I don't like Judy Blume's adult fiction at all. I read "Smart Women" last night. It was captivating writing, the story took the reader along for the ride. But the book was about divorced women with children. BB's ex moves into town. He starts sleeping, and later living with one of her good friends and co-workers. BB has a nervous breakdown, so then her daughter gets to move in with her father, his girlfriend, and her teenage children. The girlfriend had spent the intervening years between her divorce and the live-in having various flings and affairs. One of the men, a 21 year old, comes into town and begins a relationship with her 18 year old daughter.
She catches her daughter and ex-fling going at it, and tells her live-in that she's going to "respect her daughter's privacy." Later in the book she "hopes she's taught her daughter 'good values.'" Which ones would those be exactly? That it is ok to have your friend's husband move in three months after you've met him. OR that is just fine for a 40 year old divorcee to have a list of flings and lovers. Or matybe it was in setting the length of her new relationship as "As long as it works."
Really, I don't expect to spend the rest of my life reading only Anne of Green Gables and Narnia. There's a lot of pretty decent books out there that, like most movies these days, you have to flip past or zone out the smutty parts.
The last thought I was left with is this: No wonder marriage is in the toilet these days, if this is all the model we're going to see/read. Every woman in the books I've read recently walks around miserable because she's given up her "identity" for marriage and kids. The prevailing attitude of pop-culture women is, like the drunk woman in the bar the other night, " Don't get married. I used to have a good voice. Then I got married and lost it all. They just take everything from you. I wish I'd never had children. You just give up everything." How sad. And pathetic.
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