Troy Headrick
The American University in Cairo
Maadi, Cairo, Egypt
contact@savvy-women-magazine.com
June 16, 2009 (Tuesday)
It’s after seven in the evening. The light is softening and the shadows have grown long.
I’m afoot, on my way to the used bookshop, a place called The Book Spot, over near the metro station on Road Nine. I’m carrying T. C. Boyle’s The Inner Circle in my left hand. Boyle’s novel is a book by a man and is mostly about male characters. I want to trade this one in for something by a woman, about women.
I step through the shop’s front door and am greeted by a woman wearing traditional Islamic dress. I nod my head and smile at her. Now that the salutations are behind us, I become her customer and start browsing the shelves. I take a book down, look at its front and back covers, open it, read the first paragraph, and then put it back again. I do this again and again. I eventually settle on one called Abra, by Joan Barfoot. I pay and leave.
The night is fully upon me as I exit.
June 17, 2009 (Wednesday)
I walk to a restaurant called Green Mill for lunch. I have Abra with me. I enter the restaurant, take a seat, and open the book. There is a black-and-white photo of Joan Barfoot in the front matter. In it, her profile is to the camera, and she is typing on an ancient machine, something called a typewriter. I learn that she is Canadian and that her first novel (this one) won an award. I order my meal and then read the first two short chapters of the book.
The novel begins with conflict. Kate Phillips, a young woman, has just found her mother, Abra. The latter has been living in a rustic cabin in the woods ever since abandoning her husband and two children (Kate has an older brother named Elliot) nearly a decade earlier. Since her disappearance, Abra (as in Abracadabra) has been living exactly like a female version of the reclusive Henry David Thoreau. Here’s the rub: Abra never wanted to be found and resents that Kate has tracked her down. She wonders what Kate wants from her. It is apparent that her daughter is hungry for an explanation. She wants, quite understandably, to know why her mother disappeared. The two are at loggerheads as the book opens.
My meal comes just as I finish the second chapter. I eat and daydream, two of my favorite pastimes.
June 18, 2009 (Thursday)
I am sitting in the new Subway sandwich shop not far from my apartment. I have just swallowed my last bite of the Spicy Italian, and now I am finishing the third chapter of Barfoot’s book.
As you may have noticed, I like to read while I’m eating. I think this combination makes perfect sense. When I feed my body, I often feel the need to feed that part of me that is not body–that is more than body.
Chapter three is one of the prettiest chapters I have ever read about nature. This description comes as our narrator takes the reader (that would be me) on a tour of her wooded property. Abra also shows me her house, takes me from room and room, and I can see the whole layout quite vividly in my mind’s eye. I sit and think about it for a second. I don’t think a man could have written that house part.
Does thinking that make me a sexist? Or a purveyor of stereotypes?
It occurs to me that this is an unusual story. There are plenty of books about men going out into the wilderness to escape the restrictions of “society” and end up finding themselves in the process. The characters in these stories are called “frontiersmen” or some version thereof. There are not many stories (that immediately come to mind) about women characters doing this same thing. Perhaps that’s why Barfoot wrote it? She wanted to show that women can also play the lead role in stories like this? It would be interesting to ask her about her motivation.
At the end of the third chapter, Abra talks about the two things she consciously decided not to bring with her when she ran away from her family–clocks and mirrors.
June 19, 2009 (Friday)
It’s Friday evening and I’m sitting with my fingertips touching the keys of my computer keyboard. They are working in tandem with my brain. That team is trying to decide what I want to say about that bit of the Barfoot novel I read today.
OK, this is what they want to say: They highly recommend Abra to anyone who likes to read novels about families, about the relationship between mothers and daughters, about the psychology of self-discovery, about the unique pressures experienced by women of “the middle class” who appear to “have it all.”
I am finding the book to be both engrossing and terrifying. I say engrossing because it’s one of the most compelling and beautifully told first-person accounts I have read in recent months. And terrifying because the author uses Abra to make the case that human beings are absolutely opaque. No one can ever know what’s going on inside another person’s head. It doesn’t matter who that other person is either. He or she can be someone we love and trust, but that makes absolutely no difference.
That’s scary.
June 20, 2009 (Saturday)
This morning, when I opened the book, I was on chapter eleven. Now, at the end of the day, I have finished Abra, and I’m outside and walking but not toward The Book Spot. I won’t be trading this novel in for another. I’ve decided that Abra’s story is a keeper.
I will probably be a bit vaguer in this concluding section of the blog. That’s because I don’t want to spoil the book by telling its ending. I’ll just say that chapters eleven through fourteen are full of beautiful writing and surprises. One of those big surprises comes as Abra looks back and tells the story of when “the man” came for a visit during her first spring in the cabin.
The last chapter of the novel begins where the second one concludes, in the present, with Katie and Abra spending time together at the cabin. The way the two interact in this part of the book makes it clear to the reader that the two have grown closer and are past the awkwardness that marked their initial meeting. As a matter of fact, the two have become so familiar with one another that Katie has asked her mother to leave the wilderness and share an apartment with her in the city once the fall term begins (Katie is now a university student). Abra is torn. What should she do?
And now I’m going to finish by telling you that when I read the last two pages of Abra I actually got goose bumps. I was sitting in a cafe when it happened, and I was wondering if any of my fellow coffee drinkers could see that I was having a physiological response to the book’s final paragraphs.
I decided that no one had noticed, and then I closed the book and looked around me. The real world, the world outside the one Abra had created for me, the world of the cafe where I was sitting, seemed less real than the one I’d just been in.
And now, this evening, I’m sad that there is no more Abra to look forward to.
