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Mad Woman

8/26/2022

Author: Louisa Treger
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Reviewer: Gail Gilbride
Mad Woman is a fascinating novel about the pioneering Elizabeth Cochran, first female investigative journalist to break through the male dominated arena.
Nellie Bly sets out from Pittsburgh, where she’d already written some controversial articles for the local paper, and heads for New York and The World to pursue her dream of becoming a serious reporter.
Life in the city is incredibly tough… but so is Nellie. Her money has dried up and time is running out. She comes up with an

outrageous idea: to pretend madness and have herself committed to the asylum on Blackwell's Island. Once inside, she will stay undercover, experience the institution's conditions first hand and write a story no one else could ever come up with.
The asylum door does indeed swing shut behind Nellie and Louisa Treger steps up her pace at this point in the story. She draws us in to the daily horrors her character endures. The author’s scrupulous research and mesmerising style of writing, bring the ordeal to life and I found myself plunged into the cruellest institution imaginable.
Cold, isolated and starving, Nellie’s days of terror reawaken the traumatic events of her childhood, which she explores with the one compassionate doctor allocated to her.
Nellie entered the horrendous asylum of her own free will - but will her new employers really rescue her as they’ve promised?
An extraordinary portrait of a woman way ahead of her time, Mad Woman is the story of a quest for the truth that changed the world. It is a tale that simply had to be told and Treger does it with sensitivity and tremendous skill.
Would I recommend Mad Woman? Absolutely and without reservation.

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The Faraway Nearby

8/16/2022

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Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Granta
Reviewer: Nadia Kamies
I knew before I came to the end of this book that it would be one of those that I would reread and treasure. Solnit weaves together diverse threads of her own love, life and loss, with fairytales, travel and stories about explorers, revolutionaries and writers, like Mary Shelley, Che Guevarra and the Marquis de Sade.
One summer she receives three boxes of apricots from her mother’s tree, from the home she used to live in. As her mother descends into Alzheimer’s her life is slowly

unravelling – she becomes more and more confused, gets lost, locks herself out of her house – and Solnit and her brothers have to pack their mother up and move her into a seniors’ home. The apricots become a metaphor that runs throughout the book – for abundance but also for a kind of inheritance from her mother that she has to sift through, discard what is rotten, or bottle, can and preserve.
Alongside the apricots, is a trip to Iceland that she goes on as she learnt as a young woman, “never to turn down an adventure without a really good reason” and the story takes off in another direction.
Ultimately, this is a book about writing and storytelling. “Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them”, she says, and to be without a story is to be well and truly lost. We ourselves are stories and in the strongest stories we see ourselves and our connection to others through story and empathy, she adds. Ironically, her mother is losing the stories that she lived by and it changes their relationship that was always fraught with difficulties.
Solnit writes with empathy and compassion about her relationship with her mother. The book is both deeply personal and philosophical. I was interested to see the book is classified as memoir/anti-memoir. An anti-memoir is less about the author and more about the reader and this book resonated with me on many levels.

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Mad Woman

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