Blonde

This August marked the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death. Monroe is a woman who attained icon status early in her short career, and whose role in pop culture has since reached mythical proportions. Published in 2001, Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde reimagines Monroe’s life, from her troubled childhood to her whirlwind rise to stardom, and ultimately, her tragic downfall. Referring to the main figures in Monroe’s life by their roles — The Ex-Athlete, The Dark Prince, The Playwright, The President — the sympathetic portrait Oates paints is one of a naive woman who wants to be loved and also wants to be taken seriously. She is a woman rising up in an era when women in her position were fundamentally powerless and constantly at the mercy of men’s whims.

Disclaimer: I’ve never studied Monroe’s real life in any way, so I have no idea how much of Blonde is real and how much is Oates taking creative liberties, so don’t take my references to events as biography. I do know, however, that most of the beginning of the book is based in fact: her mother was mentally ill, and Norma Jeane Baker came of age in foster homes desperately wanting to know who her father was. In the book, she dies not knowing his identity (questions surround his identity in real-life, too), and this is something that always eats at her. With her beauty and her well-developed figure, Norma Jeane attracted male attention early on; in Blonde, her foster mother marries Norma off at age fifteen to get the pretty girl out of the house and away from the eyes of the foster father. This is the first of many betrayals by people Norma Jeane assumed loved her.

That marriage doesn’t work out; she’s young and never truly feels loved, and yearns to be free. Difficult years are ahead; she tries modeling and acting, but the price is high and degrading. In a moment of extreme desperation stemming from her poverty, she poses for that infamous photo shoot that ends up in Playboy. Oates is blunt in her criticisms of those in power:

Monstress

I have only one question regarding Lysley Tenorio’s Monstress: WHY ISN’T EVERYONE TALKING ABOUT THIS BOOK?! No, really…WHY? Alternating between the Philippines and the United States, the stories in Monstress explore areas of Filipino and Filipino-American culture, the traditions of the past, and the direction of the future. Further adding to the book’s complex layers is that a few of the stories feature gay and trans characters, while another examines a Filipino immigrant family’s response to teen pregnancy. The end result is a surprisingly stellar, beautiful, devastating debut immersed in familial and cultural history.

The book opens with the sadly nostalgic title story, about an actress and her B-movie sci-fi film director boyfriend. Initially dreaming of being cast as the beautiful heroine in her boyfriend’s films, the actress indeed becomes his star…only he lovingly casts her as his “monstress” every time, putting her in the grossest, weirdest costumes he can create. Years later, the two are living in poverty and obscurity. Then an American director appears one day wanting to buy their old monster footage, promising them money and the opportunity to go to Hollywood, and this proposition changes everything for them in ways they can’t foresee.

The most lighthearted story in the collection is “Help!” It’s a historical reimagining set in Manila in 1966, where the Beatles were on tour. The Beatles snub the First Lady, Imelda Marcos, and spark a national outrage (this actually happened). In Tenorio’s story, the narrator’s Uncle Willie is the executive director of VIP Travel at Manila International Airport. He’s furious that the Beatles would dare insult his beloved Imelda Marcos, paradigm of Filipina womanhood, and enlists his nephews to help him beat up the Beatles before they board their plane and leave the country. The narrator feels its his duty to help his uncle, while his cousins agree to the zany scheme only because they’d get to meet the Beatles.

Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex

This book. Arrrrgh. This book.

I was initially intrigued by Sugar in My Bowl, a collection of essays edited by Erica Jong, because of its premise. In her introduction, Jong raises a lot of great points about the gender-based double standards when it comes to writing about sex. When Miller, Lawrence, and Nabokov wrote about sex, they were subversive and daring. They were breaking down barriers. When women wrote about sex, conventional wisdom said that they may as well have sounded the death knell for their writing careers. Jong was surprised that even now, women were hesitant to write about the subject; she was even more surprised at how many contributors felt the need to consult their significant others before agreeing to participate in this project. Still, it sounded like her main goal was to have an honest discussion about female desire. Sounds awesome, right?

Unfortunately, that wasn’t entirely the case. As with most collections, some essays were stronger than others. The subtitle is also a misnomer: while most of the essays were about “real sex,” there was also quite a bit of erotica. This wouldn’t be a problem had the book been marketed differently–I have nothing against erotica–but I do feel that the inclusion of fiction altered the intended purpose of the book.

Sugar in My Bowl started out strong, and I was really enjoying myself for a while. I loved almost all of the essays by older women who grew up in a different sexual era. For instance, Gail Collins’ essay, “Worst Sex,” focus on her education at a Catholic school in the early 1960s. Although her mother was open about any questions she and her friends had about sex, her teachers were the exact opposite. It’s a humorous reflection about her sex (non-)education:

[Our teachers staged a long, ferocious campaign] to keep girls from ever having carnal relations with anyone except our future husbands. Unless of course we chose to join the convent and dedicate ourselves to perpetual chastity. Really, it’s a wonder that we are even functioning, let alone talking about orgasms.

Another essay I loved was Min Jin Lee’s “Reticence and Fieldwork,” in which she talks about sexuality and racism. Lee, a Korean woman, was shocked in the late 1980s to learn firsthand about the sexual stereotypes of Asian women; an acquaintance’s husband drunkenly approached her and said, “You know Korean girls are wild in bed.” Later, she struggled to come to terms with the sexual expectations within her own culture: virginity was one of the most important factors in snagging a Korean husband. She dissects these stereotypes with honesty and even discusses the effect that these expectations had on her writing. It’s one of the strongest essays in the collection.

Season to Taste

Fresh out of college, Molly Birnbaum only knew one thing: she wanted to cook. Even though she went to Brown and had no background in the food industry, Birnbaum managed to convince Chef Maws at the Craigie Street Bistrot in Cambridge, Massachusetts to hire her. Though she started from the bottom as a dishwasher, Birnbaum quickly immersed herself in the world of food, watching and learning as much as possible, and developing her nose and taste buds along the way. She even applied and was accepted to the Culinary Institute of America, one of the top cooking schools in the country.

Then she was hit by a car. In the painful months of recovery after the accident, Birnbaum came to the horrifying realization that she had lost her sense of smell. And since so much of a person’s sense of taste is tied to one sense of smell, Birnbaum’s sense of taste was also severely diminished. Without those two crucial senses, the future she’d envisioned for herself suddenly vanished.

As soon as I saw the premise of Season to Taste, I knew I had to read it. You see, my sister and I were born without a sense of smell, and it’s always exciting to encounter other people who are in the same boat! It actually took me longer than usual to finish this book because I kept stopping to compare our experiences. There was so much to think about!

I guess anosmia—the medical term for a complete absence of a sense of smell—has never been a big deal for me since it’s something I’ve always lived with. In fact, I didn’t even know there was a proper name for it! My main lament is that I’ll never be a wine connoisseur, even though (unlike Birnbaum) I can taste just fine. But it was a pretty traumatic experience for her, especially since she wanted to be a chef. She wrote at length about all the smells she missed, and I was blown away. When I was living in New York a few years ago, I appreciated my inability to smell the bags of trash piled up along the street or the stench of urine in the subways (two things I’d constantly overhear people gripe about). However, when Birnbaum wrote sadly about not being able to smell things like hot cider in a farmer’s market, my immediate reaction was, Seriously? You can smell stuff like that from that far away?! Most people probably wouldn’t think twice about those things, but it was truly fascinating to hear about all the smells one encounters on a day-to-day basis.

A Widow’s Story

Although Joyce Carol Oates is no stranger to dark subject matter, this particular subject is uncharted territory for her: in February 2008, Oates took her husband of forty-seven years, Raymond Smith, to the emergency room at Princeton Medical Center, where he was promptly admitted with pneumonia. After a week in the hospital, just days before his scheduled release, Smith unexpectedly died from a virulent infection. Oates was left reeling in the aftermath of her sudden widowhood; A Widow’s Story is a memoir about her struggled to cope with the depression and thoughts of suicide she experienced in the wake of her husband’s untimely death.

Oates is a prolific writer–it seems like she publishes at least a book a year–whose writing has a breathless quality to it. Her prose is beautifully descriptive, and whenever I read her books, I often find myself reading various passages over and over again because of the lyricism of her work. Though this is a memoir and not the fiction she is typically known for, the writing in A Widow’s Story is no different in this respect; Oates bares her soul to devastating degrees. Her introspections are meted out carefully, and the reader can’t help but empathize with her sense of utter loss:

“Miss Oates! Thank you so much for coming! We heard about your husband, we’re so very sorry…” [...]

How hard this is…maintaining my poise as “JCO” when I am being addressed, so bluntly, as a woman whose husband has died–a “widow.”

How hard too, to change the subject–to deflect the subject–for I must not break down, not now. I know that these women mean well, of couse they mean well, one or another of these women might in fact be widowed herself, but their words leave me stricken and unable to speak at first. Accepting their condolences I must be courteous, gracious. I must understand that their solicitude is genuine, that they have no idea how desperately I would like to not to be reminded of my “loss”–at this time, particularly.

By degrees then “JCO” returns, or resumes–the precarious moment has passed.

By now I’ve seen several interviews of Oates talking about this book. She’d originally intended this to be a widow’s handbook. Indeed, there is much to be done after the death of a spouse; sorting out legal matters–the will, estate matters, etc.–proved to be a particularly unnerving experience for Oates.

Dudebooks: Story of the Eye & Hot Water Music

About a month ago, The Rejectionist guest-posted at Tiger Beatdown on the subject of manfiction. She explained that manfiction…

…is indeed, almost but not entirely exclusively, a book by a man; but it is a particular kind of book by a particular kind of man, a Real Man, a virile, manly man, who gallops around on horses in between penning great works.

SOME MORE TELLING CHARACTERISTICS OF MANFICTION

1. There aren’t any ladies in it.

2. [...] Instead of communicating the men will drink a lot, commit random acts of violence, beat their sons or pets, and drive around in trucks without speaking. These men do not have daughters.

3. There is at least one of the following: lots of poor people, cows, hunting, a farm, a blizzardy Midwestern town, terse silences, long journeys on horseback/foot, the dissolution of a marriage. [...]

4. Maybe there are a few ladies in it…If the lady is older than thirty she’s definitely a sexless, emasculating bitch, unless she is a predatory but sordid vixen.

5. Author cites the following as influential in interviews: Harold Bloom, Charles Bukowski, fatherhood (of a son), alcoholism. [...]

6. But in general, there aren’t any ladies in it.

The rest of the post discusses why she now generally avoids manfiction at all costs since there is better out there. It’s a great post. Go read it.

I read manfiction. Not frequently, because the majority of it tends to make me violently angry (I’m talkin’ to you, John Updike, and your freakin’ Rabbit, Run bullshit).  But sometimes.  Which brings me to today’s reviews: