Tillie Olsen
24 September 2012
I’ve been thinking about Tillie Olsen this week. So many of her stories move me, make me ache with truth and motherhood and disparity. When she died in 2007 Peanut was just over a year old and while I admired Olsen’s work, I didn’t really feel her as I do now.
Today I flipped through Tell Me A Riddle looking for a quote I vaguely remember, that I absolutely don’t deserve to use as a chapter epigraph, but that I wanted to revisit.
And I remembered I Stand Here Ironing.
Do you know it?
Read it. Tell me if it sears your very being.
Holy crap, yes it does. I was thinking of Tilda Swinton, the actress, when I started reading this and wondered, Where is the going with this? Oh, somewhere so wonderful. I wish I could write like that. Delicious and searing.
She was amazing. We need another WPA to elucidate art like that.
Get the book. You’ll dig it.
It sears my very being! It sears my very being! It does! It does!
I’m reading Silences right now. She is a genius and a prophet and has a very special place in my mama writer pantheon. (I’m actually about to start a series profiling mama writers…maybe I’ll start with Tillie?)
Oooooh. Want to read that series.
With Charlotte Perkins Gilman, right?
This is a collection of her essays on the “art of creating,” focusing on class and gender differences that kept large swaths of the population silent for most of written history. Impassioned and fabulous!
“That time of motherhood is almost behind me when the ear is not one’s own but must always be racked and listening for the child cry, the child call.”
…WOW
Right?
Tremendous.
“Only help her to believe – help make it so there is cause for her to believe that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.”
Shivers.
I adore her. Hope more Americans read her.
Tillie Olson guts me. I want to run and find my copy of TMAR, but it is upstairs where the children are sleeping!!!
You know what I can promise about Tolkien Olsen? She will be there for you when you can read without waking children. ;-x
Last time I read Tillie Olsen, I was at university doing my BA in English Lit – very childless and very clever about analysing writing craft. I should go find her again and read her as a human mom, eh?
Absolutely.
And I don’t judge our early scholarly efforts, but looking at my own stuff I’m keenly aware that all I had to offer was who I was then. Young and optimistic and inexperienced and clever and industrious. Really really young.
Give Olsen another whirl.