When I started writing my first novel, More Miracle Than Bird—the story of the brilliant woman, Georgie Hyde-Lees, who is best known as the wife of the poet W.B. Yeats—I was terrified that someone else would be writing the same story. Some other novelist, a great deal more experienced than me, must also know how damned good this story was. I felt a cool dread as I opened the book review pages, waiting for the inevitable moment when I’d discover that someone else had already told this strange yarn about a clever, determined woman in a wartime London crawling with ghosts. Someone else would have been drawn in by the eccentric, famous artists that play key supporting roles in this drama. Who wouldn’t want to tackle such a story?
But then, after a year or so, I accepted that no one else was actually thinking about this story. My anxiety promptly shifted focus. Perhaps it was a terrible idea for a book! Perhaps to take on this very real person and write her story was too audacious, even for an established novelist! It was true that Georgie herself, my protagonist, would not have approved of my project. In the 1940s, in a letter to an academic who had just given a lecture about her husband, she wrote: “Thank you for leaving me out.”
Arab. Bisexual. Migrant. Anorexic. The list goes on and on. The main character in Zaina Arafat's You Exist Too Much is a nesting doll of otherness, and her journey from 12-year-old Palestinian American girl walking around Bethlehem to young woman traveling the world and looking for love in the arms of strangers is a perfect example of how culture and family can affect those whose lives span different realities.
In 1960, the Radcliffe Institute hoped to bring women hindered by domestic labor back into professional life. To women with a PhD “or equivalent” in artistic achievement, it offered paid fellowships, office space, access to Harvard and Radcliffe libraries (except the male-only Lamont Library) and, of course, precious time to work. Maggie Doherty’s brilliant new book, “The Equivalents,” tells the story of the institute by focusing on the five fellows who called themselves “The Equivalents”: Poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, writer Tillie Olsen, painter Barbara Swan and sculptor Marianna Pineda.
I saw the truck’s headlights getting closer from
the southern end of the bridge I calculated
that there was time to make it to the bottom
When the lion came through the camp,
one woman sat up in her tent, breathing
the terrible smell.