openpalm

Play It As It Lays
The Book of Common Prayer

These two books have quite a bit in common…an intelligent narrator, privileged women of the 1960’s seeking meaning in lives that are essentially meaningless. Relationships with men who are too busy, self-involved, not right. Daughters who are lost. Capabilities without outlet. An undertow of loneliness. The women keep trying. Keep on trying. And in the end they lose.

These works have the same draw for me as the poems of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Intelligent, outraged women. Beautiful, strong women. Courageous honest women. Their sense of entitlement and pride continually tangling with an endless panoply of shallow discontects and grief-laden loss.

All dead too young.

It was a hard era. America’s post-suffragete but pre-feminist educated women with no where to go. Treated as Barbie dolls when in reality their interior spaces were roiling masses of talents and dreams, frustrations and mystification at the yawning rift between what should be and what is. They were supposed to be able to do anything they wanted. Yet found themselves caged in a house of mirrors.

I am comforted by their confusions since I share them. I believe I too am capable of anything, or should have been, but always wished and waited for a prince charming would come and sweep me up.

I am warned by their fates. As Didion has shown us in simple subtle powerful word, these two story lines just don’t play nice.