I read this book when I must have been around 13 or so, another paperback lying around my parents' place. I also read The Golden Notebook, in the same timeframe- I think my mom must have bought them as she was dabbling in her (short-lived) feminist phase. She was one of those successful women who had it all -great career, great marriage, great children- and who typically put down other women.
I didn't like The Golden Notebook much and can't remember much about it, except the description at the start – the young man Tommy trying to kill himself by shooting himself in the head. He survives but is blinded by the attempt. I think it was implied he shot himself to escape his domineering mother. obviously, and after he became blind, he has to move in with her so she can care for him.
Then the story begins, and my memory fades.
But The Women's Room seized me. I read and reread it a gazillion times. The story of Mira and her friends, her marriage, her education, intertwined with the Great American Story absolutely entranced me, a small brown person living on the other side of the world. The neighbour man who wrote horrific torture porn featuring the neighbourhood women and his mom and sister. Bliss and Paul's adultery. The suburban parties. Lilian's attempt to open a dress shop and then she goes mad. That day they all went bowling together. The woman whose husband decided to stop providing for them and move back in with his mom, so she had to step up, and all the other neighbourhood women helped. Mira's relationship with Ben, the role-playing and oral sex. I think those were the first explicit sex scenes I read in fiction. Mira's life at Harvard, the student parties. Val. Oh my god, Val, and her poor daughter. The feminist terrorists.
Mira walking on the beach by the ocean, thinking back on her life, and the lives of the women she knew and she didn't know.
Those women!
My mom's only comment about the book was "so it's fine when women sleep around, but not fine when men do it?" I was flabbergasted that someone so smart and well-educated as my mom should not understand that book the way I did. I still remember her voice saying it. Argh I miss her so much, and reading books with her and being annoyed by her dumb takes.
The Women's Room definitely shaped the way I see men and women- sensitized me to the sheer extent to which women have been brutalized and violated throughout history, and to be angry about it. My daughter read it couple of years ago, and sniffed at the "lack of people of colour" and "it's really weak on race, isn't it". Fascinating how my mom and daughter reacted to this book. It's still lying around in our place, waiting for the next generation I suppose.
by 1000andonenites