“Historical novel” isn’t quite the right term for this book, which strips that particular genre down to bare bones… To this portrayal of enslavement at its most brutal, Ward adds an element of the fantastic, using it—like recent writers from Colson Whitehead and Kaitlyn Greenidge to adrienne maree brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs—to ask questions about power, agency, and past and future choices.
More at 4columns.org
Strijd en de man, dat bezingt de Romeinse dichter Vergilius al vanaf de eerste woorden in zijn Aeneis: arma virumque cano…. Twee millennia later wordt de gewapende strijd niet meer volmondig door dichters geroemd, en ook over de centrale rol van de man worden vragen gesteld. De Amerikaanse schrijver Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) werd als middelbare scholier tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog, terwijl haar drie oudere broers in dienst zaten, verliefd op de dappere held uit haar Latijnse les. Vijftig jaar en vele invloedrijke romans en essays later dacht ze niet minder liefdevol over Aeneas, maar wel anders over Vergilius’ heldendicht. Ze besloot om in een historische roman zijn ongeschreven laatste hoofdstuk op haar eigen manier te voltooien… more
Me on Le Guin’s Lavinia, in Trouw, 1 July
Mother and the Wolf: Maternal Power in Fairy Tales
Once upon a time, I was trying to tell a story, only I didn’t know how it went. There wasn’t a main character, there wasn’t an adventure, and when I tried to begin the story I just disappeared into one thing after another. “Happily ever after”—after what?
I was trying to tell a story about motherhood, and each time I set out from home I got lost in the woods… Read more at Tor.com
…Claire Dederer’s refusal to give Manhattan a free pass leads her deep into questions of representation, honesty, what it means to be an artist, what it means to love art. She takes the reader along with her—in my case, back to my sense of baffled repulsion when I saw Allen’s film in 1979. The love affair between Allen’s character, Isaac, forty-two, and Mariel Hemingway’s Tracy, seventeen, depicted a teenage reality that I sensed was all around me. (At my strict and patriarchal prep school, even we nerds knew the teachers were sleeping with the students.) What it didn’t show me was how to feel about that reality…. Read more at 4Columns.org
Stories of the Mind-Mother Problem
When I became a mother, it was the most grown-up thing I’d ever done. By age 33 I’d held down jobs and signed a book contract. I’d moved to a new city for the man I loved. The two of us had bought a refrigerator. But having a baby was clearly a vastly larger acquisition–and it felt like a powerful act of self-definition.
Yet when our son was born, a hairless human the same size and approximate cuteness as our cat but with far fewer abilities, I didn’t feel like I’d taken charge of my life so much as lost my way in it. I felt at once supremely capable and alarmingly vulnerable. I had had no idea that love could be so boring, and part of me resisted, while another part wished only to stare besottedly at my baby.
I spent my days nursing while reading the New Yorker, a gift subscription from a friend who didn’t want me to lose my intellectual edge. I spent my days wallowing in the adolescent conviction that nobody loved me. I swung wildly between ecstasy and self-pity, satisfaction and frustration. Though I was evidently the adult in the room, emotionally I was 14 again, wandering in the dark forest of my own feelings.
I probably behaved with teenage obliviousness, too, like most parents do, acting like the whole world revolves around them and the baby. I felt my emotions twanging like rubber bands and wondered what had happened to the unsentimental mom I thought I’d be. I’d had a map of motherhood in my mind, but when I arrived there, there were no signposts and no paths.
Anne Enright writes that after the birth of her child she felt she had arrived at “a place before stories start. Or the precise place where stories start. How else can I explain the shift from language that has happened in my brain? This is why mothers do not write, because motherhood happens in the body, as much as the mind.”
Enright wrestles with this shift in Making Babies, her brilliant memoir of her early motherhood. She finds few answers and many questions: how should a mother recollect herself, or create herself anew? And for a mother who is also a writer or artist, how to cope with a maternal role that in all its demands for care and selflessness seems like the opposite of creative autonomy?
Some time and another child later, I was still thinking about the relationship between creative work and mothering, a parent’s love and an artist’s independence of mind. To find out more I decided to look at great artists and writers who were also mothers. Doris Lessing, Alice Walker, the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Louise Bourgeois, the painter Alice Neel: how had they done it?
I started writing about them—and found myself back in the woods with the same useless map. I didn’t know how to tell their stories as mothers; I didn’t know what a mother’s story looked like, or why anyone else would want to read it. Rachel Cusk comments that “the experience of motherhood loses nearly everything in its translation to the outside world. In motherhood a woman exchanges her public significance for a range of private meanings, and like sounds outside a certain range they can be very difficult for other people to identify.” I couldn’t find a narrative thread.
It’s rare to see a mother as the protagonist of her own story. When “The Mother, the Woman” was the controversial theme of the Dutch Book Week a couple years ago, two male writers were invited to pen the annual essay and work of fiction. Was a mother only imaginable seen through the eyes of a son? Could motherhood never be the mother’s story? I worried we’d gone no further since the American feminist Susan Rubin Suleiman said a generation ago: “Mothers don’t write, they are written.”
That’s not true; mothers are writing, painting, and shaping their stories now more than ever. But the stories that are told, like Enright’s, are often histories of frustration and fragmentation. Cusk calls birth an event that “divides women from themselves, so that a woman’s understanding of what it is to exist is profoundly changed.…When she is with her children she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself.” The novelist Jenny Offill writes of feeling that “a bomb had gone off” in her life.
Psychology, which has long neglected mothers’ stories in favor of the child’s point of view, is starting to suggest explanations for this fragmentation. In her fascinating book Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood, American journalist Chelsea Conaboy explores new scientific insights that make it clear that becoming a mother is not the end point of a woman’s psychological development, as Freud once stated, but a time of growth and change.
According to this research, new mothers are confused and emotionally volatile not only because they’re sleep-deprived, miss their old life, and don’t have time to themselves. Quoting scientist Jodi Pawluski, Conaboy reports that the maternal brain is undergoing dramatic physical change, driven by the “endocrine tsunami that accompanies pregnancy” and the emotional stimuli of motherhood. Pregnancy and early parenthood, she writes, mark a “developmental epoch as significant as sexual differentiation and puberty.”
This is not a matter of maternal instinct. On the contrary: there is no circuit in the brain that automatically powers up when a child arrives. Instead, maternal or parental feelings are created over time by the interaction between parent and child. Babies attract the attention of adults by being cute. Adult brains respond by building new neural pathways to facilitate care. A restructuring takes place in the neural networks that determine how parents respond to their environment, how they regulate their own emotions, and how they assess the needs of others and act in response. The more you care, the more caring you become.
Research from Dutch neuroscientist Elseline Hoekzema, among others, traces the physical evidence of this alteration. It doesn’t happen right away: some of the women Conaboy interviews are shocked by their lack of immediate warm feelings for their baby. It’s a long-term process: “Caring for a baby changes what researchers call the functional architecture of the brain, the framework across which brain activity moves. And remarkably, those changes last, not only weeks or months after a baby is born but perhaps even decades later, over a person’s whole life span.”
The changes aren’t all good. Parents’ minds must be flexible to keep up with their children’s rapid growth, so their brains become “more moldable, more adaptable…, maybe even more so than at any other point in adulthood.” This lability and hormonal overload can trigger mood shifts (a majority of participants in parenting studies show symptoms of mild depression), anxiety, or obsessive-compulsive disorder. It can also, as Cusk observed, make you feel like a stranger to yourself.
But it doesn’t have to leave new mothers, in Offill’s terms, shattered, It can also look like Enright’s portrayal of motherhood as the start of a new story with the mother at the center, a story of growth and change, of losing and finding the way.
In the women’s lives I wrote about, I realized, there was a storyline after all. They all had times when they lost themselves, or lost what they cared about most, when everything fell apart. While Alice Neel was pregnant, she had panic attacks at the thought of having to give up her career. While Alice Walker was caring for her infant daughter, she said, everything she wrote sounded “as though a baby were screaming right through the middle of it.”
They were confronted with their secret fears, their childhood pain, their rage. Some felt more vulnerable, through their children, to the stress of living under white supremacy. Almost all of them mourned when their children grew up: the loss of their mother role turned out to be as difficult to process as its arrival.
They came back from their losses, too. After Lessing left her husband and lost custody of her children, she felt adrift, but full of new resolve to have her life mean something. Toni Morrison called becoming a mother “the most liberating thing that ever happened to me,” because it let her ignore other people’s opinions and demands. “I could not only be me—whatever that was—but somebody actually needed me to be that.…The person that was in me that I liked best was the one my children seemed to want.”
Recovering from an emotional breakdown that came out of her depression and confusion after her youngest son left home, Lessing wrote The Golden Notebook. In her sixties, after her children and partner had left home, Alice Neel put new energy into her career. She found fame partly with her portraits of pregnant women, into which she put all the discomfort, pain, excitement, and self-discovery that had once been her experience.
They changed, they recollected themselves, and that was their narrative. It’s the story that Conaboy tells, about how mothers grow and adapt to the constant interruptions of life with a dependent other. They are pushed in unplanned, unpredictable directions by a baby whose presence is quite literally mind-altering. And, as adolescents do, they make themselves anew.
Necessary and validating, Mother Brain confirms the changes I saw in my own life and the lives I wrote about. Conaboy tells as science the story that they told in their art: Neel’s paintings, Lessing’s fiction, Walker’s essays, Audre Lorde’s poetry about the children she raised in a lesbian relationship. It’s a story of self-creation and self-discovery, of going into the wilderness of new experience—the wilderness that arises between mother and child—and, with luck and hard work, emerging more powerful for having been so profoundly changed.
Het genie van Toni Morrison (1931-2019) is makkelijk te ervaren, maar lastig te doorgronden. Haar poëtische taal, gelaagde verhalen en thema’s als identiteit, familie, liefde, verbondenheid en uitsluiting zorgen ervoor dat de betekenissen in haar romans zich ver onder het oppervlak uitstrekken. Zoals bij elke grote schrijver lees je haar soms met het gevoel dat je mooie schelpjes opraapt op het strand van een oceaan…
I reviewed After Sappho, by Selby Wynn Schwartz, for 4Columns https://4columns.org/phillips-julie/after-sapphoat a time when I was staying with and helping a beloved older relative and was absorbed in the bodily and emotional intimacy of care. Although I was very aware of that as an aspect of friendship among women, I thought more when I was writing about my editors, also my friends, whose deadline leniency helped me finish and whose love helped me get my thinking mind back as well as my feeling self.
https://4columns.org/phillips-julie/after-sappho
“I like rewriting, so I have created a process where I do a great d
eal of it.”
I’ve been looking more lately at how writers deal with problems of focus and concentration. When I talked to Karen Joy Fowler about Booth, I also asked her about her writing strategies.
I was interested to see in a recent interview that you don’t write steadily and consistently. “I have never managed to string more than three days of writing together,” you said.
I write very much in fits and starts. And you know, that seemed like a problem to me—it probably is a problem—but I’m too old to fix it now, so I just don’t worry about it anymore. I am who I am. I write the way I write. There’s nothing to be done about any of it.
How do you keep going? Asking for a friend.
I’ve tried different strategies at different points in my life. They’ve all been successful to a point and ultimately unsuccessful: they work for a while and then they don’t work anymore. I have tried more journaling in the hopes that something will spring from that easier kind of writing process.
I usually find that if I’m going to get inspiration, it’s going to come from somebody else’s book, so mostly I do a lot of reading and hope that someone else’s genius will reach out of the page into my brain and start me thinking about something new.
And when that happens, what then?
Then I start to write. I move very slowly forward. I try to get a paragraph, and then I rewrite that paragraph, and I rewrite that paragraph again, and then I wrote another paragraph, and I rewrite both those paragraphs. I like rewriting, so I have created a process where I do a great deal of it. I do some rewriting every day, and I try to force myself forward some small amount every day as well. The worst part is when I’m at the absolute beginning, cause I’ve got nothing to rewrite. Once I’ve got some words up, then I can proceed in a much happier way.
But “just sit down and write and something will happen” doesn’t necessarily work for you?
Not necessarily. I find that if I say, “I’m going to write 500 words today,” I can do that. I can do that quite easily. They won’t be 500 words that I like, or that I want to keep, or that lead to the next 500 words. It’s an assignment I can tick off, but it’s not a helpful assignment, so no.
The idea has to be there from the beginning—
The idea has to be there. Some idea has to be there. Any idea. It doesn’t have to be a full idea for a full book. It might be an idea for a scene, or a paragraph, or a sentence, but something more solid has to be there.
Interview with Karen Joy Fowler, July 2022
Karen Joy Fowler (Indiana, 1950) made up her mind to become a writer on her 30th birthday, “a kind of insane decision that I had no real knowledge of the implications of.” Her first novel was published a decade later, and in 2004 she published her first bestseller, The Jane Austen Book Club. This engaging, drily funny tale of life in a small provincial city as observed by the book club’s members became her first bestseller.
Her next, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2014), is a magnificent novel about an experiment in primate behavior that, when it fails, exposes the ethical and emotional complications of human-animal relations. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
In her latest novel, Booth, she enters into the longings and delusions of an American household amid the tension and escalating violence of the US before and during the Civil War (1861-65). Set in a divided country, Booth offers an intimate portrait of a theater dynasty as troubled as it was famous. Like all Fowler’s books it’s told in a compelling narrative voice, sparkling with dry humor and full of acute observations on human shortcomings.
From the living room of her house in the California seaside town of Santa Cruz—home to a literary community of which Jonathan Franzen is the best-known member—Fowler talks about what drew her to the Booth family. Their letters and memoirs brought them to life for her: the charismatic, unpredictable Junius Brutus Booth, whose acting career was marred by his alcoholism, and his son Edwin, who, despite or because of his conflicts with his father, became the most renowned Shakespearean actor in America. The most famous, or notorious, member of the Booth family was its most beloved son, John Wilkes, who chose the side of the South and slavery and became President Lincoln’s assassin.
How did you go from a contemporary book about animal rights to a historical novel about the Booth family?
It began as a response to the ubiquitous and constant mass shootings we have in this country. I started thinking about the families of the shooters, and how you would go on with your life after something like that. I’m hardly the first writer to have had this thought, but that is were I started.
But in the middle, Trump was elected, and this was just a great shock to me. I will never get over the shock of it. I put the book down for a long time, just to try to deal with life in a country I no longer recognized. And when I picked it up again, my focus had shifted. I was thinking more about how the issues of the Civil War have just never been resolved, and that what we were seeing was a clear, straight through-line from the Civil War to what is happening now.
The book opens in the “golden childhood’ of the Booth siblings, when they lived on a farm in slave state Maryland. Junius chose the remote location so he could raise his children according to his own moral principles—he disapproved of cruelty to animals, eating meat, and, to a lesser extent, slavery—and also, as it turns out, because he was in hiding from his first wife.
Their happiness didn’t last, Fowler says: “The Booth family was coming apart more and more at the seams, as the nation did the same.”
You’ve said that one of the themes of your work is of a lost Eden, this idea of people who had better lives, have lost them in one way or another, and are trying to return. Did you experience Trump’s election as a lost Eden?
Not necessarily a lost Eden so much as a lost future. I had really believed that the election of Barack Obama meant something about where we had come in terms of race relations. It was a sense of progress, a sense of the creation of a multicultural democracy that seemed to me to be, with fits and starts, proceeding. That’s what I lost.
You don’t say a lot about race in the novel. I wonder what decisions you made about how to talk about race, how to talk about slavery.
It was something I just tried to do very, very carefully. For my characters, I feel there’s a real generational shift. The grandfather and the parents, who grew up in England, were shocked by slavery in a way that their children, who grew up with slavery all around them, were not. With the exception of John Wilkes Booth, they all opposed slavery, but the younger generation certainly didn’t talk about it very much, and possibly didn’t think about it very much, which is the way you are with your own family. Everything that you grow up with seems perfectly ordinary until you see somebody else’s family and you realize, no, this was crazy, this was always crazy.
A thing that I’m missing in the book, that I just would have liked some help with from these historical figures with, is that realization. Yes, they’re opposed to slavery. When did that happen? When did they notice it? But they left no record of any such thing, and I did not feel up to imagining it.
You seem fascinated with the theatricality of this theater family.
I think I can make a case that growing up surrounded by Shakespeare’s language and plots and characters had an impact [on the Booth children], and not a good one. John Wilkes, at least, saw his life as a big story, a grand story, in which he was destined to play an outsized role: he had a sense of his own importance and his destiny from very early in his life. If you look at the assassination itself, it looks like a piece of theater. He had lines and timing planned, and it seems like he was doing a scene.
The father appears to be acting his father role, in a way that’s typical of narcissistic parents.
Yes. I wouldn’t disagree with that. He had a role to play, and it could be an extremely benevolent, entertaining, lovely role as long as he was not brooked in any way. As long as he was allowed to play that role unimpeded by any sort of complaint or pushback or hesitation, he could be quite a good father. But he could also be quite a dreadful father as well.
I seem to be very attracted to alcoholic fathers in my literature, which is perhaps because I had one.
Attracted in what sense?
Well, they’re great catalysts for action. They create chaos all around them, and chaos is the stuff of plot.
One of the questions the father’s life seems to ask is about the relationship between having moral principles and being a good person.
That’s a really interesting question, yes. [Ironic tone] The one does not lead as clearly to the other as you would hope.
One of my favorite characters in all of literature is Lancelot in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. This is a person who, with the exception of falling in love with Guinevere, behaves in a morally impeccable way because he thinks of himself as such a damaged and ugly person. Because of his deep self-loathing, he lands in a place where he tries to behave with grace and generosity and courage at all times.
And it’s the people who see themselves as good who cause the trouble? The road to hell is paved with good intentions?
[Sweetly] I’m sure many people who see themselves as good are very good.
Were there things that were constraining, or liberating, for you in writing about real people?
I felt very anxious about it. It was in many ways easy, because there was so much material that I had to work with, so many things I did not have to make up, that were just there in their own letters and their own experiences. But I always felt this trepidation that I was doing something that would not hold up to close scrutiny.
Are there political divisions in your own family?
No, there really aren’t. I’m very lucky that way.
Do you have any advice for people with that problem?
I don’t know. My politics are very central to who I am. My value system is expressed in them. And my value system is one of tolerance, inclusion, the idea that everybody’s voice is as important as everybody else’s voice, the idea that everybody should be safe inside their house and outside their house. People who don’t agree with such baseline humanity…I just don’t know what to say.
I expect everybody thinks they have that same baseline that I do, but it seems to me that [drily] their policies often do not express that baseline.
The book opens with a quote from before the Civil War, from the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass: “America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.” What does that mean to you?
That there is a way of looking at American history that is not honest, but serves certain people’s purposes and can become the dominant narrative. We’re in a current time where there’s much protest, removing Confederate monuments from public spaces, and also taking a look at the sort of sainted forefathers in America and noticing how many of them enslaved people, and trying to be more precise about who they were, what they said, what they did, trying to put together a more honest portrait.
But one of the things that has done is remove symbols of unity from the country. If your goal is to put the country back together again, taking a figure like Thomas Jefferson and removing him from the reverential position that he has held is something that a number of people are gong to push back against.
Our history, which ideally should be something that unifies us, if looked at honestly is not. It seems to me that we have always chosen a sort of threadbare unity over an honest look at the past, and I think that’s what Douglass was talking about.
But isn’t that threadbare unity still necessary and valuable?
I guess. It depends on who has to be sacrificed in order to create the sense of unity. Clearly, in the attempt to put the country back together after the Civil War, the black people in the South were sacrificed in order to assure the South that the structures of white supremacy would not be overturned by the abolition of slavery, that things could go on much as they had before. It was a great betrayal of the freed peoples in the service of trying to coax the white rebels back into the country.
And I think one of the things we’re facing now is whether Trump will be held accountable for treason, and we’re facing what we always face,…a sense that the country will be very disunified if anyone is ever actually held accountable, and that it’s better just to paper over it and move forward, which is the choice we always make. So I’m very curious as to how the current situation is going to play out.
Originally published in Dutch in Trouw, September 4, 2022.
‘