193. Kim and Amy Catch Their Book Breath

KIM ASKEW: Hey, everyone. Welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co host, Amy Helmes.

AMY HELMES: We're actually dropping in today for just a quick episode. We've got a few great Lost Ladies lined up in the coming weeks, but due to the demands of scheduling those interviews, and also wanting to make sure we air our episodes to time with specific publication dates of the books we're featuring, we ended up with a rare hole in our schedule for this week.

KIM: Yeah. Somehow we're almost halfway through the year. So consider this the episode where Amy and I pause doubled over with our hands on our knees to catch our podcasting breath.

AMY: I love how we have to work in a jogging reference. As if we actually do that.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: Can you even get shin splints from reading too much?

KIM: I have no idea. I've never had one. I don't know.

AMY: Like, I don't even know that concept.

KIM: I don't even know what that is. Yeah, exactly. Um, but one thing we know is that there can never be enough books. And it's funny because people always ask you and I, Amy, how we managed to find time to read all the books we cover on this show. The funny thing is we actually read a lot more books than the ones we feature on the podcast. So yeah, we're reading all the time.

AMY: So today we thought we'd have a little quick-hits update for you guys on some of the other books we've been reading on the side, not for the podcast. You'll definitely get some more Lost Lady recommendations in this episode, so do stick around for that. But before we dive into it, Kim, I have a little new business venture idea for us.

KIM: Are you sure you want to tell me? Because I might make us do it. 

AMY: Oh, my God. That's right. you're the "let's go" lady.

KIM: All right. Well, let's hear it. I'm sure it'll be good. 

AMY: So remember about a month ago, we went to see a one man production of Hamlet?

KIM: I do remember that. Yes. 

AMY: It was amazing. David Melville, he is from the Independent Shakespeare company here in L.A…

KIM: We love him. 

AMY: He's so good. He did a somewhat abridged, but not very abridged, version of Hamlet, and he literally took every single role.

KIM: We were enthralled the entire time. 

AMY: Well, we were, and we weren't, because the woman sitting to my left, you were on my right, the woman sitting to my left felt the need, every 30 seconds throughout this performance… I don't want to be a hater, but every 30 seconds or so I would hear a “Hmm.” “To be or not to be. That is the question…” “Hmm.”

KIM: Yeah. It's like “thinking in progress over here.” 

AMY: Yeah, it was annoying me. Have you ever heard of “silent disco” or “silent dance party?”

KIM: Yes.

AMY: Okay, so in a silent disco, everybody gets headphones and they get to hear the music, but they don't hear anything else.

KIM: Mm-hmm. The sound cancels everything else out. 

AMY: I think this is the solution to do Silent Shakespeare . 

KIM: I love it. Ooh, that could work for movies too, cause people annoy me in the movie theater too. I like this business idea. Some of you will remember this, but I think the timing is perfect to dust off our list of “Five Things you Can Always Expect at any Shakespeare in the Park Performance,” it’s totally related to this conversation.

AMY: Yeah, I mean, summer's basically staring us in the face, and we're about to be venturing back into these outdoor performances. So yeah.

KIM: Be prepared, folks. 

AMY: Our longtime listeners will probably remember this. It might be new to a few though. Here it goes. 

[audio plays/ends]

KIM: Oh my gosh. Classic. And it still holds true. 

AMY: Listeners, if you have anything that you would like to add to that conversation, give us a text. You can now text us with feedback.

KIM: Oh, no, I'm scared.

AMY: What hath we wrought? No, it's a new feature offered by our podcasting platform, and we thought it would be fun to try it out. So if you want to message us, all you have to do is go to the link that's in our show notes. So basically that homepage, wherever you listen to the podcast, there should be a link there that will just take you to how to text us. And we're going to try to start asking a question at the end of each episode that might prompt you to reach out or comment. And of course, you can always join us on our Facebook page too.

KIM: Oh my gosh, I love this texting idea! This is fun. I can't wait. Please text us! Let us know you're out there. We really love to hear from you. Don't hesitate. If you're thinking of texting, do it.

AMY: You're not bugging us. You're actually making our day. We have the nicest listeners on the planet also. We got a review, Kim, from someone with the handle “Paris Bookseller.” I mean, come on, I'm dying already from that. I'm imagining a modern day Sylvia Beach listening to our show. But anyway, she (or he, I don't know which) writes: “I've been a bookseller for years and owned a bookshop in Paris. With each episode of Lost Ladies, I learned something new and fascinating. Their guests are always top notch.Thanks to them, my book knowledge and collection are expanding.”

KIM: Oh my gosh. That gives me all the feels. Our guests are so great.

AMY: Yeah, she's right, totally. And then one more, I'll share just an email from one of our subscribers named Simon.

KIM: Our Patreon subscribers are superheroes. Thank you.

AMY: Yes, we love them. Here's what he had to say when I reached out to thank him for subscribing. He said: “I came back to fiction only a few years ago after years of non fiction only. I'd been a big genre fan before that and had got very bored with it. My wife nudged me back to more mainstream fiction and then challenged me on why I hadn't read any women authors. I dipped a toe in and haven't looked back. I read almost exclusively women authors now and it has been a total joy. It's given me such insight and empathy. I love that you've done Monica Dickens and Stella Gibbons episodes. Would love one day to hear your thoughts on Margery Sharp, particularly Cluny Brown, which is one of my absolute top reads.”

KIM: Done. We are absolutely adding Cluny Brown to our list, Simon. Thank you for the recommendation. And I loved that message. It's just wonderful.

AMY: And way to tak your wife's challenge and run with it. 

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: Okay. So now back as promised, we mentioned at the top of the show, wanting to fill listeners in on some of the other books we've been reading. So, Kim, we've discussed a little bit. You know, off air… 

KIM: Yeah. Exactly. Um, so I'm going to say up front. These are all New York Review Books, because Eric got me a subscription for my birthday last year. And every single month I received something amazing. So these are just three recent ones that I absolutely loved. Um, I've been raving about, um, A Chance Meeting: American Encounters by Rachel Cohen. This initially came out in 2004, but they've re-released it this year. and what it is, it's basically fictional accounts of real world meetings between historical figures in the art and the art. Literary world. So, like Mark Twain, Henry and William James, Sarah Orne Jewett, um, Willa Cather, Carl Van Vechten, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, but it's all woven together. And the cool thing that she does is basically she takes the things that these amazing, brilliant people were thinking and weaves it through her fictionalized version of their actual real life meeting. It's like a perfect combination of fiction and nonfiction for me. I absolutely loved the entire book. I learned a little bit more about some figures. I didn't know as much about, um, and it also made me want to read Sarah Orne Jewett. I can't remember. I think something, Juniper Tree or “tree” something. Oh, the Pine Trees. Yeah. I'm confusing it … juniper trees is another author's book, but yeah, it's something about trees. [ed: The Country of the Pointed Firs.] Um, everyone raved about that book at the time and it makes me want to read that for sure.

AMY: That book is on our database, I remember.

KIM: Yeah. Hopefully I'm going to read her anyway, but so maybe we can move her up on our list anyway. Um, the second book I want to talk about is not, by a lost lady, but, it is A Strange and Sublime Address by Amit Chaudhuri and it's so wonderful, Amy. It's fiction. It's a story about a young boy who goes from where he lives in Bombay to his mom's family's house in Calcutta. And it's just the day-to-day life. And in the beginning I kept waiting for something kind of awful to happen, you know, that would drive the plot. It doesn't. Um, I don't think it's a spoiler alert to say this is just a wonderful slice of life, a memory of a child, and it's just transcendent. It's wonderful. And then my third book that I just finished last night is Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner. We just did an episode on her this year. It's Episode 158, if you want to go back and give that one a listen, if you haven't heard it, on the novel Lolly Willowes. This one is a historical novel. It's set during the French Revolution of 1848. 

AMY: Ah, Les Mis! 

KIM: Yes, I was gonna say. So, it starts out in England, and I'd say the first part is very almost Henry James in some ways because there's this aristocrat, Sophia. She's a heroine, um, it's very psychological, I would say, that's what makes me think of it as Henry James-esque, like, just trying to figure out what she thinks, what she's doing, why she's reacting to things the way she is. But then she heads over to Paris because she has a philandering husband there. And then that's when it turns into Les Mis slash A Tale of Two Cities, and so that's a whole other section, like living in Paris and, you know, lots of adventures happened to her there. And I just thought this was a wonderful historical novel. I absolutely loved it. And I texted you as I just started getting into it, I'm like, this book is amazing. So you would love it, I think. 

AMY: Not at all like Lolly Willowes.

KIM: No, totally different.

AMY: Um, and this is also making me think because we have an upcoming book that we're going to be doing an episode on that is also sort of about the years after the 1848 revolution, but in Germany. That's coming up in early July. So I'm into that 1848 revolution all over Europe. 

KIM: Oh, that's perfect. So yeah, you should read this. It's very interesting. 

AMY: I remember when Les Mis first came out, I thought it was about like the French Revolution with Marie Antoinette. I didn't even put together that there was another one.

KIM: Totally. I think a lot of people do that, and that's why I mentioned the year, because it's a huge time and a lot of stuff happened in that. Speaking of the original French Revolution, when I was in France for three weeks, one time I brought Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety with me, which is set during that initial French Revolution, and it's really amazing. Have you read that one?

AMY: No, I've only ever read her Henry VIII, like the Tudor stuff.

KIM: Yeah. It's very different, I would say, than Wolf Hall, I guess, but I loved it. Yeah. She's so amazing. 

Anyway, what about you? 

What have you been reading? 

AMY: So you mentioned Sylvia Townsend Warner, diving into somebody we've already done an episode on. I just recently did the same. Well, first of all, a little backstory here. I decided, and we've talked about this, Kim, I want to not be doing stuff on my phone that's making me feel gross. I don't like getting my news that way anymore. And I'm trying to limit social media.So I need something else for when I'm going to pick up the phone. So I put Kindle on there. Um, even though it's like a small way to read it. So I was looking for another Rosamond Lehmann title.

KIM: Oooh, we did Dusty Answer. I loved that book!

AMY: Yeah. And I've been wanting to check out some of the other titles and I found The Weather in the Streets. So I'm only about 10 percent of the way through that. But It almost reminds me a little bit of that Angela Milne book One Year's Time. 

KIM: One Year's Time. Yeah, okay. 

AMY: She's on the train going home and across the seat from her she realizes it's the brother of her best friend growing up, and so they kind of reconnect and they're having on the train this very flirty kind of conversation. The dialogue reminded me a little bit of One Year's Time. I don't know where it's going. I think it's going to get more messy and complicated because he's married. But that's my little, like, have my phone and I have 15 minutes here and there. 

KIM: Yeah. By the way, I have to say that you inspired me ever since we talked about that. I've been doing the limit too. And it's just, it's making a huge difference. So I'm so glad that you brought that up. It's been great for me too. 

AMY: Okay, I've also this spring, I've read a couple of books by Sigrid Nunez, um, The Vulnerables, which is her COVID book. about being in lockdown. She wound up getting asked to pet-sit a parrot in New York City, and then she kind of got stuck with this bird a little bit because it's like the owners couldn't get back. It's interesting and funny. But then I also read her book, I think it's from 1998, it's a very short little book called Mitz. And it's about Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf's pet marmoset who was named Mitz. And, um, if you are a Patreon member and you listened to last week's episode, then you will know that Mitz features into this.

KIM: I have to say my dad's brother and his wife before I was born, and I think maybe this was back in the 60s or something, they had a pet monkey and I guess, you know, it was kind of a thing. He had been in the Navy and so, I don't know, but anyway…

AMY: It was a thing! I call them like the golden doodles of a century ago. Everybody had one. Um, I also finished the new biography of Carson McCullers by Mary V. Dearborn. Very interesting book. Carson sounds like quite a handful. I don't know if I could deal with her for more than like 20 minutes at a time. Um, but I am going to be talking about her in an upcoming bonus episode as well for Patreon, so look out for that. Another book that I'm reading slowly is by a Swedish lost lady of lit who happens to be the first woman to ever win a Nobel Prize in literature. That was 1909. The author is Selma Lagerlof, and the book, which was written in 1891, is called The Saga of Gosta Berling.

KIM: Wait, are we going to do an episode on this?

AMY: Maybe. So I want to give a shout out to one of our listeners, Carolyn Poselthwaite, for recommending this to me. And I kind of want to do an upcoming episode just because my mother in law, Pooky, is of Swedish descent, so I know she would…

KIM: Hi, Pooky!

AMY: Yes, I know she's listening. She would be fascinated by a Swedish author. But also, I know a few people here from Sweden, like, born in Sweden. And they were both like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody reads that in school.”

KIM: So it's not lost in Sweden. It's only lost here.

AMY: No, it's not lost at all. It's taught in schools. But here's what's funny. It starts off with a priest who is a raging alcoholic.

KIM: Okay. Oh!

AMY: And drinking too much. I don't know if he's a clergyman of some sort. So the people in his community get him, ousted from their community and he goes on to become a cavalier, with a group of other, uh, men at the estate of this very wealthy woman. The woman's kind of a badass, but these men are conspiring. They make a pact with the devil to sort of take her down. It just seems like a very funny topic for children to be reading about. It's kind of allegorical.

KIM: Uh-huh. I feel like if we do an episode, we need a guest of Swedish descent who read it in school so we can get that insight. 

AMY: It was made into a movie starring Greta Garbo i, I haven't gotten far enough in to really get to the story yet, but, um, we'll see. I'm gonna throw out a few lost ladies here that I'm reading, and I kinda want feedback from listeners, like, what do you guys want to hear about? So that leads to my next book, which I read earlier this year, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. Written in 1928. The only thing I knew about this going into it was it was one of the first quote unquote “lesbian” novels because the main character is you know coming to terms with the fact that she's attracted to women, and what does that mean and struggling with it. And it was shocking at the time, obviously. I don't think the word gay is even used. The main character, Stephen Gordon (they named her Stephen because they thought she was going to be a boy) but she calls herself an invert, which would have been the term at the time. It's such a good book, Kim! You will love it so much. She's an amazing character. It's so poignant, because of all the conflicting emotions she's going through. Her mom is awful, but her father is perhaps the greatest father I've ever read in a book. I mean, just, he's my favorite father I've ever read in a piece of literature. Yeah, please read it and then let me know if we can do it for an episode because I just loved it so much and also I listened to the audio book. So sometimes when you get a really good reader, it just makes all the difference. And the woman reading this one just was fabulous. So, um, Then the last one I'll mention is The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen. So this trilogy has always daunted me because you hear trilogy and you're like, “I don't have time for this.”

KIM: It’s a big commitment.

AMY: Yeah. It's not though. 

KIM: Mm hmm. 

AMY: The trilogy is about the size of one novel.

KIM: I've been wanting to read this actually, for a long time. I need to do this.

AMY: The three books are divided into titles called Childhood, Youth, and Dependency. And it's set like right in the build up to World War Two and it's about her wanting to become a writer and just life and you know all the stuff she's going through. And then Dependency, though, that third book, is crazy because she delves into her drug dependency, and it's probably the most grueling portrayal of drug addiction that I've ever read. Like Trainspotting-ly intense. 

KIM: Have you read the Patrick Melrose novels?

AMY: I read some of those and it's, it's that, like, yikes. But this is, I mean, her life. It's based on her life. And Ditlevsen did eventually take her own life because she just couldn't beat this battle. But, um, yeah, not as long as you might expect. So don't be daunted by The Copenhagen Trilogy. So if any of these have piqued your interest and you want us to focus a full episode on them, please let us know. And if you want to give us any recommendations for Lost Ladies or books that you love, reach out to us. We keep a database for future episodes. So when we hear titles that you guys throw out, we are writing them down. 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. We're keeping track of them. Yep. And we could even maybe do a poll or something. when this episode goes live. Um, yeah. Anyway, there's never enough time to read all the books we want to read. There's too many great women writers. But that's all for today's catch up episode. We're going to be back in two more weeks with another full episode. And in this one, we'll be discussing a famous female screenwriter who is often preferred to remain in the shadows. We're talking about the elusive comic genius, Elaine May.

AMY: Yes, super interesting episode and a little bit of a departure for us since she is more in the movie arena. Next week I'll also be offering up another bonus episode to our Patreon members. And remember, you can get two extra episodes each month. It breaks down to just $3 an episode. I'm thinking, Kim, that I would like to discuss next week something we learned recently from Anne Boyd Rioux, our past guest, about Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal sculpture. There's a debate over whether a woman actually deserves credit for that piece. So I'm going to be diving into that. And I also will be talking about Judy Chicago's art installation, The Dinner Party.

KIM: Ooh, I can't wait to listen. Thanks for tuning in everyone. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.

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