This is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.—Doris Lessing

A GOOD NEIGHBOR by Therese Anne Fowler

A modern-day Romeo and Juliet? Maybe not quite. But it checks all the boxes for dueling families, forbidden young love, and stubborn pride, all leading to a tragic end. A beloved old tree is dying because of the neighbor’s new construction home. A lawsuit is filed while a secret romance between the two teenagers from both families proceeds. A Lolita-like subplot weaves through the novel’s exploration of class, race, and hypocritical religious dogma. Ultimately, it is a story of what it means to be a good neighbor. Can a good neighbor disrupt the paradigm? Sometimes the answer isn’t so easy. 

Favorite line(s): Electrochemical change is a reaction that involves electrons moving between electrodes and an electrolyte. This, in essence, is physics, and without former Oak Knoll resident Jack Martindale, who took a job with NASA, none of us knows very much about physics. What we do know is this: Some force that for all practical purposes is as real as those that can be observed and measured by science draws people together even when they rationally understand that this kind of together is not in their apparent best interests. They are helpless before it. Oh, sure, they can resist acting on it, but they can’t prevent themselves from feeling what’s true. 

INCIDENTAL INVENTIONS by Elena Ferrante 

Tasked by the Guardian newspaper to write 500-800 word missives once a week on questions the editors sent to her, Ferrante’s thoughts on childhood to climate change read like interior monologues. Ferrante, best known for her work as a novelist—My Brilliant Friend, Troubling Love, The Days of Abandonment, The Lost Daughter, to name a few—and her anonymity (Elena Ferrante isn’t her real name)—never does press or gives interviews so her opinions are that much more intriguing. The fifty-two entries are like reading pages from her diary as it provides the reader with a glimpse of how her mind works from the journal page to the fictional page. Delicious and thought-provoking because she’s fierce as hell in what she calls, “brief trickles of ink.” 

Favorite line(s): From the column, “Women Who Write”. Recently, things have been changing, but not very much. For example, when some renowned male writer says in private, or in public, that we women writers are good, I would like to ask: are we as good as you, better than you, or good only within the context of books written by women? That is, have we broken out of the literary women’s space we are confined to (and not only by the market)? Or have we overturned literature in general and its values? In other words, if you are a male writer who reads me and finds me good, are you paying me a generous complement of the sort paid to a female student who has learned her lesson well? Or are you willing to admit that, today, you can learn from writing by women as much as we women have learned—and are learning, reading over the centuries—from writing by men?

OKAY FINE WHATEVER: The Year I Went From Being Afraid of Everything to Only Being Afraid of Most Things by Courtenay Hameister

If you’re prone to anxiety and need a fun, sexy romp while riding out the pandemic, Courtnay Hameister’s Okay Fine Whatever is a dessert to go along with whatever comfort food you’ve been craving. Hameister spent twelve years as host and head writer for Live Wire! a public radio show out of Portland, Oregon. After leaving the show, she decided to embark on what she called the Okay Fine Whatever Project for a year in the hopes of tackling her fears and becoming a “not-constantly scared person.” This included floating in a sensory-deprivation tank, going to a professional cuddler, visiting a sex club with a polyamorous guy she was dating. Along the way, she dated weirdos and nice guys and gave them names like Text Guy, Ethical Slut, and Wait-List Guy. Her writing is dark comedy filled with quotable snarks. Does Hameister succeed in beating her fears? You’ll have to read it to find out. 

Favorite line(s): Here’s a thing about me: I don’t talk to strangers. I have such a strong fear of rejection and such an aversion to bothering people that aside from waiters, bartenders, and checkout people, I never approach anyone I don’t know. But the magical thing about the OFW Project was that having to write a column about these experiences somehow emboldened me and distanced me from my anxiety. Even though my column was just about my own experience, I somehow felt like a journalist studying my own life, and that fact gave me permission to talk to this stranger, even though he had no idea why I was doing it. I also thought that talking to him might distract me from the surfeit of sex acts going on around me so I could have a little time to fucking acclimate myself. 

I walked over to the DM.

“What does DM stand for?” I yelled over the music.

“Dungeon monitor,” he answered.

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN by Virginia Woolf

You know how books inch their way toward you from the shelves, knowing you need to read them right this minute for the beauty and insight they offer—well, that happened when an old copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own wiggled its way toward me. I first read it in an English class in college when I hadn’t given much thought to the plight of woman writers. But rereading it, decades later, as a woman writer, I realize how Woolf’s sentiment “a woman must have money and a room of her own (preferably with a lock) if she is to write fiction” is the song on the lips of every woman creative since the dawn of time. (Think cave drawings and the bartering of foraged food for a sharp rock to tell their stories with.)

A Room of One’s Own was originally two papers Woolf wrote in 1928 when she was asked to speak on the subject of Women and Fiction. At a loss for where to begin, let alone what to write, she started by asking, “Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?” 

Woolf parked herself inside a library and pulled book after book from the ancient sections of fiction and nonfiction shelves and realized they were all written by men. She concluded that women didn’t have time to wax philosophic about love and betrayal, revenge and murder, or the nature of the human heart, as Shakespeare and other artistic men did through the ages when feeding, clothing, washing, and caring for children and a husband had been their principal purpose in life. 

Then, low and behold, middle-class women began to write. Jane Austen, the Brontes, and George Eliot. And what did they have in common? They were childless, and so a room of one’s own was probably easier to come by.

By the early 1900s, there were more works by women on library shelves. The right to vote passed and women had more options, more freedom. But it would take several years before female authors were recognized for their poetry and prose. And several more before they produced as much as if not more important work than their male counterparts. 

We have rooms of our own now and the ability to make our own money to travel and create. 

There is something to be said for nostalgia, the good ole’ days. But I, for one, am happy to be a female writer at home in the world we live in now, pandemic and all.

Favorite line(s): Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.