TBR: The Woman at the Washington Zoo

Today's book is a collection of essays by Marjorie Williams, called The Woman at the Washington Zoo (after a poem by Randall Jarrell).  The subtitle is "Writings on politics, family, and fate" and the book is divided into three parts that roughly correspond to the three topics -- political profiles, columns that appeared in the Washington Post and in Slate, and a set of essays about her diagnosis (in her mid 40s) with terminal liver cancer and how she lived with the disease and the knowledge of her impending death.

The political profiles are elegantly written, but seem like period pieces at this point, full of references that need to be footnoted to explain them to contemporary readers.  Even the joint profile of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, written just after the 2000 election, seems like a postcard from long ago. 

In her essays and columns, Williams writes about many of the issues that I cover in this blog.  She calls feminists to task for letting Bill Clinton off the hook for his pattern of sexual harassment, writes about the decline of the "political wife," and is dismayed by the inclusion of a makeup "advertorial" in Ms Magazine.  She reviews books likeThe Nuture Assumption, The Baby Boon, and The Marriage Sabbatical.  She is equally scornful of Real Simple and politicians' false apologies.

Williams is not a soothing writer. In a review of I Don't Know How She Does It (which she liked a lot more than I did), she writes:

"American women -- can-do daughters of their country's optimism -- still secretly nourish a poignant hope that there is An Answer to the dilemna of work and family.  On a personal level, and as a matter of social policy, we often seem to be waiting for the No-Fault Fairy to come and explain at last how our deepest conflict can be managed away."

But unlike Caitlin Flanagan, Williams is never smug.  She never conveys any sense that she thinks she's got things any more figured out than anyone else, or that her choices are superior to yours.  She admits that as the mother of young children, she enjoyed the time to herself that she got when she was commuting back and forth from Washington to New Jersey to visit her dying mother.

I think my favorite essay from the book is her previously unpublished memoir of her mother.  She unblinkingly writes about the joys and costs of her mother's traditionally female path of service and reflected glory, and of her own ambivalence toward it:

"I never knew which would be worse: to be right or wrong in my hunch that her life was an unhappy one.  I suppose I will always wonder if it is self-justification that makes me see tragedy in the perfection of her kitchen.  I only know that, frozen in the passage between my mother's mooon and my father's sun, I made my choice many years ago.  but, although I always craved the gaudy satisfaction of my father's sun, it is my mother's life that fascinates me now.  And it is my love for her that both comforts and pains me more.  In life, I shrank from what I took (rightly, I still think) to be her judgments of me, her anger at my repudiation of the bargains she made.  Now, I dream about her often, and usually I wake from them with delight....

"Yet still there are moments when it stops me in my tracks to realize that I will never peel an orange the way my mother once did for me.  And sometimes those moments are too much to bear."

Comments

[Kate]

I was all choked up reading her essay, "Struck By Lightning" about her cancer and knowing she would leave her children motherless. I was on the train coming back from a long anticipated weekend away, and as I read, I thought about all I had to be thankful for - chiefly that I don't have terminal cancer - and I vowed to be a more loving, patient, understanding mother from this day on. Not 3 hours after my return, my husband was grousing, "Geez, I though you'd be more relaxed after your vacation!" (Ah, well...) I really enjoyed this book a lot.

[Laurie]

We are reading all the same books! I just finished "Love My Rifle More than You" which I will hopefully blog about soon, and I just got this one from the library. I am looking forward to it.

[Genevieve]

I love this book too - been going through it slowly. She's such an amazing writer - so incisive, notices everything, doesn't waste words.