Tag: Women

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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Watch it…

Notes:

  • Movie Review: CRITIC’S PICK – ‘Women Talking’ Review: The Power of Speech.” Sarah Polley adapts Miriam Toews’s novel into a timely political parable with a stellar ensemble cast. (NY Times, December 22, 2022)
  • Thank you Susan for recommendation.

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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Compared to the alternate realities that could have happened, how can I want for anything more in this one?

— Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (Counterpoint, April 6, 2021)

 

Notes: NY Times Editor’s Choice 9 New Books We Recommend This Week (May 13, 2021)

Truth.

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It’s the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments.

~ Lisa Taddeo, Three Women (Simon & Schuster, July 9, 2019)

Notes:

  • And another passage by Lisa Taddeo from her new book: “I think about my mother’s sexuality and how she occasionally used it. The little things, the way she made her face up before she left the house or opened the door. To me, it always seemed a strength or a weakness, but never its own pounding heart. How wrong I was.”
  • From Amazon.com: “It thrills us and torments us. It controls our thoughts, destroys our lives, and 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 and one of the most anticipated books of the year.”
  • NY Times Book Review by Toni Bentley
  • (Early Review 50 pages in: Exceptionally well written. Page turner. Raw/Emotional.)

#1, and belongs there.

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“Where is it written that a working-class widow’s daughter should to go college?” one of my uncles said to her, drinking coffee at our kitchen table on a Saturday morning in my senior year in high school.

“Here it is written,” she had replied, tapping the table hard with her middle finger. “Right here it is written. The girl goes to college.”

“Why?” he had pursued.

“Because I say so.”

“But why? What do you think will come of it?”

“I don’t know. I only know she’s clever, she deserves an education, and she’s going to get one. This is America. The girls are not cows in the field only waiting for a bull to mate with.”

I stared at her. Where had that come from?

~ Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments: A Memoir 

Notes:

Really Red

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Humanity’s love affair with red lipstick dates back to 3500 B.C. when Queen Shub-Ad of Ur, one of the Sumerian city-states of ancient Mesopotamia, first wore a red lip made with a base of white lead and crushed red rocks…

For years I wore Really Red to make me look like I felt OK. Six years later my collection of lipsticks has expanded, but every shade is red. It’s the color I wear because when I wear it now I actually believe I’m OK, because it’s still the color that gets me, and because on any given day when I catch myself in the mirror with it on, I see the person I want to be. And therein lies the power of red lipstick: its innate ability to be anything at any time for its wearer…

~ Alison Fishburn, from “When Lips Speak for Themselves”

 

Photo: julia leonidovna with self-portrait