Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2020-women-longlist‎ (16)

If this family had taught him anything it was that people could get mad at each other and then make up again.

If this family had taught him anything it was that people could get mad at each other and then make up again.

“It has become somewhat of a joke, among those who know me and my fiction well, that I am a particular kind of writer. “Claire’s stories are all very long,” it would be fair to say. “And they don’t have plots. And everyone in them loves each other a lot?” My debut novel, The Most Fun We Ever Had, is no exception: It’s over 500 pages long, and the heart of the book, for me, has always been married couple David and Marilyn Sorenson, who have been happily together for nearly 50 years, and whose happiness is the source of much of the tension and forward motion in the narrative. I once described the novel as being about “good love”—that is, the Sorensons are a family who endure a fair amount of emotional hardship, but the ties that bind them are woven from real, deep affection”

“Liza; she’s the one who—”
“Delusional psychologist? Dating the software developer with tattoo sleeves? Accidentally pregnant? ….. I’ve got all you Sorensons down. Violet’s the one with the illegitimate lovechild and the ‘live, laugh, love’ poster in her upstairs bathroom. Irish twin of your other messed-up sister—Wendy, the heiress with the tragic past… Your dad’s a stoic family practitioner who’s recently taken up landscaping in his retirement … Your mom is a bombshell flower child who was romanced into a life of quiet domesticity”

She regarded the crests of her knees beneath her belly. “I really am sorry,” she said. “I don’t—I feel terrible for acting how I did. But it’s been a—particularly awful time for me. I’m facing down being a single parent and that would be hard enough on its own, but when you grow up with parents like mine—parents who are in love like mine … God, these stable, perfect, desperately infatuated—It just …” She shook her head. “I’m falling so short of the mark.” “Yes,” Gillian said mildly. “It was hard for me too, when I was your age. Trying to figure out my own life while bearing witness, every day, to such an idyllic marriage.” Liza looked up to find Gillian staring at her squarely. It occurred to her that this woman may have been one of the few outside of their family who understood the magnificent albatross that was her parents’ love, who had suffered her own pains in its wake.

“We’re all emotionally stunted because you and Dad love each other more than you love us,” Wendy added conversationally. Marilyn hadn’t noticed her standing in the doorway, and now she came to sit beside her sister at the table, twisting her limbs yogically, her gorgeous and radically unpredictable eldest, the button pusher. “Lord, what a thing to say. Is this some kind of intervention? Merry Christmas, Mom.” “Do you disagree?” Liza asked, the two of them tag-teaming her now, apparently, her two sharp-eyed, honey-haired daughters. “Of course I—” “It’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Wendy said. “I’d rather be ****ed up because my parents are hot for each other than because they’re, like, keeping me chained to a bike rack overnight and feeding me raw oats. But you have to admit that there’s a gradient of preference.”

It wasn’t that she hadn’t grown up around love. Rather, love was constant, a nearly assaulting presence that confronted her each morning when she came downstairs and her parents were huddled together in front of the coffeepot; in the evenings when her dad was in his office and her mom would yell out, “Darling, the gas bill!” and her dad would reply, “Paid it on Monday, kid.” This wasn’t the norm, she knew. But her sisters were pretty normal, relatively speaking, and they had each had at least a couple of quasi-healthy longish-term relationships in their history. Grace was growing more and more anomalous by the day, a twenty-three-year-old non-Amish virgin who had never had a real boyfriend. Wendy had Oak Park’s high school elite and then Miles, and she was still sexually active, Grace thought, judging by the amount she drank and how often she critiqued the construction of the butts of various strangers she saw on the street. Violet had Matt, and the guy who had come before him, the scientist guy who’d fathered her newfound nephew. Liza had been with Ryan at least since she was Grace’s age. And her parents: her father had loved her mother for decades, and vice versa, but it wasn’t like all of those years had been sheer perfection. Her mother was beautiful—she knew this even objectively—but she’d had four children and smoked for the better part of her adulthood and spent much of her twenties and thirties (and forties, thanks to Grace herself) in a state of frenetic exhaustion, things that cumulatively amounted to a sort of protruding belly and veins on her hands and lines around her eyes. None of these things had ever seemed to bother her father, whose own decades of sleeplessness rendered him perpetually heavy-eyed and occasionally bedheaded. And still her mother would rub his shoulder at the kitchen sink or kiss his ear on the front porch and say things like You missed a spot, handsome, or Gosh, do I like you, mister. All of her memories of her parents’ affection consisted of a particular look that her dad often gave her mom, one that said, baldly and inarticulately, You’re the best person ever. They were both equally, aggressively sanguine about the imperfections of their union, which meant that someone, somewhere, someday probably had to accept Grace.

When he stopped talking there was a hushed silence. The fact that they had been within reach of him had given them something, a sprig of hope. But I wanted to speak, to say, Sir, you are only a few feet away from me, but you are aeons from them in their cruel captivity. You have not been there. You cannot know what was done to us. You live by power and we by powerlessness.

Other drivers have arrived and there is wild talk and conferring as to which girls to put in the different trucks. Terror had paralysed us. The moon that we lost for a time reappeared high up in the sky, its cold rays shining on dark trees that stretched on and on, bearing us to the pith of our destination.

In the city an American woman, who ran a charity organisation, took her in and helped her to rebuild. She encouraged her to read and to write out the words she did not understand. She was given a series of English stories that concerned the dippy adventures of a dog, and though it was a nice story it was not for her, it did not touch her heart.

Listen. Those Tulsa white folks burned my grandmama’s beauty shop to the ground! They burned up the school my mama would have gone to and her daddy’s restaurant. They nearly burned my own mama, who carried a heart-shaped scar on the side of her face till the day they laid her in the ground. Imagine them trying to set a two-year-old child on fire. That’s all my mama was—just two years old and barely running when the fire rained down on her. Her own daddy snatching her up, but not before that piece of wood from her mama’s beauty parlor landed on her cheek and left its memory there all her life. Two years old. Those white folks tried to kill every living brown body in all of Greenwood, my own mama included. Every last one. That was 1921. History tries to call it a riot, but it was a massacre. Those white men brought in their warplanes and dropped bombs on my mama’s neighborhood. God rest her soul, but if she was alive, she’d tell anyone listening the story.

Those white folks came with their torches and their rages. … . Turned my people’s lives and dreams to ash. So my mama taught me all I know about holding on to what’s yours. I know you hold on to your dreams and you hold on to your money. And I know that paper money burns, so you put it into rolls of quarters and nickels and dimes. And when those grow to be too many, you find the men who sell you the blocks of gold. And you take those blocks of gold and stack them beneath your floorboards and way up high in your cabinets.

They ate bologna-and-cheese sandwiches, barbecue potato chips, and Oreo cookies sitting on the library steps. Washing it down with Coca-Cola.

Crack had paid for his fresh Caesar haircut and the do-rag and the Murray’s Nu Nile Aubrey figured he used at night to make the waves he sported beneath his Kangol.

[She] refuses to give up her bed, saying it was the bed she was married in and she will not have another, so the new, grander bed is put in the room for guests.

For the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet. The first is a glassmaker on the island of Murano in the principality of Venice; the second is a cabin boy on a merchant ship sailing for Alexandria on an unseasonably warm morning with an easterly wind.

It’s like a mirror, he had said. Or that they are one person split down the middle. Their two

He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. He will carry an open wound, down his side, for the rest of his life, where she had been ripped from him. How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without rain. Tears are appearing on her cheeks now, like silver seeds, as if by magic. He knows they are his, falling from his eyes on to her face, but they could just as easily be hers. They are one and the same. ‘You shall be well,’ she murmurs. He grips her fingers in anger. ‘I shall not.’ He passes his tongue over his lips, tasting salt. ‘I’ll come with you. We’ll go together.’

Then the idea strikes him. He doesn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. It occurs to Hamnet, as he crouches there, next to her, that it might be possible to hoodwink Death, to pull off the trick he and Judith have been playing on people since they were young: to exchange places and clothes, leading people to believe that each was the other.

The fleas that leapt from the dying rats into their striped fur crawl down into these boxes and take up residence in the rags padding the hundreds of tiny, multi-coloured millefiori beads (the same rags put there by the fellow worker of the master glassmaker; the same glassmaker who is now in Murano, where the glassworks is at a standstill, because so many of the workers are falling ill with a mysterious and virulent fever).

It is tall, cloaked in black, and in the place of a face is a hideous, featureless mask, pointed like the beak of a gigantic bird. ‘No,’ Hamnet cries, ‘get away.’ .. Then his grandmother is there, pushing him aside, apologising to the spectre, as if there is nothing out of the ordinary about it, inviting it to step into the house, to examine the patient. Hamnet takes a step backwards and another. He collides with his mother, ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she whispers. ‘It is only the physician.’ ‘The . . .?’ Hamnet stares at him, still there on the doorstep, talking with his grandmother. ‘But why is he . . .?’ Hamnet gestures to his face, his nose. ‘He wears that mask because he thinks it will protect him,’ she says. ‘From the pestilence?’ His mother nods. ‘And will it?’ His mother purses her lips, then shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

The spectre is speaking without a mouth, saying he will not come in, he cannot, and they, the inhabitants, are hereby ordered not to go out, not to take to the streets, but to remain indoors until the pestilence is past.

If the plague comes to London, he can be back with them for months. The playhouses are all shut, by order of the Queen, and no one is allowed to gather in public. It is wrong to wish for plague, her mother has said, but Susanna has done this a few times under her breath, at night, after she has said her prayers. She always crosses herself afterwards. But still she wishes it. Her father home, for months, with them. She sometimes wonders if her mother secretly wishes it too.

‘Madam,’ the physician says, and again his beak swings towards them, ‘you may trust that I know much more about these matters than you do. A dried toad, applied to the abdomen for several days, has proven to have great efficacy in cases such as these.

She thinks of her garden, of her shelves of powders, potions, leaves, liquids, with incredulity, with rage. What good has any of that been? What point was there to any of it? All those years and years of tending and weeding and pruning and gathering. She would like to go outside and rip up those plants by their roots and fling them into the fire. She is a fool, an ineffectual, prideful fool. How could she ever have thought that her plants might be a match for this?

What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.

It is even more difficult, Agnes finds, to leave the graveyard, than it was to enter it. So many graves to walk past, so many sad and angry ghosts tugging at her skirts, touching her with their cold fingers, pulling at her, naggingly, piteously, saying, Don’t go, wait for us, don’t leave us here.

And Agnes finds she can bear anything except her child’s pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusion, but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief.

‘the place in your head. I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape. You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else. Nothing can keep you from it. Not even the death of your own child. I see this,’

It is also plague season again in London and the playhouses are shut. This is never said aloud. Judith notes the absence of this word during his visits.

What is the word, Judith asks her mother, for someone who was a twin but is no longer a twin?

Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place. ‘O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!’ murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.

This not-knowing when it came to my parents; things I’d never thought about, even if they were clear as day, clear as the fact that my parents had

This not-knowing when it came to my parents; things I’d never thought about, even if they were clear as day, clear as the fact that my parents had their own parents, had their own childhoods and histories. And then one day you open a drawer and out come all the secrets that have just been sitting quietly, waiting to be found, even though you never thought about them, never suspected they existed in the first place.

It had only taken her more than fifty years, she thought, and what was fifty, when the words of the people you grew up with mattered so much they formed the breadth and depth of your life, shaped the path ahead of you. All of it had begun with her waking to the world, the name she had been given. The fact of her upbringing. And then, after the horror during what was supposed to be her best years, how her mother’s words, the shame foisted on her by herself, her family and everyone around her, had dictated the silence that shadowed her every move after the war.

“Like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside”

It’s like you’re Hansel and Gretel. You just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter how old you get. Do you ever get tired of reminsicing?

Do you think it’s ever possible to see the past as it actually was …….we overlay the present on to the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered

“I’ll never watch Police Patrol again. When they act out real stories of people getting snatched or killed, it will feel as if someone is trying to strangle me. I just know it. A murder isn’t a story for me anymore. It’s not a mystery either”

“Believe me” the badshah says, “today or tomorrow, every one of us will lose someone close to us, someone we love. The lucky ones are those who can grow old pretending they have some control over their lives, but even they will realise at some point that everything is uncertain, bound to disappear forever. We are just specks of dust in this world, glimmering for a moment in the sunlight, and then disappearing into nothing. You have to learn to make your peace with that.”

Ma crumples to the ground. The camerawoman bends down so that she can catch Ma’s sadness for the news at nine. Shanti-Chachi runs to his side and puts her hand on Ma’s back before Papa can.
“How can you live with yourself?” Shanti-Chachi shouts at the camerawoman “You want us to cry, pull our hair out, beat our chests. What will you get from it, a promotion, a big bonus near Diwali?”
The camerawoman stands up
“Let’s go to another house” the reporter tells her
“Yes, leave, that will be very easy for you to do” Chachi says. “We’re the ones who have to be here today and tomorrow and the day after that. This is our life you’re talking about as if it’s just some story. Do you even understand that?”

I’m not offering him the story of one woman during the Trojan War, I’m offering him the story of all the women in the wa

I’m not offering him the story of one woman during the Trojan War, I’m offering him the story of all the women in the war. Well, most of them (I haven’t decided about Helen yet. She gets on my nerves). I’m giving him the chance to see the war from both ends: how it was caused, and how its consequences played out.

And would he really have overlooked Laodamia, as so many poets have before him? A woman who lost so much so young deserves something, even if it’s just to have her story told. Doesn’t she? There are so many ways of telling a war: the entire conflict can be encapsulated in just one incident. One man’s anger at the behaviour of another, say. A whole war – all ten years of it – might be distilled into that. But this is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s, and the poet will look upon their pain – the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men – and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn. And for what reason? Too many men telling the stories of men to each other. Do they see themselves reflected in the glory of Achilles? Do their ageing bodies feel strong when they describe his youth? Is the fat belly of a feasted poet reminiscent of the hard muscles of Hector? The idea is absurd. And yet, there must be some reason why they tell and retell tales of men. If he complains to me again, I will ask him this: is Oenone less of a hero than Menelaus? He loses his wife so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises their son. Which of those is the more heroic act?

And then she saw the glint of her father’s knife in the morning sun and she understood everything in a rush, as though a god had put the words into her mind. The treacherous stillness in the air was divinely sent. Artemis had been affronted by something her father had done, and now she demanded a sacrifice or the ships would not sail. So there would be no marriage, no husband for Iphigenia. Not today and not ever.

And I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold. I have picked up the old stories and I have shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight. I have celebrated them in song because they have waited long enough. Just as I promised him: this was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them.

“Can you make a new England? You can write a new story. You can write new texts and destroy the old ones, set the torn leaves of Duns Scotus sailing about the quadrangles, and place the gospels in every church. You can write on England, but what was written before keeps showing through…”

“I earnestly believe that only men's faces and the outwards aspect of things change, while the same things reoccur again and again. Thus we are witnessing events that happened earlier. But the alteration in names and outward aspects is such that only the most learned are able to recognise them. That is why history is a useful and profitable discipline, because it shows you and allows you to recognise what you've never seen and experienced"

That was what I knew for sure, that this was the only way to get someone to listen to a woman – to tell her story through a man; Trojan horse yours

That was what I knew for sure, that this was the only way to get someone to listen to a woman – to tell her story through a man; Trojan horse yourself into a man

The play was about the way a woman could only really have her own story if she did it through a man – in this case, Edith Wilson’s half-dead husband, Woodrow Wilson. Edith ran the country after his stroke and only got credit for it much later.

He’d forgotten something essential about life, which was to make sure your children understood your values. No matter how many times your values to them, the thing that spoke louder was what you chose to do with your time and resources …. You could hate [the posh area, apartment and private school] but your kids would never know because you consented to it. You opted in, You didn’t tell them about the asterisks, how you were secretly and privately better than the world you participated in, despite all the outward appearances. You though you could be part of it, just a little.

I’d send two or ten or forty pages to my agent and he’d say the same thing, that none of my characters were likeable ……. I thought of Archer. His characters weren’t likeable. He wasn’t likeable.

Archer [Sylvan] had written .. “Decoupling” in 1979, fourteen thousand words following a man .. through his divorce …. calling out women for changing the rules on men with no warning because of their vapid women’s lib and their stupid sexual awakenings [which] were not supposed to extend beyond what was merely an upgrade in enjoyment for men.

I realized my problems were now different. They could no longer be grafted onto a man because they were so unique to the problem of being a woman. It was time for me to leave the magazine.

I would write my book, and it would have something in it that Archer was incapable of, which is all the sides of the story, even the ones that hurt to look at directly – even the ones that made me to angry to hear them.

When Rachel and I were little girls, we had been promised by a liberated society that almost ratified the Equal Rights Amendments that we could do anything we wanted. We were told that we could be successful, that there was something particular and unique about us and that we could achieve anything – the last vestiges of girls being taught they were special mingled with the first ripples of second-wave feminism …………. Even back then I knew that the boys tolerated it because it was so clear it wasn’t true. It was like those t-shirts all my daughter’s friends were wearing to school now, the ones that said THE FUTURE IS FEMALE … the only reason its tolerated is that everyone knows it’s just a lie we tell to girls to make their marginalization bearable. They know that eventually the girls will be punished for their futures so they let them wear their dumb message shirts now.

Toby didn’t want to talk about Rachel anymore. He didn’t want to think about her. But he didn’t want to talk about me either.
Do you realize that you never react to anything I say unless it’s about you? I asked him

Among the images of my mother that exist online is a black-and-white photograph of me, watching her from the wings. I am four or five years of age,

Among the images of my mother that exist online is a black-and-white photograph of me, watching her from the wings. I am four or five years of age, and sitting on a stool, in a little matinee coat and a bowl haircut. Beyond me, Katherine O’Dell performs to the unseen crowd. She is dressed in a glittering dark gown, you can not see the edge so her or the shape her figure makes, just the slice of cheekbone, the line of her chin. Her hands are uplifted.

The phone was otherwise silent in Dartmouth Square, though phones were, at a guess, ringing all over Dublin. The gang of people my mother called friends were now busy being a gang without her. The difference between inside and outside was so swift, it was almost the same thing. She was, from that moment, more spoken about than to. She was the talk of the town.

It was gone. Up in our bedroom, I sat on the edge of the bed and put my head in my hands. If I could just stop looking, I knew, I might remember where it was. You must let the thing go, in order to find it.

“I let my brother choose the movie for once, but then it’s so stupid I can barely watch it. In the movies he likes there is always some great disaster about to happen and only one unlikely person who can stop it.”

First they came for the coral, but I did not say anything because I was not coral

It is important to be on the alert for “the decisive moment,” says the man next to me who is talking to his date. I agree. The only difference is that he is talking about twentieth-century photography and I am talking about twenty-first-century everything.

My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I’m joking, sort of, but he answers seriously. He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I’m joking, sort of, but he answers seriously. He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. It’s a weird thing, but you learn to pick up on it. Even while everybody’s convincing themselves it’s going to be okay

Sometimes I bring her books to read. She likes mysteries, she told me. Regular-type mysteries. But this last one I gave her was no good, she says. It was all jumbled up. In it, the detective investigated the crime, tracked down every clue, interviewed every possible suspect, only to discover that he himself was the murderer. You don’t say.

The disaster psychologist explains that in times of emergency the brain can get stuck on a loop, trying to find a similar situation for comparison.

A turtle was mugged by a gang of snails. The police came to take a report, but (the turtle) couldn’t help them. ‘It all happened so fast,’ he said.”

this is about being
together

Amma then spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the establishment that excluded her

until the mainstream began to absorb what was once radical and she found herself hopeful of joining it"

“also monitoring the international news that affects market conditions, the weather conditions that affect crops, the terrorism that destabilizes countries, the elections that effect trading agreements, the natural disasters that can wipe out whole industries”

“and if it isn’t related to work, it’s not worth reading”

a five-star review has already been uploaded online from one usually savage pit-bull of a critic who’s been uncharacteristically gushing: astonishing, moving, controversial, original