Of all the reading challenges, I have the most fun with What’s in a Name, hosted by The Worm Hole. I like browsing through my TBR stack to find titles that fit the challenge categories.
The challenge is simple – read one book that fits each of the five ‘categories’ – Continue reading
Seems that every second person in my Twitter feed is reading (or talking about) Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl. While everyone else has been busy getting stuck into Dunham, I wound the memoir-clock back to what is considered one of the first novels to emerge from the Women’s Liberation Movement (according to the Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing) – Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen.
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, Shulman’s debut, was published in 1972 and tells the story of Sasha Davis, following her ordinary, middle class life from childhood through to marriage and motherhood. The book is set in America during the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, and although it is fiction, there are notable parallels between Sasha’s life and that of the author. Continue reading
Ménage by Alix Kates Shulman is the story of a love triangle – with four participants.
Heather is married to Mack.
“After their big Kansas wedding, the McKays had returned to Manhattan… Full of plans, they had set out to create for themselves a certain kind of ideal urban marriage modeled on images of New York life they’d read about or viewed, they couldn’t have said exactly where. Each week they scanned the reviews in the Times and the cultural listings in the New Yorker and New York Magazine before buying tickets to enticing events…They had taken busses and taxis, learning the differences between Szechuan, Shanghai, and Hong Kong cuisine…. until Mack began his rise and Heather became pregnant with Chloe. Then they had moved.” Continue reading