Wild Women Reading Part 3
No 3: Books for curious, spirited dreamers with an awakening on their to-do list!
Welcome back intrepid book lovers to mine and author Tanya's monthly Wild Women newsletter reading with The Candy Club. We have got two books for you today that will shake up your holiday reading list. As you may recall we set out to recommend reads that we feel may prompt an awakening of sorts, books that may ignite new ideas of how to live well or may even provoke change in some way.
Last month Tanya recommended Women Who Run With The Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman by Clarissa Pinkola Estes and I suggested the travel memoir Terra Incognita by Sara Wheeler. I hope you enjoyed, or are enjoying, them as much as we did, let us know in the comments below.
But this month we have two very different books, one is a love story and the other js about desire. Both are about awakenings and change. I will be intrigued by what you think of these unusual choices both of which ask you to step out of a comfort zone and into new worlds.
Please share our Wild Women Reading newsletter far and wide and then we can pull together a great book list in a few months time for everyone to benefit from. And I’d love to hear your ideas below in the comments too please.
LORRAINE’S CHOICE
This One Sky Day by Leone Ross
I rarely read magical realism novels. It’s a category of book I have previously found tricky to navigate but I had to read this book when I was judging The Womens Prize For Fiction and it took me by surprise. I became addicted and engrossed in it, staying up late to get through chapters and desperately intrigued by the surreal plot and the extraordinary female characters. It’s part super natural, part fairy tale, part feminist wish fulfilment and part love story set in a tropical paradise that is so beautifully described I felt the humidity on my skin as I worked my way through this madcap plot. It’s also a little about addiction and the way men and women dance around each other in romantic life, and the importance they place on small actions during a relationship.
This One Sky Day is extremely funny, some of the story lines (disappearing vaginas and meditating goats feature) are cleverly woven in to make a point. I think you could call it an erotic comedy and this is how the plot is described:
“As the sun rises two star-crossed lovers try to find their way back to one another across this single day. When night falls, all have been given a gift, and many are no longer the same”
But that doesn’t really do the story justice because so much more is going on, so many families tales are part of it. I am recommending it because I had not read anything like it before, it was magical and thought provoking and also because it took me to another place in my head which a book had not done for a while.
It is British novelist Leone Ross’ third novel and she has said in an interview that it took her 15 years to write and I think perhaps I am drawn to it because Ross, like me is in her 50s, and the more melancholy moments of the plot (one of the main characters is a widow) resonated with me deeply. It felt like a story of traditions too and a tale of all the lives we may have lived rolled into so many fascinating female characters. I think if you feel like taking a moment out from real life, from the predictability of normality then this book would spirit you away.
TANYA’S CHOICE
Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
Now in her 80s and still writing books with the power to shock, Annie Ernaux is one of French literature’s most celebrated – and sensual – authors.
Simple Passion is a short but stunning novel based on Ernaux’s obsessive two-year affair with a foreign diplomat that she began at age forty-nine (after the end of a claustrophobic middle-class marriage which she describes in A Frozen Woman).
When I decided to stop taking the contraceptive pill in my mid-40s, it unleashed a storm of painful desire – in my memoir The Cure for Sleep, I describe roaming the bounds of my small town at dawn and dusk, feeling myself an animal in heat, not fit to be at home with my husband and young children. Ernaux’s book was the only story I could find that made me feel less alone in that huge and unnerving upswell of midlife erotic energy.
In simple but unsparing sentences, she lays herself bare – not only as a lover, but also as a woman who waits and prepares for the fitful attentions of a married man who comes to her when he chooses. She charts the irrationality of that desire and how changed she is: a lecturer and author who now lives for horoscopes and the acts of dressing and undressing for her lover.
Once the affair ends, she is left in the long and painful aftermath – and she describes this time with the same unswerving detail as the joy that came before it.
If you find Simple Passion as compelling as I do, then you have many more stunning autobiographical books by Ernaux to discover afterwards, including Happening (an account of her illegal abortion as a schoolgirl in 1950s France) and I Remain in Darkness (how it was to witness her difficult mother’s death from dementia). She is rare example of a woman writer who has documented all the life stages and roles that so many of us experience in silence, and sometimes shame.
Whenever I finish one of her books, I always feel bolder, braver.