If you happened to be traveling from Washington, D.C. to Richmond, Virginia in 1935, you’d likely find yourself cruising down Route 1, the forebear of Interstate 95. With the Great Depression receding in your rearview mirror, the trip is really an excuse to put some miles on your new Plymouth PE Deluxe, just like the one Chrysler showed off at Chicago’s Century of Progress exposition. Cars of the era average about 14 mpg, but 20 miles out, you notice you’re running low on gas, around Ashland, a 19th-century resort town that’s home to Randolph-Macon College. The car isn’t the only one on empty; your driving party is famished too. Just past Route 54, you spot an Esso gas station sign and pull into Ella Cinders Tea Room, likely named for the newspaper comic strip launched 10 years earlier. Lucky for you, it’s Sunday, when the restaurant offers 75-cent dinners of fried chicken or Smithfield ham.
And then, two weeks into our hospital stay, the Boston Globe feature story I’d been interviewed for several weeks earlier — the day after Clio’s first visit to her pediatrician, in fact — was published. There I was with the girls on the cover of the Lifestyle pullout section in full color. In the photo, taken on our back porch, my nose is to my daughter Elsa’s cheek, my teeth bared in a silly grimace, while Clio sits at my feet.
She had cancer in that picture. It just hadn’t “broken out” yet.
Terry Pratchett’s 1988 summary of The House on the Borderland begins: “Man buys House. House attacked Nightly by Horrible Swine Things from Hole in Garden. Man Fights Back with Determination and Lack of Imagination of Political Proportions.” It ends: “The journey to the Central Suns sold me infinity.” Infinity is a rather lofty reward for persevering through a battle with pig-men. But Pratchett was right. William Hope Hodgson’s novel, published in 1908 (but likely written in 1904) is one of the most startling accounts of infinity that I’ve ever read.
The seriousness of the topic being handled in “The Other Black Girl,” and the fact that it shared some minor similarities with the horror genre, did not stand in the way of it also being bright and funny. You may not agree with every opinion or every statement laid out in this work, but you will turn page after page after page in your eagerness to unravel this unique tale. If you are open to it, this novel will have you reviewing what your own biases may be, whether your skin is Black, white or orange.
Weiner has made a major literary career out of writing engrossing popular novels that take women seriously. At their most basic, all of her stories are about women trying to hold on to themselves in a world intent on diminishing them. “That Summer” is more explicitly a political novel than most in that its plot is informed by the rise of the #MeToo movement and the seismic shift in attitudes toward men who claim their actions should be excused because of their youth or because their victims were drunk or dressed provocatively or . . . just because. The intertwined story lines of “That Summer” concern two women, both named Diana, who have been harmed in different ways by a man. And that’s only the beginning of what these “two Dianas” have in common.