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Oh boy, reading this book is depressing and unsettling. I have to read it in small-for-me bites, maybe 50 or 80 pages at a time.
Two discrete comments so far:
1)Thank all powers for Robin McKinley and Tamora Pierce and the George Perez run of Wonder Woman, the main reasons that my own period of adolescent gender dysphoria ended before puberty really got rocking and things got tough. All that Pyle Robin Hood and Bullfinch's Mythology and The Once and Future King and stuff had definitely given me a case of "if I want to be fierce and powerful I have to be a boy" which can indeed, when crossed with being bisexual, make you wonder just a bit about how to construct your gender. Poor Alice.
2)Does anyone else see a lot of parallels to Savage Beauty, the Nancy Milford biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay? The attraction to women, the struggle to reconcile artistic impulses with gender identity construction, the struggles with depression, the time period, the incredibly powerful mother figures... the husbands who have to be chosen for their ability to tolerate the mood swings and support the work and deal with the extramarital affairs. I'm sort of surprised that their paths never seem to have crossed, at least in this biography. I suppose Millay being from a not-rich New England family (and older by a bit - a decade or two?) they'd have moved in very different circles, but it still strikes me as a shame. They could have had an EXCELLENT affair.
Gratuitous third comment: I had that same Untermeyer edited poetry collection as a kid, I got it at a library discard sale.
Two discrete comments so far:
1)Thank all powers for Robin McKinley and Tamora Pierce and the George Perez run of Wonder Woman, the main reasons that my own period of adolescent gender dysphoria ended before puberty really got rocking and things got tough. All that Pyle Robin Hood and Bullfinch's Mythology and The Once and Future King and stuff had definitely given me a case of "if I want to be fierce and powerful I have to be a boy" which can indeed, when crossed with being bisexual, make you wonder just a bit about how to construct your gender. Poor Alice.
2)Does anyone else see a lot of parallels to Savage Beauty, the Nancy Milford biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay? The attraction to women, the struggle to reconcile artistic impulses with gender identity construction, the struggles with depression, the time period, the incredibly powerful mother figures... the husbands who have to be chosen for their ability to tolerate the mood swings and support the work and deal with the extramarital affairs. I'm sort of surprised that their paths never seem to have crossed, at least in this biography. I suppose Millay being from a not-rich New England family (and older by a bit - a decade or two?) they'd have moved in very different circles, but it still strikes me as a shame. They could have had an EXCELLENT affair.
Gratuitous third comment: I had that same Untermeyer edited poetry collection as a kid, I got it at a library discard sale.
