Leah McFall: The hidden benefits of a book club
Book clubs just ask that you show up and talk. How often are mid-life and senior women encouraged to say what we think?
OPINION: Are you in a book club? You are? Oh, you lucky thing! I pine to be in a book club.
And not because of the books, because it doesn't matter where you live or who belongs, whether you all take it turns to contribute or if it's a merry free-for-all over too much Prosecco. Your club's book of the month will always be Commonwealth by Anne Patchett, and it will be next month's book as well.
That's because the point of your club isn't to discuss the book and certainly it isn't to finish it. The point is to be free to say the unsayable and reveal your actual, god-awful self to other people for two hours a month while your husband loads the dishwasher and defrosts the lamb medallions.
The book club is simply a front for a secretive emotional-laundering operation. This is why I long to join a book club.
READ MORE:
* Leah McFall: 24 hours in Auckland, a whirlwind of wonderment
* Leah McFall: For the Gen-Xers who never grew up
* Leah McFall: The local pool, a human soup
If book clubs kept minutes, this month's agenda would look something like this:
Housework, expletive redacted
Foreplay, what happened to?
Boot camp, Pilates or barre class, pain therein
Clarke Gayford, perfection of
Harvey Weinstein
Bloody Anne Patchett
(Can I first tell the group that I will never actually read Commonwealth? This is because a leading character is called Franny. "Franny" is such an annoying diminution of an adult woman's name that I refuse to persist to the end. Also, who brought the cranberry-chocolate brownies, because I need to know if they contain gluten?)
In the 1970s, book clubs were called consciousness-raising groups. Run by second-wave feminists, they aimed to harness the unfocused disaffection of suburban women and stir in them a useful, change-making, righteous sense of injustice.
These groups did this by, among other things, complaining about housework and sex. Their book of the month, every month, was Germaine Greer's Female Eunuch. They didn't exactly bake brownies for these meetings. Instead they might pass around somebody's hand-mirror so they could each examine their own gynaecology, "taking back" the realm of the vagina from the medical establishment.
Their husbands were probably at home defrosting the lamb medallions but, after sessions like this, there was no guarantee these women would ever return home to cook them. As Nora Ephron wrote in 1973, consciousness-raising often became group therapy: "…one of the women in the group was told by three members that her marriage sounded lousy. And I don't want to pretend I had nothing to do with that – I was one of the three women who told her".
Today's book clubs are tamer versions of this. They serve as many things – a reason to leave the house once a month and remind your children that you have an intellectual life that doesn't include them. A chance to experience the company of adults to whom you are not married, and who have never seen you irritated, angry, or in tears. A chance to compare notes with women living lives very much like yours but who are usually too busy to stop and talk, or to listen to you.
I guess book clubs imply that their members are happy with the status quo. They don't have the fizz or pop of those revolutionary meetings of the 1970s. They don't appear to foment any change; they simply make the repetitive knitting pattern of our lives more tolerable. In the drudgery of our days' taking care of other people, here comes one night a month that's just ours.
Still, it's potentially volatile, this Prosecco-and-sugar, women-and-art mash-up, isn't it? It's a bit boho and Bloomsbury Group, only nobody is going to husband-swap or paint pictures the walls.
Most all-female activities (like spin class, or shopping, or taking your daughters to ballet lessons) have some kind of awful goal in mind (a harder body, a stylish look, or a precocious child). Often these goals are imposed on us (to keep trim, stay young, or to win at mothering). Book clubs just ask that you show up and talk. How often are mid-life and senior women encouraged to say what we think?
Here's what I think. I liked Oprah's Book Club. I used read exclusively from her book list, anointed as it was by her approval. And when I read Open House by Elizabeth Berg – a daggy paperback, the kind you find on an airport bookstand – I knew I might never read another novel but would still die happy.
In it, a 40-ish woman is dumped by her husband. She revenge-shops at Tiffany's with his credit card before getting a grip, taking in lodgers and temping at a variety of unskilled jobs. She shops, cooks, has Christmas alone. She finds friends. Then it ends.
Nothing happens, but everything is new. I can't tell you how exhilarating it is. Want to borrow? Bring it back next month.
- Sunday Magazine
https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/99127088/leah-mcfall-the-hidden-benefits-of-a-book-club
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