The Curator: the summer of female rage
and why we should join in on the fun. Books from Lauren Groff and Eve Babitz.
What better way to celebrate the summer than with some Female Rage. Besides being a kickass band name, it’s also politically and culturally relevant. Women are f*cking politeness and speaking their truth - from locking up big-time abusers to voting out sociopaths involving themselves in our uteruses, the rage is making MOVES. More women are in charge of art - directing movies & TV, writing and producing - and challenging the notion of femininity head-on in that art. But no matter how many steps forward we take, there is always someone trying to keep us down. Hence, the rage.
As the great Leslie Knope once said, “I guess some people object to powerful depictions of awesome ladies.” And also, “ovaries before brovaries.”
Which is all great but like why should we read or watch about it? What do we care about angry ladies? Also, we just celebrated the birth of our nation, do we really need rage right now??
Yes, yes we do. Because. Feminine rage is action. It’s power, it’s change. In a world that threatens our right to exist, rage is the answer to indifference, to quiet submission, to complicity. In art, it becomes a way to expose the systems of power through narrative and character, which can be so much more humanizing than the news. Especially when we start to recognize ourselves in the struggle.
Obviously, rage doesn't solve everything, or women would have had the right to credit cards way before 1974. Generalized unexamined rage stemming from our capitalist systems can be devastating - just look at all the “Karens” being called out for misplaced rage generally towards service workers and POC. It can also backfire - as I was writing this, I noticed how heavily my rec list is white. Black female rage has been historically oppressed and policed (“the angry black woman”) to make everyone else around them comfortable. Well fuck yeah they’re angry, wouldn’t you be? And I’d like to see more of it - if anyone has good recommendations let me know and I’ll buy it stat (also for non-black friends go follow @MoeMotivate on Instagram and get really good at being uncomfortable).
A few very good stories about female rage that I do know about…
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale, the book but mostly the TV show, because watching Elizabeth Moss’ face is like staring straight into the sun. Bunny by Mona Awad is a book about rage and rejection disguised as saccharine female friendship. Not to be missed.
Or how about the cool girl speech in Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (both the book and the movie) that will live on in history until the end of time (or the end of gender). A Promising Young Woman goes on an absolute RAMPAGE of revenge. It’s a shocking and moving and terribly unhinged movie - and I loved it.
Music has rage in it’s DNA. Consider No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom, “Just a Girl” is the ultimate female rager. Or how Alanis Morisette made us all feel the rage of a scorned woman with her album Jagged Litle Pill.
TV wants to play too. Yellowjackets is called the female version of Lord of the Flies as these ladies get FIERCE and unapologetic for their decision to survive. Euphoria, the wildest teen show ever made, at its core is really about a bunch of angry girls trying to gain control & power over their own lives.
Sylvia Plath’s fictional descent into madness in The Bell Jar shows how rage can be both passive and self-destructive. And Toni Morrison’s exquisite Beloved, a book about what happens when you can’t express your rage, how the rage grows inward into pain and violence and desperation.
I get quite intense about the book reviews this week, so I leave you with this.
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FURTHER READING 💻→
The NYT investigates female rage in television, and how it can be comical, heroic, reductive.
A Post-Magazine article on why we love to see women angry.
This excellent HuffPost article on how “Black Women Have Never Had The Privilege Of Rage.”
BOOK REVIEWS📚→
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
“Fates and Furies becomes a book to submit to, and be knocked out by” - Meg Wolitzer.
You submit to this book and then right when you think you have it, carried along a lazy river of narrative streams, FURIES crashes over you. If I had been asked to write on just FATES this would be a different review.
Fates, the first half, is narrated by our husband Lotto. He is sincere and sincerely oblivious. You feel his missteps, and laugh at his simplistic interpretations of his wife’s rages and joys - is she thinking of leaving me, does she hate her job, am I a terrible husband? Along with Lotto we wonder, but as a woman, I wondered at the complications under the surface, gone unnoticed by his male oblivion. We also, as the reader, recognize the obvious - YOU MAKE $7 A YEAR and wonder why your wife is STRESSED? Weird.
And then we get Furies. Furies is the truth told by Mathilde, wife. Furies is why you read this book. Furies is all the rage and truth that women carry since they were a seed inside their mother inside their grandmother’s womb. This section hurricaned all my assumptions about Mathilde’s motivations into a jumble, dumped them out for examination, and then reassembled it all into a clear shape of her being. Mathilde is complex, layered, secretive, and rageful, but she is not without reason.
Mathilde’s body is used as a weapon and a means of survival until sweet Lotto comes along to rescue her. But the rescue is botched, unsustainable, as Mathilde must eventually deal with the “small, dark girl she’d summoned”. The unspoken terror writhes inside until she can no longer arrange her face in anything but a scowl. And unlike Lotto, we know why.
“Make me happy, Frankenstein’s monster pleaded with its maker, and I shall again be virtuous.”
Groff’s writing is Kmart Shakespeare - and this is not meant as a dig! It’s purposefully circular, grand, and verbose as a Greek tragedy and matches Lotto’s sometimes outsized ego. At points in Lotto’s section, I had to dig into the language, rereading phrases that needed to be stretched apart and examined to really be understood. Mathilde’s sections are more corporeal, base, and grounded in reality. The more I consider it, the more impressed I become.
I deeply appreciated this book. It may not have been the easiest read at times, but it was well worth the effort.
I give this an Ignorance is Bliss 4 Stars.
Sex and Rage by Eve Babtiz
I think I read a different book than the blurbists on the back of my Counterpoint edition of Sex and Rage. Or perhaps I am just reading In Another Timezone of context. But I see this book so differently than “a perpetual-motion machine of no-stakes elation and champagne fizz” (The New Yorker). Sir. SIR!
EVERYTHING [everything] IS AT STAKE, SIR.
This is everything the liest beneathest the surface (or under the waves if you will). Under the pretense of indifference is the rage. It simmers. It boils. It’s covered in alcohol and sex. But the rage is there between the sheets.
Jacaranda is an adult now. She lives in LA. She makes her barefoot way from Malibu to Hollywood writing stories and hanging with the wrong crowd, charming the uncharmable in bars and hotels across the city. What she doesn't say isn’t said - it’s written to exist into infinity.
Sex and Rage is the 1970s version of the cool girl speech written in an undercurrent of seemingly throwaway comments. I love a good subtext - clearly by the name of this publication - and this book delivers. What you see is not what you get. Every sentence is straightforward, often hilarious, but also dark and sinister if brought to light.
In Jacaranda’s mind, when she telephoned, people who got in her way ought to watch out, and it was their own fault if they didn’t notice that her voice timbre was that of a dangerous lunatic.
Perhaps my affinity for this strange little story is I see myself reflected in the pool of vodka and recreational drugs, the sunshine and dark dive bars nonchalantly hiding depression. Or maybe it’s the people you hope to impress with your coolness, the people who use and discard comrades the same as burnt ciggies. Or most likely all of the above + the manic mental gymnastics it takes to function under the stress of an inauthentic life. Eventually, it will all catch up to you.
I give this a Safe & Warm in LA 5 Stars
READING 📖→
Back to reading Trust by Hernan Diaz - I had to take a programming break and also it’s too wieldy and wordy to take to the beach. 25% of the way done and I see why this won a Pulitzer [frantically checks Google dictionary every other page].
WATCHING 📽️→
Fully in support but also hating its necessity re: the Hollywood writer’s strike because we were supposed to get a new season of Evil and have not. To substitute, we’ve been watching old thrillers like David Fincher’s Panic Room. Baby Kristen Stewart is a delight but anything is going to be a shoddy second-best to my fourth favorite TV show of all time.
LISTENING🎧→
Struggling with audiobooks rn, so The Rewatchables podcast has been a fabulous, entertaining, lighthearted but smart stand-in. If you like movies and haven’t listened, you are in for a TREAT. Start with any episode that features the Bill-Sean-Chris combo.
BOOK NEWS 📰→
Because the sun is finally out, I am still obsessing over the perfect summer novel. Lit Hub released a list of the 50 greatest summery novels of all time. I was ecstatic to see my obsession with Valley of the Dolls vindicated and to see 11 other books I love mixed with some new titles to investigate. My favorite summer list so far!
In keeping with our theme, this NYT interview with The Rabbit Hutch author Tess Gunty is about the books that make her angry, including Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond, Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, and The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian. A great example of how female rage can be used to fight for any marginalized/exploited community.
Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina “presents a surprisingly complex vision of women… with supernatural abilities” - and what woman HASN’T fantasized about having power…
LET’S CHAT☺→
This week: leave a comment with your favorite song or movie or show or book featuring a badass female MC/lead.
Or per ush, let me know what you’ve been reading in the comments. I’m always game for a good rec (or warning, grievances, etc. ). If you tell me your favorite TV show or movie lately, I’ll give you a book recommendation.
In Case You Missed It 🖤
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See you around the bookshelf!
Natalie
Been looking for reading suggestions on this topic - thank you for this post!! ♡