What We're Reading: The Book Club for Troublesome Women
Welcome to the “What We’re Reading” ongoing series where you’ll find PCVs sharing their thoughts, reflections, and reviews on books of any genre. Sticky Rice Editor in Chief Gretchen Evans also interviews fellow Volunteers and they discuss the books they’ve been reading at site. Don’t forget to leave us a comment below if you’ve also read any of these books!
Nicole Hamner, 137 TESS
When I first picked up The Book Club for Troublesome Women, written by Mary Bostwick, it sounded as far out from my typical reading interests as possible. Which was precisely what I wanted with three unfinished memoirs sitting in my kindle library. I had deemed a change of pace necessary. This feel-good historical fiction story follows four suburban housewives in the early 1960s, and, to my surprise, it left me emotional as I turned the last page.
After reading The Feminine Mystique as a means to build friendship with one another, these four women had all agreed that their lives needed to change. What struck me was how differently each woman pursued their own journey towards self-fulfillment and happiness, and how vastly different the lives they created for themselves were.
Bitsy never quite had the courage of her three new friends, but being surrounded by other women who cared about her wellbeing led her to make the right decisions anyway. The power of community is a beautiful thing. She got divorced from her less-than-caring husband, moved across the country to go back to school, and fulfilled her lifelong dream of being an equestrian veterinarian instead of continuing to pretend she wanted to be a mother.
Maggie learned to balance caring for her three children with her once-dead passion: writing. While this starts out as a hobby mocked by her husband, it leads to their marriage flourishing. She realizes that her husband also deserves to follow his passions instead of being expected to be the full bread-winner of the family. She learned that living in the neighborhood marked with society’s stamp of success was not worth the suffocating reality of earning this income. And, she learned that feminism might mean equality for both genders.
Charlotte’s story was my favorite. As a woman who had been deeply wounded by her own family, she never struggled with caring about what other people thought of her. While the book club women were all prioritizing pursuing their passions, Charlotte stopped making excuses in her artistic endeavors. This came with a gut-wrenching acceptance that she does not have a real talent for painting. Finally she put her foot down and broke free of the shackles of her father and now-ex-husband. She was then able to open an art gallery where she supported the launching of other talented female artists. A pivot queen.
Viv lived an impressive life. A former military combat nurse and busy mother of six children, she stretched herself extremely thin in order to make a tangible impact at an inner-city hospital. That is, until the long commute and hours could no longer justify missed softball games and dinner preparations. She completes the half of the book club women who did not decide that her marriage needed to be burned to the ground in order to fulfill her own life.
Now, I don’t have kids or a husband. Nor did I grow up with magazine advertisements shoving marriage and motherhood down my throat as the single path of success for a woman. So why did the book still feel so relatable today?
Social media. Instagram, for people my age anyway, is a dark spiral that tries to tell you that your life isn’t curated enough. Doesn’t look good enough for others. You should always be on, and every one of your successes will be numerically compared to every single person you’ve ever met in your life. Corporations’ desire to control what content we consume to shape how we think of ourselves in today’s world is still a very successful marketing technique - now constantly available to us through an addictive screen vs. a women’s magazine.
While reading, I also thought back to right before I came to Thailand. I was sitting in an overly-stuffed black leather chair at the hair salon where my sister used to work. I wanted to leave her with a financial gift for her soon-to-be third baby girl, so I gave her full creative liberties on my hair in order to make my appointment last as long as she wanted us to converse for. I had been soaking up all the time I could with my nieces but rarely spent quality time with my sister anymore. So she didn’t and couldn’t possibly understand the very mixed feelings I had about leaving the country again, for an experience that may or may not provide any more direction on which career I wanted to pursue. I’d been hopping around volunteer jobs in different places for a while, and while I loved the growth of perspectives and do have a heart for service, it also felt like the Peace Corps might be another two years of running away from reality.
There were two older women sitting in chairs across from mine, happily listening to my sister tell them about her free-spirited sister who was joining the Peace Corps after just recently working in Turkey and Jordan. I squirmed, as I expected their reaction to be the typical lecture on the dangers of the Middle East or of traveling alone as a girl, but instead they teared up and told me how proud they were. And that if they could go back to being in their 20’s, they wished they would’ve had the courage to choose experiences that were outside the life sold to them by society. They loved their families dearly but maybe life was meant to be more than just that.
That’s when The Book Club for Troublesome Women connected with my own life in a profound way. It reminded me of the reassurance I felt leaving my sister’s hair salon that day. Success doesn’t have to be a factor in every decision. I have the freedom to do whatever and go wherever I want, and that’s more of a blessing and privilege than I can ever imagine! Our journeys toward self-fulfillment and happiness are not going to look like the other members in our book clubs.
