Menopause throwdown: Flagg v July

Every generation believes itself to be unique, overburdened, progressive, and innovative; that the elder one calcified and simple, and the younger one entitled and surly. So it ever was, so it ever will be. Knowing this, I try to realize there is nothing new under the sun, and have made up several good aphorisms I wish would catch on, including “generations are just generalizations” and “the sky has always been falling.”

Nevertheless. I do occasionally let my Xennial heart get the better of me, and believe we have innovated a thing or two, and I am usually wrong. One is the menopause discourse. Of course, we didn’t invent menopause—when I meet THAT guy we are going to have words—but this business of chatting casually over over coffee about “peri” and hot flashes and so forth. I thought we made that up a few years ago. Or Baroness von Sketch did.

Reader, we did not. I recently read Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg, published in the mid-1980s, and was deeply surprised to discover that it’s a menopause novel. The only other novel I’ve read that could be described as such is All Fours by Miranda July, which put them directly in opposition in my mind, despite the fact that the two novels have nothing in common other than this one subject. Fried Green Tomatoes came out in 1987, is beloved, was made into a movie that is also beloved, and although it deals with race and sexuality and domestic violence and a host of other problems in a small community, is very circumspect and kindly, and even the one vaguely horrific act of the novel is just sort of winked at slyly. Whereas July’s book is all spelled out, with lots of explicit sex (as dealt with in that linked post above) and small petty cruelties. People don’t have a lot of big problems in July’s book, just one woman trying to sort out her life, which is a bit hard to compare to a town being menaced by the Ku Klux Klan or lesbians trying to find a way to live peaceably in the deep South in the 1930s. These problems are, in Flagg’s novel, related in a modern storyline to a woman having a very rough time with menopause and hearing about them does help her centre herself and put her problems in perspective, which is interesting.

You can sort of tell I liked Flagg’s book better—perspective is the thing I felt July’s book was missing with all the upper-class frustrated-lady navel-gazing, although I did feel that was the more realistic perspective, in that it is more typical. Most of us mainly gaze at our own torsos; most of us are not going to find Jessica Tandy in a nightgown to tell us some funny and poignant tales and helps us put our mental houses in order. (Remember Jessica Tandy! she was in the movie version, which I also watched and it wasn’t as good as the book, but it was very nice to see Jessica T!)

Backing up a bit: Fried Green Tomatoes starts with a frame story of a woman named Evelyn Couch going with her husband to visit his mom in a nursing home. Her mother-in-law won’t have Evelyn in the room so she goes to wait down the hall and meets a different old lady, Ninny Threadgoode, who tells her stories of her husband’s family, whom she also grew up with. These stories are fleshed out in the novel with excerpts from a community newsletter, and eventually the occasional newspaper from other communities, as well as a few bits of straight narrative from the past. Ninny Threadgoode was a sidekick-type character for most of the past sections, present but not involved, or at least not important, but occasionally she pops up in the narrative, doing a little something. It’s an EXTREMELY CLEVER structure, which I am not doing justice to here. I would loved to see Fannie Flagg’s bulletin board in creating all of this.

In between past bits, we get Evelyn, more and more enraptured by the storytelling—at first she was merely polite to a rambling elder, but gradually she gets sucked in and eventually inspired to change her life. She tells Ninny her own problems, most specifically with menopause and how adrift and confused she feels, and Ninny helps her make sense of it all. We really should listen to our elders more, is a main moral of the present-day story.

In the past, the central romance is a carefully coded lesbian love story that no one seems particularly wrought up about in the 1920s and 30s in Alabama. Fannie Flagg is an out lesbian born in 1944 so she does know something about it, though I’m not sure her dream of two pretty women raising a son and running a restaurant while the town smiles on them is completely accurate. Nevertheless, it’s nice to dream, and certainly quite progressive for 1987, let alone 60 years earlier.

There’s also a strand about race that isn’t…quite as well done. There are moments where the Black characters—Sipsy, her son Big George, his kids—are just living their lives, dealing with their own feelings and worries and concerns, and those pieces are pretty well done in my opinion, but most the time, Flagg’s Black characters, all of whom work for the white characters, keep their feelings and worries and concerns in service of their employers too. There’s a great word, I can’t remember if I picked it up in a book about literary criticism or a self-help book, but it works in either context: “instrumentalization.” As soon as you know the word, you know what the problem is—human beings often try to help each other, or have to work for each other, but our minds and hearts are primarily our own. If you reduce a person to what they can do for someone else, they don’t really make sense as a person anymore—they are just an instrument. Bad for writing, bad for humaning. (This is all MUCH worse in the film version of FGT—almost everything interesting about Big George, Sipsy, and their family was cut for the movie version, so the characters are barely characters at all—grim).

…SO to loop all the way back, Evelyn and July’s protagonist…did she have a name??…eventually feel they are on the right path through a combination of exercise, hormones, sexual fulfillment, personal affirmation, and a sense of possibilities about the future. The books are so different but the pathways out at the end are very similar for these two characters, which is wild. And a lot of other stuff went on in both books, but Evelyn cherishes the stories and memories in Flagg’s book, and maybe that’s what the protagonist does in July’s book too—or maybe the episodes of the first half are truly so outlandish as to not matter. But anyway, the past stays in the past, and the future for both these women is learned through these narratives.

Do you know any other novels that treat (peri-)menopause as a subject for literature? (I’m not interested in self-help at this time, maybe later) I don’t always take book recommendations but for this, if anyone recommends something on the right subject and says it is even halfway good, I’ll probably read it.

Some Events

We have now entered the Month of Mark, which is not only my husband’s natal month but coincidentally a month when he is doing a reading at both Brockton Reading Series on September 10, with Christopher Yusko, Steffi Tad-y, and Farah Ghafoor; and the Ampersand Review Issue 8 launch on September 13. Yay, Mark, and cheers to Virgo season.

In case you think I never do anything, I have been on the event-organizing side a bit lately for my day job, but many of those events are members-only so it seems kind of pointless—or actively mean—to publicize them here. But one coming up on September 16 is going to be open to the public and very cool—a Magazines Canada/Toronto Word on the Street co-presentation, So you want to make a magazine? with Nicola Hamilton, 7:30 to 8:30pm ET will be very fun, free, and edifying. You can register, learn more, or forward to an interested pal at the link above.

Finally:
RR and MS walk on the beach as quiet Labour Day observance, pass two young women seated in camping chairs beside the boardwalk. One is quite pregnant, with her shirt hiked up to her breasts, revealing her belly. Her friend is painting a panda face on said belly.
Pregnant woman: Eeeee….oooo. EEP!!
MS: That is exactly the sound I would make if someone were painting a panda face on my belly.
RR: Do you want someone to do that?
MS: No.
RR: I could do it with my eyeliners. I have a lot of different colours.
MS: That’s ok.
RR: I will do it when we get home.
MS: Ok. [editor’s note: I have not done this…yet]