Other thoughts for the week

Books which changed my life -- following a programme on Radio 4 last week.

1. The Women's Room, by Marilyn French.
"I'm bright, you're bright. Maybe we're even brilliant. Our aspirations are equal to our intelligence and our backgrounds. We want to make it in their fucking world."

That's a direct quote from, as I recall, page 521. Or maybe 518. I used to know the whole paragraph by heart but I don't anymore.

I was *exactly* the right age to read that book. By literary standards, it is pants. As a feminist classic, it has its place, but it's deeply naff. But I read it (and -- even cooler -- I stole it in order to read it) as a 17 year old, and I was a 17 year old whose mother wouldn't have read it because she was the wrong generation in the wrong country.

The people who wrote in to Radio 4 about this book changing their lives were women who had read it while unhappily married, and it was one of the things which gave them the strength to leave those unhappy marriages.

That is great. But I was 17, and I read it before I had a chance to become unhappily married. And it is one (of many, I hasten to add) reasons I have never married at all.

It was a book -- one of the first books, one of the first anythings -- which made me see there was another way to live your life, along with Spare Rib (dying at the time), and The Female Eunuch (dated at the time), and The Beauty Myth (brand new at the time), all of which I discovered around 17, 18, and none of which I coped with terribly well, given that I was a slightly slutty Blackpool teenager.

But you don't find these things if you're not looking for them, and I maintain to this day they it was a lot easier to be a teenage feminist then than it is now. And I feel these days that I have built up a world view that is consistent with my attitudes and behaviour (and vice versa) in a way that I could only have dreamed of then, but kind of wanted to.

I don't think my 17 year old self would dislike my 34 year old self. In fact, I think she'd be pretty proud of her. And the same goes the other way round.

Not all marriages are unhappy, of course. It's my parents' 38th wedding anniversary today. I will never have a 38th wedding anniversary and my hat is off to them both. Happy anniversary, parentals.

joella