Blogtastic!: Dear Ijeawele: A Feminist Manifesto In Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Today I’m focusing on bingo square #2 on the 2017 Leaning Stack of Books Diversity Challenge: Nonfiction About Gender or Gender Roles. Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a letter the author writes to a friend about how to raise a feminist.

Like in her fiction (Americanah is my favorite!), Adichie is writing about her understanding of both Nigerian and Western/American contexts. Growing up a feminist is both culturally specific and more universally political, and it was interesting to think about the idea of equality with that in mind.

I listened to this book on audio, but I have since read excerpts of it in print. Though I am enjoying the way I can grow my stack of books by listening to audio versions in the car, I will say that audio does this book a disservice.  Adichie is a powerful speaker. I have used her TED Talk, "The Danger of a Single Story," in my classes. THIS is the voice readers need to hear in their head when they read this book. The American audio reader sounds particularly disconnected from the letter in her hands.

I listened to this book before the #MeToo events of this fall, but the book is even more profound with that movement in mind. Raising a child is a political act, and it helps to be thoughtful about our language (princess?) and about binaries (can you be both feminist and feminine? Or are those opposite constructs?) I was especially compelled with her critique of the idea of “likeability.” We certainly expect powerful women to be likeable, but we don’t expect the same of men (think: 2016 election). Here’s a little excerpt, which I took from her Facebook page:

Please do not ever put this pressure on your daughter. We teach girls to be likeable, to be nice, to be false. And we do not teach boys the same. This is dangerous. Many sexual predators have capitalized on this. Many girls remain silent when abused because they want to be nice. Many girls spend too much time trying to be ‘nice’ to people who do them harm. Many girls think of the ‘feelings’ of those who are hurting them… We have a world full of women who are unable fully to exhale because they have for so long been conditioned to fold themselves into shapes to make themselves likeable.

Helping a child become a good person is such hard work. Adichie reminds us that consciousness-raising requires being conscious of all the little things. Now that the holidays are over, I'd like to add a 16^th suggestion. Can we get real about Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer? I think it might be time to stop celebrating Rudolf's story – or at least call out his sexist dad – don’t you think?

I recently listened to an interesting Atlantic Interview podcast featuring Adichie and Ta-Nehisi Coates. I downloaded it from Apple Podcasts, but the YouTube link gives you the audio. And here’s an article about her from The Guardian.

Review of Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum

original cover

Somewhere between the original publication of the hardcover version of Hausfrau and its paperback release, marketers decided to capitalize on the main character’s numerous extramarital affairs. In case the book jacket didn’t let you know that there would be Sexy Times in the novel, the blurb on the front references Fifty Shades of Grey. But let me be clear, this is not a sizzling beach book AT ALL. This is the story of a very depressed, disconnected woman spiraling downward into despair.

paperback cover

The book jacket also compares Hausfrau to Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.  I can see how it's a modern mash-up of both of those classic novels (trains and adultery!). The housewife in question is Anna. She lives in Zurich with her unpleasant Swiss husband and three young children. Her isolation is almost complete. She doesn’t speak the language. She doesn’t have good friends. She doesn’t have a job. What she does have is a hunger for fulfillment, which she seeks in vain through numerous lovers, and a profound ability to spin a web of lies that adds to her distance from others.

I did not enjoy this book for a single minute. BUT I did find it truly thought-provoking. The story asks the reader to think about the ways women sacrifice for family life. Anna sacrifices her country and her language. She sacrifices her ambition. You get the sense that she is sacrificing her ability to love other people. But this isn’t the nineteenth century, and the reader also gets to consider how much Anna is causing her own pain. Is she a victim of social convention or the architect of her own destiny?

The poetic writing is also worth noting, particularly the interludes where Anna is in German language class. The author connects Anna’s struggles to the framework of language itself (the role of the passive verb, for instance, or the significance of the future perfect tense). This meta discussion, along with Anna’s conversations with her analyst and with a priest, present the larger philosophical questions the author wants to explore.

In these respects, Hausfrau would be a good book club book. There are plenty of issues to tackle – women and sexuality, autonomy, parenting, honesty in friendships, being “true to yourself,” feminism. I can’t imagine that anyone would come away unmoved. But this book is a tragedy from beginning to end, and I think it will leave many readers sour (or, at the very least, sobbing on a bench in the middle of the night along with the main character).

You can find a good interview with the author, Jill Alexander Essbaum, here.

As a side note, I decided to type “depressing books” into google, and this is what I found:

Review of An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel

My kids are doing a historical fiction unit at school. In order for their book of choice to “count” as historical fiction, the story needs to take place prior to 1990.

1990!!

I suddenly feel pretty historical myself.

Hilary Mantel has a wide body of work that can be considered historical fiction, most notably her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, which I have yet to read.  Those books are positively enormous – in an intimidating way. An Experiment in Love, by contrast, is lean, which is somewhat appropriate given its focus on repression and denial.  This book follows a pair of Irish Catholic girls in England as they come of age in the 1960s. They find themselves together as they climb toward and through higher education, attempting to fulfill (or failing to fulfill?) their mothers’ aspirations that they grow beyond their social station.

If your thoughts about the 1960s involve psychedelic colors and communes and raging politics, you won’t find that here (though there is a hint of campus-based political organizing). This is a portrait of a generation of women caught between traditional roles and modern feminism.  Some of the characters resist tradition, but their resistance is sneaky and under the radar. Rebellion, when it happens, is directed inward, toward the body, as opposed to outward toward society.

This would be a great book to discuss in a group. There are many thematic onion layers to peel back and consider. There is a strand about womanhood and motherhood. There is a strand about appetite (literal and metaphorical). There is a strand about women’s education and what it yields. There’s a strand about sexuality.

This is a truly beautiful story – the writing is stunning. But at the same time, the gorgeous writing masks some rather thin characters. I could never fully “see” these people, and I sat at a distance the whole time I was reading. If one of the benefits of reading historical fiction is to be transported to another time and place, this experience, for me, fell short. But if another benefit is to generate questions about change over time, this experience definitely fit the bill.

You can read an interesting interview with the author here and a more recent one here.

Review of Us by David Nicholls

I expected Us to be a romantic comedy about a couple on a journey back to each other, because that’s what the book’s cover blurbs say. It is not exactly that. There is some comedy, to be sure. There’s certainly a marriage between two people who love each other. And there’s a lot of kvetching about and working through relationships.

But I wouldn’t call it a romantic comedy. I think this book has a different set of allies in the growing group of books that explore middle-aged masculinity.  Recent novels that incorporate this topic (albeit in different ways) include Ted Thompson’s The Land of Steady Habits, Peter Mountford’s The Dismal Science: A Novel, and Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of Poets. In each of these books, comedy is the tote bag that carries the plot along, but the emotional center of the story is serious.

Us involves Douglas, whose marriage to his wife, Connie, is on its last gasp. His teenaged son is leaving the nest, and Douglas decides to take the family on a last-ditch family vacation to restore harmony. Along the way, he wrestles with what it means to “be himself,” what role work has had in his life, and what kind of father he has been.

This novel is told from Douglas’ point of view. This is his story alone. The book is about a man’s self-discovery, and, in particular, what it means for him to be part of mutually satisfying relationships.  We learn about Connie, but it is always through Douglas’ lens.

I enjoyed it the whole way through – though I did think that some of the slapstick comedy was too much, as if it were designed for the movie this novel is destined to become. My favorite moments were quiet – when the reader learns that Douglas’ version of events is not fully reliable.

This book was on the long list of nominees for the 2014 Booker Prize. And with that in mind, here’s one thing that struck me: I think that if this had been a story about Connie’s self-discovery, the exact same journey but with the wife at the center, it would have been branded “chick lit.” It would have had a cover that featured a woman with flowing hair or a bouquet of flowers. It would never have been noticed by a prize committee or featured on the capital-L Literature table at the bookstore. And if I’m right, what kind of great stories are we passing over because of that branding?

It turns out that there are lots of conversation about this topic. Here’s a whole cluster of articles about the pros and cons of gendered marketing on the Huffington Post.  Here’s an interesting one on Salon. And here’s a little humor about chick-litifying the classics.