SPOILERS!!!
This
had much hype, which didn’t affect my enjoyment, but from reading the comments
on the book itself and the comments of those in the BTM reading group, this book
was very mixed in reception. I found it
very sad, and very true and oddly silent in places.
Lina was gang-raped while still in school after being drugged, and seemed to idolise and stay stuck on
an earlier crush from that era when she grew up, becoming obsessed with the perfect sexual
experience and it’s meaning emotionally filling her life, for her to not be
‘disgusting’ , to be loved and seen – sex and desire were all mixed up with
identity and absence. She has an affair
that becomes far more transactional than she can see it to be, with that same
man, when they are both married to other people later. He…treats her as a pet, an afterthought. I wanted her to do better, but she was so
obsessed with how he made her feel – I worried how she would feel when the
affair eventually stopped – what scaffolding would support all the outward need
she had to feel then? She had no good mirror reflecting back at her what was
her own strength, only refractions of the past she played out in lurid
emotion. I really felt her.
Maggie had alcoholic parents and an early sexual experience that she was
crucified in school about, followed by an affair with a teacher - at which
point she got totally stuck and could not move on: it had been so intense and
real and unfinished and then it was a court case and no one believed her
[except a little old man, and a reporter, but after the fact]. We see her lose hope near the end, and her
father has also killed himself; but not about this…that is a big silence in the
book – Maggie’s reaction to her father’s death.
I hope she does ok.
And Sloane. A rich girl who knew how it
all should look on the outside and went to great lengths to make it look right,
swinging when suggested by her husband, being the right level of agreeable –
‘optimal’ as the protagonist of Harrow
Lake would have said. An eating
disorder to be prettily slender. In many
ways her story was the least interesting because we got to hear the least of
it, and because she had/has perfected outward appearance – she’s preserved in
amber for however long: the thinnest, prettiest, most agreeable wife sexually. I felt Sloane needed friends. That you don’t
compete with; just friends.
The book was supposed to be about the desires of women, how we feel it and what
it does in our lives. What I read, more
than anything, was how empty we seem to be, how small and delicate our sense of
self-worth, how we constantly seek to optimise, change, manipulate it for love
and a sense of wellness or joy of LIFE of being AWAKE AND HERE! It was very very sad, to read so many different lives and to see them all come
down to the same basic thing: we feel unloved or unheard or unworthy, we are
never enough, we must always change for others, our self is always mirrored
from without, never self-sustaining.
We’re fossil fuel; we need to get renewable!
All the women seemed totally formed by the school age years and in Sloane’s
case, a bit before, regarding sexual experience as formative for personality. The early years are so important; so many of
us get stuck with the identity we feel then,
and subsequent change or layering is very much from that point, it felt. We don’t
seem to realise we are stuck with the teen or tween we were, and a lot of our
thinking about love and sex comes direct from feelings and experience of that
era, not now. Stunted growth; sometimes poison, tumourous growth around
incidents that happened then. Arrested emotional development.
This is only one of many facets of women’s lives. You don’t worry about emotional voids when
you’re trying to pay the rent or you just lost your job, or your living
situation is unsafe…But these are portrayals of states of mind and resulting
actions that made sense, and felt familiar; done some, seen some. It makes me
want, more than ever, to be more self-sustaining myself. The weird thing is,
you ask people who are, and they can’t explain to you how it’s done, they just do it.
I’m not sure how much of the changing behaviour can be learned from
books either. But I keep looking.
