Welcome back everyone to mine and writer Tanya's monthly Wild Women newsletter reading with The Candy Club. As you may recall we set out to recommend books 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 I recommended Tanya's book The Cure For Sleep and she recommended Just Kids by Patti Smith. But as you can see from the video reading above this month's choices are very different. I hope you enjoy them and we look forward to your recommendations in the comments below. Please share the newsletter far and wide and then we can pull together a great book list in a few months time for everyone to benefit from.
TANYA’S CHOICE
Women Who Run With The Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
This strange, wild book found me just when I needed it most – literally falling at my feet in my local bookshop when I pushed my buggy through the Mind, Body, Spirit section (that I - book snob as I was back then - never browsed in).
I bent down to put it back on the shelf, sniffing at the title. But hold on. Maya Angelou was on the cover saying everyone should read it…and Alice Walker.
Hmm. I began to leaf through the contents page – Finding One’s Pack, Joyous Body, Heat, Self-preservation, Marking Territory, Battle Scars. All the things newly on my mind now I was a middle-aged wife and mother.
Wherever I went with my young children for several years after that, I had it with me, adding more and more post-it notes.
It has become the way I’ve made some of the best friends of my 40s, just like Judy Blume books got passed around in our teens. Women who’ve seen me with it on a beach or at a bus stop come over to say that they have it too or to ask about it.
Estes – a trained anthropologist who works as a storyteller - takes all the familiar fairy tales and fables told to keep women in their place, retelling them to glorious, freeing effect. She also brings us new and better role models from women’s oral folktales around the world.
First published at the end of the 80s, some of its language and references are dated. But just like Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, this is a word-of-mouth classic that finds new readers in every decade, because women are always being shocked anew by the changes that happen to them in midlife and beyond.
It’s a big book that you’ll either love or hate. It’s hard to be indifferent. But don’t feel you need to read it all or even in order. The contents page is like a pick and mix of such exciting stuff: just start at whatever part speaks strongest to you and follow the trail from there…
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LORRAINE'S CHOICE
Terra Incognita by Sara Wheeler
This book is the travel memoir which took me from my desk editing a young women's magazine called B, aged 28, right across the world on a six week sabbatical from work to Antarctica. After I read it I had the feeling of a pebble in my shoe, an itch I had to scratch to find some silence and be transported completely out of my comfort zone. I felt the need for some thinking time and I knew this wild and untamed place would somehow provide that.
It's a funny, moving and emotional book. Sara travels to bleak and desolate snow worlds and chronicles the odd relationships of teams working out in Antarctica where there is 24 hour sunshine and belonging is a matter of life and death. It ignited in me the idea of stepping out of day to day life. It wasn't so much about travel, more about finding yourself by changing your surroundings and routines completely, which is what I feel is happening right now to me at the age of 53. I have left my 30 year career, my four children are leaving home one by one and the topography of my life is undergoing huge transformation.
In Terra Incognita Sara also delves into the history of explorers and the mindsets that powered them through unimaginable hardship, I learnt a lot from that and it may be useful for you to meet these characters now if you're going through big change in any way to find out how they moved forward with courage.
The title of the book means unknown territory and I think if you are finding yourself in that kind of place a travel book is often more helpful than a self-help book or memoir, most people make big physical journeys because they are on voyages of discovery emotionally as I feel I am right now. I dream of going back to Antarctica but before I make that sort of dream a reality I first need to explore a bit of my own internal unknown territory.
Wild Women Reading