For anyone keeping track (and I know that you aren’t), this newsletter is a little late. I will blame pass pages, also known as first galleys or proof pages. As many a writer will tell you, going through pass pages — or copy edits, too — is a humbling experience. All your mistakes, all your little writing tics, all your strange stylistic constructions (which seemed like a good idea during the writing but once laid out in formal type just seem awkward or corny) leer at you from the page. Thankfully, there are pass pages, and another chance to iron those out. I spent the last two weeks of November combing through pages, weeding out “buts” and “ands” or, in some cases, taking them out then putting them back in. “But” or “however”? “But” or “then”? Such is the writing life. Please pass the Malbec.
Happily, I’ve now submitted those pages to my editor, which means we are one step closer to the publication of Young Queens. I should have a cover to share with you soon - or actually two, one for the UK edition and another for the US.
Today, I’m offering something a little different from my usual fare. Since we’re entering gift-giving season, I thought I would highlight a few books I’ve read in the past year that I’ve especially enjoyed. All of them are written by women and most of them are about women. I don’t know any of these writers but am an enthusiastic fan of their books. All are narrative non-fiction, by the way. Please consider them for those book lovers on your holiday gift list. (And please support your neighborhood independent bookstore if you can!)
1. All the Frequent Troubles of our Days, by Rebecca Donner (Little, Brown and Company, 2021)
A stay-up-late-I-can’t-believe-it’s-1:00am-but-just-one-more-chapter page-turner of a history. All the Frequent Troubles of our Days is a biography that reads like fiction. The secret? Rebecca Donner, its author, is a novelist who dove into the real-life story of her great-great-aunt, Mildred Harnack, the young American scholar who became the center of a small yet driven German Resistance during World War II. You might ask: Was there a German Resistance? There was, indeed, and one of the manifold tragedies of World War II and its legacy, as Donner points out, is that these brave souls who risked their lives over years, even infiltrating into the highest ranks of the Nazi party, have not been given their historical due.
The story is riveting and the writing is powerful, as are the questions that Donner’s book raises as it tells Mildred’s story: what fuels a resistance? What drives any individual’s moral compass? And the question that most unsettled me: why did Harnack, knowing she faced the noose, guillotine, or rifle squad, when she had every opportunity to leave Germany — indeed, when she had escaped for a time to the safety of home in Wisconsin — why on earth did she decide to go back?
2. These Fevered Days: Ten Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson, by Martha Ackmann (Norton, 2020)
Although it came out at the beginning the pandemic, I did not discover These Fevered Days until the winter of 2022, just as Covid was hitting another peak. What a pleasure to curl up, then, with Ackmann’s beautiful, narrative portrait of Dickinson. Having known very little about Dickinson’s life, I was startled to discover the striking modernity of her writing when put in context, and the intensity of her passion — she had what I can only describe as a desiring mind. The woman stayed at home for most of her life, yet she was a seeker, looking for something that could be found only if she turned inward and into the writing and rewriting of her poems. She wrote with a fever that was visible to very few in her small circle of intimates and understood by even fewer. Ackmann paints Emily so vividly, that she becomes ‘Emily’ rather than ‘Dickinson’ to us — a woman firmly rooted in the Massachusetts of the mid-19th century, yet somehow beyond time and place, always modern.
3. Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century, by Jennifer Homans (Penguin Random House, 2022)
I am just mid-way through this one but had to add it to the list. My interest in this book is admittedly personal: my second home during high school was the ballet studio, where Balanchine was akin to a god. You can feel that kind of reverence coming from Homans, who was a professional dancer herself before she became a dance critic, first for The New Republic and now for The New Yorker. Even if you care not a tendu for the ballet, Homans book will enthrall: a deeply human portrait of Balanchine whose revolutionary ballets were, like the man himself, the product of the conflicts and wars that shaped and scarred the 20th century.
4. Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It (WH Allen, 2022)
Turning back now to the historical period that is more in my neck in the woods: last but by no means least on this list is Janina Ramirez’s brilliant and thoroughly entertaining revisionist Femina. ‘Revisionist’ isn’t exactly the right word: Ramirez does what her sub-title says and brings the women you’ve never heard of back into a telling of Europe’s medieval period, righting many wrongs. Zigzagging between the Middle Ages and the 20th and 21st-century archeological rediscoveries that force us to re-evaluate our views of the medieval period, Ramirez shows us that many topics we think of as central to 21st-century society — identity, the intersections of gender, race, and class, the role of women in war and in cultural and legal reform — actually have a long history. Ramirez also reveals the diversity of the medieval world with a breathtakingly ample cast of characters. And so, we have the upstart Margery Kempe and the women who wove the Bayeux Tapestries, as well as a Black slave woman who died in London during the Black Death in the 14th century and whose bones were only excavated in 2019. We also meet a person who sometimes went by John Rykener and sometimes Eleanor Rykener, a sex worker active in 14th-century London. The premise of Ramirez’s book is this: everything you’ve thought about the Middle Ages is wrong. And one unstated yet immensely important subtext is that all those medieval narratives that right-wingers marshal to support their ideas in the 21st century are wrong, too.
Ramirez had me at page one, but I was entirely in her thrall by the time she described Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th-century nun and scientist, as the writer who “provided the first known description of what a female orgasm feels like.” Shall we listen to Hildegard?
‘When a woman is making love with a man, a sense of heat in her brain, which brings with it sensual delight, communicates the taste of that delight during the act and summons for the emission from the man’s seed. And when the seed has fallen into place, that vehement heat descending from her brain draws the seed to itself and holds it, and soon the woman’s sexual organs contract, and all the parts that are ready to open up during the time of menstruation now close, in the same way as a strong man can hold something enclosed in his fist.’ (Femina, p. 189)
Not medieval porn – this is science. None of Hildegaard’s 12th-century male contemporaries found her work inappropriate. Instead, after her death, they turned around and made Hildegard a saint.
I would love to hear your book suggestions, both non-fiction and fiction. Happy reading and happy December!
Thanks for these suggestions! Balanchine made me think of those classic ballet and performing art books for children by Noel Streatfeild. More recently, Eva Ibbotson wrote wonderful works of historical fiction for children, books in which ballet and music often play a major part.
I really enjoyed reading your suggestions. This made me think about a book that won the Renaudot in 2020. Yes, it is in French. Les villes de papier by Dominique Fortier. What is it about? Emily Dickinson. A novel mixing biography and fiction about this American author. I am thinking, why not read both books?