Idgie Says: I call this book "Snarky with Insight". Gina has a lot of deep thoughts that she shares in her essays, but at other times she's just sharing things we all think in our minds, but never come out and say. The titles to her essays are hysterical: "Sex Talk in the Park"; "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions"; and "The Female Orgasm, In Her Own Words, Explains How She is Not Elusive" are just a few of them.
I have a Q& A Below along with an example selection of Gina-isms.
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"If You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse?":
Questions and Thoughts for Loud, Smart Women in Turbulent Times
Hardcover
March 29, 2016
St. Martin's Press
Gina Barreca is fed up with women who lean in, but don't open their
mouths. In her latest collection of essays, she turns her attention to
subjects like bondage which she notes now seems to come in fifty shades
of grey and has been renamed Spanx.
She muses on those lessons learned
in Kindergarten that every woman must unlearn like not having to hold
the hand of the person you're waking next to (especially if he's a bad
boyfriend) or needing to have milk, cookies and a nap every day at 3:00
PM (which tends to sap one's energy not to mention what it does to one's
waistline).
She sounds off about all those things a woman hates to hear
from a man like "Calm down" or "Next time, try buying shoes that fit".
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Here's the post from Gina. Gina's site is: ginabarreca.com.
Almost
as soon as she became part of it, my mother wanted to get away from the
weight of the Sicilian tribe into which my father had dropped her. My
mother's ideas of becoming an American included fantasies of a place to
call their own, not just a room down the hall where she shared a
bathroom with her husband's mother and grandmother. It took her years to
get away from them; her sense of exile and tense longing for a space of
her own has stayed with me my entire life. Years after her death, I've
discovered myself rehearing and rehearsing my mother’s anxieties and
desires.
We
moved from my grandmother’s house on a fiercely cold, grizzled winter
morning. My uncles drove from Brooklyn to Long Island with the heavy
pieces of furniture lashed to the open beds of their trucks or else tied
precariously onto the tops of their cars.
It
was in early December and to this day, fifty years later, my brother
and I swear to each other that we’ve never seen a better Christmas tree
than the one we had that year.
“Remember that tree?” we say, and out of hundreds, there’s only one tree we mean.
But this was no Hallmark holiday. This was no Rockwell painting. This was no “Miracle on 34th Street.” Instead it was the circling of the wagons.
This was not some Christmas gift horse; this was war.
I
don’t remember all that much about the big move except the outlines,
stenciled in block patterns the way decorations depicting snowmen ands
stars were stenciled onto the windowpanes with Glass Wax: What I
remember from the days proceeding the move from Brooklyn was chaos.
I
know my grandmother was against it, wanting to keep my father, the
favorite of five sons, under her roof. She’d relinquished him when he
was drafted by the U.A. Army to be a waist-gunner and a radio-operator
in a Liberator Bomber—he was the only one of her children to fight in
World War II—and she didn’t intend to lose sight of him again.
But his little French-Canadian wife he’d brought into the family had different ideas.
Almost
as soon as she became part of it, my own mother wanted to get away from
the weight of the Sicilian tribe into which my father had dropped her,
like an insurgent behind enemy lines who arrives with plans for an
escape.
My
mother’s ideas of becoming an American included fantasies of a place to
call their own, not just a room down the hall where she shared a
bathroom with her husband’s mother and grandmother, neither of whom
spoke English let alone shared her own native Quebecois brand of French.
She
didn’t want to sit in dark living room with the votive candles flicking
in front of religious statues, or else sip coffee in the basement
kitchen where my father’s sisters cooked vats of food, endlessly
steaming.
The
older women reigned in flowered-print aprons and heavy black stockings,
speaking a dialect from the outskirts of Palermo where they’d left a
life of sulfur mines and abject poverty for their own version of a new
life.
My
mother taught, in contrast, herself English by watching American movies
and by listening, illicitly and probably illegally, to international
telephone conversations as she worked a switchboard for Bell Canada-- a
job she’d held since she leaving a convent school at age 13.
(That
both our parents were operators, essentially connecting invisible
parties from one end of a line to another while being left out of the
conversation themselves, is something else my brother and I have
discussed over the years, right along with the tree. They were conduits,
our mother and father, working lines of transmission; they listened
carefully and were good at remembering as well as keeping secrets.)
While
I don’t know it for a fact--because in my family nothing was ever known
for a fact--I suspect what forced my father to leave his mother’s house
and agree to my mother’s demands was her discovery that he was having
an affair.
I
certainly didn’t know the word “ultimatum” but my brother and I could
feel it in the frozen air. My brother and I would sneak out to hallway
in my grandmother’s house and listen to my parent’s argue.
One
day the arguments stopped. Soon after that the uncles came with their
vehicles. I remember, vividly, my grandmother giving me a dollar bill
and kissing me on the head while she cried as we waved good-bye.
We were moving all of twenty-five miles away. But it wasn’t the distance that mattered. It was the altered boundaries.
That first year, the four of us graced by that glorious, unmatchable blue spruce, was the happiest we’d ever know.