Q.This time on Open Stacks, with Philip Leventhal, Elizabeth Branch Dyson, Paul Yamazaki, and Dan Wells, we ask what makes a book "serious." Booksellers Amélie, Annie, and Artemie share scholarly favorites. There was a great quote in there, about her mom saying, love goes out the window when you’re poor. In some sense a loving relationship was reserved only for the wealthy and the privileged. She comes to this realization that her mother and all of their sisters - because they didn’t have the power of choice in their husbands, and when they had kids - they could not have a loving relationship. And by the end of the book, you feel she can allow herself to be sad and to mourn what she didn’t have and even go a step further and start to mourn what her mother didn’t have. In the first half of the book, particularly in the first 10 pages, she’s so, so angry. She let herself be saddened, or almost mourning. She let herself be vulnerable in Chicago. There was a great quote (from Gertrude) about the (Chicago Public Schools superintendent Ella Flagg Young): “It was my idea of a good time to see men afraid of a woman.”
She was exposed to feisty women that made men afraid. She was given a vocabulary that she didn’t have before, and I mean that both literally and figuratively. Chicago gave her the causes into which she could channel that anger and that drive. Nina: I think Texas gave her the anger and the drive against degradation. Chicago, where Gertrude studied and taught school in her 20s, was a place where she really blossomed. That’s part of why there’s so little documentary evidence. I think the other thing is that no one would publish it. I think part of that is because we didn’t want to know, as a country. None of those books have stood the test of time. You see it coming out in books that were published at the time: this real, horrible poverty, and how degrading that sort of impossible poverty is. What I do have a sense of was that life on the frontiers, life as a farmer in the Great Plains or the Midwest, was so much harder than “Little House on the Prairie” depicts it, and so much less child friendly.
Nina: I don’t have any sense of how common sibling rape was.
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