love walked in

Being a tweedy book nerd, I thought I'd post a bit about Marisa de Los Santos' love walked in. It is the story of Cornelia, a twenty something cafe manager, and Clare, an eleven year old girl whose bipolar mother abandons her. While the ending was a bit too neat and tidy for me, I did like the characters. Cornelia thinks in allusions to movies of the forties and fifties and falls for a Cary Grant look-a-like (who wouldn't?!) while Clare is brave on the scale of Kidd's Lily. Los Santos shifts from first person Cornelia to third person Clare, but this didn't bother me as much as Greene's switches in Jemima J, perhaps because Los Santos' switches are clean breaks between chapters as opposed to right in the middle. This book itself would make a good movie.

"The Moon is Always Female"--The Secret Life of Bees

Vickey Meyer
Christine Specht
Contemporary Women’s Fiction
25 July 2008

“The Moon is Always Female”*

Every time I read Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, I am reminded of why I loved it the first time I read it and why I love it still. Kidd beautifully crafts this coming of age story of Lily, a narrator reminiscent of Twain’s Huck Finn or Lee’s Scout, who searches for the maternal, the religious, the answer to a past mystery, love, and healing. Every human being is searching for some type of healing, some place of belonging in the world, and we identify with Lily because she embodies that search, and she finds her place within the Boatwright family and within the feminine/maternal divine. One of the many reasons I love this novel is Kidd’s honest and poetic portrayal of her flawed narrator.
Kidd’s use of language astounds me each time I pick up one of her books. Her vivid diction opens Bees with a sensory paragraph that “splits my heart down its seam” (Kidd 1). The similes and metaphors combine with poetic imagery to give Kidd’s language a “perfect crispness” (7) that often leaves me with the thought “I wish I had written that.” Kidd’s language so often rings true to my ears. I share in Lily’s incredulous thought about T. Ray when she wonders “What kind of person is against reading?” (Kidd 15) and agree that “Sunset is the saddest light there is” (Kidd 50). Kidd’s verb choice is exquisite and surprising as demonstrated by Lily’s remembrances of May and “the blaze of love and anguish that had come so often into her face. In the end it had burned her up” (199).
Even though Lily faces misfortune again and again, she does find a home with Black Mary and the Daughters. I love how the characters in this novel make their own religion. Lily grew up with Brother Gerald who claimed that “hell was nothing but a bonfire for Catholics” (Kidd 58), yet Lily finds her spiritual self within an invented religion with very Catholic roots. Being Catholic myself, the Daughters of Mary with their storytelling, rosary like mantras, and elaborate ceremonies, really appeal to me, and Lily slowly learns that “her [Mary’s] spirit is everywhere” (Kidd 141). The connection between the spiritual world, the natural world, and the maternal world all makes a whole lot of sense.
The symbol of the moon as the feminine divine illustrates that connection. Black Mary carries a yellow crescent moon, and the moon waxes and wanes in the novel just as the comfort Lily discovers waxes and wanes. When Lily visits her special spot in the orchard where she remembers her mother, she loses “her boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin and the moon was my heart beating up there in the dark” (Kidd 23). When Lily wades naked in the creek with Rosaleen, she gives thanks to the moon, and when she walks through the bee hives with August, Lily feels like a drifting moon. The moon is linked directly to the feminine divine through Black Mary. August says her mother claimed “Our Lady lived on the moon” (Kidd 113).
The joy in The Secret Life of Bees is that Lily finds healing, finds love, finds the maternal and feminine divine within herself and within the Daughters of Mary who are “the moons shining over me” (Kidd 302).
*The title for this journal is taken from a book of poetry by Marge Piercy.

Horror and Healing--The Lovely Bones

Vickey Meyer
Christine Specht
Contemporary Women’s Fiction
17 July 2008

Horror and Healing

I have a problem with dead girl lit. While I enjoyed reading Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and respect her as one of the authors who have the courage to write from a first dead person point of view, I worry at the implication that a young girl only gets a voice after she is dead. Sebold weaves her story well, including intimate portraits of characters so touched by the horror of Susie’s death that their own lives begin to unravel as in the case of Abigail and Jack or begin to begin as in the case of Lindsey and Samuel. Susie may have been the narrator of this novel, but she is not the only character who calls forth the reader’s sympathy.
Unlike many stories that build up to a violent act, the atrocious horror that steals Susie’s innocence and her life occurs as the inciting incident of the novel, and Sebold uses the rest of her plot to force the readers to look through a magnifying glass at the wreckage left behind. From the first chapter, I wanted retribution for Susie’s rape and death. Mr. Harvey buried alive would have suited me nicely, but Sebold refuses to give the reader that satisfaction, and we are left at novel’s end with an old and pathetic Mr. Harvey who never did get the disemboweling he deserved. Sebold instead focuses on how human hope can still flourish even in horror’s aftermath.
After Susie’s death, I found myself, strangely, empathizing with her father more than with her sister or her mother. Lindsey found solace in the ordinary glory of first love while Abigail escaped into “merciful adultery” (Sebold 197). These are just some of the paradoxical ideas included in The Lovely Bones, whose title, perhaps a nod to Theodore Roethke’s poem beginning “I knew a woman lovely in her bones,” even juxtaposes horror and beauty. Jack was left to attempt to pick up the slivers of debris, crying only “into the deep ruff of fur surrounding the dog’s neck” (Sebold 29). In his own sorrow, he does not turn to family to offer and receive comfort. My favorite character is definitely Grandma, who is both an alcoholic and a good person. She swoops in to remind the Salmons that life does indeed go on.
The reader is given closure, not in Mr. Harvey’s death by icicle, but by Susie and Ruth’s strange switch, which gives Ruth the opportunity to receive rose petals and lecture old Beatniks in heaven, and gives Susie the “time to fall in love” (Sebold 309). Although I prefer the mysticism of Alice Hoffman, Sebold’s practical portrayal of heaven and the divine makes the appearance of this miracle both sudden and more believable for the reader. Overall, Sebold overcomes my reticence for dead girl lit. through her treatment of time and human connection being a harbinger of hope and healing.

Works Cited

Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 2002.

"Belly Good"--Jemima J

Vickey Meyer
Christine Specht
Contemporary Women’s Fiction
10 July 2008

“Belly Good”

My nieces are currently obsessed with Webkins, which are stuffed animals one can buy and then register online, giving them homes, walks, and food. After introducing me to a panda they had named Halle, I remarked that she looked a little sad. My youngest niece then told me the stuffed panda was sad because she was fat. While it was true the panda had a cute pudgy stomach, I was disturbed that my niece equated sadness with being fat. So I took it upon myself to teach my nieces a new phrase inspired by a Marge Piercy poem called “Belly good.” Piercy points out women’s obsession with thinness with an apostrophe to her belly saying, “You’re not supposed to exist/ at all this decade. You’re to be flat/ as a kitchen table” (Piercy ln 12-14). Piercy goes on to state that her belly is a comfortable swell and ends the poem by labeling bellies “our female shame and sunburst strength” (Piercy ln 40).
In Jemima J British novelist Jane Green addresses the universal issue of obesity and dieting. The main character, Jemima, begins the novel with the line, “God, I wish I were thin” (Green 1) and continues through the trials of internet dating, dieting, and attempting to find happiness. While I do believe these issues are important to the modern woman, I do not agree with the message readers seem to be learning from Jemima. She hides her binges, embracing the “female shame” portion of Piercy’s poem. After swinging between the extremes of over eating to obsessive dieting and exercise, Jemima does seem to find a happy medium, but only when she has snagged the man of her dreams, which only happens after she has reached an enviable size 10.
The main problem I have with Green’s message is summed up toward the end of the novel when the third person narrator, who obtrusively and annoyingly breaks into the plot, tells readers that “Jemima Jones never dared to believe in herself” (Green 373). Never in the novel does our flawed and likeable heroine learn the other lesson Piercy teaches in her poem. Jemima never learns to look at her body as her “sunburst strength.” I believe in being healthy, but I also join “half the women in the country [who] are a size 14” (Green 2). I am amazed that in this day and age when women have overcome the obstacles of suffrage and employment equality that we still look to outside sources to tell us what is beautiful. And we still value or devalue ourselves based on what those outside sources say.
With reality shows that display competitions to be the next top model or which contestant can lose the most weight the fastest and workout videos like Abs of Steel, I am looking forward to the day when I can read a novel or watch a television show where the size 18/20 heroine finds happiness, her dream job, and her dream lover and ends each episode eating chocolate, patting her belly, and looking into the camera while pronouncing the new catchphrase, “Belly good.”

Works Cited
Green, Jane. Jemima J. New York: Broadway Books, 1999.
Piercy, Marge. "Belly Good." What Are Big Girls Made Of?. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., 1997. 75-76.

eat pray love

Anyone who knows me knows that technology usually gets the best of me, so this post is just to try out this whole blogging endeavor, and I'm using it to gush about Elizabeth Gilbert's book eat pray love. I adore it. Elizabeth Gilbert is a writer who, after going through a nasty divorce, decided to take a year and try to find balance in her life. To do this, she traveled to Italy, India, and Indonesia to explore the concepts of pleasure, prayer, and finally, finding a balance between the two. I think the concept of finding a balance between the physical world of pleasure we inhabit through our senses and the spiritual world we inhabit through our expression of devotion or faith is interesting, and the writing is at times unexpectedly beautiful and laugh-out-loud funny.