Vacation = Gillian Flynn, The Group, Pretty Is, New Margaret Atwood !!!

Because my idea of relaxing is reading about women in desperate circumstances driven to make choices that aren’t really choices at all because they are WOMEN. Repressive society, nobody understands their inner life, maybe they don’t even have an inner life, and you have to escape your gallant kidnapper while your friends talk shit behind your back and if you’re lucky you’ll end up competing with a prostibot. Or, as Luscious Jackson put it, “When a man knows where he came from he can tell me I am shameful.”

Like this:

You’ll have to wait until September 29th for my full review of Margaret Atwood‘s The Heart Goes Last but oh my you need to preorder it right this fucking second or you will never know why I now feel the way I do about Blue Man Group.

Pretty Is has been getting the full hype push and I can see why. It has an irresistible premise, told from the alternating points of view of two girls who were kidnapped and held hostage in a cabin in the Adirondacks. They escaped, largely unharmed, and the story picks up when they are in their 20s trying to extricate their lives from the shadows of their past. I was in the Adirondacks when I read it, and that was the most thrilling thing about this book.

On the other hand, Dark Places by Gillian Flynn, delivered all the macabre insanity I was hoping for while my brain melts in the despicable heat. Libby Day survived the murder of her entire family at the hands of her older brother, and now she’s almost 30 and out of money because nobody cares about her tragedy anymore. She takes up with a group of oddballs obsessed with conspiracy theories about her family’s murder and starts to wonder if she really knows the truth about her own life. The ending was completely outlandish but made sense so I didn’t care.

How many times have I read Mary McCarthy’s The Group? And each time I do, I discover something new that fits with my stage of life. This time, I was utterly fascinated by the chapter about mothering, and failed breastfeeding–so full of booby traps that I want to share it on Facebook via my page for my private practice. I doubt this book will ever get old.