Once upon a time there were two brothers who lived in a small kingdom in the middle of a crazy patchwork of other small kingdoms, each with its own prince or archduke to rule it. Some of these kingdoms were so small the princes could fire at each other from their castle walls.
The two brothers – named Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm – were the eldest of a family of six, all boys except for the youngest who was a girl named Lotte.
Next door to the Grimm family lived a family of six girls and one boy named the Wilds. They lived side-by-side on the Marktgasse in the medieval quarter of a town named Cassel, famous for its palace set in vast gardens and forests.
Jakob and Wilhelm and their family were desperately poor. Their father had died, and the two elder brothers struggled to feed and clothe their siblings.
One day a mighty emperor called Napoleon decided he wished to rule the world. On his way to seize the thrones of the other great kings and emperors of the world, he took over the Grimm brothers’ small kingdom and mashed it together with many of its neighbours to create the Kingdom of Westphalia. He set his young brother Jérôme up as king. In his first week, Jérôme played leapfrog in his underwear with his courtiers through the empty halls of the palace, then spent a fortune ordering new furniture from Paris.
Life was very hard for the Grimms. Everything changed under French occupation – the laws of the land, the weights and measurements, even the language everyone must speak - and censors meant the newspapers only printed what Napoleon wanted people to know.
Partly as an act of defiance, and partly in the hope of making some money, the Grimms began to collect old stories from their neighbours and friends, with the aim of publishing a scholarly book.
The Wild girls who lived next door knew many stories, particularly Lotte’s best friend, the fifth daughter, who was named Dortchen. She told Wilhelm many tales, including ‘The Frog King’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘Six Swans’ and ‘Rumpelstiltskin’.
Wilhelm and Dortchen fell in love, but the Grimms were so poverty-stricken they could only afford one meal a day. Wilhelm’s and Dortchen’s only chance to marry was if the fairy tale collection was a success.
Unfortunately, the book was a failure. It was criticised for being too scholarly, too unsophisticated, and filled with too much sex (some of the stories were indeed ripe with sexual innuendo).
It was a time of war and terror and tyranny. Napoleon marched on Russia. The fields of Europe were burned black, and many hundreds of thousands of people died.
Wilhelm struggled on (his elder brother Jakob was now busy with other scholarly undertakings). He collected more tales, from Dortchen as well as from other storytellers, and he rewrote the stories to make them more palatable to a middle-class audience. He added such terms as ‘once upon a time’ and ‘happily ever after’, and made sure the princess did not take the frog into her bed anymore.
Slowly the war was won, and peace returned. Slowly the fairy tales began to sell. Slowly the Grimm brothers’ reputation grew. At last, thirteen years after they first fell in love, Wilhelm and Dortchen were able to marry. They lived together with Jakob happily until their deaths.
Dortchen’s Tales:
One young woman named Dortchen Wild told the Grimm brothers almost one-quarter of all the tales in their first collection of fairy stories, when she was just nineteen years old. Stories she told include:
‘Rumpelstiltskin’
‘Hansel and Gretel’
‘The Frog-King’
‘Six Swans’
‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’
‘The Singing Bone’
‘Sweet Porridge’
‘Mother Hulda’
‘Three Little Men in the Wood (a version of ‘Diamonds & Toads’)
‘Sweetheart Roland’ (about a girl whose betrothed forgets her)
‘Fitcher’s Bird’ (A Bluebeard variant where the heroine saves herself and her sisters)
‘The Singing, Springing Lark’ (a very beautiful version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’)
‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’ (an incest tale)
Dortchen also contributed many folk sayings and proverbs to the tales, and made up some of the rhymes, including the famous verses in ‘Hansel and Gretel’.
Seven Fascinating Facts about the Grimms & their Fairy Tales
Just how grim are the Grimm tales?
* In the 1812 version of the Grimm’s tale ‘Little Snow-White’, it is the heroine’s own jealous mother that wants her dead. She tells the huntsman to bring back her daughter’s lungs and liver, for her to eat. Wilhelm Grimm later changed the mother to a step-mother.
* The jealous queen was punished by Little Snow-White and her prince by being forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes till she died.
* In the original (1812) version of ‘The Frog King’, the princess does not kiss the frog to change him into a prince. Instead, she throws him as hard as she can against a wall.
* In ‘Aschenputtel’, the Grimm’s version of ‘Cinderella’, one wicked stepsister cuts off her toes to try and make the slipper fit and the other cuts off her heel. In the end, they have their eyes pecked out by pigeons.
* In a later edition (1857) of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, the dwarf tears himself in two when the queen guesses his true name. This detail was added in by Wilhelm, quite possibly because he thought it was funny
* in one Grimm tale, ‘The Maiden Without Hands,’ a girl’s hands are chopped off by her own father
* The villain of ‘Fitcher’s Bird’ is a sorcerer that travels about the countryside, kidnapping girls and hacking them to pieces in a hidden room.
* In ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’, a girl disguises herself in a coat made from the fur flayed from a thousand animals
* in many cases, Wilhelm made the stories more violent – particularly the punishments for witches and evil step-mothers
* nonetheless, nearly all of the tales end happily, with the hero or heroine triumphing because of their courage, goodness, and wit
Ten Things you didn’t know about Napoleon
One of the problems of writing historical fiction which draws on the lives of real people is that, well, they’re real people. And if you are trying your best to be true to their life, you can’t go mucking round with known facts. Well, at least, I can’t. It’s important for me to be as historically accurate as I can, whilst still weaving a vivid and compelling story.
My latest novel THE WILD GIRL tells the story of star-crossed lovers Wilhelm Grimm and Dortchen Wild, drawn irresistibly together by their love of old half-forgotten stories but kept inexorably apart by parental disapproval, poverty, and war.
Yep, that Wilhelm Grimm. One half of the famous Grimm brothers, whose collection of fairy tales is one of the famous books of all time. Most people do not know that his one true love, the woman who would become his wife, was one of the primary oral sources of the tales. Dortchen Wild grew up next door to the Grimm family and was best friends with the only girl of the family, Lotte Grimm. Dortchen told Wilhelm such famous stories as Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, The Frog King, Six Swans, and The Singing Bone, when she was just nineteen years old, and Wilhelm in his mid-20s. They fell in love, but many obstacles stood in their path and it would be another fourteen years before they could marry.
Well, that’s the first thing I’d have changed, if I could. Fourteen years is a long time to maintain suspense and narrative tension in a novel (though luckily lots of other interesting things happened, like Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow, his defeat and imprisonment, and then his dramatic escape to gather another army and wage war on Europe again.)
Another problem I had is that Wilhelm Grimm is not most women’s idea of a heartthrob romantic hero. Most illustrations of him are stern and unsmiling, and quite a few of them show him in his dotage, a grumpy old man.
The truth is he was strikingly handsome as a young man, in a pale and poetic sort of way. He had suffered asthma as a child, and in his 20s was ill with a frightening and painful heart condition that may have been caused by panic attacks, or by mercury treatments for his asthma, or may have been a condition such as paroxysmal auricular tachycardia, which basically means an abnormally fast heartbeat that comes without warning. He was also devout and driven by a strong sense of duty to his family.
So Wilhelm was not your usual Alpha male.
Luckily for me, I’ve never been a fan of those big, brutish thugs you see bare-chested on romance novels. I’ve always preferred a more Byronic hero. You know, with pale hollow cheeks and tousled dark hair that you just long to stroke away from his dark eyes that are fixed intensely on your face, your mouth.
A man who loves books and music and art, and wants a woman who can match him for wit and ardour.
A man that talks of poetry and passion, not huntin’ and fishin’.
Wilhelm was the poet of the two brothers. It was Wilhelm who rewrote the fairy tales with such aching beauty that they have been read and re-read for the past two hundred years.
Wilhelm wrote of the fairy tales: ‘ín the myths which tell of the golden age, all Nature is animate, and the sun, moon and stars are approachable, give presents, or let themselves be woven into clothes, while in the mountains the dwarves dig metal, the water nymphs sleep in the water, the birds, plants and stones speak and know how to express their sympathy, blood itself calls out and speaks.’
And Wilhelm wrote of his love for Dortchen: ‘I have never ceased to thank God for the blessing and happiness of this marriage. I had known my wife ever since she was a child, and my mother loved her like one of her own, without ever guessing that one day she would be.’
Now that’s my kind of man!
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
On the fifth floor of the White Caps Hotel, four young boys are left alone while their parents dine downstairs.
But when one of the parents checks on the children at midnight, they discover one of them is missing.
The boys swear they stayed in their room. CCTV confirms that none of them left the building. No trace of the child is found.
Now the hunt is on to find him, before it’s too late – and before the search for a boy becomes a search for a body
My Thoughts:
I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary crime in the past year, mainly by Australian women writers, but had not yet given Candice Fox a whirl. That’s only because it can sometimes be hard to know where to start with a writer that has a whole of books, and I hadn’t had time to google ‘Candice Fox books chronological order’. Because crime books should be read in order, don’t you think?
Anyway, I was in Brisbane for GenreCon, I’d read all the books I had packed, and the bookshop had only one copy of her books left: Gone By Midnight. My deep FOMO caused me to grab it, and I read it on the flight home.
What a great crime novel! Pacy, pithy, clever, full of surprises, with plenty of comic relief to help balance out the horror of a story about a missing child. Her characters were fabulously well-drawn, full of vulnerabilities and heartache, and yet also hope.
Of course, I soon realised it is part of a series, and that I really should have started at the beginning. I fully intend to now!
You might also like to read my review of The Lost Man by Jane Harper:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-lost-man-jane-harper
Writing Lessons I Learned From Charles Dickens
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way …
It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
A luminous novel about love by an acclaimed rising star of Australian literature.
Sarah and Hannah are on a cruise from San Diego, California to Sydney Australia. Sarah, Hannah’s grandmother, is returning to the country of her birth, a place she hasn’t seen since boarding the USS Mariposa in 1945. She, along with countless other war brides, sailed across the Pacific to join the American Servicemen they’d married during World War II.
Hannah is the age Sarah was when she made her first journey, and in hearing Sarah tell the story of her life, realises the immensity of what her grandmother gave up.
The Passengers is a luminous novel about the journeys we undertake, the sacrifices we make and the heartache we suffer for love. It is about how we most long for what we have left behind. And it is about the past - how close it can feel - even after long passages of time.
My Thoughts:
A young woman and her grandmother travel on a cruise together from the USA to Australia. For Sarah, it is a journey to the country of her birth, a place she has not seen since she left as a war bride in the 1940s. For Hannah, it is a chance to leave behind old hurts and discover a new land. Each tell their own story, in their own voices, each regretting mistakes they have made and people they have left behind.
Sarah’s story begins as a girl on a diary farm in New South Wales. Times are hard, and her father sells the farm and moves his family to Sydney. Sarah is forced to leave her beloved cattle dog behind. She finds work, and reams of marriage, putting a white dress on layby. Sydney is full of American soldiers. There are fights and dances and flirtations. She falls in love and marries, and has just one night with her new husband before he is shipped out to Papua New Guinea. When the war ends, Sarah must leave her home and family and travel thousands of kilometres to a place she has never been, to live with a man she hardly knows.
As Sarah tells her story to her granddaughter, Hannah reveals some of her own secret vulnerabilities. Slowly the two stories echo and reflect each other, in clear lucid prose that glows with its own inner light.
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
Inspired by the gothic classic Wuthering Heights, this stunning new fantasy from the author of the Books of Pellinor is a fiercely romantic tale of betrayal and vengeance.
In a savage land sustained by wizardry and ruled by vendetta, Lina is the enchanting but willful daughter of a village lord. She and her childhood companion, Damek, have grown up privileged and spoiled, and they’re devoted to each other to the point of obsession. But Lina’s violet eyes betray her for a witch, and witches are not tolerated in a brutally patriarchal society. Her rank protects her from persecution, but it cannot protect her from tragedy and heartbreak. An innocent visitor stands witness to the devastation that ensues as destructive longing unleashes Lina’s wrath, and with it her forbidden power. Whether drawn by the romantic, the magical, or the gothic, readers will be irresistibly compelled by the passion of this tragic tale.
My Thoughts:
I collect books faster than I can read them. Most of them I buy, many are given to me as gifts. The only way I could read them all was if I spent my whole life with my nose in a book and lived several centuries.
The books I haven’t yet read are stacked and double-stacked on a bookshelf in my bedroom, and when I’ve read them they go into their proper place, by genre and alphabetically, in my library. Every month or so, I rummage around at the back of my to-be-read bookshelf and pull out a book that has been hidden there far too long.
Black Spring is a reimagining of Wuthering Heights, set in a world of wizards, mutes, vendettas and wild magic. Written by poet, critic and novelist, Alison Croggon it was published in 2012 which means it has been waiting for me to give it life in my imagination for seven years. I love Alison Croggon’s writing and so I knew I was going to love this book. I’m so glad it finally sprang into my hand.
Constructed, like Wuthering Heights, as a story within a story, it follows the well-known trajectory of love, obsession, revenge and tragedy of the original book by Emily Bronte. Alison Croggon, has, however, created something quite new and remarkable with her addition of magical elements. It has given Black Spring an eeriness that Wuthering Heights demonstrated in its famous scene of the ghost sobbing outside in the snowstorm, but did not deliver quite so powerfully elsewhere. Alison Croggon has taken this gothic scene, and extended its spine-chilling, unnerving quality throughout the entirety of the narrative.
She has also simplified and strengthened the primary narrative arc of Wuthering Heights, losing all the bits that most readers skip over. The result is a work of dark, poetic intensity that acknowledges its inspiration but creates its own uncanny, mysterious world.
GET YOUR COPY OF BLACK SPRING HEREYou might also like to read my review of The Girl In The Tower by Katherine Arden:
BOOK REVIEW: The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably worse.
August Pullman was born with a facial difference that, up until now, has prevented him from going to a mainstream school. Starting 5th grade at Beecher Prep, he wants nothing more than to be treated as an ordinary kid—but his new classmates can’t get past Auggie’s extraordinary face. WONDER, now a #1 New York Times bestseller and included on the Texas Bluebonnet Award master list, begins from Auggie’s point of view, but soon switches to include his classmates, his sister, her boyfriend, and others. These perspectives converge in a portrait of one community’s struggle with empathy, compassion, and acceptance.
My Thoughts:
I’ve had an Advanced Reading Copy (ARC) of this book on my shelf for literally years, but had never found the time to read it (although I wanted to). Then the movie came out and I always like to read the book before I watch someone else’s creative response to it. So the book jumped the queue and I finally got around to reading it.
It’s a simple enough story.
August Pullman was born with a genetic disorder that resulted in a childhood of hospitals and operations. Despite this, he has been left with facial deformities that make many people who see him for the first time uncomfortable. He’s been home-schooled, but his mother thinks it is time for him to go to a mainstream school. Auggie is reluctant. He is afraid of the other kids’ horror and unkindness. But finally he agrees, even though he knows it will be an ordeal.
The first part of the book is told from his point-of-view, with succeeding sections told by his older sister, her boyfriend, and some of the other kids at school. This device allows us to see how Auggie’s struggle to be accepted impacts on those around him. R.J. Palacio does a good job of creating different voices for her characters, though it is Auggie’s point-of-view which is most memorable. Auggie is funny, brave, and caring. He just wants to be an ordinary kid, and yet those around him can’t help but treat him differently.
R.J. Palacio has called her debut novel “a meditation on kindness”, and this is the book’s great strength. Wonder has been criticised for being over-sentimental and over-simplified, but you know what? I had a big lump in my throat when I finished it. It’s true that this is a big, difficult and complex topic, and that – for people who suffer differences and disabilities - there is rarely any such happy ending. However, this is a book written for children, with a very important message about learning to live with empathy, compassion and thoughtfulness, and I believe that many child readers will find themselves fundamentally changed by reading it.
You might also like to read my review of Molly & Pim by Martine Murray:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-molly-pim-the-millions-of-stars-by-martine-murray
A Tale of Two Cities was Charles Dickens’s twelfth novel, and was written and published at a tumultuous time of his life. He was at that time in his mid-40s, unhappily married with ten children aged between 20 and 5.
He was already famous, having written such great classics as Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield and Bleak House. His most recent novel, Little Dorrit, had won him more readers than ever.
Dickens had also been busy working on ‘The Frozen Deep’, a play written and staged in collaboration with his friend Wilkie Collins. The story was inspired by the true story of a doomed expedition to the Arctic in 1845, led by Sir John Franklin, former Lieutenant-Governor of Van Dieman’s Land. The explorers hoped to chart the Northwest Passage, but the expedition was lost without trace.
‘The Frozen Deep’ begins when a young woman named Clara Burnham becomes engaged to Frank Aldersley the night before he joins an expedition to find the Northwest Passage. Clara is an orphan, staying with her best friend, Lucy Crayford, whose husband is a lieutenant on the voyage. The same evening Clara rejects the advances of another man Richard Wardour. Vowing revenge on his rival, Wardour joins the expedition at the last minute.
Two years later, their ships are trapped in the Arctic ice with most of the expedition dying from cold and starvation. When the two men become separated from the main group, Wardour is tempted to leave his rival to die. Lucy and Clara have sailed to Canada to seek their lost lovers. Wardour staggers from the snow, carrying Aldersley in his arms – he has saved his life at the cost of his own.
The play was first performed as an amateur theatrical at Dickens’ home, Tavistock House, on 5 January 1857, for an informal audience of servants and tradespeople. Dickens acted the role of Richard Wardour and was the play’s stage-manager. Several other performances followed, to audiences of the two authors’ friends and colleagues.
Then a close friend of Dickens – Douglas William Jerrold – unexpectedly died, and Dickens decided to stage some benefit performances of the play to help raise funds for his widow and children. The first was a command performance on 4 July 1857 for Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and their family and guests, who included William Thackeray and Hans Christian Andersen. Queen Victoria praised the performance, especially Dickens's acting, in her diary.
Realising that insufficient funds had been raised to sustain Mrs. Jerrold and her children, Dickens arranged for a series of much larger public performances at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. He was concerned that his amateur actresses, including his daughters Kate and Mary, would not be able to project their voices in such a large venue. So he hired professional actresses, including Fanny Ternan and her daughters, Maria and Ellen (called Nelly) who was then just 18 years old.
Their three performances, given on 21, 22 and 24 August 1867, were attended by thousands, many of whom were moved to tears by the play – including the stage crew and cast.
A week later, he wrote to his friend John Forster that his relationship with his wife was breaking apart: ‘Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other … reasons have been growing which make it all but hopeless that we should even try to struggle on.’ Within the next few weeks, Dickens had moved out of the marital bed and into a separate bedroom.
Around the same time, he wrote to Angela Burdett Coutts about a new idea growing in his imagination: ‘Sometimes of late, when I have been very much excited by the crying of two thousand people over the grave of Richard Wardour, new ideas for a story have come into my head as I lay on the ground, with surprising force and brilliancy. Last night, being quiet here, I noted them down in a little book I keep.’ This was the first mention of the story idea that would become A Tale of Two Cities.
His notebook from the time read: ‘a story in two periods – with a lapse of time between, like a French drama.’ And, a little later, ‘The drunken? – dissipated? – What? LION – and his JACKAL …’
In late January 1858, he wrote to John Foster that he had enough ideas for a book ‘if (only) I can discipline my thoughts into the channel of a story.’ In March, he sent Forster three possible titles, including ‘Buried Alive.’
In May, Catherine Dickens accidentally received a bracelet meant for Ellen Ternan. Her daughter, Katey, said her mother was distraught at the discovery. By the end of the month Dickens had negotiated a settlement where Catherine should have £400 a year and a carriage, but the children would live with him. His eldest son Charley was over 21 and so permitted to choose where he lived. He decided to stay with his mother.
There were inevitably, rumours and scandal. In June 1858, Dickens issued a statement to the press: ‘By some means, arising out of wickedness, or out of folly, or out of inconceivable wild chance, or out of all three, this trouble has been the occasion of misrepresentations, mostly grossly false, most monstrous, and most cruel - involving, not only me, but innocent persons dear to my heart... I most solemnly declare, then - and this I do both in my own name and in my wife's name - that all the lately whispered rumours touching the trouble, at which I have glanced, are abominably false. And whosoever repeats one of them after this denial, will lie as wilfully and as foully as it is possible for any false witness to lie, before heaven and earth.’
Kate Dickens later recalled: "My father was like a madman... This affair brought out all that was worst - all that was weakest in him. He did not care a damn what happened to any of us. Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home."
Dickens could not write. Almost a year later – in February 1859 - he said, ‘I cannot please myself with the opening of my new story, and cannot in the least settle to it or take to it.’
However, only a few weeks later the title came to him - ‘exactly the name for the story that is wanted’ - and he ordered Thomas Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution from the London Library. ‘All the time I was at work on the Two Cities, I read no books but such as had the air of the time in them.’
By 5th April he was writing steadily, and the first installment was published on the 30th of that month. Dickens then had to produce exactly eight columns of text a week, for the weekly serialisation, with the last chapter printed only six months later, in November. He felt cramped and rushed by these constant deadlines, writing: ‘The difficulty of the space is crushing. Nobody can have an idea of it who has not had an experience of patient fiction-writing with some elbow-room …’
A Tale of Two Cities has been criticised for its swiftness of pace, its tight compression of time, and its simplicity of plot, but I actually feel this distillation down to the quintessence is why the story is so powerful.
The characters are drawn simply but deftly, without exaggeration or caricature, and yet they are entirely memorable: the old man kept prisoner for 18 years, making shoes from scraps of leather; gentle Lucie who shows such courage and strength of character in her steadfast support of her broken father; Charles Darnay, her lover who hides a secret past, and his doppelgänger, the debauched young lawyer Sydney Carton who finds redemption in love and self-sacrifice; and – perhaps most vitally - sinister Madame Defarge, whose knitting secretly encodes the names of those whom she wants to die;
The pace is swift and compelling, the plot is full of mysteries and surprises, and each scene is so vivid and memorable – the child knocked down and killed by an aristocrat’s carriage; the murder of the evil marquis; the storming of the Bastille; the death carts with their doomed human cargo, rattling over the cobblestones; the terrible swift drop of the guillotine blade ….
All this occurs against the background of the French Revolution, a time of terror and treason, in which the world is changed forever. The sheer drama and tragedy of its historical setting, and the book’s powerful themes of revolution, redemption and resurrection, combine to make – I believe - ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ Dickens’s greatest novel.
Dickens himself agreed with me, writing to a friend on the 15th of October, 1859: ‘I hope it is the best story I have written.’
10 Fascinating Facts About A Tale of Two Cities:
Charles Darnay shares the same first name and initials as Dickens himself
Evrémonde - his French surname – means ‘everyman’
The book’s Lucie shares the same name as the character played by Ellen Ternan in the Frozen Deep.
Lucie’s father was driven mad by his 18 years in prison; Ellen’s father died in the Bethnal Green Insane Asylum.
Dickens referred to Ellen Ternan as his ‘magic circle of one’; Sydney Carton said to Lucie: ‘I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.’
Dickens once witnessed a beheading by guillotine in Rome in 1845
Dickens said he read Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution 500 times while writing A Tale of Two Cities
Real-life characters in the book include Charles-Henri Samson, the Royal Executioner of France, who executed around 3,000 people during the Terror, including the French king
The second part of the book is ‘The Golden Thread’ gave its name to a famous English Legal Judgement: ‘one golden thread is always to be seen – that is the duty of the prosecution to prove the prisoner’s guilt’ ie the Common Law concept of the presumption of innocence common in the English speaking world.
Charles Dicken’s favourite fairy tale character was Little Red Riding Hood, a traditional French story full of darkness, sexual tension, and a man who saves a girl by cutting her from the belly of a wolf after it had devoured her.
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
It thrills us and torments us. It controls our thoughts and destroys our lives. It’s all we live for. Yet we almost never speak of it. And as a buried force in our lives, desire remains largely unexplored—until now. Over the past eight years, journalist Lisa Taddeo has driven across the country six times to embed herself with ordinary women from different regions and backgrounds. The result, Three Women, is the deepest nonfiction portrait of desire ever written.
We begin in suburban Indiana with Lina, a homemaker and mother of two whose marriage, after a decade, has lost its passion. She passes her days cooking and cleaning for a man who refuses to kiss her on the mouth, protesting that “the sensation offends” him. To Lina’s horror, even her marriage counselor says her husband’s position is valid. Starved for affection, Lina battles daily panic attacks. When she reconnects with an old flame through social media, she embarks on an affair that quickly becomes all-consuming.
In North Dakota, we meet Maggie, a seventeen-year-old high school student who finds a confidant in her handsome, married English teacher. By Maggie’s account, supportive nightly texts and phone calls evolve into a clandestine physical relationship, with plans to skip school on her eighteenth birthday and make love all day; instead, he breaks up with her on the morning he turns thirty. A few years later, Maggie has no degree, no career, and no dreams to live for. When she learns that this man has been named North Dakota’s Teacher of the Year, she steps forward with her story—and is met with disbelief by former schoolmates and the jury that hears her case. The trial will turn their quiet community upside down.
Finally, in an exclusive enclave of the Northeast, we meet Sloane—a gorgeous, successful, and refined restaurant owner—who is happily married to a man who likes to watch her have sex with other men and women. He picks out partners for her alone or for a threesome, and she ensures that everyone’s needs are satisfied. For years, Sloane has been asking herself where her husband’s desire ends and hers begins. One day, they invite a new man into their bed—but he brings a secret with him that will finally force Sloane to confront the uneven power dynamics that fuel their lifestyle.
Based on years of immersive reporting, and told with astonishing frankness and immediacy, Three Women is a groundbreaking portrait of erotic longing in today’s America, exposing the fragility, complexity, and inequality of female desire with unprecedented depth and emotional power. It is both a feat of journalism and a triumph of storytelling, brimming with nuance and empathy, that introduces us to three unforgettable women—and one remarkable writer—whose experiences remind us that we are not alone.
My Thoughts:
A journalist named Lisa Taddeo spent a decade talking to women about their sex lives, asking questions, probing for details, encouraging them to open up and share. She then writes a book which tells – in an extraordinary act of ventriloquism – three of their stories. Two of the women have their identity protected by pseudonyms. The third wants her name to be known.
The first woman, Lina, is married to a man who will not kiss her on the mouth. Through social media, she reconnects with her teenage sweetheart – a married man – and seduces him into an all-consuming affair.
The second woman, Maggie, had sex with her English teacher whilst still only a teenager. The fallout from the affair, and ensuing court case, destroyed her life while her lover is named North Dakota’s Teacher of the Year.
The third and last woman is Sloane, rich, thin and successful. She is married to a man who likes to watch her have sex with others. He picks out partners for her, and she works hard to satisfy his and their needs. She does not know how to explain or articulate her need to please others, until she reads 50 Shades of Grey.
Each of the three women carry secrets. Each have been harmed in some way. Each struggle to negotiate love, desire, and longing. Each of their stories is unique, personal, and yet somehow universal.
Astonishingly frank and intimate, this book is both shocking and yet heart-breaking. A tour-de-force of imaginative reporting.
You might also like to read my review of The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-orchid-thief-a-true-story-of-beauty-and-obsession-by-susan-orlean
