One cannot live on genre fiction alone (can one?). But just as some moviegoers seek out serious dramas during the summer special effects blockbuster season, some readers still crave serious fiction with something important to say. Something to read on the plane or at the beach. By Daffy Duck Pt.Summer is seen as a time to read light-hearted, romantic novels or thrillers. Where poems come from Pt.3 / Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.Thoughts on the ending of Drive My Car (film, 2021, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi).Thoughts on the 2021 K-drama series Hometown.The Old Woman With The Knife by Gu Byeong-mo and The Plotters by Kim Un-su (Un-su Kim).Turns out I write about gender politics and violence, for now. Not sure what I’d write about at this point.
Last time I was writing memoir pieces that sent me into a tailspin of depression. Maybe I’ll import the content of one into the other and just retain one. I’m thinking I might reactivate one or both of my blogs, Elly McDonald Writer and Telling Tales. Also mine was as much a lashing out at corporate culture… oops, so is Charlotte’s.Ĭharlotte’s novel stayed in my mind and I remember it now, precisely two years later (to the day), with more appreciation than I felt at the time. Eventually I edited it into a short story, which worked better.Ĭharlotte Wood has set hers in a distinctively Australian environment, anchored by Australian references (notorious true crimes perpetrated against individual women and generic misogynist scenarios), whereas mine was set in a land of fable with lots of east Asian elements. I liked my opening sequences, too, but my draft backed my heroine into a muddy pit and I could not devise a way to extract her.
It was very similar, thematically, to the novella I wrote mid-2012: women forcibly interred in a kind of prison camp run by men, subjected to humiliations intended to enforce the “natural way of things”, with femaleness seen as abject and subject to male controls. Which is beside the point in a schematically rigorous parable like this. Even as an unabashed feminist I found myself squeaking “But I like men!”. It’s not an easy novel to like – stylistically sometimes too gothic for my palate (the Ransom doll) and ideologically hardline. I liked the opening sequences and the final section some of the middle sagged a bit. I finally read Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things.
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