Hello, it’s been a while since I was last able to sit down and write. I finished Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo more than a month ago. It was one of those books that I read carefully, slowly, because I didn’t want it to end.
This book blew my mind. I loved it so much, I hope I have the time to read it again one day. More than a novel, I think it’s a work of art.
If you decide to read it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Have a great rest of your summer!
mariana
Why did I read this book?
I don’t remember how I came across this book, but I probably saw it featured somewhere. It has received a lot of attention because it’s brilliant, and also because it has won many awards.
What is the book about?
Twelve different voices: Girl, Woman, Other brings to life the stories of 12 different characters, “mostly women, black and British”. These characters are interconnected in a way that we can appreciate the impact of history and personal decisions across generations. I found each story more engaging than the next, and I thoroughly enjoyed the messages the author tried to get across through each one of the characters.
Contemporary issues: Where to even begin? This book covers so much: immigration, identity, politics, feminism, patriarchy, success, relationships, sexuality, history, privilege, economic stratification, survival, the meaning of being British. All these topics and more, are cleverly and elegantly woven into the characters’ condensed life stories.
Intersectionality: Wikipedia defines Intersectionality as a “theoretical framework for understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities (e.g., gender, sex, race, class, sexuality, religion, disability, physical appearance, height, etc.) combine to create unique modes of discrimination and privilege.” Through the stories of each character, the reader can appreciate the many dimensions that directly affect how we experience life.
“she listened as they debated what it meant to be a black woman
what it meant to be a feminist when white feminist organizations made them feel unwelcome
how it felt when people called them nigger, or racist thugs beat them up
what it was like when white men opened doors or gave up their seats on public transport for white women (which was sexist), but not for them (which was racist)”
― Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other
Why should you read it?
Get to know an amazing author: “British writer Bernardine Evaristo is the award-winning author of eight books and numerous other published and produced works that span the genres of novels, poetry, verse fiction, short fiction, essays, literary criticism, and radio and theatre drama. Her writing and projects are based around her interest in the African diaspora.” In an interview with The Guardian, she mentioned that she wanted her book to focus on people who are often ‘othered’: “I wanted to put presence into absence. I was very frustrated that black British women weren’t visible in literature. I whittled it down to 12 characters – I wanted them to span from a teenager to someone in their 90s, and see their trajectory from birth, though not linear. There are many ways in which otherness can be interpreted in the novel – the women are othered in so many ways and sometimes by each other. I wanted it to be identified as a novel about women as well.”
A beautiful and clever read: I found Evaristo’s writing style sensitive, human, honest. I found myself underlining so many sentences that I thought were simply beautiful. The prose style and syntax are not conventional, as she doesn’t use punctuation or capital letters, this might be difficult for some readers.
Read about contemporary issues through the lens of the past: I found this book very zeitgeisty, full of current topics to reflect on. The author leverages the past to explain the tones of the present, gently guiding the reader through a journey across generations.
“ageing is nothing to be ashamed of
especially when the entire human race is in it together
although sometimes it seems that she alone among her friends wants to celebrate getting older
because it’s such a privilege to not die prematurely, she tells them as the night draws in around her kitchen table in her cosy terraced house in Brixton”
― Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other
Links to buy the book
Always try to support your local bookshop instead of using Amazon :-) If you’d like me to add any bookshops to the list, let me know.
UK
Spain
Mexico
Italy
US
//As an Amazon Associate I earn a commission from qualifying purchases via the above links.//
Favourite quotes
//The purpose of this section is to share some of my favourite book bits, so you can come back to them when you finish a book, if you wish to do so. I’ve put in bold my favourite ones, in case you want to read a few (or all) ahead of the book.//
“they believed in protest that was public, disruptive and downright annoying to those at the other end of it.”
“ageing is nothing to be ashamed of
especially when the entire human race is in it together
although sometimes it seems that she alone among her friends wants to celebrate getting older
because it’s such a privilege to not die prematurely, she tells them as the night draws in around her kitchen table in her cosy terraced house in Brixton”
“she headed for London where people proudly proclaimed their outsider identities on badges”
“look at it this way, Amma, she says, your father was born male in Ghana in the 1920s whereas you were born female in London in the 1960s
and your point is?
you really can’t expect him to ‘get you’, as you put it
I let her know she’s an apologist for the patriarchy and complicit in a system that oppresses all women
she says human beings are complex
I tell her not to patronize me”
“Amma experienced commitment to one person as imprisonment, she hadn’t left home for a life of freedom and adventure to end up chained to another person’s desires.”
“she misses the people they used to be, when they were all discovering themselves with no idea how much they might change in the years to come”
“it must have been so traumatic, to lose his home, his family, his friends, his culture, his first language, and to come to a country that didn’t want him”
“she didn’t tell them she’d taken her father for granted and carried her blinkered, self-righteous perspective of him from childhood through his death, when in fact he’d done nothing wrong except failt to live up to her feminist expectatitons of him”
“who needs enemies when your life partner undermines you on a regular basis?”
“unfortunately, once seen, never unseen and it was a lesson for her at a young age that you never know people until you’ve been through their drawers
and computer history”
“privilege is about context and circumstance”
“oh to be one of the privileged of this world who take it for granted that it’s their right to surf the globe unhindered, unsuspected, respected”
“because the purpose of life was to journey towards its conclusion, otherwise it wasn’t life”
“there is someone for everyone in this world”
“people have to share everything they do these days, from meals, to nights out, to selfies of themselves half naked in the mirror
the borders between public and private are dissolving”
“one thing she’s learnt is that falling hopelessly, helplessly in love is actually a highly selective process”
“because we immigrants are much cleverer at it than you, we refuse to pay ridiculous amounts for spices simply because they are in pretty little glass jars with ‘a scattering of cardamom pods’ or ‘fine strands of saffron’ on the label”
“when your own mother pretends you don’t exist, it is like you’re dead”
“how did this happen? two people meeting by chance and feeling as if they had known each other for ever”
“with Augustine in her life, Bummi did not feel so alone
they were two halves of a circle moving towards completion”
“Bummi complained that people viewed her through what she did (a cleaner) and not what she was (an educated woman)”
“just as she did not know that when she strode on to the graduation podium in front of hundreds of people to receive her ribboned scroll, and shake hands with the Chancellor of the University, that her first class degree from a Third World country would mean nothing in her new country”
“do not be distant, authoritarian and uncommunicative, my son, be close to your daughter when young and you will remain so when she is older”
“she decided there was no great spiritual being watching over her, protecting her and the people she loved”
“the space once occupied by God was now hollow, and with no god to promise everlasting salvation, it hit her hard how much she was on her own”
“Bummi never understood why English women did not show off the outline of their fulsomeness, the more fulsome the better, so long as it was done with decorum
in her culture a substantial woman was a desirable one”
“Mummy said children who did well in life had parents who took them to museums, and you don’t need to be rich to do that”
“an enemy of the nation on account of his skin colour
to be stopped and frisked by the cops, which began when he was twelve and looked fifteen, terrified when these grown men manhandled him in the street in front of everyone, tried hard not to cry, sometimes did”
“she’d found the husband she’d wanted when very young, sparing herself years of wondering if she’d ever find Mr Right”
“every mother wants their child to have a best friend”
“Dora said there was no such thing as objective truth and if you think something’s good because it speaks to you
it is”
“very small children don’t care about skin colour, until they’re brainwashed by their parents”
“it was the defining aspect of Megan’s early childhood, she didn’t actually have to do or say anything except be cute — an end in itself”
“except it felt wrong, even at a young age, something in her realized that her prettiness was supposed to make her compliant, and when she wasn’t, when she rebelled, she was letting down all those invested in her being adorable”
“Megan was part Ethiopian, part African-American, part Malawian, and part English.
which felt weird when you broke it down like that because essentially she was just a complete human being”
“then her body started to show womanly curves and it didn’t feel right, it wasn’t what she felt herself to be
so much that she hated catching herself in mirrors, hated the breasts that appeared without her permission
two amphibian mounds taunted her with their nipple eyes”
“GG reassured her there was something wrong with a friendship based on having the right haircut”
“Rex said her tempestuous feelings as a teenager wouldn’t last, was she really sure she wanted to create a tattoo that would?”
“I’m going to hit the next person who confuses transsexual with transgender, I swear! people won’t tolerate ignorance on here, love, transgender people are only transsexual when they medically transition, okay?”
“...of course feminism isn’t about man-hating! it’s about women's liberation, equal rights and freedom from limiting expectations, you need to think for yourself instead of parroting the patriarchy, time to grow up, Megan!”
“I just want to be myself, Bibi
wow, talk about ambitions, don’t you want to change the world?
I wanna change my world first, Bibi, one step at a time”
“Megan already knew it was time to grow up, the whole point of leaving home was to find out where she began and her parents ended”
“Bibi replied that dreaming wasn’t naïve but essential for survival, dreaming was the equivalent of hoping on a large scale”
“...gender is one of the biggest lies of our civilization
It’s to keep men and women in their place, she shouted out to the landscape, as if evangelizing from a pulpit”
“what matters most to me, is that I know how I feel, and the rest of the world might catch up one day, even if it’ll be a quiet revolution over longer than my lifetime, if it happens at all”
“Londoners think they’re the centre of the bloody universe, ignore the rest of the country and keep up their relentlessly unfunny jokes aimed at the peasants who live ooop North, eat fried Mars bars for breakfast, get so hammered at weekends they end up pissing their pants in the gutter, and are generally inter-generational, unemployed scroungers”
“history and critical context are at risk of being lost in favour of people who only how to write in attention-seeking soundbites”
“she needed to know that being trans wan’t about playacting an identity on a whim, it's about becoming your true self in spite of society’s pressures to be otherwise, most people on the trans spectrum felt different from childhood, they said, trying not to sound too harsh as the audience filed slowly out of the room...”
“instead of writing plays about black women which will never have popular appeal, simply because the majority of the majority sees the majority of Les Négresses as separate to themselves, an embodiment of Otherness”
“so many deaths ruined any sense of nostalgia, sadly, remembering the past also meant
remembering the
dead”
“he bemoans the fact that black people in Britain are still defined by their colour in the absence of other workable options”
“white people are only required to represent themselves, not an entire race”
“they pick up as comfortably as the time before, this is the real meaning of a friendship that lasts a lifetime”
“I’m not sure I want to become a foreigner anywhere else
so try it out like a new outfit that may or may not suit, life is about taking risks, not about burying your head in the sand”
“feminism needs tectonic plates to shift, not a trendy make-over”
“any serious political movement that relies on beauty to sell is doomed”
“a man raised as a man might not feel like one but he’s been treated as one by the world, so how can be he exactly the same as us”
“then you need to talk to them, Dom, and we should celebrate that many more women are reconfiguring feminism and that grassroots activism is spreading like wildfire and millions of women are waking up to the possibility of taking ownership of our world as fully-entitled human beings
how can we argue with that”
“it’s easy to forget that England is made up of many Englands”
“this is about being
together”
I am on the last few pages. I have really enjoyed it. It is so ambitious in its depiction of lives, time span, location. It manages to be both universal and relatable and unique and specific. I can see why Evaristo won the award. I also found it easy to read with minimal punctuation and multiple narrators, whose voices change. That was an interesting device.
Can’t wait to finish this book 🙌🏻