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The timing of our new lives together coincided with my starting a PhD program with a focus on studying women’s writing. While I was quietly trying to stay married long enough to make a dignified exit later if need be, I was introduced to collections of early feminists’ writing that I’d had no idea even existed.

One afternoon early in my program, I dipped into The Sound of Our Own Voices, a book about how women in the late 1800s used study clubs to get the education they were denied in the public sphere. Then at bedtime, I lay next to my husband and started the Amanda Cross mystery Death in a Tenured Position, sent to me by my mom who thought I might like to read a murder mystery set in a college English department.

Kate Fansler, the English prof/detective protagonist of the Amanda Cross series, kept me up way too late that night. I had to read the end of the book, so took it with me to school the next day, planning to polish it off on my lunch break. In the echoey upper hallway of the English building, I claimed a wooden bench as hard as an old church pew.

Tuna sandwich in one hand, Death in a Tenured Position in the other, I dug in. Fellow students and faculty members flowed through the hallway at class breaks, but I barely noticed them. I was busy trying to solve the mystery before Kate did when a slim book appeared in my upper peripheral vision. Its bold title was immediately visible: Writing a Woman’s Life. I looked up to see Dr. Sue Carter holding the book out, smiling at me. I quickly used a paper napkin to scrub my face and hands free of tuna.

“Hi! What’s this?”

“You need to read her other books when you’re done with that one.”

I was understandably confused. This new book’s author was Carolyn Heilbrun. I was reading Amanda Cross.

“Same person! And I’d say Kate Fansler is basically Carolyn Heilbrun, but you can judge that for yourself. If you like it, keep it!”

Sue was delighted to share insider info. I was just relieved that she wasn’t trying to substitute a “real” book for the mystery I was devouring along with my lunch.

That night, I propped myself up in bed after some quick sex with GG. He was out like a light, sleeping the sleep of a guy who worked at a slaughterhouse all day so he could contribute his fair share to our finances. While GG snored, I held the book Sue had given me. It fell open to a page I assumed had been read and reread many times. I put a star next to this passage:

We live our lives through texts. They may be read, or chanted, or experienced electronically, or come to us, like the murmurings of our mothers, telling us what conventions demand. Whatever their form or medium, these stories have formed us all; they are what we must use to make new fictions, new narratives. (37)

I didn’t know why, but I started to cry. Quietly, so as not to wake my bedmate. I kept reading. The author describes the Carolyn Heilbrun she was when she started writing the Kate Fansler character in Amanda Cross’s voice:

When she sought psychic space, it was not from personal frustration but rather from a wish . . . for more space, less interruption, more possibility of adventure and the companionship of wiser women through these adventures, greater risk and a more fearless affronting of destiny. (120)

In Kate Fansler, Heilbrun gives life to a character whose mostly predictable work as a lit professor is sometimes interrupted by adventure. Kate is a fantasy, yes, but she was already more than that to me after reading just one book. Experiencing Kate’s world through Carolyn’s story was giving me space to imagine how a woman might be strong, sexy, authoritative, and free. Kate experiences danger without coming apart at the seams. She can choose to smoke or not, drink Laphroaig single malt scotch or not, marry or not, have children or not.

My doomed marriage to GG lasted eighteen months. We both knew we should’ve gotten an annulment right away, but it was too late for that, so divorce was our only option. GG moved on to have several children with several different wives who were also adored, from what I can tell, but whom he also did not really know. As for me, I finished that grad program and pretty quickly got a job teaching all the things I love. I did that for almost thirty years.

Shortly after my divorce, my dad, with whom I’d long had a difficult relationship, said to me, “you know, some people were just never meant to get married.” I knew by his tone that he meant me specifically, not me and GG. I was furious. It felt as if he was saying I was unworthy, not a catch, whatever; and because he was my father, he didn’t explain.

Now I think Dad was right, though I don’t exactly know what that means. Although I dated seriously (and not so seriously) over the intervening decades and was even engaged one more time, the pull to seal the deal in the marrying way just hasn’t been there. I’ve never said I won’t marry again, but I do say I can’t imagine it. Not wanting something that so many others treasure is a hard thing to explain; fortunately I’ve never felt the need to.

Believe me, I know how lucky I am to have had so many luxuries of choice: to get more education or not; to marry or not, have children or not; to become my mother’s roommate or not; to retire in my late fifties and move across the country or not. In short, to write my own story. I’ve achieved this with the help of many other people, to be sure; but it is still my own story. These are my own adventures, unhindered by the spoken or unspoken desires of anyone else. And as I turn sixty this week, I return to Carolyn’s words again, this time with an eye on my third act:

…we should make use of our security, our seniority, to take risks, to make noise, to be courageous, to become unpopular. (131)

Yes please! I can’t wait. And I hope to hear, see —and read—you, too, dear readers, around the next bend.
 

Night at the Musée d’Orsay: Poems of Paris & Other Great European Cities

by Judy Wells

Night at the Musée d’Orsay: Poems of Paris & Other Great European Cities is a vibrant memoir of travel poems centering on Judy Wells’ appreciation of well-known European painters, architects, writers, and musicians associated with great European cities. Her poems explore artists in France, Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Spain, from Van Gogh, Chagall, Matisse, and Balzac in Paris, to Velázquez and Goya in Madrid, and Gaudí in Barcelona.

Wells interweaves her own personal life into her poems, which illustrate her creative responses to her travels at different times—from young adult in France to older woman confronting aging in Barcelona. Her poetry encompasses various poetic styles—lyric, narrative, and surprisingly for a book on European travels, haiku.

Night at the Musée d’Orsay
 
If the curators knew I, a moth, was in the Van Gogh room
they’d be shocked!
But what do they expect—
I love light and I’m particularly
attracted to a painting
of stars—globs of light
reflected in a river.
 
I’ve sat on top of these yellow blobs
and survived though I can feel
the heat of these stars
right through the paint.
Light bulbs are cold by comparison
though I’m not singed by Van Gogh.
I’m transformed and waves of ecstasy
wander through my wings.
 
I rest on Van Gogh’s stars all night.
In the morning I flit to a cottage
and settle on a deep blue iris.
The tourists think I’m part of the painting.
I laugh. I’m just a moth
with grand taste.

Available from Amazon, Bookshop.org, and www.regentpress.net

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