Welcome back books I can read in one sitting! Funnily enough, I am currently reading another book for a Quebec lit class about a girl who has to leave her home country (Chile instead of Vietnam) at a young age and relocates to Quebec where she must grapple with her dual identity. I will try my hardest to not get these books confused but with such similar themes I’m already struggling. It’s called La où je me terre by Caroline Dawson if anyone’s interested. No idea what it’s called in English.
What first stood out to me about Ru was the writing structure. I personally love short chapters so this was heaven for me to read. The way one chapter bled into the next had such a natural flow to it. This flow wasn’t adhering to any chronology, but rather associations between characters, feelings, and events. It reminded me of the flow of memories. They don’t come to you in the order in which they happened. They come at random, brought on by feelings and associations. I think this whole book is about memory. The majority of it is spent reflecting on events of the narrator’s past and how it affects her present.
I also love the way this book discusses motherhood. The relation the narrator has to her mother, being “and extension of her” carries so much weight of responsibility and expectation. Especially given the mother’s description as an authority figure even among her own siblings. Her mother seems to bear the majority of the responsibility of their family, from ensuring the children learned English to making sure their teeth were straight. A line that really stuck with me was “My mother started to live, to let herself be carried away, to reinvent herself at the age of fifty-five” (p. 63). Young women have so many expectations put on them, to get married to have kids, to be a good wife and mother. And the narrator’s mother did that. She took after her kids AND her siblings. But now at an age where her kids are independent, she has the time and capacity to explore her own desires. And in the very next line, the narrator described how her father has not had to reinvent himself at all. Forgive me is this is slightly unrelated, but there is a freedom that comes to many middle aged women (often called menopause!) where you are unburdened by the societal expectations of womanhood. You are no longer expected to reproduce, and so there is no need to attractive to men. Generally, your kids are grown and independent, no longer needing your care. You are free in a way, from the ever-present identity of woman and mother. And you can begin to seek a new identity and pursue your desires. Men, in general, can simply be their whole lives. They don’t have a permanent attachment to their identity as man or father. They can shed these titles whenever they please without consequence.
Anyway, this is obviously not a universal truth of all middle aged women but my own theory based on this book and what I’ve observed from women in my life. If I wasn’t already over 500 words, I would try to cover a more global theme from the book. But this line about reinvention stuck out to me and really made me reflect so I went off. My question for the class is do you agree that middle aged women have this freedom? Or do the the same restraints of womanhood persist post-menopause?



