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Writing memoir is a messy business, and no one knows this better than Helen Fremont ’78.

Fremont’s book The Escape Artist serves as a sequel of sorts to her memoir After Long Silence, published in 1999. After Long Silence grapples with the secret Fremont’s parents kept from her and her sister for most of their lives: that they were Jewish Holocaust survivors. Though Fremont and her sister knew their parents had survived World War II, fleeing their Polish hometown, the daughters were raised Catholic. This false religious identity was one their parents assumed to flee Europe, and, to protect those who helped them, it was an identity they kept up until Fremont and her sister were in their 30s. Upon discovery of the truth, Fremont wrote After Long Silence, revealing the secret her parents had kept for over 50 years. “I’d lived my whole life in my parents’ fiction, governed by lies and secrets and half-truths,” writes Fremont in The Escape Artist, about After Long Silence. “I needed to write something that was my own truth.” Truth exposed; case closed.

Keep reading in Wellesley Magazine.

The post Review of The Escape Artist by Helen Fremont appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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I woke up at 3 a.m. to pee the other night. This was not unusual. I like to drink tea before bed, and I usually wake up at least once in the night to relieve myself. What was unusual was that before falling asleep, I read a story by Daisy Johnson. I dreamt of deep pools thick with eels, of lips dripping with human blood, of an albatross standing on the kitchen table. This time, when I got up to use the bathroom, I was not fully awake, so heavy pressed the dreams. My shadow seemed to move on its own; the walls of my apartment appeared to be breathing. And when I heard a rustling on the other side of the bedroom door, never did it occur to me that it was just my boyfriend, puttering around the apartment after a late bartending shift. I stared at the door certain that a pack of violent foxes was clawing at the other side. I gasped and screamed and, finally, woke myself from the dreams.

The post Review of Fen by Daisy Johnson appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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I used a prayer card from a wake as my bookmark while reading So Sad Today by Melissa Broder. It happened accidentally—I went to a memorial service for someone I cared about, and, in wanting to keep her close, slid her prayer card into the book I was carrying with me at the time, which happened to be So Sad Today. But it feels fitting.

2016 has been a bad year for people dying. A lot of people whom I love and admire have left this planet, and we are only one-third into the year. It makes me sad, and it makes my heart beat too fast at night as I think about who will go next. I try deep yoga breathing, I try counting backwards from a hundred, I try taking a swig of NyQuil, and, when none of that works, I get up and read So Sad Today. Reading about Broder’s own anxiety and depression makes me feel better and less alone. I’m writing this review in the middle of the night because I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking too much about death. That also feels fitting.

The post Review of So Sad Today by Melissa Broder appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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A friend posted a picture of me from her wedding, and all I can see is my stomach. I’m with friends, wearing goofy hats for the photo booth, having fun, but I don’t care. Something about the way my body is contorted, or how that slinky polyester is the most unforgiving, or how the waistband of my nylons cut across my middle, but there it is: the bright blue fabric rippling like thick waves over the uneven surface of my bulging gut––an oozing, distorted potato.

Wow, I think. You’re fat.

Mona Awad’s fiction debut 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is a novel in thirteen vignettes about the experience of being a woman dealing with body image issues or simply put: The experience of being a woman. At the time I saw that wedding photo of myself, there were probably thousands of women online at the same time, also looking at photos of themselves, also thinking the same thing––no matter what those women actually weigh.

The post Review of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

I wrote about my goal to read 50 books by women in 2015 for Wellesley Underground! Not only did I write about my experience, but I also some how managed to list my TOP TWELVE FAVORITE BOOKS that I read last year.

Need some reading recommendations? Check it out.

The post 2015: All Books By All Ladies, All the Time appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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Save three stray years, I have lived in Massachusetts my entire life. It’s a small state, and running into people I know is rarely a surprise. Sitting on the train in Boston, I’ll hear my name, and a former high school classmate will be four seats down. Walking through Harvard Square, I’ll pass one of my best friends on her way to dinner. Any time I meet someone from Massachusetts, I play that old game: Where did you grow up? Oh, do you know so-and-so? She’s from there too. Where did you go to high school? Oh, what about…

This phenomenon isn’t restricted to New England. Every place has its networks, no matter the size. A place can’t get much larger than Russia, and yet the world that Lyudmila Ulitskaya creates in her novel The Big Green Tent feels as intimate as Cambridge. The characters run in their own circles––the Russian intelligentsia, Moscow artists and musicians and poets, Soviet dissidents, producers of the self-published literature or samizdat, Russian ex-pats living abroad. Everyone is somehow connected, whether they know it or not.

The post Review of The Big Green Tent by Lyudmila Ulitskaya appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

And, naturally, the library has all of them. Thanks for nothing, Cambridge Public Library.

So, I’ve been reading these damn fairy books out loud now for months, and here is my review of Polly: The Party Fun Fairy:

NOPE.

The post Review of Yet Another Damn Fairy Book: Polly the Party Fun Fairy appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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I began to seriously question whether or not I want to have kids one Wednesday at 9 p.m. while having my hair checked for lice. I was sitting in a black swivel chair, wearing a leopard-print hairdresser cape, as an older woman meticulously worked through my scalp with mint-scented conditioner, baking soda, and a fine-tooth comb.

The post Sixteen Writers on the State of My Uterus appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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I used to take pride in the fact that I’m not a big crier.

That I consider suppressing emotions a sign of strength is a problem, one that I am––don’t worry––currently working to resolve with my therapist. This problem of stifling emotions is actually a lot bigger than my own psyche; it’s a problem a lot of women have, and a direct product of the oppressive patriarchy. Women are taught from a young age that they are, supposedly, more emotional than men, and, therefore, to be emotional (or “hysterical,” to use that notorious word) is a woman’s quality. Young women, looking around, quickly assess that the world is (still) dominated by men, and to get ahead, clearly being a woman and acting like a woman isn’t going to get them anywhere any time soon, so having any traditionally female qualities––like being emotional––is a bad thing. Someone once called me an Ice Queen, and I took it as a compliment. I used to brag that while my ex-boyfriend cried as we watched the end of The Notebook, I stayed dry-eyed. Push those feelings down. This is how you will excel.

Supposedly.

In reality, this technique isn’t working at all. If it did work, we would have lots of women presidents by now, right? Instead, acknowledging that you have any feelings at all causes women to feel crazy, volatile, and full of hate for themselves. Not to mention that this patriarchal construction is damaging to men too––remember, guys, it’s all right to cry. Having a full range of emotions is part of the human experience.

That’s why I was happy that I cried tonight while watching She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.

The film is a documentary, directed by Mary Dore, about the beginning of the modern women’s liberation movement from 1966 to 1971. The documentary does an incredible job of showing the many elements of the movement, the different organizations, the range of issues, and clashing of ideologies, but how, if we are going to make a change in the world, we need to be in this together. There is no one universal female experience, and so, to be a true feminist, you need to fight not only sexism, but also racism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia. My friend Ali Barthwell said it well on Facebook: “[She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry] does a great job of showing intersectionality and diversity within the women’s lib movement and a great history of the ordinary women who rose to the task of fighting for our freedom. It’s powerful and fun and accessible and shocking. If you’re a man who considers himself a feminist, you have to see this movie to know what women went through and are still going through.”

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry gave me chills and lit a fire in my chest. I realized, watching the film, just how much about the women’s liberation movement I did not know, and how much I still have to learn. All the books that I took for granted––eh, I don’t have to read The Feminist Mystique, we’re past that wave of feminism, right?––and all the women’s studies classes at Wellesley I never took because I thought, being at Wellesley is enough of a women’s studies class in itself, right? No. To be a feminist, an activist, is to learn and work, and to never stop. Because, as they say in the film, lose vigilance for one minute, and they’ll pull the carpet out from under you. Seeing all the things that the women of the late 1960s fought for, and how horribly we have regressed as a nation––the fact that, very quickly, abortion could again become illegal, over forty years after Roe vs. Wade––has energized me.

Ellen Willis’s daughter, Nona Willis-Aronowitz, says towards the end of the film, “Though my mother was an early pro-sex feminist, I didn’t really know what feminism meant to me, to our generation.” I’ve known I was a feminist for a long time, but it took me until fairly recently to realize what that really meant, and for all that the women before me had fought, and all the things for which we have to keep fighting. I feel a warm energy under my collarbone.

I walked out of the Coolidge Corner Theatre and into the Brookline Booksmith to buy a copy of The Feminine Mystique. So often in my life I have hidden behind sarcasm and humor. They work as a protective barrier from letting out real feelings, because, for such a long time, I knew that to be genuine is not to be cool. To be sincere, to be painfully earnest and heartfelt, is dorky, pathetic, lame. To be emotionally open, to wear your heart on your sleeve, is dangerous. You don’t want to get too invested in anything, because that will make you vulnerable. But She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry inspired me to be a better feminist, a better activist, and a better human being. I am writing this sincerely, with my heart open and ready. Feminists of the world unite. Let’s take on the universe.

So this is what my review comes down to––five words:

GO SEE IT RIGHT NOW.

I am listening to Bikini Kill on full volume while writing this.

The post Tonight I Saw She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry and It Made Me Cry appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

Okay, let’s get this over with.

Enter: Barbie of Swan Lake. Let’s start by setting aside the fact that I feel pretty weird about these Barbie books in the first place. Barbie is bad enough in real life with her high-heel-shaped feet and totally impossible proportions and the whitest and blondest of white people features, but does she really have to invade books too? Why do we have to suffer through commercial reinterpretations of classic fairy tales featuring Barbie as the protagonist? Aren’t fairy tales already misogynistic/racist/classist/heteronormative/terrible enough without having everyone’s favorite sex-doll-turned-toy get in the mix?

In general, I try to keep an open mind when I read to the Babysitting Charge. (Please note here that one thing I love about kids is their total inability to have any sense of “taste” when it comes to books––whatever that means. A “trashy” Barbie fairy tale is just as satisfying to them as a “classic” masterpiece by Roald Dahl, and, at the end of the day, if a story gets a kid into reading, as the great Donalyn Miller encourages, who cares what they read?) Besides, I love the story of Swan Lake. As a Russian Language & Literature major in college, I spent a year living in St. Petersburg, which included several viewings of the Swan Lake ballet at the famous Mariinsky Theatre. Tchaikovsky is my boy.

Something feels wrong here.

Then I turned to the first page. “Once upon a time, there was a beautiful girl named Odette. She was sweet and kind…” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then I blinked.

Wait, hold on.

Certain I was hallucinating, I turned to the second page.

Yes. That is a unicorn.

Nope. Still there. Yes, you are seeing exactly what you think you are seeing––a giant purple unicorn. I’m all for artistic license or whatever, and I know there have been a fair number of adaptations of the classic Swan Lake tale, but last time I checked, none involved a unicorn. “She watched as the unicorn tapped its glowing horn on a rock near a waterfall.”

And then my head exploded.

I read on in disbelief––about an enchanted crystal and some Magic Fairy Queen and a Book of Forest Lore and Odette’s internal struggle to be brave. I quickly realized that the only thing Barbie of Swan Lake has in common with the original is the names: Odette, Odile, and Rothbart. The end. Yeah there is a curse and Odette gets turned into a swan, but that was about it.

Who is this fairy lady?

Is that a troll?!?

Yes, definitely a troll.

I FEEL LIKE I AM TAKING CRAZY PILLS HERE

By far the highlight of the story was that apparently the illustrator had used Cyndi Lauper for the model of Odile.

That Odile, what a B.

Cyndi, is that you???

When the troll appeared, I actually started chuckling to myself, and the Babysitting Charge looked at me like I had lost my mind. “A wise unicorn told me that I was braver than I thought,” says Odette at the end of the story, a line that I choked out through suppressed laughter.

Thank GOD.

I had never been happier to reach the end of a children’s story before. I quickly closed the book and thought about where I could hide it so I would never have to read it out loud again. Meanwhile, the Babysitting Charge sighed happily.

“I love that story,” she said dreamily.

“Oh…” I replied. “I’m so…. glad…”

“And guess what?”

“What?”

“This weekend I am going to get to see Swan Lake the ballet with my mom! I can’t wait for the unicorn. She’s my favorite part.”

The poor kid. She is going to be so disappointed.

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