When I started reading some of the stories in Dancing Girls for MARM in 2021, I was between short story projects and the idea of focussing on some single stories appealed.
When Old Babes in the Wood appeared in 2023, I didn’t want to set the older collection aside, but I also wanted to acknowledge the new work, so I read a few stories from each collection last year.
All of this is to say that I have charted an unpredictable, slightly erratic, path through these two collections, so imagine my surprise to find that the final story in Dancing Girls and the seventh in Old Babes in the Wood would be such a fine match.
Reading them as bookends, one in the morning and one in the evening, was so enjoyable that now I can’t imagine how they would even work as independent stories.
But, of course, they are independent stories, although both consider how narratives accumulate over the course of our lives, how we participate in rewriting them to reflect experiences that we accumulate as time passes.
MARM 2024 PLANS
Launch (November 1)
Dancing Girls, “Training” (November 5)
Old Babes in the Wood, “My Evil Mother” (November 7)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 10)
Dancing Girls, “Lives of the Poets” (November 12)
Old Babes in the Wood, “The Dead Interview” (November 14)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 16)
Margaret Atwood’s 85th Birthday (November 18)
Dancing Girls, “Dancing Girls” (November 19)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Impatient Griselda” (November 21)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 24)
Dancing Girls, “Giving Birth” (November 29)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Bad Teeth” (November 29)
Wrap-Up (November 30)
In “Giving Birth” Jeannie is in labour, trying to “remember why she wanted to have a baby in the first place”. She must have been another person then, she muses, twelve hours into the process.
“She remembers the way women who had babies used to smile at one another, mysteriously, as if there was something they knew that she didn’t, the way they would casually exclude her from their frame of reference. What was the knowledge, the mystery, or was having a baby really no more inexplicable than having a car accident or an orgasm? (But these too were indescribable, events of the body, all of them; why should the mind distress itself trying to find a language for them?) She has sworn she will never do that to any woman without children, engage in those passwords and exclusions. She’s old enough, she’s been put through enough years of it to find it tiresome and cruel.”
There we have an amorphous group of women retelling the apocryphal story of giving birth, one experience of living in a woman’s body prioritised over all others, creating a narrative where simple biology resides. Oh, but isn’t it a miracle?
In “Bad Teeth” we meet Csilla and Lynne, two women who have been friends for decades who, now, in old age are looking back at their experiences, through the lens of a rumour about an escapade in Lynne’s past, an affair that Csilla describes having heard about from the man involved. Lynne insists it never happened and burrows into past connections to determine the genesis of the rumour.
We see young Csilla with her “built-in” “Hungarian gloom”, see her move to the “lands of superior shopping malls and daytime-TV game shows: Csilla with her mini-skirt and her white go-go boots.
We see Lynne, too, a “strict one-piecer” (never a bikini): her experience being “married” “reproduced” and “lullabied”.
As in The Robber Bride, where Zenia is Everything, Csilla is The Star. She is also the storyteller, as it turns out, because she started and pursued the rumour herself. And isn’t that another kind of miracle. Albeit a small one, as Carol Shields might add.
“A story isn’t great because it’s true,” Csilla says. “It’s great because it’s good.”
There is something supremely satisfying about reading this pair of stories, rooted in women’s lives, written about fifty years apart.
It’s a perfect note on which to conclude my 2024 MARM reading.
What author has provided you with stories written 50 years apart? Are you still reading with MARM in mind? Or, perhaps another collision of narratives in your stack is satisfying you these days?
Margaret Atwood
“Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else.”
Fifty years apart! Good question. I’m trying to think of an author whose career lasted that long. Rodney Hall is one, but I haven’t read stories or novels of his over that range. And Thomas Keneally. Helen Garner’s career is around 50 years, with her first novel published in 1977, but she’s moved into nonfiction so that doesn’t really count. So hmm … no, I can’t think.
Meanwhile, I love the sound of those two stories – any writer who catches the details of how people think and behave, and women in particular (for me), just gets me in. I don’t need much of a story if I get that. And, I like this idea of thinking about “how narratives accumulate over the course of our lives, how we participate in rewriting them to reflect experiences that we accumulate as time passes”. Is it the memories that change or how we interpret them. I suspect it’s both – we remember, we interpret based on where we are now and somehow often then shift the memory just that little bit … and so it goes.
Keneally is a good one! And he’s written in a variety of forms, too, I think? Garner’s does look similar in that sense to Atwood’s writing (stories, novels, essays, etc.) but perhaps fewer publications (although the Wikipedia list indicates it’s incomplete so I really have little sense of that).
If you’re still interested in the stories but haven’t found time to read them, that video would work as an audio track too (and you could simply stop after the two stories are “performed”). But I know you don’t “do” the audio thing often, so that might not be useful.
Yay for short stories that seem to be having an impact! I feel like my top short story writers are Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth is a favorite), Adam Haslett (You Are Not a Stranger Here), and Xuan Juliana Wang’s short story “Vaulting the Sea” from her collection Home Remedies. Perhaps I will check out some of Atwood’s.
That’s a solid list! I have yet to read one of Adam Haslett’s collections. I’ve jotted his name down for 2025 but I’m still “tidying up” 2024’s reading log so plans don’t feel real yet.
I wanted to read more Atwood, but my Orwell project was insistently calling my name – only one month until the the end of the year, and still so many unread Orwell’s on my TBR!!
But I have enjoyed reading your MARM posts and hope to get to more of the Old Babe stories soon.
Ohhhh, I know what you mean, and the end of the reading year is always hectic for me, too, with unresolved project reading. (And my Orwell post is still lingering! I read Wigan Pier back in the summer!)
I read Bad Teeth a few days ago in the expectation that you would soon explain what it means. More than the two old women gasbagging that I took from it, for sure.
My kids grew up wishing their mother would stop describing giving birth, at least while they were within earshot. The word ‘orgasm’ in this connection still makes them squirm (and the youngest is a grandmother now).
Heheh, well I’m sure there are many ways to look at it…and gasbagging is one of those! Maybe it was really only meant as entertainment.
Understandable! Hah!
How interesting! I’ve just finished the OBITW collection but I don’t remember Giving Birth at all – I’ll get down Dancing Girls from the shelf and have a read. A perfect flip quote to end on too 🙂
I will be very curious to hear if you found them a good pair too (or if, perhaps, the recognition I felt between the stories seemed mostly to do with the stories but was, actually, more just to do with me and what I was hoping to find therein).
It’s a curious decision, I think, to place GB as the final story, but perhaps she wanted to counter the decidedly single-woman stories earlier on.