Category: Book Review

Sarita Sidhu

Golem Girl is a sweeping, stunning work of visual and literary art. It is the groundbreaking memoir of an artist who has refused to be erased by a society with a rigid, very short set of rules on who deserves to live and who can and cannot be human. 

Riva’s birth was a miracle, after her mother, Carole, had experienced the trauma of three miscarriages. But her life hung on a thread, a cord; her spinal cord to be specific. Riva was born with the worst type of spina bifida in which a section of her spinal cord billowed from her back “like a gruesome [red] birthday balloon.” This was 1958, when surgical interventions were reserved for only the ‘strongest’ 10% who made it to the age of two; to operate sooner would be ‘wasting’ medical resources.  Ironically, and very fortunately, Carole had worked as a medical researcher for a birth defect specialist who did not subscribe to this conventional wisdom. Riva was operated on by a surgeon trained in cutting-edge techniques to close the lesion in her spine. She says “Spina bifida babies are born open to the world.”.

She has undergone more than forty surgeries during her life, and each one delivered the message that she needed to be fixed. She was also given this message in other ways: “People kept giving me books about little crippled girls…All the books agreed on one point: all you really needed to get better was willpower.” The world also spoke to her directly:

Our bus was painted with CONDON SCHOOL in big block letters, so we were always 100 percent visible … Sometimes six or seven kids stood at the corner where we’d stop at the red light; other days, there would be teenagers or even a single vicious adult. There was no lack of people eager to scream ‘Retard!’ at the top of their lungs.

***

I was browsing the racks [of an upscale boutique] when a woman planted herself at my elbow, checked me up and down, and announced, ‘If I looked like you, I’d kill myself!

The source of Riva’s self-loathing―going so far as to call herself a monster― is no great mystery. She writes: “I began each day with an illusion. My last act before leaving the house was to take off my glasses … and let Chicago disappear in a smear and a blur. I dodged traffic and baby strollers, dogs and delivery men, all to ensure I wouldn’t see myself reflected in the city’s shop windows and plate-glass mirrors. The sight of me literally made me sick.” 

Riva’s avoidance of other disabled people enabled her denial of her own disability. But she admits that she selfishly joined the Illinois Spina Bifida Association when she developed novel frightening health issues, and she needed guidance. She realized that pretending she was ‘normal’ might lead to her death. At the organization’s picnic she tells us she “walked into a field populated by my own body. All of us short and barrel-chested, all of us limping, leaning on our braces, crutches, and canes, or wheeling our chairs over the grass.” She continues “A few brief conversations confirmed my worst suspicions. No one had a job, no one was married or even had a sweetheart, and everyone lived at home.” Propelled by her artistic creativity, this was the fate she had fought so resolutely to avoid.  

She writes of her time at Condon “I had memorized the times of the day when the art room was empty and I could work in peace. The art room had always been my room…Art was magical, and not just in the making: people would look at my work, then look at me with a changed expression. One far from the usual oh poor you.”

The author alternates with ease between the universal and the deeply personal throughout the book. She “discovered that there were satisfyingly weird people at DAA [the Department of Design, Art, and Architecture at the University of Cincinnati],” but it was in the Chicago Disabled Artists Collective that she found “[her] people.” As Riva takes us through her political awakening within this group, we are simultaneously educated: 

Our true obstacle was not how our bodies or minds functioned; it was having to wrangle with physical and social environments that ignored our existence. I’d always accepted that I wasn’t strong enough, tall enough, fast enough … I’d never considered that society derived benefits from ignoring the needs of the Disabled. Self-blame absolved the normate world for its failures of justice.

I had spent years fighting against misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Semitism, yet I’d so easily believed that I should be ashamed of my body that I’d never understood that shame was both the product of and tool of injustice. I hadn’t just needed Disabled friends. I’d needed friends who could give my experiences context and analysis.

Many years prior, as a young art student, Riva’s overwhelmingly old white male professors had only valued conformist art which perpetuated their own subjective but long-   standing aesthetics; there was zero interest in feminist art, and the same total disregard for Riva’s subject matter. Her TA, Bryan, had explained that her task was to find universal subject matter: ‘“A viewer is never going to recognize himself in these pieces of self-indulgence. Yet it’s hardly feminine work, is it?”’ In typical form, Riva wonders “What (in Holy Penis Hell) is Universal Subject Matter?”  Bryan graces her with an expansion of his wisdom:

‘The themes that civilization has always chosen as basis for great art! Conflict! Think of Ruben’s Consequences of War…And beauty! Ingress’s Grande Odalisque.‘ 

Riva understood that the Universal was only “men at war and women in bed” and that “The fragile human body pertained only to [her].” She describes her surprise though with her own response to this realization: “Instead of sobbing, or quitting, I felt the beginnings of fuck you stirring in my soul.”

Through her immersion in disability portraiture, Riva’s indoctrination with conventional beauty standards is shattered:

For most of my life, I had glanced at impairment and looked away, afraid to see myself. Now I looked slowly and deliberately. I let the sight come to me. And beauty arrived … This was a beauty I couldn’t name. It startled me and didn’t, was familiar and unexpected. I remembered how it felt to love disability back at Condon School. I’d rejected that love ever since. “Normal” beauty is unmarked, smooth, shiny, upright; but my gaze began to slip past normal beauty as if it was coated in baby oil. I wanted crip beauty―variant, iconoclastic, unpredictable. Bodies that were lived in with intentionality and self-knowledge. Crip bodies were fresh. 

***

The division of the memoir into its two sections pivots on Carole’s tragic, untimely, and avoidable death, while Riva was still a high school student. Carole suffered with nerve pain that “[made] it hard to exist” following back surgery performed by a negligent doctor. This led to her addiction to painkillers. The family had become burdened with financial debt due to medical bills and also attorney fees, but justice never materialized. Carole died at the moment her dream career was beginning to blossom:

Twenty-two years after she’d been forced to relinquish fashion design, Carole Horwitz Lehrer would work to change how big women dressed. She left a trail of notepads all over the house, full of gowns that swirled with joy and dignity (and, of course, rhinestones). 

Along with the seismic loss, Riva had to contend with the guilt and regret she carried from their final heated conversations around her increasing desire for autonomy. She explains “Mom had been my librarian, my architect, my surgeon general, my curator. She had left me half-formed; for all my teenage rebellion, I was unprepared to take over the task of inventing myself.”

Having spent an unimaginable amount of time in hospital, (the first two years of her life, just for starters) it’s unsurprising―yet simultaneously surprising―that Riva’s first sexual encounter was in the courtyard garden at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, with a hospital employee. It occurred while she was battling with her mother over her need for greater independence. She writes about this awakening with the complexity that emerges over time. Riva also addresses the prevalence of sexual assault and abuse of disabled individuals, both at home and elsewhere.

Riva weighs in on the topic of forced sterilization of the vulnerable, in the context of her own sterilization, without her consent. In tandem with this question of who is allowed to reproduce, she questions, with obvious authority, the abortion of disabled fetuses. 

The life of any artist is often synonymous with struggle, and the challenges are multiplied by several orders of magnitude for disabled artists. Riva acknowledges the additional, significant obstacles, while also recognizing her own relative privileges as a white woman with a middle-class upbringing. 

I was drawn to this memoir because of my long-standing affinity with the underdog, whose life is rarely, if ever, portrayed with the complexity that is warranted. This is precisely why we must write our own stories. As someone who was born in India and raised in working-class England, the oppressive layers of the misogyny rooted in my own culture, the patriarchal constructs in wider society, racism, and classism, felt like a fire blanket on a life that was predetermined to be compacted and subjugated. As a radical feminist, I understand that there is still a long way to go in the creation of an egalitarian world, because change takes time. A really long time. But it starts with a repudiation of the lies we are told about who we are and all we can ever be.

This memoir is full of joy and humor. Each chapter is short and accessible. Each page is set as though it is itself a work of visual art. The reader is forced to consider their own complicity in the perpetuation of an ableist society through our own blind spots. And so this expansive, insightful book is also a call to much-needed action for the inclusion of the disabled community in all considerations of the greater good. 

Drama Script Review

By Aronne Guy

The name Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but should be familiar to women artists. An abbess who lived in the 12^th century, she was a prolific writer who courageously reworked the plays of Terence to bring them into line with Christian values. She defended the peculiarity of her profession—a woman writer—by reframing her ambition as a service to God. The Almighty wanted her to be a writer, and thus was willing to work with the humble clay of womanhood. Raised in the Pentecostal church, I am only too familiar with this argument, since I often heard it used by women preachers and church leaders in the 1980s. The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

The never-ending struggle to transcend ancient patriarchal values is a key theme of the play No Place Like Gandersheim by Elizabeth Dement, which had its world premiere at the Skylight Theater in Los Feliz in June 2023. Dement tells a fanciful story which takes as its launching point the life of Hrotsvitha, known here by the snappy nickname Roz. (This is a review of the play as a written work, not as a performance.) After her play is rejected by the Emperor Otto, Roz drifts through the ages—still writing, still waiting for a moment when women will be able to express themselves artistically without all the bullshit. In early 21^st century Los Angeles, perhaps she will finally have her opportunity.

It is hard not to think of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as it becomes clear in the second act that Roz is about a thousand years old. Roz does not switch genders, but she does make a transition that Orlando never attempts. While Virginia Woolf’s character is defined by a certain intractable Englishness, Roz throws off her German identity and becomes fully American—a divorced lesbian writer/producer with an emotionally neglected 15-year-old daughter and a hit show about nuns.

Bringing a character like Hrotsvitha to life—eternal life, even—is a fine enterprise that I can get behind. In spite of her well-deserved place setting in Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, she still needs all the press she can get. We stand on the shoulders of giants—or perhaps, as suggested by Chicago’s work, we eat off their shapely plates. She didn’t make the cut for Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, but No Place Like Gandersheim gives Hrotsvitha another chance to shine.

The first act is the closest to telling her actual story, as it takes place in a German abbey in the 12^th century. While providing a useful quasi-historical framework for Dement’s fictional take, the dialogue in this section is hard to accept—there’s a flippancy that creates an uncomfortable feeling of tacked-on hipness. It’s jarring to read. As spoken on a stage, though, the contemporary-sounding dialogue is probably really funny, cool, and relatable to an audience. It’s not really history. I get it.

The second act, taking place in the present day, leaves the historical issues behind and suddenly the dialogue works on the page. Otto still exists, but instead of the emperor he is the head executive at an unnamed network. Throughout the play, men are an invisible force, always offstage, yet always in control. Like offstage violence in a Shakespeare play, the men’s invisibility enhances the perception of their power. The author is clearly at ease in the second act. The machinations of the network executives provide high intrigue and support the theme.  

The third act is also quite clever and has a twist that works seamlessly within the plot. The bittersweet ending is perhaps the most accurate way to sum up the life of Roz, as reimagined in a current faux-liberated milieu and a future techno-dystopia. A message comes through that without human liberation, there is no female liberation; furthermore, writing is an inherently selfish act that does not have much impact on the struggle for either. It’s a bit hopeless after all, but not inaccurate. 

No Place Like Gandersheim makes a valuable contribution to theater in its clear-eyed vision of the sacrifices necessary to live as a creative woman, regardless of era, while bringing attention to an under-recognized early female playwright. Here’s hoping we see another production soon.

A Book Review of Rachel Lousie Snyder‘s Women We Buried, Women We Burned

by Camilia Cenek

Women–especially mothers–are at the root. Even–and especially–when they are dead, absent, or abused. Rachel Louise Snyder’s Women We Buried, Women We Burned beautifully evokes both the particular and the universal struggles of women who become, or desperately need, mothers. The memoir’s cascading disasters are first set off by the early loss of the author’s mother, an event which of itself is catastrophic but which triggers further collapses that could hardly have been imagined by then eight-year-old Snyder or her remaining family.

Snyder burns through her tormented teen years, rages down a treacherous path through violence, drugs, and trouble. Though her travails are extreme, in some ways they ring familiar to the reader who once also torched rules and reason as a teen. Through the crucible of suffering and abandonment, Snyder tests her mettle, walks through flames, and emerges smoldering but cleansed on the other side. Improbably, she discovers the transformative opportunities of education. Of discovery. Of spirituality. Later, midway through a sea voyage around the globe, where she finds herself straddling the two halves of the earth, Snyder reaches her inflection point:

“Be open. Be flexible. Move like the sea grass. There are no plans, only ideas.”

Snyder’s friends and classmates model these values which she sorely needs. For the first time, Snyder is introduced to the idea that the death of her mother, while undeserved, also offered a lesson in how to live. Curiosity, tenacity, and generosity of spirit, Snyder discovers, can be and often are the byproducts born from loss. In this moment, she opens a great gift bestowed by her mother, unknowingly stewarded by her friends. From here Snyder passes from one hemisphere to another, entering a second segment of her life. There she finds the power to author a new script for her developing story.

She travels. She enters deeply into the stories of mothers and cultures around the world, where she finds pain, cruelty, unimaginable hardship–and resilience. The stories of women the world over are unique. The stories of women the world over are the same.

Later in the middle zone of Snyder’s life and book, she herself becomes a mother. Readers (including myself) who have become mothers after losing mothers will know well the profound mystery of re-entering the mother-child relationship, this time from the other side. In that space there is joy, there is terror. There is the burden of avoiding one’s own death in order to prevent the repetition of the mother-loss cycle–and the knowledge that no matter what one does, such a risk can never be contained.

Snyder traces the cycle of her growth, the circle of her life, and gently, brilliantly, deposits the reader back where we started. The memoir culminates with the author’s ultimate wisdom: mourn the mothers that you lose; keep the mothers that you have. The substitutes, the surrogates. The unexpected stand-ins. Specifically, the stepmother that Snyder long rejected. As her stepmother approaches the end of her own life, Snyder once again faces undeserved pain and loss, both parallel and perpendicular to the mother-death story that she survived before. Parallel in its eerie similarities. Perpendicular in the profound shift of perspective, power, and personhood. This time, Snyder is ready. This time, Snyder can speak. In perhaps the most pivotal moment of the book, she calls her stepmother “Mom” for the first time. She asks her stepmother questions, tells her stories, discovers truths that had long been buried. Unearthing the pain stings–and heals.

Together they participate in the essential, crucial maternal exchange: the real economy of humanity. The foundation. Women, their daughters, and their stories.