The Yellow Wallpaper
It was during my feminist awakening/introduction in college that I first read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and I have been rereading it ever since. The wallpaper may be faded and torn, bu the impact of this story never dims. Charlotte Perkins Gilman lived from 1860, born just on the cusp of the Civil War, through 1935. During her time, she became a well-known writer and speaker, and she is an influential feminist foremother. Her book Women and Economics makes points about the worth of women’s work in the home that were echoed decades later by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (the famous “problem that has no name”) and which still resonate today. Gilman swore never to marry, seeing marriage as an institution that in those days did not offer women the chance to also pursue work. Despite this pledge, she did, however, marry, at a young age, bore a daughter, suffered from postpartum depression, and later, scandalously, divorced her first husband. She then moved with her daughter to California, began her career in ernest, managed to fix up her ex-husband with a friend of hers, and later, deciding they would be the more stable parents and, also radically, that a father deserved to be with his child as well as a mother, sent her then nine-year-old daughter to live with her father. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” was inspired by Gilman’s own postpartum experience, as well as the time she spent being treated by S. Weir Mitchell, a noted doctor based in Philadelphia famous for creating what he called “the rest cure” for women: no activity, no work–nothing to trouble their little heads… We met virtually last week for the Open Book Lunch ‘n’ Learn short story class to discuss this story and, as I said above, found its power undiminished 130 years after it was first published. We plan to offer a repeat of this class as well as classes about other famous feminist literature: Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and more. Email me (lynn@lynnrosen.com) for more...
Writers & Lovers by Lily King
A woman in my writers group had a line in her submission last week that we all enjoyed. In her book, a group of young men are going somewhere where they will be seeing a woman that one of them has met recently and is really interested in. The one friend says “He likes her,” and the other says “Yeah,” and the first one, to emphasize what he means, says “No, he likes her likes her.” I was amused to see this line come up again In Lily King’s new novel Writers & Lovers. “You two really hit it off.”“She likes you.”“We’ve known each other a long time.”“She likes you likes you.”p.236 I read a lot of books. Sometimes I don’t like them and sometimes I do like them. And sometimes I read a book that I am just so happy to be reading, and the time that I am engaged with this book is a period of such great pleasure, that I’m sad when the book comes to an end. I’m sure you’ve had that experience. That’s how I feel about Lily King’s new book. And that made me realize that the best way to describe how I feel about this book is this: I don’t just like it. I like it like it. Ok, now, about the book… This is a story about a 31 year old woman who is struggling to write a book. I do tend to be a fan of books about writers trying to write books. This book now definitely goes on my short list of favorite novels about the writing process, along with The Friend by Sigrid Nunez and Graham Swift’s Mothering Sunday. Casey, the protagonist of Lovers & Writers, is reeling from the recent and unexpected death of her mother, and she is very lonely. She’s working as a waitress and struggling to pay off student loans and trying to recover from the heartbreak of several failed relationships. And for the past six years, through graduate school and even a prestigious writers residency, she has been struggling to finish her novel. We follow Casey through the trials of her work life, her love life, and her writing life, and it’s just a great, well-told story, in addition to being full of insight about the lives of writers and the writing process. Brava, Lily...
You Can’t Say That Again
Here is one of my favorite articles I wrote while I was the Editorial Director of Book Business magazine, a publication for book industry professionals. While researching this article and inteviewing professors and other plagiarism experts, I learned a lot about how doing reseach online has created a generation of students who cut and paste and aren’t concerned with attribution, and who don’t really value the concept of originality. That latter concept really shook me! Find the article...
Our first virtual Short Story Lunch ‘n’ Learn
Today a group of us convened virtually for our first Open Book Productions short story discussion group. Thanks to Stephanie Feldman for leading a great discussion! The subject for discussion was the short story “The Third and Final Continent” by Jhumpa Lahiri, from her collection Interpreter of Maladies. The story is told by an Indian man who comes to the United States in 1969 to work at MIT and who will soon be joined by his wife from his arranged marriage. Prior to her arrival, he rents a room in the home of Mrs. Croft, an elderly woman in Cambridge. One thing that struck me from this discussion is how much depth a talented writer like Lahiri can embed in a short story. We were able to unravel so many themes: the immigrant leaving his homeland and becoming a stranger in a strange place (learning to eat cornflakes instead of rice for breakfast), relationships — with mothers, with new brides — culture, community, family, hope. We were really able to step into the narrator’s life and gain an understanding of what was meant by the title of the story, what the “third and final continent” really was. Was it America? Was it death? Read the story and see! And join us for the next short story Lunch ‘n’ Learn! Details...
Amnesty by Aravind Adiga
A selection for my Spring 2020 “Hot Off the Press” book discussion class. The class enjoyed reading this book by a writer whose debut novel, The White Tiger, won the Man Booker Prize in 2008. Here’s a quick plot summary: Danny—formerly Dhananjaya Rajaratnam—is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, Australia, denied refugee status after he fled from Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he’s been trying to create a new identity for himself. And now, with his beloved vegan girlfriend, Sonja, with his hidden accent and highlights in his hair, he is as close as he has ever come to living a normal life. But then one morning, Danny learns a female client of his has been murdered. He thinks he knows who the murderer is, but turning him in means exposing his own illegal status. Click HERE for my video...