Voting Day by Clare O’Dea

Fiction, 2022

A spasm of guilt hits me and I cover my face again. My mother loves me. She has done nothing wrong and she is on my side. The person I should be angry with is the man who is even older than her, a so-called man of the world who uses his position to dominate other people. It’s not just me, it’s how he treats the younger surveyors and the apprentice. God knows how he treats his wife. I don’t want to think about her. I turn to face the wall and stare at the blankness of my misery. So this is what it is to lose hope. It’s like being in a deep, dark forest with no paths and no light coming through the canopy of trees; nothing like my forest at home which is bright and welcoming in every season. This is the thorny, overgrown forest from the most frightening fairy tales, the worst place you’d want to be caught wandering, lost and hopeless.

This slender, potent novel mainly takes place on the day in 1959 that Switzerland first voted on a referendum to extend suffrage to women. (Ridiculously, it took until 1971 before women could claim that fundamental right in the country.) Clare O’Dea presents the stories of four women on that day, sometimes fretful about the vote and sometimes going about their days weighed down with other concerns. Each character gets their own large chunk of the book, the ownership of the narrative passed along like a baton. What can initially seem like discretely different stories become properly, movingly intertwined by the end.

O’Dea writes with a fine clarity. She avoids getting mired in description and flowery language when directness is clearly the better approach. As a result, the characters feel deeply real instead of constructs. The author is serving them rather than the other way around. Voting Day is a sharp, mildly melancholy, and ultimately hopeful novel that carries a real resonance.

Miss May Does Not Exist by Carrie Courogen

Nonfiction, 2024

The oft-repeated portrait of Elaine as the obsessive recluse is entertaining, but it’s shaded with damning judgment that makes it difficult to consume with the same giddy delight as most gossip. Elaine is certainly not the first artist—not even the first director—to devote herself so fully to a project that it supersedes her own desire or ability to take care of herself. After all, is that not the kind of behavior we often hold up as being that of geniuses? But if such behavior is considered a trait of geniuses, then it takes us to the question of who is allowed in that club, and if granted access, who gets slotted into a special category of “mad” genius. More often than not, women are sectioned off as such, allowed to be geniuses only if their brilliance drives them crazy. And their madness—perceived or otherwise—will cost them something sooner or later. Genius can explain away the problems of men time and time again; it’s rarely that simple for women.

I’m aware that Carrie Courogen has long championed Elaine May’s spectacular saltiness in various online dispatches, so it’s a special thrill to see her turn her appreciation in a full biography of this artistic icon who’s somehow both revered and underrated. In Miss May Does Not Exist, Courogen clearly admires her subject, but she is not an uncritical observer. When a project goes off the rails, Courogen makes it plain that it did and acknowledges how May’s own temperament and creative predilections were primary contributors to the ill turns. She is a meticulous biographer, and that means honesty and clear-eyed assessment prevails.

The book moves briskly, due to Courogen’s chatty, chummy writing style and the not-so-secret weapon of never having to go more than a few pages without having cause to deploy a quote from May that is the equivalent of wit reformed into a roundhouse punch. Courogen tracks through May’s career cleanly, regularly finding ways to fairly muse on the chauvinistic double standards that women artists must face. In its pointedness and humor, Courogen’s book does right by May.