‘This American Ex-Wife,’ ‘Everywhere the Undrowned’ and ‘The Manicurist’s Daughter’ delve into the challenges of knowing oneself and one’s family
What’s clear from the very first page of Lyz Lenz’s new book is that her ex-husband is a real jerk: leaving garbage to fester on the floor, taking Lenz’s feminist mugs and hiding them in the basement, telling her she should get pregnant with baby No.
3 and write fiction to be “less stressed out.” Oh, and he voted for Donald Trump. Lenz acknowledges that getting married young and being raised in an evangelical community didn’t help her self-actualization skills. “Do you want to know how I finally got my husband to do his fair share?” Lenz asks. “Court-ordered fifty-fifty custody, that’s how.” But “This American Ex-Wife” is bigger than Lenz’s horrific marriage. Lenz is a journalist; her previous books, “God Land” and “Belabored,” explored the religious right in middle America and the rights of pregnant people. In her latest, she sets out to prove, using anecdotal evidence and hard statistics, that marriage is an oppressive tool determined to squeeze the life out of any woman it entraps. While it might be tempting to shrug off Lenz’s argument because of her unlucky coupling, the data here is persuasive. In heterosexual marriages, women bear more of the domestic and emotional labor, even when they are the primary breadwinners. This isn’t inherently because of the institution of marriage, but it stems from the ways in which we’re socialized to believe women should function in a family. Lenz quotes a sociologist: “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.”“This American Ex-Wife” can be exhilarating or worrying, depending on the status of the person reading it. What ultimately makes it compelling, whatever one’s feelings about straight marriage, is the sheer joy that Lenz so obviously experiences as a single woman. Even when she meets a man she likes, “the best man I’ve known,” she says, “I was still scheduling and reminding and doing the emotional and cognitive labor. And I was no longer interested in doing all of that. I wanted to be the one who was free.” Lenz is done with marriage, but her book carries a more powerful message than “marriage sucks.” Women’s lives, their happiness and their desires, matter. If a husband stands in the way of a woman being “equally and fully human,” as Lenz puts it, well — it’s time to take out the trash. “Cats don’t get sad,” Stephanie Clare Smith’s mother once told her when the family cat went to hide under the house, presumably to die. “Still,” Smith writes, “I could see it.” There’s not much Smith doesn’t see as a survivor of rape and neglect. When she was 14, her mother left her alone at home in New Orleans to fend for herself over a summer. Looking in her mom’s closet, still filled with all her clothes, “I knew somewhere in between all the shoulders hung my worry —The memoir “Everywhere the Undrowned” is, somewhat unbelievably, Smith’s first book. A poet and essayist, she works as a clinical social worker and mediator in Raleigh, N.C. Her book conveys a story that many survivors of neglect and sexual violence will recognize. Her own experience led her to help other victims. One, named Tiffany, was 14 when her mother decided to relinquish her custodial rights. They discussed tattoos: Tiffany wanted “my mother’s name on my right arm and my sister’s name on my other arm,” she told Smith, despite the fact that her sister wouldn’t claim her, “because I am full black and she’s half.” “This is what it is,” Smith reflects. “We tattoo ourselves with the people who won’t claim us.”After she was raped by a man in a green truck the summer of her mother’s absence, she put the clothes she had been wearing during the attack in a paper bag and placed them near a trash can. “But when I got back upstairs, I could still hear them crying. After an hour, I brought the clothes inside,” she writes. “They quieted down or else they just died.” This book, told in short vignettes like one of the books Smith recalls reading — “Bluets,” by Maggie Nelson — is a kind of prose poetry that recalls the work of famed writers like Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver. When Smith finally told her mother about her assault, the response was deeply upsetting. “That Smith survived that summer in New Orleans is remarkable. That she found the drive, space and courage to turn that experience into this book is what makes “Everywhere the Undrowned” not only a compelling memoir but a work of literature, the kind she was reading that horrible summer. She recalls staying up late to read Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre”: “One morning, I found a dent on my cheek from where her bound corner slept into me all night.” Describing how Jane survived, because of “her resilient heart cave,” Smith is also describing herself. “In Vietnamese, there are six tones that can change the definition of a word,” Susan Lieu writes. Depending on tone, the word “ma” can mean mother, but, tomb, horse, ghost or rice seedling. The loaded connotations of a lost mother are what haunt and propel this memoir, which is based on Lieu’s one-woman theater show, “140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother.” Lieu was 11 when her mother died after a botched tummy tuck procedure performed by a doctor who was on probation at a plastic surgery clinic in San Francisco. The youngest of four, Lieu later made revenge her mission — but when she discovered that the doctor who had performed the surgery was dead, her mission morphed into another: to know her mother. It was a mission made impossible by her family’s unwillingness to speak about her mother or the circumstances of her death. “It wasn’t until I went to college that I learned words like ‘capitalism,’ ‘exploitation,’ and ‘intergenerational trauma,’” Lieu recalls. Her parents were from Chinese families that had fled persecution into Vietnam, and from there to America. Lieu was the first child born in the United States, so her mother decided to give her an American name. It was also the name of the first nail salon her parents opened, “Susan’s Nails,” over which her mother presided like a general. When Lieu went to Harvard, students shared their parents’ careers: surgeon, professor, lawyer. “My dad does nails,” Lieu told them. “He’s a man-i-curist.”Unsurprisingly, Lieu had a hard time finding her way in life. Her father remarried, her aunts moved out, she fell prey to a yoga cult run by a White woman who demanded money in exchange for spiritual detoxing. Her family’s running commentary on her weight was relentless: “You look fat,” one aunt flatly said. Lieu was driven by some force to keep pushing to learn about her mother in the face of her family’s stonewalling. “What was she like?” Lieu said in the second iteration of her one-woman show. “No,” her director instructed, “say it like you’re in Viet Nam and you’re shouting across the ocean to America.” Lieu’s foray into theater proved to be a healing balm, not only for her but for her siblings and father as well. “As I inhabited their words, their gestures, their voices, my perception of them began to change,” Lieu writes. “My energy toward them shifted, and so did their communication with me.” Two of her siblings joined her for a Q&A after a performance. “We were children who had tragically lost our mother. Two decades later, I could finally stop because we had found her, through one another.” Maybe. In reality, “The Manicurist’s Daughter” shows that Lieu did the heavy lifting herself. We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Astronaut Selection ProgramAs NASA prepares to launch American astronauts this year on American rockets from American soil to the International Space Station – with an eye toward the M...
Read more »
AMERICAN VALUES: What small town America is saying about the American Dream, 'getting too hard'People in the small town of Noel, Missouri, weighed in on the status of the American Dream today, with some saying it still exists while others say it is long gone.
Read more »
Food prices will climb everywhere as temperatures rise due to climate changeClimate change, and specifically rising temperatures, may cause food prices to increase by 3.2% per year, according to a new study by researchers in Germany. As climate change continues to worsen, this price inflation will mean more and more people around the world don't have a varied and healthy diet, or simply don't have enough food.
Read more »
Anne Hathaway's Belt Necklace Is About to Be Everywhere This SpringAnne Hathaway wore a belt necklace to a basketball game, proving sometimes form is more important than function.
Read more »
Fees, Fees Everywhere: Tipping in Denver Is Changing, and Some Diners Aren't HappyThree restaurant owners break down their take on fees, tipping and transparency.
Read more »
American nearing 600 days in Taliban captivity as wife pleads with Biden officials for helpAnna Corbett, wife of American Ryan Corbett who is being held hostage by the Taliban, shared details from her recent phone conversation with him that signaled he is losing hope.
Read more »