nonfiction

Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen

alicia — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Pay cable offers us a whole new realm of addictions and one of the most recent was Showtime's production of The Tudors. The program, now ended with the inevitable death of King Henry (no spoilers in history), portrayed the complicated realm of the Tudor Dynasty, which included two notable queens—sisters Mary and Elizabeth. This historic era, because of Queen Elizabeth, offers us a space to enter and critique how women were used for political gain, often not their own.

Anna Whitelock offers a similar proposition when she explores the life of Mary Tudor—a life often derided in British history. Daughter of Katherine of Aragon and King Henry, Mary later becomes known as Bloody Mary and as an overzealous threat to her own country.

Though historians have depicted the facts of the dynasty and the royal successions, Whitelock's argument is that historical texts have typically overlooked the fact that the value and vision of Mary and her contributions to history are greater than simply a slaughter of the non-Catholic community.

What makes Whitelock's book powerful is both its impeccable timing (the Tudors are the new pink) and its nuanced look at how women were political tools and machines simultaneously. The complicated graces involved in diplomacy, governed by the social mores of the time, lent to women having more space to enact persuasive maneuvers and machinations. This look at power in an era where even royal women seemed quite powerless (and were publicly thought of as weaker and merely vessels) is refreshing.

The truth of the matter, is, however, that Mary's story is also a sad one. Tossed about from prince to prince even as young as two and a half as a political token, a seal of trust and betrothal between men's nations, Mary's life is much more than the violent persecution of non-Catholics under her reign.  Whitelock frames the well-known history with a lens that offers just what she promises—a new look at Mary with perhaps the sympathy or value she's often been denied. Further, the story becomes timeless as Whitelock profiles just how close Mary and her indomitable mother, Catherine of Aragon, were. The strength of relationships between women is perhaps even more valuable in an era where there was little power to be held elsewhere.

The book is a generous read, even for those not familiar with Tudor history. As you read, you will recognize the political trumps and trollops that are not unfamiliar to us today. Described with the flourish they deserve, yet written clearly and in such a manner that all characters and dates can be digested, Whitelock's biography is an excellent lesson in the lives of powerful women, fortune and politics.

Written by: Dr. Julie E. Ferris, December 9th 2010

Face It: What Women Really Feel as Their Looks Change

admin — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Vivian Diller, Jill Muir-Sukenick

Hay House

As the authors of Face It explain in the preface to their book, women who came of age during and after feminism's second wave were brought up to believe our looks don’t have to define who we are or determine our possibilities. What mattered more in this 'enlightened' new age were our brains, our talents, our degrees, our abilities, and our ambition. The paradox is that women continue to receive conflicting messages from the media and our culture about the role appearance plays in our lives. Because many of us have never attempted to unravel our ambivalent feelings about our appearance, the way it impacts our self-esteem, and how we relate to our family and friends, we deny these feelings when we see the first signs of aging—or react with a vengeance to try to arrest the aging process.

Face It is all about guiding women through this potentially treacherous time, during which many of us feel the very ground shifting beneath us. Like many adolescent girls, aging women cling to what the authors describe as “masks” that take the form of "workaholism," addiction to cosmetic surgery, excessive exercise, and dieting to protect ourselves from the sadness and loss we feel at the change in our appearance. In this thoughtful and engaging book, the authors, both psychotherapists and former models, present the stories of how different women approached the aging process. Runway models, nurses, homemakers, and businesswomen, who range in age from early thirties to mid-sixties, tell us their stories.

Some women never felt their appearance played much of a role in their lives, and were taken by surprise when they felt a sense of loss, or even panic, about their changing looks. In contrast, the models interviewed for the book were aware of aging, given that it pushes them out of their profession at the youthful age of twenty-five, and experienced a range of feelings and emotions similar to what many women face when they enter midlife. For women who believed that their intelligence and ambition were their ticket to success, it was often embarrassing to admit to friends and family how their changing looks were impacting them, because it seemed frivolous or superficial.

The authors use the experiences of these different women successfully navigating this challenging time with the use of an innovative six-step program that forms a pathway to a new acceptance and understanding of the aging process. This program involves taking an honest inventory of one's experiences with beauty and acknowledging how family and culture shapes one's identity as a woman. While the authors stress that they aren’t against using plastic surgery to enhance one's appearance, they want to give women the tools to make decisions about it from a place of strength and appreciation for their unique attributes, not out of a panic to "stay in the game."

As a forty-something woman, I found this book intriguing and was pleased to discover that it lived up to its billing of helping women navigate such a challenging time in our lives. Face It helps women of any age to gain an understanding of how to fully own the aging process and not react out of fear to our changing looks and bodies, but to, instead, appreciate and learn from the journey.

Written by: Gita Tewari, April 23rd 2010

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

admin — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Zadie Smith

Penguin Press

Many readers know literary wunderkind Zadie Smith for her raging success propelled by novels such as White Teeth and The Autograph Man. In Changing My Mind, her first collection of non-fiction, Smith alternates between roles as a cub reporter, movie reviewer, and homage-paying biographer to the stars of the silver screen.

The strength of Smith’s writing is perhaps best evidenced in the difficulty I have selecting only a few of the dazzling essays to highlight. Witty but also incredibly useful for writer types is Smith’s explanation of her own writing process in “That Crafty Feeling,” in which she differentiates between micro-manager and macro-planner novelists. “One Week in Liberia” is the kind of essay that stays stuck in your mind more than one week and forces you to consider how the global economic crisis—let alone everyday poverty—might be affecting people less fortunate than yourself.

Smith’s movie reviews are interesting even if you’ve never seen (or heard of) the films in question. Her ability to tease out the plot's nuances in geopolitical hypertext thrillers like Syriana speaks to her understanding of the world as well as her talent for relaying complex ideas into simple, readable prose. Less interesting—at least to me personally—were her long-winded accolades for film stars such as Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo and writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Franz Kafka.

Perhaps most relevant for a life like my own is “Speaking in Tongues,” a lecture-turned-essay about the necessity of shifting between dialects and class identity as you move between numerous worlds. In what Smith dubs “Dream World,” candidates like Barack Obama suddenly make sense to so many of us, those of us who also shape-shift and might be called inauthentic for our cultural or linguistic inconsistencies. Smith explains that these multiple sensibilities have always been cherished in artists, and as the world becomes continually globalized, this is our varied yet collective future.

Changing My Mind is the type of collection that might languish under your pillow or on the bedside table for several weeks—not because it isn’t a page-turner, but because it is so tempting to savor every last sentence.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, February 13th 2010

When She Flew

admin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:03:00 +0000

By Jennie Shortridge

New American Library

In a fictionalized version of a true event that that happened a few years ago, an Iraq war vet and his young daughter are discovered living in the Oregon woods. When police officer Jessica Villareal hears that a young girl has been sighted in the woods and could be a runaway teen, she asks to be added to the search team. Jessica has always played by the rules, but finds herself heading towards forty and feeling like her job is the only thing she has going for her. She has an estranged teenage daughter and grandson who live close to her ex-husband, Rick in another state. As the story unfolds, we learn that Jessica, who is half-Mexican, is the daughter of a policeman who was killed in an auto wreck while on duty when Jessica was very young. Since then she has tried to maintain a firm grip on her world to keep danger and insecurity at bay.

Throughout When She Flew, we sense that Jessica is trying to find her way back to her daughter and her own lost childhood by trying to help Lindy, the teenage girl. As told through the narrative voices of Jessica and Lindy, we inhabit the worlds of these two separate, but linked individuals. Despite a lack of material resources, Lindy has been brought up by her survivalist father to love and appreciate nature. She has a special interest in birds and is first sighted by bird watchers when she ventures away from the campsite to follow a blue heron she sees by the river.

Without giving the entire plot away, the title of the book _When She Flew_ symbolized, for me, how both the younger and older female characters of the novel eventually find the courage to leave the safety of the known and find their own “truths” about life and their place in the world, even if they doesn’t always conform to societal expectations. The novel asks thought provoking questions about our assumptions when it comes to raising children. Pater is raising his daughter outside of the confines of conventional society, but would Lindy be better off with a foster family, or in an institutionalized setting? These characters stay with you long after you’ve turned the final page. Once I started reading this book, I found it hard to put it down.

Written by: Gita Tewari, January 12th 2010

Sisters in War: A Story of Love, Family, and Survival in the New Iraq

admin — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Christina Asquith

Random House

Sisters in War is a brilliant, convincing, and powerful story of three women from the same Iraqi Shia family: Zia is twenty-two years old, university educated, an outspoken and brave young woman when the story begins with the invasion of Iraq in 2001. Her younger sister, Nunu, a university student, is a quiet and traditional Muslim woman who hopes for an arranged marriage with a suitable man. Their Mamina, a schoolteacher, reminisces about the proud Iraqi tradition of equality for women in the 1950’s and 1960’s. She recalls the times of General Kassim who believed in equality, freedom and creativity for all: women, men and children alike. Since 1979, Mamina and her Ph.D. educated husband, Baba, have lived in Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s control.

The story of this Iraqi family is interwoven with the historical account of the events in Iraq during the American invasion as experienced by Heather and Manal. Heather was an idealistic and ambitious employee of the White House, whose office had already overseen $350 billion dollars in federal spending on national security programs when she understood that she could not overcome anti-American sentiment in Iraq from behind her desk in Washington, D.C. Manal was an educated, veiled woman in her twenties, an outspoken American aid worker who laced her powerful speeches in the United States with Muslim slang.

Both women traveled to Iraq where against all odds they became strong advocates for Iraqi women’s rights. They risked their own lives trying to help Iraqi women survive in their own country. They also founded the first women’s center in Baghdad.

These stories serve as a basic thread of Iraqi women’s lives, their hopes and dreams, and amongst them is Zia’s romance with Keith, an American contractor working in Baghdad. Zia supported her entire family working in the U.S. Headquarters as a translator from Arabic into English.

Zia and Nunu become the target of violent Iraqi militants. In a destroyed country, whose people experience the lack of every imaginable commodity, the dream of their liberation loses its significance. People are afraid to go out, women prone to abuse by any passing man yet unable to escape the restrictions of Iraqi society, are unable to continue their normal lives. Experiencing violence and harassment many of them fall into deep depression, giving up all their hopes and optimism for the future.

In spite of all the hardship, fear and death threats, the story has a happy ending. Zia manages to leave Iraq for Washington, D.C. in 2005, but her sister and Mamina have to stay in the horrifying, bloody city where suicide bombers kill hundreds of innocent civilians in every day attacks. Luckily, all three women are reunited at Sacramento International Airport in the summer of 2008 and Baba might be able to join them in the future. Zia’s love story is crowned by her marriage to Keith. Mamina, Zia, and Nunu are finally together and will share their lives together, hopefully in peace.

Christina Asquith, a journalist who spent two years in Baghdad working for The New York Times shortly after the start of the Iraq war, has written a sincere, thought-provoking, and timely account of the lives of Iraqi women from 2001 to 2009. This true story is engaging and very well written; in fact, I felt I was reading a novel rather than the non-fiction intimate description of the true events in Iraq. It is not only a story of women fighting for their liberated lifestyle. It is a story of Islamic traditions, religion, power, and politics versus American lifestyle, American power, and American beliefs.

In a subtle manner it recognizes the failure to understand, to want to understand the Muslim world by Americans and vice versa. Indeed, in her extraordinary book, Asquith filled in many pieces of the Iraq puzzle that needed to be deciphered.

Written by: Anna Hamling, January 9th 2010

The Delicacy and Strength of Lace

admin — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:05:00 +0000

By Leslie Marmon Silko, James Wright, Annie Wright

Graywolf Press

The Delicacy and Strength of Lace is a rare and beautiful collection, illustrating the power of artful expression in a time when communication is, more often than not, abrupt, cursory, and expedient. The book, composed of letters exchanged between Leslie Marmon Silko, a celebrated fiction writer, and James Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, is an "epistolary classic," and it performs the remarkable feat of capturing, in a tangible, material way, the nature of a friendship.

Their correspondence ranges over little more than a year, and in that short time, their relationship sees Silko's divorce, child custody struggles, and professional turmoil, and Wright's own family tragedies, flourishing career, and finally, his illness and death. They write each other at a spirited pace, even while Wright travels through Europe and while Silko bounces across the United States; detailed address lists and itineraries are tucked into their notes about landscapes and heartaches. Their devotion to one another is made all the more extraordinary by the fact that their friendship was initiated and maintained almost exclusively through letters. Its success was due, in part, to their shared facility with language, which allowed them a candor that would have been lost in the hands of less capable writers. The missives are written with such charm and sincerity that they do not feel like mere evidence of friendship, but like the substance of it.

The correspondence begins timidly, with some mutual flattery and formality, but blooms almost immediately into intimate conversation:

"Dear Mrs. Silko," Wright begins, "I trust you won't mind hearing from a stranger... I have finally had the chance to read _Ceremony, and I am moved to tell you how much the book means to me... I am very happy that you are alive and writing books."_

"Dear Mr. Wright," Silko returns, "Your letter came at a time when I needed it most. So many sad things have happened with my marriage and my children—it is good to know that my work means something..."

Silko writes with the ease of a natural storyteller, ambling from anecdotes about her farm to her personal and professional troubles. "Dear Jim," she writes in her second letter, "I just fed the rooster a blackened banana I found in the refrigerator. He has been losing his yellowish collar feathers lately, and I'm afraid it might be that he isn't getting enough to eat. But I suppose it could be his meanness too." Wright volleys with his own observations about writing and teaching. Where Silko writes with tenacity and sadness, Wright's letters are milder but more ominous. "It has been a pleasure to teach and work here in Delaware, but now once again I can feel time closing in on me, and there are still many tasks to be performed and many duties to be met," he writes, a foreshadowing of the cancer diagnosis that will kill him a year later.

The Delicacy and Strength of Lace was first published in 1985, and its reprinting today seems designed to point out that these kinds of epistolary relationships have all but disappeared. One may be tempted to blame email and blogs and Twitter, but to lament the informality of modern communication is miss a greater truth: Silko and Wright's remarkable correspondence was born out of their mutual love for writing. Their letters were crafted with a mixture of skill and affection that has always been rare. The immediacy and volume of modern communication may have diluted the frequency of clear, heartfelt expression, but this collection shows that our appetite for it is undiminished.

Written by: Rebecca Zerzan, December 17th 2009

It’s Never too Late to Be What You Might Have Been

admin — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:00:00 +0000

By BJ Gallagher

Viva Editions

The title of this book is drawn from an adage that is sometimes lost on the young. Youth is often painted as an open road with endless paths leading to infinite dreams. The challenge that we face as we get older is maintaining the attitude that life still holds an abundance of opportunities and that we are up to the task of conquering them. Contrary to what society tells us, BJ Gallagher's It's Never too Late to Be What You Might Have Been proclaims that reinvention is not just for those without lines on their faces or traces of gray sprouting from their scalps.

In this volume, Gallagher offers a collection of inspirational anecdotes that touch on a variety of arenas where we might dream of starting over: careers, education, health, finances and love. The author maintains that in all of these areas, we are never too old to either fulfill old dreams or pursue new interests, and she provides a series of interviews as proof. Among her subjects are Elgene Doinidis, a woman who decided to learn how to fly in her middle age; Arnold and Raine Chanin, who became avid hikers in their sixties; and Gary Gwilliams, who ended a marriage after twenty years and then stumbled upon his soul mate.

In these stories about starting over and second chances, Gallagher does not dig deep. She does not offer a step-by-step guide or any kind of action plan for following one's heart. It seems that her sole point is to say that no matter who you are or where you are in life, you can still take risks and pursue your goals. While It's Never too Late to Be What You Might Have Been is an ultra-light, fluffy read bordering on advertorial by including the URLs for its interviewees' commercial web sites, it serves the purpose of patting the reader on the back and whispering in their ear, "Yes, you can do this, too!"

Written by: Beverly Jenkins-Crockett, November 25th 2009

Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat: A Story of Bulimia

admin — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:00:00 +0000

By Stephanie Covington Armstrong

Lawrence Hill Books

When I was growing up, I thought of bulimia and anorexia as "White girl problems." Through the media and interaction with peers, I had been given the impression that Black women did not experience body image issues or struggle with eating disorders. As I got older, I realized that these assumptions were wrong, but I still could not find stories of African American girls or women who had contended with anorexia, bulimia, or compulsive overeating.

In Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat, Armstrong tells her story of growing up poor and hungry in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn and Norfolk, Virginia. Armstrong's childhood is transient—her mother moves her and her sisters often—and characterized by a constant hunger for food, love, and acceptance. She writes of choosing her childhood friends based on their afternoon snacks and the content of their refrigerators. Armstrong endures foster care and is sexually molested by an uncle when she's a preteen. The emotional pain and sense of betrayal eventually leads her to compulsive overeating and bulimia in isolation. She continues to live out the transience of her childhood by moving back and forth from New York City to Los Angeles while trying to escape herself and her disease.

Armstrong experiences difficulty in finding help with her disorder; she writes of a particular incident in which she is treated like an oddity because of her race. To make matters worse, Armstrong feels the need to keep the secret of her bulimia from her family and friends because she wants to project an image of a strong Black woman to the world, even while going home at night to binge and purge. Thankfully, Armstrong eventually recovers through attendance at twelve step programs and support from her family and friends.

Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat is an important contribution to writings on anorexia, bulimia, compulsive overeating and body image among women of color. Armstrong presents an example of how a woman can free herself of food addiction and help others by telling her story.

Written by: Rekesha Spellman, November 24th 2009

German for Travelers : A Novel in 95 Lessons

admin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:42:00 +0000

By Norah Labiner

Coffee House Press

Norah Labiner's third novel German for Travelers reads a lot more like poetry than prose. Each chapter, which is framed as a lesson, begins with a seemingly disconnected sentence translated into English from German, before jumping to a different time period, country, character, or all three. Though a somewhat dizzying read, German for Travelers is a unique family history told through a gradual unraveling of a long kept family secret. It might also be described as a nonfiction mystery novel—à la Truman Capote—that takes as a starting point Sigmund Freud's famous (and, from a feminist perspective, rather notorious) Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.

The novel’s narrative(s) center on the Leopold/Berlin family who are descendants of a renowned Jewish German psychoanalyst, Franz Apfel. It begins besides Lemon Leopold's pool in her Hollywood mansion, year 2000-something. Lemon is a famous Hollywood actress; her brother Ben a frustrated psychoanalyst. Their cousin, Eliza Berlin is a gloomy romance writer who, unlike Lemon, has had a lot of "rotten luck". Lemon and Eliza, in fact, are opposites in almost every way. If they weren't cousins, they would no doubt never cross paths, but as can only happen with family, the unlikely pair travel together to Berlin to unravel the unsolved case of "Elsa Z"—their great-grandfather's incurable patient.

In some ways, German for Travelers is a critique of Freud's Dora, and perhaps of the limits of psychoanalysis in that, in Elsa's case, the doctor never discovers the obvious (and ruinous, for him) truth about Elsa until it is too late. Elsa is also turned into a somewhat prophet of the approaching Holocaust (although I actually found this aspect of Elsa's character a little hard to swallow). It is successful, I think, in highlighting some of the misogyny and homophobia of Freud's incomplete analysis of Dora—but the novel is too short, and there is too much going on in it, to form a sustained and coherent critique.

It’s Labiner's characters who manage to stay with the reader by the time the book spirals to its end. I found the dark, world-weary romance writer Eliza and her deceased husband Hans two of the most compelling characters in the novel. Hans is portrayed as a haunted, tragic, yet romantic character—though we are never quite sure if we are seeing him through the narrator (who is constantly shifting) or Eliza's point of view. For example:

He lamented: Time is the fire in which we burn. He pronounced: Every man his own football! He railed: I think of Germany at night: the thought keeps me awake till light. Once as he and Eliza rushed through a station to catch a departing train—he made it onto the platform first—and he called out to her: Run, comrade, run; the world is behind you. (Lesson 13)

I was, at first, somewhat frustrated with the chapters given to the Hollywood-dwelling siblings, Lemon and Ben Leopold, but I came to feel that there was a lot of truth to the characterization of these two somewhat superficial personalities who nevertheless are respectively intrigued and haunted by their family's past. Lemon and Ben's parents were (publicly) an image of the sugar-coated all-American family; one, however, that is hiding a few scandalous secrets. Lemon, Ben and Eliza's grandparents were Holocaust survivors who, as is often the case with many Holocaust survivors of that generation, (and in fact survivors of such traumas in general) never seemed to speak about their pasts. Their grandfather, in fact, after the war, is supposed to have lost his mind, and hence rendered voiceless. I found the way the novel touched on the trans-generational effects of trauma, and the effects of the repression of family history, quite touchingly and intelligently portrayed.

My one reserve is that there is so much going on in so few pages that, at its close, it feels somewhat unfinished. It is a part-critique, part-novel, part-history that can barely hold its characters bursting with personality, its references to pop culture and pop psychology, and its weighty themes. However, I also think this is part of the charm of this book: it leaves the reader thinking and, given its digestible size, this might be the kind of book that deserves a repeated reading—or perhaps, given the book's brevity of words, weighty themes, and lingering phrases, it is, as I first suggested, better read as a poem than novel.

Written by: Rachel Liebhaber, November 17th 2009

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

admin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:39:00 +0000

By Tom Wolfe

Picador

Radical Chic, noun: a small clique of the New York upper elite who, in order to appear groundbreakingly fashionable, support social movements and causes which ironically are at odds with the morays inherent to their identity

Mau-mau, verb: to stubbornly and meticulously badger someone into supporting a cause; to petition while using one’s minority identity in such a way that a member of a majority is left without rebuttal

Flak Catcher, noun: poorly paid and hardly respected public officials who are often used as human shields to protect their bosses from mau-mauing (see definition)

Beginning Tom Wolfe’s collection of two essays Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, I admit I knew very little. Who or what was the radical chic? What was mau-mauing? Why were flak catchers on catching end? A child born long after the '60s, I had little beyond a layperson’s knowledge of Wolfe’s other eccentrically long titles—something involving Kool-Aid, acid, and some sort of test.

Upon concluding the book, I’m happy to admit that I now know infinitely more, not only about the kooky title, but also about race relations in the 1960s, the Black Panther movement, and the infamous evening that brought the hypocrisy of the highest New York socialites to the nation’s attention. With a constantly tongue-in-cheek tone, Wolfe walks the reader through the dinner party hosted by Leonard and Felicia Bernstein in 1970 in his essay “Radical Chic” and through the methods employed by minority groups to petition the local government of San Francisco in “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.” On both coasts and with two different populations, Wolfe holds up a mirror to the duplicity, irony, and hilarity of race relations.

I couldn’t help laughing as Wolfe aptly described the wonderfully humorous scenarios: Roquefort cheese balls served to dinner guests in black leather, rich Jewish party-goers writing checks for an anti-Semitic organization, minority leaders protesting against a white government for their failure to follow through, then failing to follow through with their own protests. Wolfe’s style is disarming and feels truthful, as if he’s the only person who sees each situation for what it actually is, and the actions, desires, and blind spots he reveals in people of every ethnicity serve to both humble and unite them.

Both essays were highly enjoyable, and as someone far removed from the 1960s, New York, and San Francisco, I can only imagine they would be even more interesting to someone with firsthand knowledge of those locales during this time period. Although the book was essentially about how people tried to deal with difference, I turned the last page feeling more akin to each person’s fumbling portrayal regardless of race. The best part of Wolfe’s writing is the recognition that he himself is part radical chic, part mau-mauer, and part flak-catcher. We all are, to varying degrees, and as long as there is a satirist to expose our foibles and peccadilloes, we should keep hosting parties to provide hilarity for the audiences of the following decades.

Written by: Melissa Ablett, October 12th 2009

Twisted Triangle: A Famous Crime Writer, a Lesbian Love Affair, and the FBI Husband’s Violent Revenge

admin — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 10:29:00 +0000

By Caitlin Rother, John Hess

Jossey-Bass

“Stranger than fiction” is the most accurate way to describe the premise for this book about married FBI agents. The wife has a lesbian affair with a crime novel author, and the husband kidnaps and later tries to kill his wife. And yet, it’s a true story! Having never heard of this case before, I could not put the book down and found myself eager to get to the end to see how it all turned out.

The book tells the complex story of an abusive relationship between Gene and Margo Bennett, as well as their personal, professional, and legal troubles. Evidence of Gene’s emotional abuse towards his wife is presented early in the book, and starts to draw the outline of the picture that’s yet to come. He carries out a scam to get money from the F.B.I., and is prosecuted when Margo decides to divorce him and reports the incident. A power struggle starts as he seeks revenge for her betrayal and her affair with Patricia Cornwell, a famous author. He kidnaps her to make her lie in court and clear his name, but is still convicted. When he gets out of jail, he carries out an elaborate and bizarre plan to frame her for murder and attempts to kill her. Ultimately, Gene is found guilty on several charges, including attempted murder, and sentenced to twenty-three years and ten years of probation. The book wraps up by describing the aftermath of the trial and its effect on Margo and her two daughters.

One of the problems with the book is that it’s told primarily through the perspective of Margo, but this is because the author attempted to contact Gene, but he did not agree to participate. The writing itself is awkward at times, which doesn’t help the fact that the story unfolds itself is hard to keep up with. There are so many names and places to keep track of, yet they are sometimes mentioned without a reminder about how we should know who or what the author is referring to.

These problems, however, are minor when compared to the important themes raised in the book. Because Margo was raised to be ashamed of homosexuality and bisexuality, she viewed her relationships with women as innocent experimentation. She even viewed her affair with Patricia Cornwell as separate from any pattern that would make her label herself as a lesbian. The homophobia and bias against homosexuality in the Virginia justice system is also mentioned several times throughout the book.

Gene’s abuse towards Margo, along with her ignorance about what was happening in her marriage, is the perfect example of how abuse works. It seems that no matter how severe the abuse and torment, the blame still falls on the victim. In fact, this situation shows that the more severe the abuse, the more blame a victim might receive. Why didn’t she know better? She was an FBI agent after all... How could she not see the signs in her own relationship? Why did she let it go that far? All of these are questions echoed throughout the book by her peers, and all demonstrate why these stories need to be told. It should go without saying that there is great motivation to disconnect one’s own relationship from the scenarios and “what ifs” that a person hears about, and yet these questions often come up.

At its core, this book is about abuse and sexual repression—two themes that could certainly use more attention and discussion, especially when they reflect a true story and not a work of fiction.

Written by: frau sally benz, July 26th 2009