by Melissa | May 16, 2015 | Uncategorized
I want to talk about Mad Men and its Didionesque gaze. The gaze has always been there, most obviously in the series’ sidelong glances at California, where the warm golden light and desert haze renders everything hyperreal. And critics have, at times, alluded to this,...
by Melissa | Apr 22, 2015 | Uncategorized
The Ghost at the Wedding, Shirley Walker’s 2010 memoir of her mother-in-law Jessie, explores the devastating impact the First and Second World Wars had on the soldiers themselves, as well as the women left at home. She does so with deftness and subtlety, in a...
by Melissa | Aug 11, 2014 | Uncategorized
When I was seven or eight years old, sometime between reading Little Women and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I decided I wanted to be a writer. I began writing little books, culminating in the seven-chapter opus Amabel Strikes Back, which received rave reviews...
by Melissa | Jul 24, 2014 | Uncategorized
Children are always episodes in someone else’s narrative, not their own people, but brought forth into being for particular purposes. So wrote historian Carolyn Steedman in her 1986 memoir Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives,which contrasts two working...
