Meg Wolitzer addresses feminism through fiction

Lynda Davis
May 29, 2018
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The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer tackles the evolution of contemporary feminism through the experiences of fictional 20-something Greer and 60-something Faith Frank. It's a riff on the old theme of A Star is Born where the veteran is overtaken by her protégé. We're introduced to Greer as a young girl being raised by seemingly indifferent parents. Her neighbour Cory becomes her best friend, lover and hoped-for life partner. Both Greer and Cory are gifted students with great futures predicted for them both at high-end ivy-league universities. Cory successfully qualifies…

Three young women: three different war experiences

Lynda Davis
May 14, 2018
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Best-seller Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly was not easy to read. At the same time, it was not easy to put down. It's the compelling story of three women from three different countries during World War II and author Martha Kelly tells their individual stories in the first person so we feel intimately connected to each one. What makes this book particularly engaging is it's based on the lives and diaries of real women; two of the names are real; one a pseudonym. Other characters are composites and some…

The voice of Mary Walsh comes through in her writing

Lynda Davis
April 19, 2018
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Britain may have Dame Judi Dench as their national treasure but we have our own Boomer Broad Mary Walsh as our beacon of everything Canadian. Newfoundland-born Walsh is a writer, comedienne and actor whose decades-long career began in a local maritime comedy troupe and grew to become a regular on national television. Walsh has skewered Prime Ministers and business tycoons as activist Marg, Princess Warrior. She made us laugh as one of the Friday Night Girls on CODCO and later as a regular on CBC's This Hour Has Twenty-Two Minutes.…

Living my dreams through Vanity Fair’s Tina Brown

Lynda Davis
January 8, 2018
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What could be more enthralling than reading someone's diary, especially someone who regularly rubs shoulders with the rich and famous? It feels forbidden, furtive, even a bit titillating. We're discovering that person's innermost thoughts, opinions and impressions in the context of their daily life. And when that life is one lived in the rarefied circles of Tina Brown, editor of Vanity Fair magazine from 1984 to 1992, it's delicious beyond words. Which explains why I binge-read her book Vanity Fair Diaries in three or four-hour bursts until my eyes wouldn't…

David Sedaris’s humour has a raunchy edge

Lynda Davis
November 21, 2017
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The brilliance of David Sedaris's writing is his ability to make it look so effortless. Having read most of his books over the past few years, I'm always amazed at how he can take the most seemingly ordinary situation and turn it into something hysterically funny. It's a skill shared by Jerry Seinfeld—although Sedaris is raunchier. He's a master of understatement and innocent observation. Growing up in a completely normal North Carolina family that included five siblings (one brother and four sisters) he's versatile and wonderfully flawed. Sedaris has parlayed…

Dear Margaret: I was wrong. I’m sorry.

Lynda Davis
October 3, 2017
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It was a scramble to finish reading the book Alias Grace before the television series aired as I didn't want to preempt any of the deliciousness of the story line. Written by Margaret Atwood more than twenty years ago, it took me a long time to get to the book because I'd been put off by her later writing, including The Handmaid's Tale. I disliked The Handmaid's Tale as I found it too dystopian and weird when I first read it in 1986. Times have changed; the world is becoming…