Our community opened up a new library this week and it’s absolutely majestic. Three stories high filled with inviting places to read, study, work, play, gather. I love living in a community that invests in libraries. When growing up in Georgia the W. C. Bradley was our primary library and it became the primary place where I did research as a journalist and author writing the story of Judge Rufe McCombs. The staff there were so helpful. They kept folders of information for me to access. They even kept a folder on me and the many columns I wrote for the Ledger-Enquirer.

Back then I would spend hours scrolling through their microfish searching through articles about the judge’s campagin against the men she was up against. To this day I rely on newspaper arcives for all sorts of research. During summer months, when we are in Oregon, Tim and I often can be found at the library. As a child in Georgia, I didn’t have a mother who took me to the library so I had to rely on the bookmobile, which I loved just as much as the W.C.

Lately, I’ve been on a reading binge. Over the last few weeks I have read Belle Burden’s Strangers: A memoir of a marriage; Gisele Pelicot’s A Hymn to Life: Shame has to Change Sides; & Marjan Kamali’s The Stationery Shop of Tehran, a historical fiction book basked on the 1953 Iranian coup d’etat. If you are in need of new books to read, I highly recommend any and all of these.

Burden’s book struck a nerve with me because I witnessed my daughter’s marriage blow up in a very similiar way to Belle’s. One of the most piercing moments in the book is when Belle recounts how during the divorce proceedings, she offered her husband 50/50 custody of their three children and he refused. He didn’t want any custody. Nothing. He claimed it was for the children’s best interest – how fking altrustic of him, right? Well it seems most of the men that Belle associated with thought that was a very generous act on behalf of her husband, not to demand any custody. What a true gent Henry P. Davis (she calls him James in the book), thinking first of his kids, right?

What a bunch of dookey. Imagine, Belle suggests, if she had been the partner/parent who said, “I don’t want any custody of the children. It’s best for them if we don’t split them up. They can see me when they want but the day to day care of the children is your sole job because I’m being such a fkn nice person.”

Would those same men say the same thing about a mother relinquishing control/responsiblity for children then?

We all know the answer. We all can see the ways in which patriarchy is embedded into the fabric of our society and how women are condemned should they make decisions that we applaud men for. Imagine had Kamala Harris been a divorced mother of five children by three different men, what all the white nationalist racists would be saying about her. She would have never been vice president much less run for president. Hell she would have never even been AG of California. She would have been deemed a welfare queen. But Trump? Yeah, well he’s the second son of God, sits to the right of Jesus in their eyes.

Belle is a beautiful writer and this book should serve as a big red flashing light for any married woman. or woman planning on marrying. Take control of your own finances. Separate bank accounts. Name on all property. Know your mate’s income. Do not turn over all the details of the household finances to another. Be responsible. Don’t abdicate your role to another.

I loved The Stationery Shop which is at the heart of it a love story & a story about the what ifs of life. If you are in search of an engrossing story, this is it. It played like a movie in my mind. The characters are people I want to sit and have coffee with.

There have been a bevy of news stories about Giselle Pelicot and the trial she endured, none of which I read at the time it was happening. I just didn’t have the bandwidth for it at the time. But her memoir is comprehensive and provides plenty of context for much of what unfolded during those proceedings without being explicit. It is horrifying to imagine being married to someone for 50 years, having built a life with them, to realize that you never really knew them at all, or ever really understood the depths of their depravity. If like me you didn’t follow this story at the time, this book is worth a read.

Each of these books is a testament to why women’s stories matter and how our lives have been devalued by a culture of instutionalized patriarchy.

What have you read lately?