Two Books

Girls They Write Songs About

By Carlene Bauer

Read by Cady Zuckerman

Copyright 2022

9 hrs

The Princess Bride

By William Goldman

Copyright 1970, et al

450 pages

I am not sure when I have managed to deal with two such totally opposite books at the same time. As I was reading The Princess Bride, I was listening to Girls They Write Songs About.

And they are very different books, written 50 years apart.

I did not like The Princess Bride. I'm not sure I would have finished it except for the glowing reviews friends had given it, and my sense that I'd somehow missed this piece of pop culture and should fill in that gap. (I still have not seen the movie.) I mean, the fellows on The Big Bang Theory quote from this book in one episode (and somehow I knew what they were quoting - thank heavens I read a lot). I'd been told it was funny, but I did not see the humor. I didn't like the author asides, or his personal side story that constantly interrupted the fantasy/fairy tale. I did not like Buttercup (the heroine, although the men were the heroes of this story) at all, who could have been a cardboard cutout, so little fleshed out was her character. I suppose the fact that this is a tale within a tale within a tale had something to do with it; as a device I didn't like it. I felt like I was dealing with an unreliable narrator, and I have never liked books with unreliable narrators.

And then there is Girls They Write Songs About, a feminist manifesto about friendship, betrayal, and women who take from other women without a second thought. In this book, Charlotte and Rose both want to be writers; they are different people, but they were people I used to be, of a sort. The author's literary prose flows through the pages, and I could relate to characters who would talk books for hours or discuss the merits of a song even if they could not sing it. She tossed out references to Anne of Greene Gables, Little Women, and other books as I once did, way back when I was in college, and the narrator (Charlotte) used the big words that I have been chastised for knowing and told not to use in either my writing or my verbal expressions, at least, not around here. I use them anyway, sometimes, but I am rusty. I envied the author the ease and flow of her style, and I do hate it when that little green monster of jealousy rears its vile little head.

The book also takes to task those of us who want to be writers but end up being something else. Like Charlotte and Rose, I had a freelance career, I have published extensively, but I've never written a book, never written much of importance, really. I have catalogued my community and left an impression, I suppose, but to have been a graduate of one of the most prestigious women's colleges, one with an extraordinary reputation as a college for writers, I must surely be a disappointment to some professor somewhere, should one remember me. 

The women in this book were fully drawn, perhaps overly drawn, while the men came across as caricatures, not as cardboard as Buttercup in The Princess Bride, but certainly not deftly drawn out to be anything more than men of certain types.

Politically, both books had something to say, as well - and they basically said the same thing. In The Princess Bride, the patriarchal desire for power and autocracy is greatly in play, as Buttercup's wedding to Prince Humperdinck is solely a device the prince is using to create a war between his country and a neighboring one. Men rule in this world; women have very little say and frankly, do not matter except as something to use. The only woman with any depth at all is deemed a witch, married to a man with the power to revive the dead. Doesn't this say a lot about how the sexes are perceived by some groups?

Politics is scarcely mentioned in Girls They Write Songs About, but it is there, nevertheless. And again, it's the patriarchy at play, the fact that despite the fact that these young women are second generation feminists, they are still, when it comes down to it, merely pawns to men, doing the bidding of men, keeping the houses for men, spawning the children, and losing themselves and their souls as one becomes the housewife and the other moves on to become the mistress, her body always a weapon for good or ill. It is not her words, her work, her productivity that make her a person, it is sex and sexuality, and motherhood. The settling, when the fight finally goes out of us, that most women end up with, because it is exhausting to try to fight a system that is so plainly and clearly set up to beat the shit out of us simply because we have no penis, as if that little piece of a body part actually matters. How did it come to rule the damn world?

Rose and Charlotte do not remain friends. This is not a spoiler, as the author has Charlotte say this plainly in what is probably the first paragraph of the book. One reads the book to find out why these two, so alike, so concerned for one another, so loving to one another at various times, are no longer friends, and even after learning the why of it, six hours into the book, one finishes the book with a secret hope that one or the other will pick up the phone and make the call that will bring them back together.

In the end, I must wonder, are we all only cardboard cutouts to one another? Where do we click? Where do we find ourselves when we cannot reach each other, when humanity sees only "other" and not "someone like me?" When we lose ourselves and look around for a mirror, and see that the world has changed, is the landscape of today the only answer to the politics of the patriarchal society that has ultimately created so much hatred and so much death? Does it ever actually perpetuate love, in all of its many forms, or does love scrape against that grain, and the love that we feel for one another, for however long or however short, however thin or thick, is this love the thing that fights the patriarchy as hard as it can? Do we overcome the many negligences of today by reaching out to a friend? And when we do save someone else, what or who are we saving them for?