Not good for peaceful sleeping

Has anyone out there read the classic novel, "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood?

Last night, page 89, I was ready to hang it up for all the bleakness. There are some grisly scenes involving giant meat hooks, and I'm not one to be entertained by impaling human flesh with anything. Think: the Taliban joins forces with Focus on the Family and creates a society kept in check by teenage boys with big guns. I believe I had nightmares.

The setting is futuristic where environmental degradation has created a world in which most women are infertile for all the poisoning and pollution (and certainly men are infertile too, but it's illegal to call men infertile, it's always the women's fertility at issue), so most women are "unwomen" and most babies are "unbabies." The women who by chance do carry working ovaries have the option of becoming a Handmaid, a role of sexual slavery, bearing children for upper class military families, submitting to strange rituals in conception and birth so that the Wife-class of women receive the babies as their own.

And whoa bessy, can Margaret Atwood concoct strange rituals. Although in the author's notes she insists that everything she put in the book is based on truths from different times and places.

So this morning, page 93 brings on "the ceremony," what this society calls the process of conception, for lack of a better phrase. Bizarre. Later the reader finds that the birthing process is equally strange. I'll let you read for yourself the details but I'll say that it's three mostly clothed human beings, united in a most peculiar way. The most opposite of intimacy you could possibly get, which is actually the point of the entire society, to ban human interaction on pretty much all levels.

It's strange, alright, but I couldn't stop reading. And now, on page 163, the reader discovers what the Commander of the house wants most, what is most contraband, what is most forbidden, what is most lacking. I won't give away any spoilers here, in case you haven't yet read the book, but I will say it's pretty surprising. Margaret Atwood is genius.

I'll close with this review from the Washington Post Book World: "A novel that brilliantly illuminates some of the darker interconnections between politics and sex...Just as the world of Orwell's '1984' gripped our imaginations, so with the world of Atwood's handmaid!"

At page 163 the reader still doesn't know what happens to unwomen and unbabies. This reader isn't sure she wants to know. This is another book that I'll probably never watch the movie rendition. Too visually graphic for my taste. But a real page turner, although I've decided to only read it during daylight hours. "The Handmaid's Tale" does not make for peaceful sleeping.

Your thoughts?

For MLK Day: "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, annotated

Read this book and be grateful if you believe in forgiveness
and the potential for Beloved Community. 

To commemorate Martin Luther King Day, I'm pleased to post my annotation of the book Beloved, by Toni Morrison:  

Beloved by Toni Morrison is a novel set in Cincinnati the immediate years following the civil war, centering on a former slave, Sethe, and her family. “Family,” defined by slavery standards as family didn’t exist for slaves; would-be loved ones were bought, sold, rented, burned, hanged, or otherwise lost. Sethe’s family was her mother-in-law, her daughter, her new lover who was an old co-slave (for total lack of a better word), her two runaway sons, her vanished husband and her ghost daughter, Beloved, who forms the center of the plot line. The book demonstrates why it was nearly impossible for a slave to form bonds of love, and the reader understands how love could be best shown through infanticide. Yes, read that last sentence again slowly. Love through infanticide. I won't give away the spoiler, the method.

I wanted to read this book for two reasons. First to further my quest to read the classics. In 2006 The New York Times Book Review deemed this book as “the single best work of American fiction in the past 25 years.” The original NYT review was written in 1987 by Margeret Atwood who wrote this about Toni Morrison: “If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, Beloved will put them to rest. In three words or less, it's a hair-raiser.”

What would I give to find a nonfiction story like this to write (and I have to believe they exist). Or better yet, I only wish there were no nonfiction stories like this. This is a story of our American heritage and it’s really hard to read. Just as Sethe and her lover, Paul D., wanted to “unremember” their horrific past—perhaps they had most severe cases of post traumatic stress—so do we as a country. Perhaps this book could help serve a national truth and reconciliation effort, to tell stories of our slave history and collectively heal. Idealism.

The second reason I wanted to read this is to see how Toni Morrison writes the supernatural. (My writing and research interests include writing nonfiction supernatural.) Morrison writes the narrative like a conch shell—circling wide with big open holes in the story and rotating the prose inwards, winding towards a tight ball of tension and providing details to the circumstances of Beloved’s past and present. Slavery is horrible, yet is also just a word that cannot in itself evoke the complexities of what it did to people, white and black, and to our society. Morrison puts flesh and bones to slavery; not only to its enormous injustices, but also to its tragic nuances. The inwardly spiraling accounts of chronic and severe abuse suffered by all of the characters seem to beg for a supernatural telling as the haunting seems almost as expected as killing your own baby in order to save it. It seemed a person enslaved lived constantly on the border of life and death, and so to accept a ghost into your household, to accept existence as a straddling of the present world and the next, wouldn’t be out of the ordinary.

The book opens with the supernatural: “124 was spiteful. Full of baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims” (3). Yes, indeed, Morrison is writing about ghosts of the poltergeist-type, including incidents such as “a mirror shattered” and “two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake” (3). Yet the way Morrison writes the supernatural, it could also be referring to the super traumatic. Would not anyone who murdered their own child be haunted, and thus negatively influence everyone around them?

As part of the inward spiraling of the narrative, Morrison tells the story through different characters in their own voice, in a non-linear fashion. The disjointed style of prose emulates the jarring uncertainties faced by its characters, yet it all works together to tell a thick, multi-layered story of attempting to love in a nightmare.

With love, T

Before the mommy blogger there was Shirley Jackson, the mother of horror.

Life Among the Savages

By Shirley Jackson

Farrar, Straus and Young 1953

An Annotation

Life Among the Savages is s sweet mommy-memoir by Shirley Jackson, the same author who wrote a story that has terrified me since sixth grade, “The Lottery.”

As I read Life Among the Savages I couldn’t help but to wonder how her life experience of raising kids in a small town informed her creation of the horror masterpiece, The Lottery, set in a small town with a ritual of annual human sacrifice. Even the title begs the question, who does she mean when she refers to the “savages?” The kids? The townspeople? The parents? And what kind of writer includes the word “savage” in a sweet mommy-memoir title? But then again she titled her second sweet mommy memoir “Raising Demons” so there you go.


The book is full of stories of how it is to raise children, the tender, the frustrating, the funny, and the futile. As one who likes to write about the chaos of my children, I could easily relate to her setting. She opens by describing their house:

“Our house is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily a half million books; we also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking horses and lamps and doll dresses and ship models and paint brushes and literally thousands of socks.” (1)

She uses the word “and” over and over instead of inserting commas, a stylistic choice that emphasizes the chaos. As the book unfolds she often refers to the white house, its rooms, its pillars, its characteristics; almost as if it were an entity unto its own. She often places household elements as the subject of the sentence, and the people as the object, for example, when describing how the family moved into the house Jackson writes: "One bedroom chose the children, because it was large and showed unmistakable height marks on one wall and seemed to mind not at all when crayon marks appeared on the wallpaper and paint got spilled on the floor" (19-20). Focusing on the house itself is an effective way to tell the story of the people who live inside it, and it inspired me to consider writing my own mommy memoir centered around our big white house, which is a source of as much joy as incredible frustration. Think money pit meets the American dream.

But the other consideration in Jackson’s choice in lifting up the house as a character is knowing that she also wrote a famously frightening book, "The Haunting of Hill House," which I have not read yet but I’m curious if there is a connection in Jackson’s creative process. (This book has been sitting on my shelf waiting for me for months. It's first up after December graduation. :-)

While funny and sweet, Life Among the Savages seems to hint at that part of Jackson’s brain that can concoct the scariest tales ever. For example, she describes her search for a paid mother’s helper, recounting all the reasons why this or that household helper didn’t work out for the job. The mother’s helper, Amelia, who baked a batch of almost evil cookies helps show Jackson’s skill at blending funny and sweet with the slightly eerie:

“Amelia had but one major failing. The second day she was with us – which turned out, coincidentally, to be the last – she made cookies, spending all one joyous afternoon in the kitchen, droning happily to herself, fidgeting, cluttering, measuring.

“At dinner, dessert arrived with Amelia’s giggle and a flourish. She set the plate of cookies down in front of my husband, and my husband, who is a nervous man, glanced down at them and dropped his coffee cup. ‘Sinner,” the cookies announced in bold pink icing, “Sinner, repent.” (98-99)

In this short passage alone, Jackson manages to artfully join words like cookies, joyous, pink, nervous, sinner, and repent. I count her as one of my main influences.