julia's Reviews > Heroines

it’s so funny when you want to love something so badly. are basically desperate for this book to be a life-altering experience. and it’s not to say that i don’t find much of what zambreno has to say / vocalize / synthesize impactful. so much of the experience she shares, both her own and that of the other women’s she so meticulously and generously collates, feels not only relevant but depressingly evergreen. but again, through no fault of its own, time has had its way with this book, with its theories and solutions. why don’t we try cutting out the intermediary and writing earnestly and explicitly? well that’s fine but it won’t work i respond from 12 years in the future. but the gaps which hindsight allow us to see clearly align with the missteps made in this reader’s estimation. the narrowness of the scope of subject a byproduct of the focus on what they were denied: the so-called attainment of some bourgeois ideation of “artistic genius”. by focusing on these women from similar periods classes and social strata and comparing them to their male counterparts (whose procurement of this “genius” status was far from a salve for all of their problems), what at the time may have come across as a knowing narrowing of lens now reads as a glaring omission of perspective. these women were silenced, many of them brutalized in the process, but their stories still echo louder than the vast majority of women who have lived and struggled and fought despite (in spite!) of the hellish suppressive circumstances they were born into. those who don’t have the luxury of modern madwifery. the swiss alp institution muse treatment. what of those women’s stories? does a story only matter if it’s written? do i not carry around lessons in the pit of my stomach that were there before i was even born?
but these are the aspirations of an aspiring writer. an aspiring genius. and this is a snapshot of a person a focus a moment in time. the content of which leads me to believe that the author would have no hesitation owning up to the mistakes made and opinions changed. its insistence on theorizing synthesizing and visceralizing the immediate. on proving beyond a shadow of a doubt the value that that has. nothing else i’ve ever read has impressed upon me so firmly that if there is something you must do you must do it. Or made me more sure that there is literary value in cataloging one’s masturbatory habits.
there is no better embodiment of this than the introduction to the updated version, to me the most impacting portion of the entire book. written by jaime hood, one of if not the great contemporary writer exploring the intersection of gender sex artistry and personhood, so obviously and admittedly in zambreno’s lineage. the way hood recounts the jolt this book sent through her life rebounds and echoes in mine. together she and zambreno encourage me not to take their word for it but to figure out what i think. yes i. me.