Sixth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

"The thing about illegally breeding fire-breathing possums is that you gotta keep a bucket of water handy."

*Those fools! Fire-breathing possums are greasy; water will only feed the flames! Oh, if only I could tell them of my empire...*

(Context: https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/1839.html?thread=2678831#cmt2678831)

Talk fandom! Making things! Reading, writing, drawing, whatever! Miscellaneous life chatter! Meme's happy to see you again!

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Comments

Re: Books

[(Anonymous)]

Currently reading Remember Me To Tom, a memoir from Tennessee Williams' mother, Edwina Dakin Williams. Am enjoying, though also kinda amazed at the sexist way lit historians write about her. I shouldn't be surprised but. I do believe that she was extremely exasperating, but they go a step further and do stuff like attributing her dislike of her husband to class snobbery. Whereas he was abusive and violent... Makes me wonder if I'm gonna end up the world's foremost expert just because I actually bothered to read it. I also get the impression they don't understand the difference between complaining about not having money (which she doesn't do) and complaining about being financially abused (which she takes pains to point out). She has not yet said anything like "he didn't earn enough", she has said (paraphrased) "he had plenty of money at some point apparently but I wouldn't know because he never let us have any of it; he enjoyed subjecting us to petty humiliations by arbitrarily limiting what we could have".

Though not finished the book yet, so who knows, maybe we'll get a U-turn and it'll become the thing of these men's fantasies: "my husband was lovely but not posh enough so I felt hard done by". But I'm not holding my breath.

It's pretty fascinating if you want an account of a family growing up with abuse from a time where it was less socially acceptable to talk about it.

Re: Books

[(Anonymous)]

I finished it and yeah, if anyone says this, they're wrong and they've probably confused her with a fictional character from one of her son's plays. Edwina's husband was from some old American family and she spends a couple of pages talking about how distinguished it was (I think because she wanted the reader to sympathise, like 'oh no how could she have possibly foreseen he would be abusive, when he was from such a good family???' so there is class snobbery there, but it's NOT directed at him. Iirc his family was richer than hers.)