There used to be something called "women's literature," in the days when Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather and Margaret Mitchell were the few distaff writers given critical and popular attention. Now the boxes of audio books that flood my house each month feature more female authors than male ones, and there is little distinction in the subjects covered.
Occasionally a book about women, by a woman, still resonates in a different way than a similar story told by a man. This is certainly true of Sheila Weller's Girls Like Us (Tantor Audio, $49.99), a sprawling, detailed and always fascinating saga about the rise of pop-music singer-songwriters Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon. Weller has a big agenda: She tries to make the ups and downs of all three performers' lives and careers act as metaphor for an entire generation of women learning how to free themselves from the control of men in their personal, sexual and, in this case, musical lives.
Weller gets bogged down in too many nuggets of information (do we need to know the name and owners of every nightclub in which the young Joni Mitchell performed in Saskatchewan?), but her thesis holds up, as does the informed reading by Susan Ericksen. There's no question that Mitchell, King and Simon blazed new paths for women who could write songs as well as they could sing them, and didn't need a husband, partner or Svengali to help them make it in the music business.
A similar transformation awaited Julia Child, although it was not musical, but culinary in nature. Both the book and the movie Julie and Julia (Hachette Audio, $16.98,) have been so hyped that it was with real trepidation that I put in the first CD. But Julie Powell, who reads her own work, is a humorous and natural writer who makes you feel as if it is fun to be with her on her yearlong, self-imposed task of cooking the entire batch of Julia Child's recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And she means the entire book: aspics, tongue, brains, soufflés, live lobsters, etc.
The descriptions can make you alternately hungry and squeamish, and also make you wonder how Powell didn't balloon to 400 pounds, given that all the recipes seem to require "a stick of butter." Her charming back-story involves a very tolerant husband, a New York apartment from hell, a disapproving Texas mother, and a secretarial day job surrounded by only Republicans.
There's no Meryl Streep in the audio version, unfortunately, nor the piercing voice of the original Julia Child. Maybe that's a good thing.
There are some amazingly strong women in history, and Catherine de Medici was one of the strongest, as demonstrated in The Devil's Queen by Jeanne Kalogridis (Macmillan Audio, $34.95). She was born and raised in the tumult of 16th century Florence amid the rebellion that threatened to destroy the elitist Medici family, escaped to a nunnery where she endured drastic privations, and was finally rescued by her uncle Pope Clement VII to rejoin the whirl of court life in Rome. Married at 14 to Henry II of France, who paid attention only to his much older mistress, Diane de Poitiers, and after 10 years of infertility, Catherine apparently chose to dabble in the black arts to bargain with the devil for her nine future children.
The amazing part of this extensively researched biography is that the author can present a queen who both sacrifices to a devil and plans the St. Bartholomew Day Huguenot massacre with equal aplomb, and still have her be somewhat sympathetic. This accomplishment is due to an excellent reading of the first-person account by Kate Reading, though at times the name-dropping can be exhausting. Apparently the devil always gets his due in the end. But you admire Catherine de Medici for sheer stamina, and Reading for a superb vocalization.
Dale Pollock, a former dean at the School of Filmmaking at the N.C. School of the Arts, now teaches film there.
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