once in love with amy (and jo)

Warning! Spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn't read Little Women or seen the 2019 movie version which is a delight; you should watch it first before you read this unless you like having things ruined for you.

via GIPHY

It is a truth universally acknowledged by anyone who has ever read Little Women that Amy is the Absolute Worst and that Jo should have married Laurie.

And, not only should Jo have married Laurie (who is a boy and extremely hot), she should NOT have married an old man who is not hot in any way, was prone to mansplaining, and was probably some kind of bear shapeshifter.*

Baby sister Amy spends the first half of the book being the most annoying brat to inflict herself on a long-suffering big sister, which is bad enough when you are a long-suffering big sister yourself and can relate. But then she commits the unforgivable sin of burning Jo's writing in a fit of pique.

The only copy of the words that Jo wrote. Burnt.

Words that flowed out of her like a deep river gliding effortlessly down to the sea. Words that wouldn't let her sleep at night, jangling in her head so loud she had to get out of bed, light a candle, and desperately scribble them down just so she could get them to shut up. Words she wrestled out of her brain and pinned to the paper. Words that would embarrass her later in life but for now seem like a work of staggering genius. Words that were good and worth saving. Words that she struggled to find and slaved over and could never reproduce no matter how hard she tried. Words she totally forgot to back up in the Cloud.

I couldn't have been more horrified if Amy had set fire to the family house and then put Marmee on a spit to roast over the coals.

Jo may have forgiven her but I have not.

Then Friggin' Amy who is the Absolute Worst gets to go on a trip to Europe instead of Jo just because Aunt March wants to actually enjoy herself by taking someone she actually gets along with.

And then, Friggin' Amy, the Destroyer of Words, actually MARRIES LAURIE despite the fact that everyone is still shipping him with Jo and will to the end of time.

Via Relevant Obscurity See also Tomato Nation.

Essentially, LMA has been on my shit-list for the past 40 years or so.

But other than that teeny, tiny, whopping great grudge which I was intending to take to my grave, I actually love Little Women.

I am Jo. Or I wanted to be. All she ever wanted to be was a writer. She was a tomboy whose best friend was a boy (I had no idea how to talk to boys) and a maverick who runs off to New York to actually be a writer in the great big world despite the patriarchal system that said there was no way she would make it. That was how I wanted my life to go.

I could even imagine that my sisters were Meg, Beth, and Amy, mostly because I have three sisters and I'm the second oldest, just like Jo, and mostly because I was best sister-friends with my next younger sister, my "Beth", and my baby sister, my "Amy" used to bug the shit out of me.**

I read the book several times back in the day and have seen most, if not all of the movie adaptations. The Katharine Hepburn one, the June Allyson one, the Winona Ryder one. The tv mini-series where Captain Kirk was Professor Bear Bhaer.***

I know the plot forwards and backwards and upside down. I almost didn't go to see the latest version because I know the plot forwards and backwards and upside down. But then I read that the director was Greta Gerwig and that she had done something to make it new.

Basically, she solves the problem of Amy. For that matter, she solves the problem of Jo.

Instead of following the timeline of the novel, starting with their childhood adventures/sins and working up to the happily ever after that is marriage and career fulfilment (for some), the movie starts with Jo arriving in New York, carrying her portfolio, pursuing the true romance she has always dreamed of - her love of words.

Meanwhile, Amy is in Paris, working on a painting, dreaming of being a great artist, when she meets up with Laurie. He is mourning the loss of the love of his life with the traditional European bacchanal of wine, women, and Eurail passes.  She calls him on his shit and helps him get past it all while being remarkably sensible about the realities of a poor woman's life in the 19th century, marriage being practically the only career that a woman without sufficient artistic talent can aspire to, marriage to a rich man the only way out of genteel poverty.

The grown-up, admirable Amy is there in the book too, but it's a lot easier to forgive the unforgiveable when you meet Good Amy first and the Book Burning is shown in flashback. You can't get too attached to LaurJo when the narrative gives you LaurAm first. Timing is everything.

Jo also meets a handsome young man (who is not old and not a bear) but the romance takes a backstage to her writing. Sure she dances with him at a hot New York dance club and takes his literary criticism to heart, but those scenes take up far less screen time than the scenes of her scratching out words with her pen, arranging her pages on the floor, talking to her sisters about whether a book about the domestic lives of young women is "important" or not (spoiler alert: it is!), and negotiating a copyright contract with her publisher.

A copyright contract. Someone was negotiating a copyright contract on a big screen right in front of me.

I got so excited, I almost shouted at the screen, "Don't sell him your copyright outright! Make sure you retain merchandising rights! Negotiate a clause about sharing it in a scholarly repository!"

I know it is not a normal response to get excited about a copyright negotiation but I did.****

The publisher actually has to negotiate Jo's romance/marriage into the climax of her book because apparently maintaining control of your work and ensuring that you make a living wage from it isn't sexy enough for some people.  Personally, I needed a cigarette after that scene and I don't even smoke.

In the LMA book, Jo's ursine boyfriend organizes the publication of Jo's work (I mean, he didn't even have the right to authorize publication because that is the exclusive right of the author!!!) and presents the printed book to her as a fait accompli.

How much more satisfying it is to see Jo in charge, brave enough to bring her book to the publisher herself, inexperienced enough to not know what copyright is but not afraid to ask, smart enough to know it's worth more than she's being offered.

This was also the Jo I always wanted to be and I didn't even know it.






*There is actually a sub-species of romance novel about women falling in love with bear shapeshifters and apparently they are quite good in bed (I mean, I've heard rumours about books like that) but I was unaware of said genre at the time I read LW, probably because LMA probably invented shapeshifting bear romance, and also because I hadn't gotten around to wondering how good anyone was in bed yet.
**But not now. Love you, D-Squared! Also I have an older brother who is technically the second oldest but he is temporarily omitted for the purposes of inserting myself into this particular fictional world.
***and Laurie Partridge was Jo!
****You can retire the girl out of the copyright office but you can't get the copyright officer out of the girl

500 GBP and a room of my own

Some time during the last century, possibly while I was doing my masters degree in 1988, I read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.  Shortly thereafter, I started rereading Jane Eyre (the good bits) because I was trying to write my final paper for the Bloomsbury Group course I was taking (Virginia Woolf was part of the group) and I had no idea what the hell I was going to write my paper on so why not read Jane Eyre instead is generally my motto when faced with something I don't particularly want to do.

Anyway, in 1928, Woolf wrote that in order to be a writer a woman needed to have money (she reckoned about £500 per annum) and a room of her own.  This struck me so forcefully at the time that I have taken it at gospel ever since.

Her book was an answer to all those idiots who kept wondering why there was no female Shakespeare and so few women writers in the canon at all.  Back in her day and mine, the university bookstore shelves were stuffed full with the novels, plays, and poetry of dead white men, with a few above-the-sod white men thrown in for variety and the occasional bone tossed to Jane Austen or one of the Bronte sisters (but not Anne*). 

When I had started my masters, I had to drop a course on early women writers because none of the books were in print and I was faced with having to compete with 15 other students for the one or two copies to be found in one of the multitude of libraries scattered around the University of Toronto campus. This was back when the library's computerized catalogue could tell you where the book was but not that the book was already checked out until you had trudged all the way over there.

Of course, I didn't really need Virginia to tell me I needed money to support my writing habit.  Having reached the tender age of 26 with no clear career goals other than "be a writer" in my head and having rejected a journalism career after a stressful six months of learning that being a journalist meant you had no time to write anything other than news stories, I was casting about myself to see what else I could do to keep myself in lined paper. This was before personal computers and the internet could provide the opportunity for you to blog your guts out to the world for (mostly) free.

My year in Toronto made it clear to me that being an English professor was not for me either.

So I went back home to Newfoundland, working at the university library for a few years until sheer boredom led me on to working as a copyright officer for a lot of years until sheer boredom led me to retire as soon as the countdown on my days-to-retirement clock had reached zero plus a few extra weeks thrown in to get things in order for the winter semester.

Things weren't actually in quite the order I had hoped for but it's hard to concentrate on the daily grind when "why not read Jane Eyre or the internet or that e-book that I had on hold but is now on my phone" is generally my motto.**

Did you know that if you put an e-book on hold at the NL provincial library, it automatically downloads to your account the minute it becomes available?  Did the productivity of all former English majors in the province dramatically decrease when that became a thing?***

Getting back to Virginia's book, her thesis was that a writer needs financial security, space, and time to get any writing done but getting the money you need to get the space you need and to maintain the space you need and to feed and clothes the kids you end up having if you marry the money you need or you keep working but have to be a superwoman-who-has-it-all eats away at the time you need to actually do anything except work, eat, raise kid(s), drive kid(s) to all their activities, watch TV, read books (hah!), and sleep. 

And maybe Anthony Trollope could get up at 5:30 a.m. and write for three hours before going off to work and produce 47 novels in 35 years but I bet bloody Anthony Trollope never changed a diaper or had to deal with a half-day kindergarten schedule that changed every two weeks or lived during the Golden Age of Television. Given the reality of most women's lives especially before there were many ways for them to earn money outside of marriage, it's amazing that any of them got into print at all.

Despite what I said above, my career in copyright wasn't always boring.  It could be a real roller coaster ride sometimes, with periods of intense activity followed by great lulls while you wait for the next semester to ramp up.

I got to create presentations about copyright and stand up in front of people telling them things they didn't know about stuff I knew backwards and forwards because I'd been doing it for so long, which is quite cool if you are a bit of a show off.

So many interesting things to read came across my desk all needing copyright clearance.  I was supposed to be concerning myself with just the copyright but how can you not read something called "How to Display Data Badly" or a scholarly article on the awesomeness that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Did you know that the berries Newfoundlanders call Bake Apples got that name because the French who came here back in the early days called them "baie qu'appelle" meaning "I don't know what to call this berry but my god it's some tart" and the English who came here back in the day misheard.

On the other hand, books and articles about copyright law are usually a surefire cure for insomnia (except for my copyright article in the Gazette, of course).  It is amazing how thinking about the rules which protect the art works that inspire our imaginations can stamp out all signs of life in the prose concerning those rules.

Of course, copyright protects boring stuff too or I would never have gotten any work done.**

It was while I was writing my not-at-all-boring article (that I got loads of compliments on so you should read it, too, right after this post) that it suddenly hit me that in a few short years I could be doing this full time.  I could create copyright stuff just as boring and maybe just as entertaining as other people. I already had the room; I would soon have the £500.

And so here I am today in front of a computer writing this word. And this one, too. Hoping that someone will read them. Dreaming that someday someone might pay me for them. But mostly just hoping someone will read them.

Either way, this is my new job and so far I'm loving it.  

I am a woman, I am a writer, and I am in print.

*Anne Bronte is brilliant by the way and you should finally get around to reading her very soon and not leave her sitting on your shelf in your complete Bronte sisters collection like an idiot (aka me) for years on end

**Can you get fired retroactively after you retire?

***Could they dock your pension or something?  Asking for a friend...

subject

While I was tweaking my last post for publication the other day I had a sudden crisis of conscience. I knew She Who Does Not Obey was embarrassed about her zombiephobia and didn't want anyone to know about it. She wouldn't even let me tell her camp counselor to take the proper precautions, i.e. locate the nearest weapons cache and practice bashing heads with them.

Although I am maintaining a secret identity, so that I might fight internet crime more effectively, the only readers I have know who I am (that is as far as I know - does anyone know how to install a site meter?).

Ny niece Drama Queen knows I have a blog and I knew she had probably read at least one post. SWDNO was going to hear about it if I didn't tell her first.

As good as the story was, it was not a story wholly my own. I had only partial ownership.

And if that wasn't enough, I also knew what it was like to be the subject of someone else's tale.

My father was a newspaper columnist who wrote about the outdoors, but from time to time, he peopled his column with characters who he claimed to be his actual family. We shared the same names and birth order, but there were times when we found it difficult to recognize ourselves.

Once we hit puberty, it became especially embarrassing to face our friends the morning after the column appeared. My sister TR gained the horrifying (to her) nickname of "Nature Girl" after one such column declared her absolute devotion to the great outdoors, although my father was apparently the only one who had observed said devotion.

Our avatars were often called upon to express a childlike wonder at some aspect of nature according to the demands of the topic of the day. I expect we actually did say such things once upon a time, but as teenagers we would rather eat dirt than make such uncool utterings.

As for me, it seemed that he saw me as a pig-tailed innocent and not the badass teen I truly was. But since my badassery consisted solely of watching my friends smoke, and watching my friends drink, and learning to identify the sickly sweet scent of a joint without ever trying one myself, he probably had me down better than I was willing to admit at the time.

However, to my dying day I will always deny ever having said "The plot thickens."

A girl has to maintain some dignity, after all.

But whether I agreed or disagreed with how I was portrayed, my father was a writer and his topic was his life. My four siblings and I were inextricably part of his life and so many of his experiences of the outdoors. There was no way for him to take us out of his writing without leaving out something that he felt was important and true.

He had his share of hunting and fishing trips with the boys, but I think that he spent far more time taking his children out into the wilds of Newfoundland and sharing his love of this wonderful island with us. We spent most of our summers travelling around the island, first sleeping in a tent when our baby snowsuits served as sleeping bags, then later in a trailer that somehow managed to sleep seven.

When I was ten or so, my parents sold our trailer and built a cabin just a short 20 minute drive from our home, but to this day it still feels like you are as far removed from the city as anyone could wish. We spent all our summers there from that point on, my father loved it so. And despite our adolescent posing to the contrary, we loved it too. We still love it and still share it.

Given all of that, I can see no way for him to remove us from his story when he took such trouble to make us a part of it.

But he must have made some decisions about what he would and wouldn't write, some boundaries he wouldn't cross.

While I was writing my zombie post, I felt like I was dangerously close to a boundary I shouldn't cross at least not without a letter of transit.

This was brought home to me quite obviously while I was editing my work. She was hanging off of me, clambering over the couch I was on, sitting on my shoulders as I typed. She could hardly fail to catch the occasional word on my screen.

It was then that I confessed all, allowing her to read selected passages, but not all - there being certain details of zombie behaviour I wished to convey to you but not share with her. When fighting off the undead, discretion can be the better part of valour.

In the end, I got her blessing, her desire to be an internet celebrity outweighing her self-consciousness I guess.

So I expect you will see She Who Does Not Obey appearing on these pages for some time to come, but I will try to weigh my need to tell a tale against her need to protect her own story as she sees fit.

She is so much a part of me, that I'm afraid I cannot tell you about me without telling you about her. It's the price you pay for proximity.

my brilliant career

I am a narrative junkie. I love a good story.

I will even follow a bad story down a dark alley full of the nastiest clichés just to know how it turns out.

I have read every book that I could stomach past the first page right until the end, no matter how painful.*

I read all of Ulysses (but have no idea what that shit in the middle was about).

I sometimes tape tv shows I don’t even like that much because I start to watch them while I’m brushing my teeth and can’t stay up late enough to get closure (if one can really require closure in a relationship that brief).

For as long as I can remember, perhaps from as far back as I could hold a crayon, I felt compelled to try to write stories as well. I needed to add to the narratives I saw all around me.

I wrote all manner of short fiction during the elementary stage of my career, peopled with many a character lifted wholesale from my favourite television shows. The protagonist would be my own invention, intelligent, beautiful, tough, often with long black hair and violet eyes. She would inevitably meet up with a handsome, witty cop/PI/cowboy/spy/con man who, until he met her, never could find true love no matter how many beautiful women crossed his path.

I rode a lot of horses, solved a lot of mysteries, married some of the cutest actors on TV.

I began my first novel sometime during Grade 5 or 6, in partnership with my two best friends. We wanted to supplant the Hardy Boys with The Mystery of the Old Auditorium starring three sisters/detectives named Gerry, Mike and Jim. We liked to pretend to be them. We were tomboy-wannabes who had no tomboy skills – and were possibly lacking in feminist zeal.

My next opus, begun in junior high after watching the TV series Colditz, was a war novel entitled W.A.R. Spells Hell. I wrote quite a few chapters of that, despite my abysmal lack of experience with either of those concepts.

Except spelling, of course. I am (generally) an excellent speller.

I also managed to produce a maudlin 8^th-grade Christmas story that won rave reviews, i.e. my teacher said that is was very well-written — if it was really my work.

To be accused of plagiarism seemed like the highest of praise to me, even though I knew that the story was a pile of treacle and that my teacher had a horrendous sweet tooth.

In high school my output slowed, but I wrote one short story that won a Major Award (honorary mention) in a writing contest and then got published in my high school yearbook.

I thought it was a really good story, but it was also a sensationalized and extremely fictionalized account of selected events in my life spun out to predict the worst possible outcome.

And it was thus I learned my first lesson about writing and consequences.

When my mother came into my room and closed the door one afternoon shortly after the yearbook came home, I was taken aback. I had never before committed any crime that couldn’t be discussed at top volume in front of multiple siblings.

I was forced to deny her autobiographical accusations as convincingly as I could, while my father waited anxiously in the living room. He was a part-time newspaper columnist who should have known how many lies writers tell even in a true story. Fortunately, they both seemed quite willing to accept the story I came up with that day.

Meanwhile, my best friend faced a similar inquisition from her parents simply because I had named one of the main characters after her. Apparently they thought I was too stupid to come up with pseudonyms. But then again, I was too stupid to realize anyone would try to connect my fiction to real life.

How many more paranoid parents I terrified with my moustache-twirling melodramatics, I can only imagine.

The moral of this story came through loud and clear, however.

The pen truly is a dangerous weapon and writing is not for sissies.**

*The one exception is Clarissa. She is too annoying to live for 15-fucking-hundred pages. Richardson should have stabbed her through the heart with his quill on page 25 and written about bunnies instead.

**I am a sissy.