![[Home_9_12-2-22.jpg]] Photo by Alana Settle {a picture of two people on display in the center of a curio cabinet} I’m reading _Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life_ by Anna Funder, and it’s one of those rare books I feel deeply connected to, like she’s speaking directly to me and my life in this moment. As a writer, I enjoy the hybrid nature of this book — part biography, novel, and memoir all in one. It’s the type of book I’d like to write one day. Funder writes of Eileen, Orwell’s wife, “Now, her literary talents will be sublimated into helping other people realize theirs,” when Eileen decides to marry Orwell, and systematically reveals the legacy of a woman’s existence (and erasure) by the patriarchy. It’s a dissertation on womanhood — the fight to be seen when the world fights for her to be erased. ### **Book Notes** “Access to time, as to any other valuable good, is gendered.” “Invisible workers require no pay or gratitude, beyond perhaps an entire, heartfelt sentence in preface, ‘thanking ‘‘my wife.’’' Read Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” Time is finite; time as currency; time given to men (and taken from women) in the system of patriarchy Chapter “Free” on Patriarchy — “to pretend to be liberated from the work while doing it” > “Maybe a more fluid understanding of gender will eventually also free us not only from the fictions of what it is to be female and what it is to be male, but also from the assumptions about work and care that those definitions secretly, and not so secretly, carry.” “When women can’t be left out all together they are doubted, trivialized, or reduced to footnotes in 8-point font.” — Orwell and his cis-male biographers left Eileen out. “Women are imagined to have consented to what was done to them” — cis-male biographers glossing over rape and marital affairs. Thinking about the importance of story, history, and omission Thinking about Anna Karenina (a book I love) and the male gaze Doublethink — Orwell’s homo-erotic desires, their suppression; his split personality — “a wife gives a man a double life: one to go off in, and another to come back to” Thinking about my MFA thesis story, a hybrid poem about choosing to leave my marriage (choosing not to suppress my homoeroticism) — could I write about the experience of being a wife and mother, the guilt of leaving — the question: am I like a man? Thinking about a potential PhD dissertation, a book on gender roles in relationships, the impacts of patriarchy on marriage (homosexual and heterosexual), on doublethink as the split personality of partnership. Thinking about why a woman might say they want to “bro out”; what does it mean — the psychological affirmation and power of being perceived ‘like a man.’ Maybe the title is “Like a Man.” On making the stories of women visible — what would our history be like if we systematically told it from the woman’s perspective instead of the man’s? Thinking about reading — consuming the literature, culture, and language of societies and people other than ours; we must be willing to look into the void if we are to learn from it (Nietzsche). You learn about history through the stories told by the people who lived it; not through their government’s propaganda. Potential chapters of a book: mother, sex, religion, queer, gender, girlhood, wife, student, teacher.