Polygamy...We Should All Be So Lucky

I just finished reading a book called Hush Ma by Mamet. We actually had the opportunity to interview this author for our website (www.book-club-queen.com/writer-interview-mamet.html).

The interview was enlightening and also horrific at the same time. Mamet is very candid and honest about some of the atrocities that go on in tribal Africa. As a victim herself, I would say she is an expert.

So the two main customs I'm talking about that are unacceptable are polygamy and female circumcision. I don't know which is the lesser of the two evils considering they are both demoralizing and bordering on inhumane. The women that are subjected to female circumcision are done so because the men of the tribe wish to make sure that their women don't have any sexual feelings at all, therefore taking away any likelihood that they will be unfaithful. The surgery, if you can call it that, is painful and oftentimes performed with rusty equipment. These women are scarred for life.

And who came up with polygamy? Obviously - men. Who wouldn't want to have as many partners as they felt like having with no moral responsibility to the idea of being faithful to one person. There are many who might argue that humans are not meant to spend their lives with only one person but in these tribes described by Mamet the men take full advantage. It might be a totally different story if the women were also allowed to practice polygamy.

It made me angry to read about these practices but I also thankful that strong women like Mamet are out there and willing to share their message with the world so that hopefully it will eventually stop.

Nonfiction? Nah!

An interesting quote just came up in a book my mom was reading and reviewing. It's from Fannie Flag's Can't Wait to Get to Heaven. (for the full review check out www.book-club-queen.com/fannie-flagg-books.html).

"Scratch any person over the age of sixty, and you have a novel so much better, certainly more interesting than any fiction writer could make up. So why try?" (33)

This got me thinking. I'm a lover of fiction. I can't help it - I just am. I have tried over the years, very unsuccessfully I might add, to read the token nonfiction book because I'm an English major and also English teacher so I figure I need to cover the two main genres.

But what I've found is that I'm NO GOOD at it! I can never seem to get into a nonfiction book. Here and there I've come across the rare literary nonfiction (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) that I've found totally fantastic. But really, I just can't get into them.

This quote from Can't Wait to Get to Heaven got me because I actually agree! Real life people are SO much more interesting than made up characters. So why don't I love reading about them?

I think I've figured it out. Real life people that write books about themselves don't generally do so using the same "storyesque" quality that authors who write about made up characters do. Hold on though, what I realized is, most great authors of fiction base their best characters, at least in part, on someone they know. In essence, many of them could be writing a nonfiction but "the names are made up to protect the innocent." This gives the author a full range of freedom. If they write about someone or something they know under the pretense of it being false, they don't have to worry about being totally accurate. I know, when I finally write my book someday, this is what I'll do.

The thing of it is, maybe I do like nonfiction after all. Perhaps the labels are just not up to par...