Samantha Ellis’ awesomely named memoir, filtered through her love of books and their leading ladies, is one of my favorite reads of this year. Intertwined with the author’s own backstory are all the books, stories, and heroines that have touched her life somehow – and often more than once. Growing up as a Iraqui Jew in London, it’s not as if Ellis’ life lacked for its own sense of drama, not to mention that her career path as poet, playwright, journalist and author isn’t all that drama-free either. On the plus side, she certainly encountered a lot more perspectives and possibilities for heroines (and heroes) than one might consider average.
But a random discussion with a close friend leaves her questioning her allegiance to a certain moorish heroine, and she wonders if ALL the ladies she’s spent her life reading about made as questionable role models, if she looks back at them from where she is now. And so she delves into the women and girls she has lived her literary life with: The connections she made, the differences she never expected, the questions that needed answering, and the questions she didn’t even realize she needed to ask. And she does so with such depth, warmth and willingness to bare her own secrets that, as a reader, I couldn’t help but be drawn in.
Ellis also talks about the girls she outgrew, and why. But she doesn’t discount them, even when her feminist-self shudders at some of the messages child-her was receiving: She knows, instead that while she might find Sara Crews (A Little Princess) imagination less charming and escapist in ‘the wrong way’ now, when she was a child, being able to relate to someone else all the grown ups thought had an overactive imagination was a connection that allowed her to bask in her creativity, rather than stifling it.
I think that’s important – that the books we loved as children (or teenagers, or young adults, or the last year before your world fell apart and you had to claw it back together) – are allowed to still keep places in our hearts, because we loved them as we were then, and- even if we know better now – they were still valid and valuable, in many ways.
She talks about being disappointed in both Anne Shirley and Jo March for their later books, in which they get married, settle down and … lose something of themselves. “I started to realise that when bold, clever, creative girls like Anne and Jo became women, something happened. They became less themselves. This was a worry because I would soon be a woman myself.”
In fact, the author finds herself severely disappointed in the overly moralistic Little Women, now that she’s grown. On this, Ellis and I disagree, if only because: I don’t care. I don’t dispute her findings that it adheres too strictly to Victorian standards for women, and only slightly find fault in her stand that each of the March women must be ‘conquered and crushed’ in their own ways to fit the novel’s standards, but Little Women is my book, and even when it crushes my heart, or I have to explain to someone why it gets a pass from my very strict ban on ‘inspirational crip’ lit, I just can’t let it go. It made me a reader and a writer and a girl who could somehow stand to be in the same room with her own sisters (at the time, we were 4 girls living in one tiny room, so you can see that might have been a troublesome concept), and I will make all the apologies for it that it needs, so long as I can keep Jo and Meg and Amy and Beth and Laurie to comfort me when I need them. Also: I really enjoy the sequels? Little Men is underrated, and a few of the others, who told the stories of all of Jo’s Boys and the school, and their own families, helped me to see past the ending of the book, and how it could be carried forward into a world. Ellis herself does talk about how Jo rebounds & forges ahead in Jo’s Boys, becoming the feminist, writer and woman we’d all hoped her to have been all along, and saying that she wish she’d read it when she was younger, knowing how well it turns out.
In addition to maligning long-held favorite books, Ellis doesn’t shy away from anything: She tackles sexism (“I wondered, not for the last time, if these heroines were tragic because their authors were men,”), confronts religion, vocations and boyfriends with Franny Glass, and expounds upon the virtues of creativity, honor and honesty, via Lucy Honeychurch and her author. She talks about the girls who were ‘betrayed’ by their creators (Marjorie Morningstar), and how she imagined their stories ending, how she, as an author, would have let the characters keep themselves. She discusses the girls she wishes she had met as a younger version of herself, so that she could have learned from them some of the lessons she had to learn the harder way. Particularly on point are her only-grown appreciation for Lizzie Bennet (and Mr. Darcy); her absolutely spot-on disdain for Ashley Wilkes, aka Mr. ‘Milquetoast’ & admiration for Ms. Melanie; and her own journey into the Valley of the Dolls, (and the superior Lace, which got an add to my TBR pile).
I was interested in the “must reads” of a girl growing up in London in what seems a handful of years before my friends and I had must reads of our own over here in the US, and where there was overlap and where there were gaps – while I’ve heard of Jilly Cooper, for example, there certainly was no ‘cult like’ following for her in my cohort; as well as the characters she felt most reflected herself at certain points in her life – How she went from being Petrova Fossil some days to feeling more like Melanie Wilkes on others. Because I think those are the journeys and stories that matter most to us, and Ellis writes about her transformations (and changes of mind) so clearly, concisely and with an openness that is often lacking in memoirs.
Perhaps my favorite of Ellis’ revelations occurs when she becomes ill – ultimately chronically- as a college student and misinterprets it as a “rite of passage,” the idea that “suffering must have value, an insidious idea which was everywhere.” In that chapter she discusses Esther Greenwood, and the paralyzed Katy Carr & her “saintly invalid” Cousin Helen, who “wafts about … and thinks illness is an opportunity” and how she had become indoctrinated in the belief that suffering would “be transfiguring.” Ellis eventually reaches the conclusion that “when suffering came, it didn’t teach me or liberate me….Rather than see my seizures as a dark fate, a necessary suffering or even … as being struck down by God, I could decide to be a survivor, to keep getting up every time I was knocked down.” And can I get an Amen?
Here is the trope that chronically ill 15-year-old me fell face first into lock, stock, and barrel: the idea that I was suffering so that other people wouldn’t have to, that my illness would somehow be the making of me (and, of course, then be magically cured). After all, there was Beth March, sacrificing herself for her family (and the Hummels, but that’s another story); and Mary Ingalls, suddenly blinded by scarlet fever and yet So Brave and Never Sad, A True Inspiration to All Who Knew Her. Could I do any less than accept my lot as the sick sibling, knowing it would protect those I loved from sharing a similar fate? (Yeah: it so does not work that way, you guys, in case you were wondering.)
But – while I have learned many things in the twenty years since then, and some of them CAN be attributed, at least in part, to being ill – it was a vital lesson to learn, that being sick and suffering did not have an intrinsic value, were not something to just… accept, not a role I was born to somehow fill. Some people’s lives are just hard, some people’s bodies are just unhealthier than others – it doesn’t make you worse than other people (as abelists – even literary ones – will tell you), but it also doesn’t make you BETTER than them either (as other, no-less dangerous abelists will tell you). As Ellis puts it “There is no School of Pain.”*
After finishing How To Be A Heroine, if you’re looking for any MORE inspiration about some lovely heroines to check out, I’m going to suggest Ladies of Literature Vol 1 & Vol 2, which are (unfortunately), not available on Amazon. But there are links in their tumblr to places that (Vol 2 at least) some are available to purchase. I got mine through the Kickstarter campaign, earlier this year, and it arrived a few weeks ago. I LOVE IT. It’s a collection of artwork, from various, diverse (hallelujah!) artists of some of their favorite literary ladies. And while there’s a lot of wonderful women I’m already in love with, portrayed in ways that make me supremely happy 
…See Ms Ramona Quimby, practicing her cat-Qs:
What might be even better is how many NEW heroines worthy of worship I’m getting introduced to. Because, praise everything that’s right in the world, the editors include a listing of who exactly each portrait is of, not just who the artist is. And there’s so many kick-ass ladies out there, waiting around for me between the pages of books, and I’m so looking forward to meeting them all!
Are you telling me you don’t want to know this lady’s story? (She’s apparently “My favourite sassy dark elf, Altira, from Steven M. Booth’s Dark Talisman!”, says artist Charles Tan.)
*(Oh, I think there is, but I also think it doesn’t teach anything anybody wants to learn: You’re vulnerable – every single person is. You aren’t as in control of your life as you think you are. Your mood – no matter how positive or negative – does not always reflect itself in your physical being. You can’t wish yourself better, no matter how hard you try. Other people’s patience for your pain is absurdly – to you – limited. Your patience for other people’s pain may vary by the day {the next time someone tells me about how ‘they’re fatigued, too’, I might have to shoot them, because: No; you are not, it’s not the same. But if you tell me you’ve got a migraine, I WILL build you the coziest, darkest, blanket fort in all of creation.} You do learn things, in this school of pain, but one of those things is that your suffering is just… your suffering. It’s not punishment or reward, or a measure of how good a person you are or will become – it’s just a happenstance of existing. Get used to the unknowableness of it all.)
