The Good Girls + Miss Austen + Spoiler Alert
Non-fiction, historical fiction and romance — read it all
It’s new year’s day according to the Bengali calendar. Although technically this is a Hindu calendar I’m referring to, Nababorsho is one of those celebrations that is genuinely secular. On this day, Bengalis wear new clothes, ask one’s elders for their blessings, stuff their face with good food and fill the day with all that they want the coming year to hold. Most years, my father will gift himself at least one book for Nababorsho while my mother’s priority is to ensure her afternoon nap remains sacrosanct. For me, Nababorsho almost always feels like a wake-up call. It’s reminder that almost a quarter of the other year, which is no longer new, is almost over. The panic invariably leads me to a notebook or my computer where I will diligently write a few pages to make myself feel slightly better about not having completed any of the writing assignments I’d set myself in the previous months. Or I’ll write a newsletter about reading… .
The website for the Merriam-Webster dictionary has a Time Traveler feature (you have no idea how hard it is for me to not add an extra L, but if Merriam-Webster wants to use the wrong, sorry, American spelling of traveller, then I must respect their choice). If you put a year into the search field, the site will show you the words first recorded on that year. I put in my year of birth and in the word cloud that was generated, I spotted the following:
Dark matter
Identity politics
La-la land
Tiger shrimp.
Which, if we’re being honest, is a pretty decent summary of this newsletter writer. Other words and phrases that entered our conversation on the year of my birth include email, California roll, fragile X syndrome, lip-lock and supermoon. Also enoki mushroom (imagine how that would read to a Japanese-American person, given the Japanese have been in America since the late 1800s and cooking enoki since forever).
Of course, I’m trusting Merriam-Webster to not make this stuff up or pull out words that an algorithm has recommended based on something sinister, like my Google history.
Years ago, a journalist had told me, jokingly, that fiction must be a cakewalk because a writer isn’t obliged to strive for accuracy. I don’t think it’s as simple as that — though writing fiction may not demand factual accuracy, it comes with responsibilities that are exacting in their own way — but it is true that readers expect reliable information and facts from non-fiction.
As requirements, these may seem very basic, but they’re actually not. The way we understand facts depends largely upon the available information. For instance, the quantitative measure of gravity has changed since 1798 even though gravity itself hasn’t. Henry Cavendish was the first person to serve up a reliable measurement of gravity and his 1798 reading was marginally more than today’s calculation. (Or so I’m told.) I’m going out on a limb here, but pretty sure peeps in the 18th century weren’t sinking deeper into the earth’s surface. And let’s not even get into the minor detail that gravity wasn’t considered a fact for millennia simply because there were other explanations for our rootedness.
Sonia Faleiro’s The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing is about facts that changed in the process of an investigation. It’s an examination of an incident that was presented as a rape and murder, but revealed itself to be very different (though no less tragic). The book shows us how inherited fears, anxieties and mindsets control our perceptions and how it can all go terribly wrong when assumptions are confused with facts.
In 2014, two girls, who had left their home the night before, were found hanging from a mango tree the next day. The incident was widely reported and their family alleged the girls had been raped by a man who lived in the area. The family also said the local police was siding with the accused. Both allegations sounded credible, given the ground realities of rural Uttar Pradesh in particular and India in general. Violent crimes against girls and women are the norm in India. According to data released by the National Crime Records Bureau last year, India recorded an average of 87 cases of rape a day in 2019. The situation is made significantly worse by a police force that is understaffed, misogynist and mired in local politics and tribalism.
The Good Girls is an excellent example of that seemingly contradictory term, creative non-fiction. There are details that Faleiro imagines while recounting what happened to the two girls, but they aren’t flights of fancy. They are imaginings rooted in research and reportage. You can tell the depth of her research from the details she provides, like the grotesque conditions under which post-mortems were conducted or the descriptions of people’s living arrangements. The Good Girls neither exoticises the poverty in rural Uttar Pradesh nor is it horrified by the hardships borne by locals. The third person narrator’s tone is almost neutral and the lack of infrastructure is noted, but not sensationalised. She reminds us that as deplorable as these conditions may be, they’re practically the norm in large parts of the country.
Faleiro spent years following this case, going back to the two girls’ families and examining the investigations by the local police and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). As she pieces together what happened on that terrible night, Faleiro tells the story with great empathy for everyone, including those who unwittingly did the girls wrong. There’s a lot of effort put into giving histories and contexts to the reader. From the origins of the CBI to how Jyoti Singh’s case (popularly known as the Nirbhaya gang rape) inspired real change, Faleiro covers a lot of ground. Not all of it necessarily contributes to the story she’s telling, but the reader gets a sense of the times. Even though the root cause of the girls’ deaths is the centuries-old patriarchal tradition of disempowering women, Faleiro does everything she can to remind us that the events are unfolding in 21st century India.
I’m doing my best to not give away what the investigators and Faleiro found out about the deaths of the two girls because the case didn’t end up being famous. For those readers who didn’t follow the case, the revelation is likely to be heartbreaking. The findings of the investigators were reported back when they were first released, but it got far less coverage than when the girls’ bodies were discovered. This is partly because the conclusion felt anti-climactic and partly because there are always new crimes and misdemeanours fighting for space in mainstream media. (The reason I remember the case is self-centred: I referenced it in a column and got some important details wrong, which was fortunately pointed out to me later on Twitter). Let me just tell you one important detail: the girls were not raped. Unfortunately, this only serves to make the way they died more tragic. Rarely does the absence of a violent crime leave you with no sense of relief. This is one of those situations.
Ultimately, The Good Girls is an examination of how narratives are controlled and manipulated. It’s also a portrait of contemporary India, a country and society that is bipolar in the way it’s simultaneously stuck in a regressive past and changing at a breakneck pace. In case of the two girls who were found hanging, facts were misrepresented. The truth of what happened to them wasn’t suppressed out of malice. In fact, those who did so often acted upon good intentions. It’s just that the narrative that the girls’ champions chose to believe catered to the needs of the living, rather than respecting the dead.
The question of who controls a narrative is very much at the heart of Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen. Hornby’s novel explores one of the great mysteries of Austenland. In the 1840s, Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra burned most of the letters Austen had written to her. No one knows why, but thanks to this pyromaniacal behaviour, we know very little about Austen’s personal life. Hornby puts forward the theory that Cassandra burned the letters to protect Austen and ensure no one gossiped about either the author or her extended family. The 19th century’s norms for women were particularly strict, which is why many of the episodes that Cassandra worries may taint her sister’s reputation feel benign to the modern reader. But as she goes through the letters, we get glimpses into the past and see Austen through her sister’s eyes.
Hornby’s folded in a lot of the Austen family’s biographical details into her storytelling. It’s also a portrait of the life of an ageing spinster in that bygone era. In contrast to the Austen novels (in which single women finding husbands is a central project), Miss Austen shows the challenges and satisfaction of being unmarried and living independently. The novel is a good read, but not a great one. One of its failings is that it lacks wit. Hornby’s Jane Austen just doesn’t radiate the sparkle and mischief that you’d expect from the author who wrote zingers like the lines that the real Austen put in the mouths of her characters. In case anyone’s interested, we did a whole episode on Austen on The Lit Pickers.
The best thing about Miss Austen is, without doubt, its exquisite cover. It was actually embroidered and designer Emma Grey Gelder used the embroidery beautifully. I particularly loved the detail of printing the back of the embroidery on the reverse of the cover. The artist, Chloe Giordano, has a whole video of her making the cover. Proper, pure and painstaking magic.
At some point in March, I also tore my way through three or four of Olivia Dade’s romances, which were enjoyable enough at the time, but the only one I really remember is Spoiler Alert. Dade writes stories with heroines who are either overweight or fat. Not just that, these women are not apologetic about their weight or appearance. While the wider society is often critical of these women’s looks, the heroes aren’t sizeists. They fall hook, line and sinker for the plus-sized ladies without hesitation.
Dade’s heroines give you an idea of how much the genre has changed in a very short time. These aren’t overweight women or women with body image issues. They’re fat, they’re fabulous and they demand the world see them that way. All of this is such a departure from the Mills and Boons and romance novels I grew up with and even as an adult, I can practically count on my fingertips how many times I’ve encountered a not-thin heroine. We assume women in romances have “perfect” figures and perfect means thin, naturally. I remember some books in which the heroine was anxious about being too thin, which is a very real issue for some women, but just didn’t compute as a genuine problem in my (immature) head because I’ve grown up seeing thinness being praised and glorified. If someone was described as beautiful, it meant they were fair, thin and tall (in that order). When someone gained weight, it was as though they became less than what they were before. Almost every woman I know has obsessed over losing weight and their sense of being beautiful is intimately tied to being thinner than they are in the present.
Large woman who are famous are never described as beautiful (thank you, Lizzo, Melissa McCarthy et al for forcing this change upon our societies). Plus-sized women celebrities will invariably lose a staggering amount of weight (eg. Jennifer Hudson, Rebel Wilson), which is generally hailed as self-improvement, as though the older, heavier body was flawed and shameful. It’s only after weight loss that previously-large women can hope to be seen as “beautiful” by society at large.
So yes, a romance that loves its fat heroine? I and my love handles are here for it.
In Spoiler Alert, Dade sets up a romance between an actor, Marcus, who is sick of being treated like a dumb blonde hunk (or himbeau — him + bimbo + beau — which is a brilliant word coined by journalist, editor and general genius Supriya Nair). In reality, for all the boiled chicken that he may eat and the weights he may lift, Marcus is actually a book nerd. As a result of his profession, he’s a book nerd with abs.
Marcus moonlights as the admin of a fan fiction site to deal with his frustration at bad adaptations of books into TV shows. The site is his refuge and among his virtual friends, he is closest to April. In real life, when April isn’t writing fan fiction, she is (among other things) a fan of Marcus the actor. She has no idea that the admin of her beloved fan fiction site is actually the actor. The plot is cute, but the book’s real charm lies in how it sees fat women (as beautiful) and imagines a world where a man’s top priority is the woman he loves. This doesn’t happen often enough even in romance novels (but the latter does happen with heart-fluttering regularity in K-dramas. Just saying). I would have enjoyed Spoiler Alert more if it had spent more time with the members of the fan fiction site and the fiction on the site had been a smidge better, but Dade chose a less bookish and more melodramatic route for her couple.
That’s all I have this time. In India, as we sink under the newest wave of Covid-19, it feels like April 2021 is a whoopee cushion on which March 2020 is sitting. Too much feels the same as last year — shops boarded shut, jobs lost, masks on chins, worry lines everywhere. It feels different in terrible details, like the monstrously high daily caseloads and the way the invisible swarm of this dreaded infection seems to inch nearer and nearer with every reported case. Still, the fact is that this is a new year. I hope the coming months are filled with kindness, growth and joy for all of you. Take care and stay safe.
Thank you for reading. Dear Reader will be back soon.