Last Names

How to be equitable about last names without getting hyphenated names that are miles long (me and some friends figured this out over a decade ago, and I thought I'd share it):

This is best explained with an example. Amy Jones marries Mike Smith. They have two kids, Lisa Jones-Smith and Kyle Jones-Smith.  So far, so good. A two-name last name is a bit long, but worth it for gender equality.  But what happens when Lisa and Kyle grow up and want to marry people?

Let's imagine another family. Nora Johnson marries Ed Gibson. They have two kids, Ella Gibson-Johnson and Nate Gibson-Johnson.

The kids grow up and meet each other. Ella falls in love with Kyle. Coincidentally (to make our example easiest, without inventing more fake people), Nate falls in love with Lisa. What will their last names be?

The girls take the last name that originated with their mothers, and the boys take the last name that originated with their father, and they combine them. So we now have two couples, Ella and Kyle Johnson-Smith and Lisa and Nate Gibson-Jones. Easy!

Useful points:

• Although they are taking either their mother's or father's name with them when they get married, they still have a name-link to BOTH their parents (since their parents hyphenated their names).
• Although the brothers and sisters now have different last names than each other, this would be true if the traditional patriarchal naming structure was followed, as well, when the girls got married and changed to their new husband's name.
• In the above examples, the order of the last names was decided simply by the alphabet. Couples could default to that, or decide which sounds best.
• Gay and lesbian couples could decide which of their parents' names to take with them when they get married, or they could do a default alphabet scheme (for example, choosing the names that occur first and last in the alphabet, out of the four).

It's a plan that totally works! The only issue, of course, is that everybody, or at least most people, need to adopt it. Otherwise it falls apart. So consider it, people.

Favorite Books

I just made a quick (about two minutes) list of my ten favorite books, as part of an exercise on creativity that I was doing. I thought I'd share it, with the reminder that it's not meant to be a serious, well-thought-out thing: it's my top ten great books that occurred to me while sitting at my desk (away from my library) on a Friday afternoon.

In no particular order:

• Open House by Elizabeth Berg
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• The Goneaway World by Nick Harkaway
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
• The City and the City by China Mieville 
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
• Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
• PopCo by Scarlett Thomas
• The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
• This one about memory, about this guy in London...I LOVED it, and I can't remember its title off the top of my head, nor its author.

I just noticed that I chose five books by men and five by women. (Curtis Sittenfeld is a woman, and the person who wrote the book I can't recall is a man.) Unintentional gender equity. 

Anyway, if you've read any of these, please, let's discuss them! I love to talk about books I've read!

Feminism and Spirituality

I recently re-read At the Root of This Longing by Carol Lee Flinders.  I'd read it in college, when I'd taken a women and spirituality course as part of my women's studies minor, but I didn't remember much of it at all. 

It's great!  It's all about the author's work sorting out the disconnect she felt between her feminism and her spiritual practices, and how she reconciled that disconnect, realizing feminism and spirituality are not only compatible but mutually beneficial to each other.  The book is divided in two parts.  The first uses the story of Julian of Norwich, a Catholic mystic, as a framework, and the second uses the story of Draupadi from the Mahabharata, the Indian epic. 

Flinders makes points that I'd felt but never been able to articulate.  She summarizes these contradictions as "vowing silence vs. finding voice, relinquishing ego vs. establishing 'self', resisting desire vs. reclaiming the body, and enclosure vs. freedom."  In the first part of the book, she tackles them.  In the second half of the book, she talks about using both feminism and spirituality to drive community action, to make change in the world. 

I loved it so much that I emailed the author to tell her.  She emailed me back the next day!  She was really nice, and recommended other things for me to read.

Should you read it?  If it sounds at all intriguing, yes!

Cinderella Ate My Daughter

How great of a book title is that? I love it.  Cinderella Ate My Daughter is by Peggy Orenstein, the author of Schoolgirls and Waiting For Daisy, both of which I love.

Cinderella Ate My Daughter is about, as the subtitle says, girlie-girl culture.  Orenstein discusses Disney Princesses, child beauty pageants, Miley Cyrus, and more.  She tries to sort out some nature-vs-nurture questions, and determine just how harmful or harmless some of these pink, glittery girl things are.  What the book ends up focusing on a lot is consumerism - how much advertisers push things on our kids, and then make the kids' desires for the products seem "natural."

It was fascinating.  It could've been more in-depth, but that isn't a criticism, really.  I think the book set out exactly what it meant to do, examining this part of our culture, and to look deeper would mean to actually read through some of the studies she's quoted.  Which I will probably do.

One problem: it was so hard to put down!  I stayed up way too late finishing it last night.

Now I'm re-reading The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld, another addictive author.

Something less twisty and intense

I took a break between Murakami books to read something lighter and more straightforward.  Thin Is the New Happy by Valerie Frankel is a memoir about Frankel's attempt to free herself from her lifetime of dieting and body image issues.  I enjoyed it.  It's light-hearted but also honest.  Frankel didn't have a horrible eating disorder or shocking history to write about (though that's not to say there aren't sad, difficult things that she dealt with and discusses in the book), but that doesn't mean she has nothing to say.  Her observations are funny and keen.  One line I enjoyed is when she points out that dieters think of certain foods as bad or evil.  "Putting 'cupcake' in the same category as 'Osama Bin Laden' is just wrong."

I really, really hope she is still managing not to obsess about her weight.  It's so tough in our culture.

Prep, again

I re-read Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld this week while on vacation.  I just picked it up briefly, and then fell into it (just like I had the first time) and decided I need to read the entire thing again.  It really is a fantastic book.  It's impossible to put down.

Lee, the prep school protagonist, is definitely a well-rounded, realistic character.  Sometimes she was so frustrating I wanted to reach into the book, grab her by the shoulders, and shake her.  She's so passive, such an observer, and so frequently judgmental (and often wrong).  But her thoughts about how high school boys relate and flirt, how people of different classes interact, how adolescent girls often feel, are spot-on.  And the other characters in the book seem so real, as well!  Everyone in the book is a complete, full person.  I buy all of it; nothing pulled me out of the story and said "this is a book, a work of fiction."  That's why it's so hard to put down.  It's less like reading a story and more like immediately falling into someone else's head, into their life.  I recommend it so much.

Prep

I finished Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld yesterday.  I started it the day before, randomly opening it up even though I hadn't finished Right Ho, Jeeves, and then I couldn't put it down.  I was up until one a.m. reading, despite having to work early the next morning, and after work I read for another two-and-a-half hours until I was finished.

Oh my GOD, it was SO GOOD.

I think Sittenfeld gets exactly what it is like to be a teenage girl.  That's not to say I was just like Lee, the protagonist.  The book follows all four years she spends at a New England boarding school, something I certainly haven't experienced.  But the dialogue and the worries about conforming and the stress and crushes - all of it felt just right.  Just like a teenager.  Perfect.

Should you read it? If you only like action, or mystery, or sci-fi, or non-fiction, then no.  Otherwise yes, for sure.

A note: The author's full name is Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld.  Was the choice to go by her male-sounding middle name made to help her career?  Are men's novels taken more seriously?  Well, yeah, generally.  I knew she was a woman, and that, combined with the white cover with a pink and green belt on it, made me assume it was chick lit.  So maybe there's something to that.  There's a lot to analyze there, but I'll leave it at "ugh."