canada, speak German, live communally and wear very distinct and plain clothing. So young Lisa, a teenager in Montana, decided to write a newspaper column for several years about what it means to be a Hutterite: how they don’t shun technology, how they divide labor along gender lines, how they make clothes, ceremonial and holiday traditions, etc.

While she goes into detail about how to make bread for a hundred and her school schedule, even that her brothers hoard John Deere tractor catalogs like other boys do dirty magazines (my words, not hers), she doesn’t really go into the things I want to know. Such as do they talk about the birds and the bees? Is enjoying sex a crime because the act in purely for reproduction? Are there illegal drug rings skulking around the barns in the dead of night? You see, that’s why I couldn’t be a Hutterite, that dirty little mind of mine.

So while I enjoyed the book, I wanted more. I wanted the truth that didn’t have to be read by her mother before it went to press. Also, the narrative style was a bit choppy given that the book is simply a compendium of her previous columns, not a cohesive work. I guess all that bread baking keeps a girl too busy to re-write from scratch. Still, a really fun read. I think I finished the whole book over the course of an airplane trip with a layover.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Vacation reading

What Fresh Hell is This? (Marion Meade)

Not a lot of people outside of obsessive literary circles know who Dorothy Parker was or have read her poetry and short fiction. However, I have always been drawn to her wild and witty personality, her simple and acerbic words and also, I will admit, her artistic and wretched vices — so common among the Literati of the 20s and 30s (She socialized with Faulkner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fitzgerald and Hemingway to name a few). This biography was reverent and exhaustive in its depiction of the life of this “Celebrated Wit,” and though it was long, I enjoyed most every page of it.

“What fresh hell is this?” Such was the typical, pessimistic attitude of Parker when the doorbell rang or something new happened to interrupt the old. She was known to like you to your face, and rip you to shreds when you back was turned. She had but a few friends, but those loyal, and an on-again-off-again success monetarily. As in the newspapers, gossip columns and magazines of the day — she was one of the first writers, and a continuing one, in The New Yorker magazine — she is still remembered for her biting one-liners. A sampling:

• When told that President Coolidge was dead, she asked, “Well, how can you tell?”
• A friend of Dorothy’s was described as never being able to hurt a fly. She replied, “Not if it was buttoned up.”
• At one of her first literary jobs at Vogue, Dorothy wrote captions for fashion pictures. One, which almost ran before it was caught, read, “From these foundations of the autumn wardrobe, one may learn that brevity is the soul of lingerie.”

But her personal life was turbulent, and included abortion, two divorces, buckets — if not barrels, if not ships — of alcohol, Communism and other then-disdained political choices, and chronic financial neediness thanks to a drive towards charity and the need to spend every penny in her hand, when she had it.

One of my favorite of her magazine poems, many of which she came to think of as vapid and silly in her later life, spoke of marital problems:

By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying —
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

It’s a long read (414 pages in my copy), but worth it if you have an urge to find out more about this “Wit.” (I’d like to know, how do you get the title of “Wit” anyway? Is it possible in the 21st century?) However, the story of her life is darker and deeper than her cutting words. The biographer did a great job, but her poetry and short fiction depict her personality, too, in a much more dynamic way… a more true way, from a certain point of view. Besides, it kind of depressing to know that her ashes are still lying unclaimed in some attorney’s office in New York.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

A Long Way Gone (Ismael Beah)

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier is the true story of Ismael Beah, a native of Sierra Leone who was caught up in the violence of the country’s civil war (1991-2002). Separated by a surprise rebel attack from his family, 13-year-old Ishmael runs into the jungle with a few friends. They encounter mostly mistrust, fear and resistance from the villages they pass because the rebels often employ troops of young boys of about the same age. Ironically enough, after surviving in the jungle, wandering a significant way across the country and back, Ishmael encounters a small town defended by the government’s troops.

However, rather than taking the young boys in and shielding them from further involvement in war, these soldiers offer the boys a choice — fight as soldiers by the troop’s side or leave the town into the hands of surrounding rebels, who will likely take them for governmental collaborators. Each boy receives a small dose of training, a large gun and a daily supply of drugs and violence: marijuana, cocaine and a substance they call “brown brown,” a mixture of gunpowder and drugs, plus war movies such as Rambo played on a gasoline-generator-run projector every night.

With plain, simply and un-fussy language, Ishmael tells his whole story. And he doesn’t need any frilly text — his story is so compelling and unbelievable that the reader hangs on every plain and simple word. The book is a journey through the hell of war, about how twisted ideals, adults and circumstances can wrench away childhood, an article that is impossible to regain once lost. This book is about how a human in extraordinary circumstances survived, and how such a person forgives themselves afterwards for how they enacted that survival.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe is known as a journalist and a chronicler of his times, and this book had been on my list for some time because it is one of his best-known works and, frankly, it has a really awesome title. True to the reputation of the novel and its author, it is a creative piece of non-fiction that stays true to its time even after that time has past, recreating the environment and the emotions (the aura, man, do you see the aura?) of that hippie existence so often satirized but so little understood.

Wolfe speaks in this book about Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and one of the founders of the psychedelic movement, and Kesey’s group of friends and fellow travelers who name themselves The Merry Pranksters. They’re the first to travel the country on a magical mystery tour (yes, before the Beatles) and one of the first to try to make acid and the ensuing mental expansion related to the drug a cultural and philosophical movement.

Tune in, drop out. Tune into the wholeness, the interconnected nature of the universe and drop out of square (meaning live to day to day with your head down) society. So long Mom, Dad, John and Jane Doe. Hello the true world, which is more than your parents with their antiquated notions of what is right and wrong, what the future should be, with their stuck-in-a-rut daily lives. In this book, you begin to see the “hippie” notion of expanding yourself rather than fitting into a conformist mold, or seeing the world in a new way, a spiritual journey of discovery rather than an oft-traveled path of marriage, career and death.

The Pranksters spread the message of LSD through parties known as Acid Tests, which in the media, are often thought of as multi-media experiences (think light shows, trippy music and such) that replicate the acid experience without the actual drug. But yeah right, the LSD was there! On the other hand, Wolfe brilliantly recreates the acid mindset, varying his prose and descriptions, making the reader feel as if they truly have the trip without the drugs.

It’s a great history of the sex, drugs and rock and roll of the time period told from the naive point of view of the time period, the perspective that they were doing something that had never been done, feeling emotions that had never been acted upon. And though the world has changed since the time the book was written, that idealism and spirituality shines through. It’s a fun jaunt back in social history, and it’s even more fun now that we are older, wiser and knowledgeable about the effects of the “hippie” movement.

While I didn’t imbibe the LSD, I feel I have learned a small bit of truth about history, about how it felt to be present in a certain time and place in American history. And, most importantly, I have been entertained.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection