Recommended for you
A year ago today, the Women’s March was a movement seen and heard throughout the world. In hundreds of cities on all seven continents, over five million people marched in support of women’s rights, hoping for a beginning to true equality and an end to rape culture. Over the past year, we’ve seen an increasing groundswell that has included sudden attention to the #MeToo movement and a partial overhaul of the entertainment industry, where long-standing accusations of sexual coercion and assault are finally being believed. This is only a start, though; renewed attacks on rights and freedoms, as well as a desperate need for intersectionality in feminism, demand constant, thoughtful vigilance. The three new works in this week’s book club do what issue-based writing does best: The novels take reality and spin it into breathtaking, cautionary allegory, and a memoir takes a personal experience and makes it universal. Together, they’ll convince you that fighting the patriarchy is a full-time job, but a meaningful one.
<em>Red Clocks</em>
Zumas’ novel gives us a setup with an all-too-plausible dystopia: “Two years ago the US Congress ratified the Personhood Amendment, which gives the constitutional right to life, liberty, and property to a fertilized egg at the moment of conception. Abortion is now illegal in all fifty states. Abortion providers can be charged with second-degree murder, abortion seekers with conspiracy to commit murder. In vitro fertilization, too, is federally banned… (The embryos can’t give their consent to be moved.) She was just quietly teaching history when it happened. Woke up one morning to a president-elect she hadn’t voted for. This man thought women who miscarried should pay for funerals for the fetal tissue and thought a lab technician who accidentally dropped an embryo during in vitro transfer was guilty of manslaughter.”
<em>The Beauty</em>
Whiteley’s novella, now getting its first North American publication, was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson and Sabotage Awards, and is on the James Tiptree Jr. Honors List. It’s not hard to see why; it’s creepy, speculative, apocalyptic, and grotesque. Six years after all the women in the world died from a mysterious creeping fungal illness, mushrooms begin to sprout from their graves. A group of men has left the city to live in the Valley of the Rocks, and they are the first to see the phenomenon. It’s chronicled by the group’s storyteller, “Nathan, just twenty-three and given to the curation of stories.”
<em>Body Full of Stars: Female Rage and My Passage into Motherhood</em>
Body horror like that of The Beauty is rooted in real fear, and very little gets at the crux of women’s body horror like pregnancy. Molly Caro May had a particularly difficult time after her pregnancy, where it felt like her body was betraying her: She dealt with severe bladder incontinence, a thyroid imbalance that went undiagnosed for months, and pelvic dysfunction. Worst was dealing with a society where nobody wanted to talk about any of this with her, leading to embarrassment about her own body, and debilitating postpartum rage. May’s book embraces the knowledge that nothing creates change like speaking up.
