Her obsession with how words work began early (as a child growing up in Soviet Russia, she was known to occasionally stand on furniture and recite Pushkin poems), and her writing focuses on migration, memory, motherhood, generational expectations, the petty indignities of middle age, and the importance of embracing a broader, more generous vision of what it means to succeed.
At Electric Lit Smith tagged nine books that take "circumscribed journeys: across a parlor, through a single unruly sentence, back into a childhood bedroom.... But even when hemmed in by economic exigency, physical disability, or cultural constraints, these protagonists show us that nothing is more heroic than a consciousness finding a way forward on its own terms." One title on the list:
The Penelopiad by Margaret AtwoodRead about another entry on the list.
Odysseus’s loyal wife, Penelope, spends most of The Odyssey weaving, waiting, and weeping. Now that she’s dead, she’s ready to drop some truth bombs from the underworld. She is no longer willing to bite her tongue, to keep the right doors closed and go to sleep during the rampages. She’s sardonic and angry. She regrets not standing up for the maids Odysseus and Telemachus slaughtered when Odysseus returned to Ithaca, but it’s too late; their voices haunt her story, for the maids understand better than anyone the steep cost of keeping the home fires burning.
The Penelopiad among Paula Munier's eight top works informed by The Odyssey.
--Marshal Zeringue
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