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Braided Lives
Growing up in Detroit in the 1950s, and going to college when the first seeds of sexual freedom are being sown, Jill and Donna are coming of age in an exciting, turbulent time. Wry, independent Jill thrives in the new free-spirited world, while her beautiful cousin Donna desperately searches for a man to make her life whole. As each cousin is driven by different demons and desires, they eventually realize that they cannot overcome fundamental differences in each others' lives. Still, as their futures assume contrary paths, Jill and Donna realize that they may be separated, but they'll never be truly divided from one another.
"Rings with passionate awareness...honest and impressive."
THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
From the Paperback edition.
"Rings with passionate awareness...honest and impressive."
THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
From the Paperback edition.
551 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published March 1, 1982
22 people are currently reading
584 people want to read
About the author
Marge Piercy
111 books933 followersMarge Piercy is an American poet, novelist, and social activist. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Gone to Soldiers, a sweeping historical novel set during World War II.
Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a family deeply affected by the Great Depression. She was the first in her family to attend college, studying at the University of Michigan. Winning a Hopwood Award for Poetry and Fiction (1957) enabled her to finish college and spend some time in France, and her formal schooling ended with an M.A. from Northwestern University. Her first book of poems, Breaking Camp, was published in 1968.
An indifferent student in her early years, Piercy developed a love of books when she came down with rheumatic fever in her mid-childhood and could do little but read. "It taught me that there's a different world there, that there were all these horizons that were quite different from what I could see," she said in a 1984 interview.
As of 2013, she is author of seventeen volumes of poems, among them The Moon is Always Female (1980, considered a feminist classic) and The Art of Blessing the Day (1999), as well as fifteen novels, one play (The Last White Class, co-authored with her third and current husband Ira Wood), one collection of essays (Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt), one non-fiction book, and one memoir.
Her novels and poetry often focus on feminist or social concerns, although her settings vary. While Body of Glass (published in the US as He, She and It) is a science fiction novel that won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, City of Darkness, City of Light is set during the French Revolution. Other of her novels, such as Summer People and The Longings of Women are set during the modern day. All of her books share a focus on women's lives.
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) mixes a time travel story with issues of social justice, feminism, and the treatment of the mentally ill. This novel is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic. William Gibson has credited Woman on the Edge of Time as the birthplace of Cyberpunk. Piercy tells this in an introduction to Body of Glass. Body of Glass (He, She and It) (1991) postulates an environmentally ruined world dominated by sprawling mega-cities and a futuristic version of the Internet, through which Piercy weaves elements of Jewish mysticism and the legend of the Golem, although a key story element is the main character's attempts to regain custody of her young son.
Many of Piercy's novels tell their stories from the viewpoints of multiple characters, often including a first-person voice among numerous third-person narratives. Her World War II historical novel, Gone To Soldiers (1987) follows the lives of nine major characters in the United States, Europe and Asia. The first-person account in Gone To Soldiers is the diary of French teenager Jacqueline Levy-Monot, who is also followed in a third-person account after her capture by the Nazis.
Piercy's poetry tends to be highly personal free verse and often addresses the same concern with feminist and social issues. Her work shows commitment to the dream of social change (what she might call, in Judaic terms, tikkun olam, or the repair of the world), rooted in story, the wheel of the Jewish year, and a range of landscapes and settings.
She lives in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, Massachusetts with her husband, Ira Wood.
(from Wikipedia)
Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a family deeply affected by the Great Depression. She was the first in her family to attend college, studying at the University of Michigan. Winning a Hopwood Award for Poetry and Fiction (1957) enabled her to finish college and spend some time in France, and her formal schooling ended with an M.A. from Northwestern University. Her first book of poems, Breaking Camp, was published in 1968.
An indifferent student in her early years, Piercy developed a love of books when she came down with rheumatic fever in her mid-childhood and could do little but read. "It taught me that there's a different world there, that there were all these horizons that were quite different from what I could see," she said in a 1984 interview.
As of 2013, she is author of seventeen volumes of poems, among them The Moon is Always Female (1980, considered a feminist classic) and The Art of Blessing the Day (1999), as well as fifteen novels, one play (The Last White Class, co-authored with her third and current husband Ira Wood), one collection of essays (Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt), one non-fiction book, and one memoir.
Her novels and poetry often focus on feminist or social concerns, although her settings vary. While Body of Glass (published in the US as He, She and It) is a science fiction novel that won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, City of Darkness, City of Light is set during the French Revolution. Other of her novels, such as Summer People and The Longings of Women are set during the modern day. All of her books share a focus on women's lives.
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) mixes a time travel story with issues of social justice, feminism, and the treatment of the mentally ill. This novel is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic. William Gibson has credited Woman on the Edge of Time as the birthplace of Cyberpunk. Piercy tells this in an introduction to Body of Glass. Body of Glass (He, She and It) (1991) postulates an environmentally ruined world dominated by sprawling mega-cities and a futuristic version of the Internet, through which Piercy weaves elements of Jewish mysticism and the legend of the Golem, although a key story element is the main character's attempts to regain custody of her young son.
Many of Piercy's novels tell their stories from the viewpoints of multiple characters, often including a first-person voice among numerous third-person narratives. Her World War II historical novel, Gone To Soldiers (1987) follows the lives of nine major characters in the United States, Europe and Asia. The first-person account in Gone To Soldiers is the diary of French teenager Jacqueline Levy-Monot, who is also followed in a third-person account after her capture by the Nazis.
Piercy's poetry tends to be highly personal free verse and often addresses the same concern with feminist and social issues. Her work shows commitment to the dream of social change (what she might call, in Judaic terms, tikkun olam, or the repair of the world), rooted in story, the wheel of the Jewish year, and a range of landscapes and settings.
She lives in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, Massachusetts with her husband, Ira Wood.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews
October 4, 2007
A life changer. I credit this novel and a steady diet of Ani DiFranco right around 1995 with turning me into the man hating evil feminist I am today. In hindsight, not the greatest novel - like most 70's era second wave feminist literature, it's heavy handed and the story and characters take a backseat to the political agenda. Every horrible thing that could happen to middle class white women in the 60's happens to these characters - rape, incest, coat hanger abortions, abusive "activist" boyfriends...it's almost textbook. But it got to me at 15 and it changed the way I thought about women and about being a woman.
January 5, 2009
Marge Piercy is working-class feminist gritty real lady book comfort food. I think reading this book when I was 14 showed me how you become a writer when you don't have a trust fund, and how you live through this as a no money girl writer- love, life, fucking, danger, solo apartments, stealing paper from work.
January 14, 2014
An old favorite. Found this book in a used bookstore in London when I was 18 and was deeply moved by the story of women's friendships in the proto-feminist era.
Read
February 24, 2016This is the story of the friendship between two women, a friendship that starts when they are girls and lasts over decades, following their braided lives as one marries and becomes the wife of a rich man while the other begins a career as a writer. The story is told from the first person perspective of the latter and explores what it means to be a woman in a capitalist society, with a distinct feminist slant.
And no, I am not referring to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, even though the similarities are more than striking and more than likely not coincidental – considering that the novel I am referring to here, Marge Piercy’s Braided Lives, is somewhat of a feminist classic, I think it is not too far-fetched to assume that it was the inspiration for the Italian author’s series of novels, and it actually was that assumption which made me decide to read Piercy’s novel right after the ones by Ferrante.
Which is why the following post will likely be focusing on the comparison between the two which is not quite fair towards Piercy’s novel, as it really deserves to be considered on its own terms and merits, not just as some kind of precursor to the Neapolitan Novels. So let me state outright (and I shall probably repeat this later) that Braided Lives stands very much on its own and is well worth reading even if you have not read Ferrante’s novels and maybe do not plan on ever doing so. As similar as both works are in their premise and concept, they read very differently indeed and I for one found it quite interesting to trace those differences.
First and probably most obvious is of course that Piercy’s novel – which is a “proper” novel with fictional protagonists (called Jill and Donna) but which on the other hand the author openly admits is inspired by her autobiography rather than taking Ferrante’s oblique approach on that matter – takes place in the USA rather in Italy; more important, however, is that place in general does not play as big a part in Braided Lives as it does in the Neapolitan Novels which are so firmly rooted in their setting that it almost becomes a protagonist in its own right. This gives Piercy’s novel a somewhat more universal air, a sense of “this could have happened anywhere” but it also increases the danger of the book coming across as didactic, a fable more concerned with the general than the personal, something which Ferrante, even with all her outspoken support of feminism and the labour movement, never did.
Marge Piercy, however, also manages to avoid that pitfall, and never turns her novel into a mere case history about patriarchal oppression of women. She achieves this mostly by virtue of her writing style which is – maybe somewhat paradoxically – simultaneously more openly literary and more personal than Ferrante’s. The Italian author’s prose is very reduced and matter-of-fact, only occasionally breaking out into short passages of beautiful writing which always are quickly reined in again. Piercy’s writing, on the other hand, is very rich in images and often assumes an outright lyrical tone (I was not at all surprised to find out, after reading Braided Lives, that she also writes poetry and has published several volumes of poems). Contrary to what one might expect, however, it is Ferrante’s apparently artless writing which comes across as objectified and (comparatively) distanced, while Piercy’s composed and arranged, openly artificial and writerly prose breathes subjectivity and has a much more immediate feel to it. And where Ferrante uses melodramatic narrative to draw in her readers, Piercy does it with her narrative voice whose tone oscillates between conversational poise and lyrical brilliance. The narrative of Braided Lives also shifts between present and future – while the focus of her story is clearly in the sixties and the friendship between the novel's protagonists Jill and Donna, Piercy intersects her main narrative with episodes from the narrator’s present, during some of which she looks back at what has happened to her or her friends in the intervening time. This is a far shot from Ferrante unwinding her tale in a linear chronology, and again it is Piercy’s book which marks itself unabashedly as literary fiction while at the same time feeling – precisely thanks to the literary techniques she uses – much closer to the actual process of remembering.
What Piercy and Ferrante have in common, however – apart from their basic plot premise – is that both are very outspoken about women’s rights, so much that they are a, if not the central concern of both works. Both are very sensitive to the suppression of women in a patriarchal society, their never-ending discrimination in job, family and everyday life; and both show women who do not just accept that state of affairs and suffer in silence but who actively take a stand against it and even succeed. Succeed up to a point, that is, for even without the advantage of hindsight that the Neapolitan Novels have, Braided Lives leaves no doubt that things still are very bad (and in fact delivers that insight with a gut punch) and there still is room for improvement. My edition of the novel also has an introduction by the author in which she remarks on the lasting relevance of Braided Lives in the 21st century as conservatives increasingly try to cut back on women’s rights and to bring back precisely the state of affairs Piercy’s novel positions itself against But even if we’d be living in a feminist Utopia, Braided Lives would still be worth reading if only to see what it was like in the bad old days and what price women had to pay to get out from under the thumb of male oppression but also to celebrate the courage of those who did oppose the patriarchy, not all that infrequently literally risking their lives in doing so.
And no, I am not referring to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, even though the similarities are more than striking and more than likely not coincidental – considering that the novel I am referring to here, Marge Piercy’s Braided Lives, is somewhat of a feminist classic, I think it is not too far-fetched to assume that it was the inspiration for the Italian author’s series of novels, and it actually was that assumption which made me decide to read Piercy’s novel right after the ones by Ferrante.
Which is why the following post will likely be focusing on the comparison between the two which is not quite fair towards Piercy’s novel, as it really deserves to be considered on its own terms and merits, not just as some kind of precursor to the Neapolitan Novels. So let me state outright (and I shall probably repeat this later) that Braided Lives stands very much on its own and is well worth reading even if you have not read Ferrante’s novels and maybe do not plan on ever doing so. As similar as both works are in their premise and concept, they read very differently indeed and I for one found it quite interesting to trace those differences.
First and probably most obvious is of course that Piercy’s novel – which is a “proper” novel with fictional protagonists (called Jill and Donna) but which on the other hand the author openly admits is inspired by her autobiography rather than taking Ferrante’s oblique approach on that matter – takes place in the USA rather in Italy; more important, however, is that place in general does not play as big a part in Braided Lives as it does in the Neapolitan Novels which are so firmly rooted in their setting that it almost becomes a protagonist in its own right. This gives Piercy’s novel a somewhat more universal air, a sense of “this could have happened anywhere” but it also increases the danger of the book coming across as didactic, a fable more concerned with the general than the personal, something which Ferrante, even with all her outspoken support of feminism and the labour movement, never did.
Marge Piercy, however, also manages to avoid that pitfall, and never turns her novel into a mere case history about patriarchal oppression of women. She achieves this mostly by virtue of her writing style which is – maybe somewhat paradoxically – simultaneously more openly literary and more personal than Ferrante’s. The Italian author’s prose is very reduced and matter-of-fact, only occasionally breaking out into short passages of beautiful writing which always are quickly reined in again. Piercy’s writing, on the other hand, is very rich in images and often assumes an outright lyrical tone (I was not at all surprised to find out, after reading Braided Lives, that she also writes poetry and has published several volumes of poems). Contrary to what one might expect, however, it is Ferrante’s apparently artless writing which comes across as objectified and (comparatively) distanced, while Piercy’s composed and arranged, openly artificial and writerly prose breathes subjectivity and has a much more immediate feel to it. And where Ferrante uses melodramatic narrative to draw in her readers, Piercy does it with her narrative voice whose tone oscillates between conversational poise and lyrical brilliance. The narrative of Braided Lives also shifts between present and future – while the focus of her story is clearly in the sixties and the friendship between the novel's protagonists Jill and Donna, Piercy intersects her main narrative with episodes from the narrator’s present, during some of which she looks back at what has happened to her or her friends in the intervening time. This is a far shot from Ferrante unwinding her tale in a linear chronology, and again it is Piercy’s book which marks itself unabashedly as literary fiction while at the same time feeling – precisely thanks to the literary techniques she uses – much closer to the actual process of remembering.
What Piercy and Ferrante have in common, however – apart from their basic plot premise – is that both are very outspoken about women’s rights, so much that they are a, if not the central concern of both works. Both are very sensitive to the suppression of women in a patriarchal society, their never-ending discrimination in job, family and everyday life; and both show women who do not just accept that state of affairs and suffer in silence but who actively take a stand against it and even succeed. Succeed up to a point, that is, for even without the advantage of hindsight that the Neapolitan Novels have, Braided Lives leaves no doubt that things still are very bad (and in fact delivers that insight with a gut punch) and there still is room for improvement. My edition of the novel also has an introduction by the author in which she remarks on the lasting relevance of Braided Lives in the 21st century as conservatives increasingly try to cut back on women’s rights and to bring back precisely the state of affairs Piercy’s novel positions itself against But even if we’d be living in a feminist Utopia, Braided Lives would still be worth reading if only to see what it was like in the bad old days and what price women had to pay to get out from under the thumb of male oppression but also to celebrate the courage of those who did oppose the patriarchy, not all that infrequently literally risking their lives in doing so.
January 8, 2009
My favourite book ever. I first read it 25 years ago (eek) and have reread it at least yearly since, and I get something new out of it each time. It speaks to me more than any other book, and I read all other books hoping to get the same thrill from them. The main character, Jill, is so real, which may be because the book is partly autobiographical, as confirmed in Marge Piercy's autobiography, Sleeping with Cats, also well worth reading. Her description of first love is amazing, as well as the depiction of female friendship. Oh, just go read it!
April 22, 2023
Piercy captured me with her sensual, honest, and enchanting prose. This should be required reading for all women in their 20s who are hungry for life. She paints a vivid picture of the underside of womanhood in the 50s— a world a lot of us can’t imagine, but will relate to more than expected.
This is one of my favorite reads in the past few years, not only because of her unique voice, but because of how much Jill, and Marge Piercy herself, have inspired me. Can’t wait to read more from her.
This is one of my favorite reads in the past few years, not only because of her unique voice, but because of how much Jill, and Marge Piercy herself, have inspired me. Can’t wait to read more from her.
June 15, 2007
This was my first Piercy book, and I think this one and "woman on the edge of time" are the best by her that I have read. "Gone to Soldiers" was fantastic, but there were so many characters in such a huge novel that at times I wanted to diagram the plot to make sure I was thinking of the correct story line. In these two, she gets it just right, and the stories are compelling and fabulous.
Maybe a little too "neo feminist" for some, but i love her work.
Maybe a little too "neo feminist" for some, but i love her work.
July 16, 2012
Another Marge Piercy that I never ever wanted to end. This one is set in the 50s and 60s, and provides a nice reminder of the darkness that nurtured pre-feminist awakenings in America. A very nice counterpart to Mad Men. Can I just have The Complete Marge Piercy delivered to my doorstep?
January 18, 2019
Just finshed re-reading this, maybe for the second time since my twenties. Why do her books touch me so? This one is so relevant again. Plus the Ann Arbor history is wonderful.
April 1, 2020
Many writers open their career with Bildungsromane, but Piercy held off till her seventh novel. She still hasn't perfected an authoritative manner, or learnt to write with anything like polish; but, in a sense, she's doing something better--capturing 'what it felt like' with a sweaty closeness to the moment, being authentically vulnerable and allowing all of herself, her background, her contradictions, her pretensions, her self-love, self-hate and spirit of self-preservation, to be present through every pore of this narrative of her early life. There is, maybe, integrally something artistically 'off', or bad, in this--for instance, a row with her oppressively close mother is like swimming through mud, or the furnishings of her rich second boyfriend's pad are like a 'sybaritic' stomach. Piercy, through her alter ego Jill Stuart ('Stu'), knows, as an English major in Ann Arbor, that she will only be able to write, to forge a manner and path as a professional writer both, through bucking tradition--offending it, but being so personal, intense and acute she can't readily be dismissed by it. This autobiographical history is recounted over twenty years after the event by a successful feminist writer--who would not have been interesting to the women now fete-ing her as a hardscrabble part-time secretary.
The novel is not just a traditional, but strongly female, novel of the main character's development, but also a traditional 'sentimental education'. Jill, Jewish on her mother's side, has parents who archaically don't believe in sex for women before marriage, but nevertheless passes through four serious lovers in the book, including her fiance. She says she learned something from each of them; but the first two are awful, programmatically bent on overturning her sense of herself as a woman, writer and intellectual. Conversations with them are a perpetual fight for dominance--for the guys--and a ceaseless effort, often witty, shrewd, glancing, at self-assertion for her. Mike, also from working-class Detroit, styles himself a Rimbaud-esque poet. He writes histrionic, even violent blank verse; and pronounces Jill's more interesting and invested women's free verse 'merde' (even if he hasn't always said so, it's been implicit in what he's told her of his 'aesthetic theory'). He goes to Yale. He doesn't believe in a woman's choice in abortion and boasts to his guy friends about how many times he's had sex with her in their private wooded arbour (both were virgins starting out). Matters come to an ugly, shaming head with him when Jill's mother infers from her cousin's letter they're having sex and puts the gun to his temples, threatening disclosure if they don't marry. His parents are respectable Jews, looking askance at Jill's Asiatic 'Kazan' eyes.
Her second boyfriend, short, outwardly refined and self-possessed, is cowed by his father, a big-shot city architect who rations the luxuries (Porsches, convertibles, houses) his son can have. Peter, an acolyte of Freud and of clitoral developmental 'stages', feints and probes with his every claim that Jill does not know herself or what she wants. An insecure and mediocre physicist, he is an aficionado of classical music and casual sadist in sex and sexualised personal interaction. Kemp, a gun-toting minor hoodlum and representative of life outside the academe, is better (his Italian mother taught him how to cook). With her fiance, Howie, she is caught in a love triangle with her roommate, an expressive Greek woman also trying on a number of possible, and possibly equally partial and frustrating, roles available to mid-50s women.
It's likely the novel would seem less by-numbers polemical, less a frame for feminist talking-points, if it were less autobiographical (that is, did it not all--more or less--actually happen). Two of Jill's most interesting relationships are with her mother and cousin, Donna. She fends off Peter's theory that her mother is jealous of her--but it does seem that her sexuality, and the greater opportunities open to a self-improving college girl, threaten her mother, an intelligent woman confined to homekeeping and her extended family. Her father is a union man who mends trams, coming home late; her mother without complaint throws away the first batch of deliciously steaming beef stew and gets out hamburger when he turns in at 11pm. When her mother has Jill's upstairs sanctuary painted a brilliant yellow, she accuses her of betrayal; and her mother strikes her on the mouth. Donna, her cousin, a thin, electrically pale weapon, plays the game of family conformity, but is a more avid autodidact, and restless self-examiner, than even Jill herself. They share a room as intimates, clashing, sharing everything and also--in the end with bad consequences--being attracted to the same man.
The novel is not just a traditional, but strongly female, novel of the main character's development, but also a traditional 'sentimental education'. Jill, Jewish on her mother's side, has parents who archaically don't believe in sex for women before marriage, but nevertheless passes through four serious lovers in the book, including her fiance. She says she learned something from each of them; but the first two are awful, programmatically bent on overturning her sense of herself as a woman, writer and intellectual. Conversations with them are a perpetual fight for dominance--for the guys--and a ceaseless effort, often witty, shrewd, glancing, at self-assertion for her. Mike, also from working-class Detroit, styles himself a Rimbaud-esque poet. He writes histrionic, even violent blank verse; and pronounces Jill's more interesting and invested women's free verse 'merde' (even if he hasn't always said so, it's been implicit in what he's told her of his 'aesthetic theory'). He goes to Yale. He doesn't believe in a woman's choice in abortion and boasts to his guy friends about how many times he's had sex with her in their private wooded arbour (both were virgins starting out). Matters come to an ugly, shaming head with him when Jill's mother infers from her cousin's letter they're having sex and puts the gun to his temples, threatening disclosure if they don't marry. His parents are respectable Jews, looking askance at Jill's Asiatic 'Kazan' eyes.
Her second boyfriend, short, outwardly refined and self-possessed, is cowed by his father, a big-shot city architect who rations the luxuries (Porsches, convertibles, houses) his son can have. Peter, an acolyte of Freud and of clitoral developmental 'stages', feints and probes with his every claim that Jill does not know herself or what she wants. An insecure and mediocre physicist, he is an aficionado of classical music and casual sadist in sex and sexualised personal interaction. Kemp, a gun-toting minor hoodlum and representative of life outside the academe, is better (his Italian mother taught him how to cook). With her fiance, Howie, she is caught in a love triangle with her roommate, an expressive Greek woman also trying on a number of possible, and possibly equally partial and frustrating, roles available to mid-50s women.
It's likely the novel would seem less by-numbers polemical, less a frame for feminist talking-points, if it were less autobiographical (that is, did it not all--more or less--actually happen). Two of Jill's most interesting relationships are with her mother and cousin, Donna. She fends off Peter's theory that her mother is jealous of her--but it does seem that her sexuality, and the greater opportunities open to a self-improving college girl, threaten her mother, an intelligent woman confined to homekeeping and her extended family. Her father is a union man who mends trams, coming home late; her mother without complaint throws away the first batch of deliciously steaming beef stew and gets out hamburger when he turns in at 11pm. When her mother has Jill's upstairs sanctuary painted a brilliant yellow, she accuses her of betrayal; and her mother strikes her on the mouth. Donna, her cousin, a thin, electrically pale weapon, plays the game of family conformity, but is a more avid autodidact, and restless self-examiner, than even Jill herself. They share a room as intimates, clashing, sharing everything and also--in the end with bad consequences--being attracted to the same man.
March 13, 2020
çağının öncülü bir hikâye, gelgelelim bazı ifadeler bana fazlasıyla yapmacık geldi. sevdiği erkekler listesinde marx’ın ilk sırada olmasını, freud tartışmaktan bitap düşen kuzenlerden birinin kendi ödev konusu olan faulkner’a odaklanması gerektiğini ifade ediş tarzı bana ziyadesiyle -mış gibi izlenimi verdi. bilemiyorum, belki alışık olmadığım içindir; entellektüellerin “entel” diye aşağılanmasına mukabil onların buna tepkisinin, bildiğini mizah katarak aktarması ve karşıdakini “rencide edecek kadar” bilgili görünmemeye çalışmak şeklinde olduğu bir ortama aşina olduğumdan mıdır nedir biraz daha mütevazı bir anlatım bekledim sanırım, ifadeler alabildiğine köşeli ve “metallica diye bir grup keşfettim, süper!” der gibi geldi bana.
her “dava”nın, ona gönülden bağlı olanlarını ve onu bir araç kullananlarını anlatışını beğendim. bütün bir hikayeyi de galiba bu minvalde okudum, hiç kızkardeşlikmiş, en yakın dosta ihanetmiş ayrıntılarına girme zahmetine katlanmadım. benim için kitap, “her dava arkadaşınız sizin gibi düşünmek zorunda değil, gerçekler insanları daha pratik olmaya ve her ne olursa olsun önce kendini garantiye almaya iter, aradaki kurbanlar da sadakatlerinin sonucunda elde ettikleri bütün bu acı tecrübeleri anlatma gereği hisseder”i anlatıyordu kısaca.
her “dava”nın, ona gönülden bağlı olanlarını ve onu bir araç kullananlarını anlatışını beğendim. bütün bir hikayeyi de galiba bu minvalde okudum, hiç kızkardeşlikmiş, en yakın dosta ihanetmiş ayrıntılarına girme zahmetine katlanmadım. benim için kitap, “her dava arkadaşınız sizin gibi düşünmek zorunda değil, gerçekler insanları daha pratik olmaya ve her ne olursa olsun önce kendini garantiye almaya iter, aradaki kurbanlar da sadakatlerinin sonucunda elde ettikleri bütün bu acı tecrübeleri anlatma gereği hisseder”i anlatıyordu kısaca.
February 19, 2020
A reread, possibly a second reread. I can't remember when the first was. This is a battered old copy that has been read to death by someone before it came to me. It's pierced through the cover and the first few pages. It's sellotaped at the back. It's been wounded and loved and repaired, and if ever a book should be judged by its cover, it's this one. (By the way, if you want it, let me know, I've said my goodbyes to it.)
This is a book about sex and sensuality, about the politics and poetry of girlhood and womanhood. It's a book about the USA in the fifties, about love and trust and friendship, about race and gender, and the bonds between women and men. I loved reading it, and wish it was longer.
This is a book about sex and sensuality, about the politics and poetry of girlhood and womanhood. It's a book about the USA in the fifties, about love and trust and friendship, about race and gender, and the bonds between women and men. I loved reading it, and wish it was longer.
February 4, 2017
Actual Rating: 3.5 rounded to 4 stars
Marge Piercy is one of those authors best encountered at exactly the right time of life and in the right frame of mind. I’ve read three of her other novels (Small Changes, Sex Wars: A Novel of Gilded Age New York, and Three Women) and found them to be, for the most part, what I expected: novels written by a politically active Second Wave feminist poet. For some reason, I really connected with Braided Lives, I think because the characters are close to my age range. This book is an obviously left-leaning political novel, but it’s also a lovingly crafted coming-of-age story with autobiographical elements, and that’s why I connected with it.
Jill Stuart, a non-religious Jewish girl raised in a working-class neighborhood in Detroit, narrates Braided Lives. The story follows her journey to college alongside her cousin Donna, through college courses, dormitory shenanigans, and relationships with men (and boys). Although it’s set in the 1950s, much of what Jill and Donna experience isn’t that far off from the modern day college experience. The situations each character encounters molds them into the women they become by the end of the story, and I think that’s a really accurate trajectory for most young women in college.
I really enjoyed Piercy’s poetic writing style in this. It’s a 500-page book, but it doesn’t seem like it; each bit of dialogue, each description, and each of Jill’s inner monologues are well-placed and poignant. There were several one-liners and longer passages that I want to cut out and hang on my wall as a reminder that I’m not the only one who’s felt this way or thought this certain thing about the world. What’s amazing to me is just how little has changed between the 50s and now. The women’s experiences with men remind me so much of my early relationships, particularly in college and directly after, in which I didn’t quite know how to articulate what I wanted and was easily swayed by overly confident men who were used to getting what they wanted.
With that being said, Braided Lives is a highly political novel, and its plot is shaped in certain ways by Piercy’s politics. Ultimately, this is a book about abortion pre-Roe v. Wade, about the dangers that having sex entailed for women and the lack of access to good birth control. Jill and Donna are both sexually active at a time when unmarried women were supposed to be virgins—despite the fact that unmarried men were presumed to be having sex. At one point, the girls buy themselves cheap wedding rings and fabricate husbands just to get fitted for a diaphragm. Keep in mind, this was before the pill was even invented, but that, too, was subject to a doctor’s discretion and it wasn’t easy to get a prescription if you were unmarried.
There’s a lot of discussion of mediocre sex, and a lot of Freudian opinions on how sex was supposed to be for women. Jill even admits to having same-sex attraction, but she hasn’t acted on it since she was a child; having lesbian tendencies would literally get you locked up in an insane asylum. Obviously Piercy (and Jill) disagree with these (now outdated) ideas about female sexuality, but Jill and Donna are still affected by these ideologies.
There’s even a self-induced abortion; I’m including this without a spoiler alert because it was an incredibly emotional reading experience and I wouldn’t have wanted to go into that blindly. Jill is involved in left-leaning politics on campus, and she later becomes involved in a sort of secret society that helped women access illegal abortions and aftercare. Piercy does not disguise her politics, but shows how for the characters the personal becomes political before that phrase was even coined.
I read another Goodreads review that said Braided Lives would’ve been way better if you stopped before reading the last 50 pages, and I have to agree with that. The first 500 pages of this book would’ve been 5-stars for me, to be quite honest, but the last 50 pages were more political than they were good storytelling. While I was somewhat disappointed that, for all her politics, Jill spends the entire book in and out of relationships with men, I completely related to that and found it realistic. What I couldn’t accept: Essentially, while I had hearts as well as tears in my eyes for the majority of this reading, the politically charged and unfulfilling ending left me with a 3.5-star rating, rather than a 5.
Marge Piercy is one of those authors best encountered at exactly the right time of life and in the right frame of mind. I’ve read three of her other novels (Small Changes, Sex Wars: A Novel of Gilded Age New York, and Three Women) and found them to be, for the most part, what I expected: novels written by a politically active Second Wave feminist poet. For some reason, I really connected with Braided Lives, I think because the characters are close to my age range. This book is an obviously left-leaning political novel, but it’s also a lovingly crafted coming-of-age story with autobiographical elements, and that’s why I connected with it.
Jill Stuart, a non-religious Jewish girl raised in a working-class neighborhood in Detroit, narrates Braided Lives. The story follows her journey to college alongside her cousin Donna, through college courses, dormitory shenanigans, and relationships with men (and boys). Although it’s set in the 1950s, much of what Jill and Donna experience isn’t that far off from the modern day college experience. The situations each character encounters molds them into the women they become by the end of the story, and I think that’s a really accurate trajectory for most young women in college.
I really enjoyed Piercy’s poetic writing style in this. It’s a 500-page book, but it doesn’t seem like it; each bit of dialogue, each description, and each of Jill’s inner monologues are well-placed and poignant. There were several one-liners and longer passages that I want to cut out and hang on my wall as a reminder that I’m not the only one who’s felt this way or thought this certain thing about the world. What’s amazing to me is just how little has changed between the 50s and now. The women’s experiences with men remind me so much of my early relationships, particularly in college and directly after, in which I didn’t quite know how to articulate what I wanted and was easily swayed by overly confident men who were used to getting what they wanted.
With that being said, Braided Lives is a highly political novel, and its plot is shaped in certain ways by Piercy’s politics. Ultimately, this is a book about abortion pre-Roe v. Wade, about the dangers that having sex entailed for women and the lack of access to good birth control. Jill and Donna are both sexually active at a time when unmarried women were supposed to be virgins—despite the fact that unmarried men were presumed to be having sex. At one point, the girls buy themselves cheap wedding rings and fabricate husbands just to get fitted for a diaphragm. Keep in mind, this was before the pill was even invented, but that, too, was subject to a doctor’s discretion and it wasn’t easy to get a prescription if you were unmarried.
There’s a lot of discussion of mediocre sex, and a lot of Freudian opinions on how sex was supposed to be for women. Jill even admits to having same-sex attraction, but she hasn’t acted on it since she was a child; having lesbian tendencies would literally get you locked up in an insane asylum. Obviously Piercy (and Jill) disagree with these (now outdated) ideas about female sexuality, but Jill and Donna are still affected by these ideologies.
There’s even a self-induced abortion; I’m including this without a spoiler alert because it was an incredibly emotional reading experience and I wouldn’t have wanted to go into that blindly. Jill is involved in left-leaning politics on campus, and she later becomes involved in a sort of secret society that helped women access illegal abortions and aftercare. Piercy does not disguise her politics, but shows how for the characters the personal becomes political before that phrase was even coined.
I read another Goodreads review that said Braided Lives would’ve been way better if you stopped before reading the last 50 pages, and I have to agree with that. The first 500 pages of this book would’ve been 5-stars for me, to be quite honest, but the last 50 pages were more political than they were good storytelling. While I was somewhat disappointed that, for all her politics, Jill spends the entire book in and out of relationships with men, I completely related to that and found it realistic. What I couldn’t accept: Essentially, while I had hearts as well as tears in my eyes for the majority of this reading, the politically charged and unfulfilling ending left me with a 3.5-star rating, rather than a 5.
August 3, 2019
I picked this up as a beach read (although not with the cover pictured here - that would not be an incentive for me!), and found myself drawn in to a book whose story is decades old, but absolutely of the moment. I really enjoyed the many levels of the book - political, intellectual, and personal. The theme running through it is women's empowerment and choice. Excellent.
March 24, 2018
Really captures the time. The more things change, the more they stay the same:
November 26, 2020
This is an old favorite. I read it many years ago. You can tell she's a poet - the prose is lyrical.
March 17, 2017
She's just so good!
April 8, 2013
I wanted to like this book, since it had come highly recommended by another reader who said the author, Marge Piercy, was "amazing." I was able to keep reading the book only because I was trapped on a plane with it and had nothing else to read. Otherwise, I would not have made it past the first few chapters. Apparently, the author is a poet as well as novelist, which might account for the impenetrable prose that seemed, at times, to be nothing more than the author playing with the sound of words and phrases. The edition I read (a Fawcett Crest paperback) also seemed to be quite poorly edited, with numerous typos and scenes that go from one to another without a helpful intervening white space.
It's hard to say what this book is about. It covers roughly five years in the life of one Jill Stuart, who goes to college in the mid-50s and proceeds to have what amounts to typical college experiences with men, sex, drinking, more sex, roommates in the dorm, even more sex, crushes on professors, etc etc. All through this time we are told that she writes poetry, but you wouldn't know she IS a poet, since any thoughts about writing she might have had rarely penetrate the fog of sexual encounters she lives in.
Finally, our protagonist graduates and moves to New York and gets a part-time job and tries to act like a working poet--but, again, everything in her life circles around her sex life and other people's sex lives. She says she wants to work and to have a life that doesn't revolve around domesticity, but we never see her spending much time or thought on this work, whatever it is. You would think it might be writing, but by the end of the book we find that she has become something else entirely: a crusader for abortion rights.
Throughout the pages of the book a theme has begun to emerge: having sex in the era before birth control was easily available and abortion was illegal can lead to horrible consequences, such as unplanned pregnancies and botched abortions. The author's way of illustrating these issues is to create characters and stories about them and then become very preachy. I happen to agree with her positions on these issues, but I didn't like her hit-them-over-the-head way of expressing her opinions, particularly since I'd thought this was a novel, not a political position paper.
It seems like the author has tried to throw together a story with characters to illustrate every feminist theme she has heard of: men who expect every woman to know how to cook, husbands who "don't allow" their wives to work, the female orgasm and men's inability to "get" it, the consequences of abortion being illegal, lesbian sexual encounters and their superiority (in her mind) to sex with men, the trauma of rape, etc etc. I got to where I was rolling my eyes each time another issue came along, until I came upon this sentence on page 394: "I have a vision of myself just before sleep as a mountain composed of millions of women, keening, begging, demanding the fulfillment denied them. All their thwarted wills flow through me."
This book was published in 1982 and it might have been timely and interesting at that time, but now it just seems tedious and sad.
It's hard to say what this book is about. It covers roughly five years in the life of one Jill Stuart, who goes to college in the mid-50s and proceeds to have what amounts to typical college experiences with men, sex, drinking, more sex, roommates in the dorm, even more sex, crushes on professors, etc etc. All through this time we are told that she writes poetry, but you wouldn't know she IS a poet, since any thoughts about writing she might have had rarely penetrate the fog of sexual encounters she lives in.
Finally, our protagonist graduates and moves to New York and gets a part-time job and tries to act like a working poet--but, again, everything in her life circles around her sex life and other people's sex lives. She says she wants to work and to have a life that doesn't revolve around domesticity, but we never see her spending much time or thought on this work, whatever it is. You would think it might be writing, but by the end of the book we find that she has become something else entirely: a crusader for abortion rights.
Throughout the pages of the book a theme has begun to emerge: having sex in the era before birth control was easily available and abortion was illegal can lead to horrible consequences, such as unplanned pregnancies and botched abortions. The author's way of illustrating these issues is to create characters and stories about them and then become very preachy. I happen to agree with her positions on these issues, but I didn't like her hit-them-over-the-head way of expressing her opinions, particularly since I'd thought this was a novel, not a political position paper.
It seems like the author has tried to throw together a story with characters to illustrate every feminist theme she has heard of: men who expect every woman to know how to cook, husbands who "don't allow" their wives to work, the female orgasm and men's inability to "get" it, the consequences of abortion being illegal, lesbian sexual encounters and their superiority (in her mind) to sex with men, the trauma of rape, etc etc. I got to where I was rolling my eyes each time another issue came along, until I came upon this sentence on page 394: "I have a vision of myself just before sleep as a mountain composed of millions of women, keening, begging, demanding the fulfillment denied them. All their thwarted wills flow through me."
This book was published in 1982 and it might have been timely and interesting at that time, but now it just seems tedious and sad.
November 3, 2024
While reading this almost autobiographical memoir, I came across themes that have tormented the way in which we have felt over the female body and its long set institutions that have led us to bad consequences and then given no help to make decisions over those consequences.Like where did the idea of feeling shame over expressing yourself sexually come from ? why did religion shape purity against women?
Told in a coming out of adolescence age in a period of history that was horrible on women; having them hand over their rights because they weren’t seen as enough to hold them. The characters in the book were stuck in a time based on traditions built upon thorough sexism and old religion practices in purity that have done more damage than good to the female sex.
I cried, I saw myself and I reflected. I felt for her, no matter how fictional it was, it was based on real emotions.
The ending with the comparison to the kitten was actually heartwrenching
Told in a coming out of adolescence age in a period of history that was horrible on women; having them hand over their rights because they weren’t seen as enough to hold them. The characters in the book were stuck in a time based on traditions built upon thorough sexism and old religion practices in purity that have done more damage than good to the female sex.
I cried, I saw myself and I reflected. I felt for her, no matter how fictional it was, it was based on real emotions.
The ending with the comparison to the kitten was actually heartwrenching
February 13, 2014
If I had stopped reading this book before the last 50 pages or so, I would have been much happier and would have given it 4 stars. Overall, this was a good read - I like Marge Piercy's writing style and sometimes feel like we have led overlapping lives, but she let her personal politics get in the way of an otherwise excellent story. The ending of this book was way over the top, felt false, and diminished the power of the story. She is not the only writer to fall into this trap - Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" and John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" suffer from the same problem - and it's really unnecessary. All of these books have a political slant that is up front and not subtle, and make the author's point clearly, but the authors feel the need to get out the sledgehammer and clobber the reader towards the end of the book, just in case they missed the point. Very disappointing.
September 30, 2010
This book helped me see things from a different angle-- corny or not, this book is "empowering". Maybe the book is dated, but nevertheless a great book I'll recommend to my own daughter one day, when she's older, much older. And she probably won't read it because she'll have a Kindle and access to all the Pretty Little Liar books she can consume... no lazy summer days with nothing else to do other than read the weird Marge Piercy book her mother bought for her.
November 2, 2022
I love Marge Piercy. She's one of my all time favorite authors. I loved this book though I was really disappointed with the ending. I think the book could probably have gone on more than it's 551 pages if she had chosen to and part of me wishes she had because I felt a little cheated with this ending. So many unanswered questions. *sigh* The feminist in her is present throughout the book though, which is just one of the many reasons why I loved it and why I love her.
February 12, 2016
There were parts of this book that I really loved but I did find that it dragged on quite a bit and I got tired of hearing about the protagonist's love affairs. She was such an ardent feminist and yet there was so much focus on the men in her life of whom I grew quite bored. I would have preferred to read more about the character's political work which was just mentioned here and there in passing. But, still, it was nice to read a feminist account of women's lives in the 1950s.
February 26, 2008
A college novel regarding a woman undergraduate from a working class background at University of Michigan in the 1950s. Good insight into the challenges of a first generation student, and sexism in the 1950s college dating scene. Scenes of campus life at UM will be familiar to anyone who has visited or gone to school there.
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December 13, 2009It's the 1950s and Marge Piercy's main character doesn't want a man to posses her. Hmmm. Good luck with that. Having just read her memoir, I can tell that large portions of this novel are inspired by her own life. It seemed like things were going to be grim, and so my attention waned. Also? Horrible 80's-esque cover. So bad it is almost good.
February 1, 2008
one of the many books that changed my life at the time that i read it, which was when i was working for planned parenthood as a teenager. it's images of the women's rights/reproductive rights movement are beautiful, the prose is fluid and the story is unforgettable.
June 25, 2013
An epic story of life in Ann Arbor and NYC during the 60s. I suspect it is autobiographical - though she claims not. The story of how lives of friends braids together was interesting -- but it had an air of soap opera as to who was having sex with who how often etc.etc.
September 7, 2007
One of my favorite Marge Piercy books!
March 25, 2015
Two years in the plan -- and well-worth the wait given its relvance to our time and to the book which I read in tandem with it. Piercy is a never fail in my opinion.
May 3, 2008
one of my absolute favourites.
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