Educated, by Tara Westover, I’m sure needs little introduction, it’s a serious memoir by a serious person, extremely painful to read. Beautifully written, admirably honest.
Bad Mormon, by Heather Gay (of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City) is of course completely ridiculous, mostly superficial, and is riddled with odd syntax and cheap attempts at humor, which made it painful to read in its own way. I read it because I have a fascination with the Housewives franchises and Mormonism as phenomena.
What struck me as so odd is that they are both the same story with different details. Whether you come from wealthy temple privilege or from the poor fringes of the community, once you decide to begin to reckon with Mormonism, it is going to eff you up, especially if you are a woman. Both Westover and Gay fought their ways out of the boxes they’d been locked into. Though Westover is a hero and Gay is a buffoon, both had to come to terms with who they really are as women underneath the stain of oppression and “keeping sweet.” Readers get a full picture of what it is like for women when they are called whores and unclean since childhood, and how hard it is to dismantle that type of thinking. I know I’ve reckoned with it being raised in the Lutheran church, I can’t imagine how much more damaged I’d be if I was raised LDS.
Have you ever been struck by a strange pairing? Or realize that your personal course of reading is sort of subliminally following a thread of themes?
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by Scared_Recording_895
2 Comments
I read a biography of E Nesbit and The Childrens’ Book by A S Byatt more or less back to back and it’s hard for me to remember what’s real and what isn’t
I also read His Dark Materials and A Whistling Woman (again, A S Byatt) very close together and they have a lot of the same themes. On re-reading, my mind has misremembered what was in which book
Also, I loved Educated as well
Well, without intending to, I read The Power by Naomi Alderman immediately followed by The Change by Kirsten Miller. They became available on my library hold list sequentially so I just read one after the other. They are both about female rage and female power. I found it interesting that The Power starts with teenage girls and The Change is about women in menopause. Interesting sort of bookends. Despite similarity in themes, they went very different places with their stories. I thought they made an interesting contrast.